I noticed Edamame was missing from your list, and are delicious just slightly steamed and sprinkled with a little salt.
Also, when it comes to southwestern eatin’, I always prefer a mayocoba to a pinto anyday! It’s a tiny bit larger and as creamy as can be. Use exactly the same way you would a pinto or a black bean!
I'm a huge fan of Anasazi beans. They are red and white in a sort of calico pattern to start with, but turn a uniform creamy pink-red when cooked. They basically are like pintos but with a smoother texture, which is great.
I love those too! It’s very difficult for me to source them however… I’m lucky to live near a bunch of supermercados that have mayocoba but they don’t have the more ‘exotic’ beans beyond that
Pepper is best when fresh, and its an easy way for them to provide an experience for diners where they feel like someone is giving them special care when it comes to their food, if that makes sense. Salt makes no difference freshly ground. Also, at least in the USA, generally no one will be insulted if you ask for salt; is that an experience you have often? And do you have to ask for salt often? Anywhere I eat they just have salt shakers available, it seems odd to me that they’d make people ask
Because the food is almost always going to be salted several times during cooking, but pepper is best put on very fresh afterward and isn’t necessarily used on everything.
But also: Where do you have to ask for salt? I’ve never been to even a fancy place that didn’t keep salt on the table.
New Zealand. Another cultural difference I know about is we also don’t really have filter coffee, except in really old-fashioned working class cafeterias.
The espresso culture in this part of the world is so well established that Starbucks struggled when it expanded into Australia and New Zealand and instead of proliferating, shrank to just a few stores that cater to overseas tourists.
Do cafes there serve more than coffee and pastries? I’m just curious why they would have salt on the table, but not a restaurant and I’m flooded with ideas that are probably really dumb lol
Thats genuinely fascinating! I love hearing about that kinda stuff, its always really neat to hear the life experience that folks get and how it differs in different cultures.
If you were to ask for a salt shaker, do you feel like it would be offensive to the folks working there, or preparing your food?
Thanks for sharing your knowledge of another culture with me ☺️
If I were to ask for salt for chips in a cafe or something, no problem. But in a proper restaurant, that would be the same as what @ScrollinMyDayAway describes: it would mark me as some kind of philistine that can’t appreciate the chef.
I’m fascinated by this stuff too! We share a language and consume a lot of your pop culture but there are still so many little things that are different.
Eg “tuna noodle casserole” sounded super gross to me because of the language difference. Here, casserole = a thin, liquid stew with chunks of meat in it, cooked in a ceramic pot, and noodles = only Asian noodles (ramen, udon, etc). But it turns out it’s more like what we call a “pasta bake”, a totally normal dish.
Yep, like me. I normally like my food spicy, and can usually tell whether a dish needs pepper or not.
Also, at the nicer restaurants, the waiter offering it to you is part of the tradition and experience. It can be seen as the restaurant being attentive to the diner. It’s not just pepper, they may offer to grate cheese as well, and I guess customers have come to expect such service as those restaurants.
Even though this happened over 20 years ago, I will never forget the experience I once had of a waiter grinding all the pepper into my lap instead. It was an upmarket restaurant, but I think perhaps he was on something.
Doesn’t matter what level of culinary experience you are partaking in, the kitchen is probably partaking in something.
To the point where it’s actually a huge issue and there are organisations to deal with the drug abuse and depression experienced by chefs and other hospitality workers.
My employment is in tandem to the hospitality industry and we sponsor some of these charities, among others.
I guess that’s not surprising, based on the people I used to know in hospitality. One person who was a chef changed field and retrained after one too many hostile workplaces.
I can’t stop laughing. Did you tell him, or did he just sit there grinding more and more pepper into your lap?
My wife and I went to an Italian restaurant in Vegas a few years ago. The waiter asked if we wanted Parmesan, pulled the tiniest cube of cheese out and held it up like a magician, and then never broke eye contact while he grated it. It was unnerving.
I know you said it was multi-ply, but did that pan actually have anything other than a copper core? For example, steel or magnetic stainless steel? Some multi-ply cookware still isn’t induction compatible because those magnetic core materials aren’t included. Copper alone is not compatible with induction because it can’t respond to the magnetic field produced by the induction hob (which is why I’d be skeptical of anyone saying copper “draws too much current,” if anything it draws too little or none at all)
I always do the magnet test on new cookware now, or look for people doing it in review videos. The more magnetic material used (within reason, obviously!) the better the pan will respond to the stove.
If you can test them in person, a magnet on the underside should stick to a pan that will work with induction ranges. That’s how we figured out what pans to keep when we switched to an induction range earlier this year.
I think a cast iron pan will also work, but not entirely sure. We ended up picking a Rachel Ray set we found, so not high end but this might give you some ideas for materials to search for that will be induction ready.
I find stainless steel to be great for searing things or when I’m not to worried about sticking, things like meats, chunky veggies (Brussel sprouts, potatoe chucks) will stick until their surface has lost most of it’s moisture or broken down the proteins enough. This can actually super useful as it’s a great way to tell when one side of something is “done” getting some nice color on it.
Cast iron (or carbon steel if you want something a bit lighter) is much less sticky and will last multiple generations. Great for scrambled eggs or anything you don’t want sticking. So long as there are multiple layers of baked on oil it’ll be nearly as stick resistent as any fancy non-stick pan (the hydrophobic ends of the oil molecule end up bonding to each other and the iorn to form layers of a patina/polymer that resists sticking and sheds water).
Frankly I’m quite skeptical of non-stick pans in general, a lot of them have moved away from Teflon because of the serious issues surrounding it, but the replacements they’ve introduced are not exactly well vetted and I’m not exactly trusting of the chemical industry to do their do diligence after Teflon and C8.
The team noted that at 120 °C there was a 40 percent decline in the polyphenol content and a 75 percent decline at 170 °C when compared to unheated raw EVOO. The team wrote in conclusion; however, “Cooked EVOO still meets the parameters of the EU’s health claim.” […] “Despite the decrease in concentration of polyphenols during the cooking process, this oil has a polyphenol level that reaches the declaration of health in accordance to the European regulation, which means it has properties that protect oxidation of LDL cholesterol particles.”
In the Acta Scientific Nutritional Health study, 10 of the most commonly used cooking oils were selected from the supermarket and heated in two different trials. In the first, the oils were heated for about 20 minutes until they reached 464 degrees. In the second trial, the oils were heated in a deep fryer to 356 degrees, the highest temperature recommended for deep-frying foods, for six hours.
In both tests, extra-virgin olive oil displayed the greatest oxidative stability, producing lower levels of polar compounds, trans fats and other byproducts when compared with other oils that had higher smoke points.
Always nice to see studies of these things! I feel like there’s a lot of olive oil lore out there, it’s cool to see that some of that lore checks out scientifically.
don’t overthink it. Use extra-virgin olive oil if you want to impart the flavor of green olives. Use refined/“light” olive oil if you want a healthy cooking oil that won’t make your shit taste like olives. EVOO has a slightly lower smoke point, but if you aren’t going higher than 400°F then either oil will work fine.
(I’m going to write with confidence, but I’m not an expert, just grew up around chefs. Please feel free and welcome to fact check me.)
Yeah, EVOO is made by cold-pressing the olives, and regular olive oil by hot pressing. Cold pressing releases less oil and also several tasty compounds that come along for the ride. Hot pressing releases more oil but also other compounds that don’t taste as nice, so generally regular olive oil will then be refined, removing most of the compounds that give it flavor. If you compare, you’ll find that real EVOO[^1] tastes distinctly olive-y, and regular olive oil has very little flavor at all.
When it comes to cooking, traditional advice is not to cook with EVOO because it’s got a low-ish smoke point[^2], whereas regular olive oil (which has been refined) will have a higher smoke point. EVOO’s smoke point isn’t actually that low, but I generally avoid high temp cooking with it anyway in favor of things like avocado oil (my personal go-to), peanut oil, or vegetable oil which are very tolerant of high temperatures. You absolutely can cook with EVOO though if you only want to keep one kind of oil around the house or something.
To clarify: heating up EVOO and cooking with it is fine as long as you don’t smoke it. It won’t make it any less extra-virgin or anything: to get those less good-tasting things into your oil, you need to heat up the olives themselves.
So are you wasting money if you do cook with it? Maybe.
Do you want what you’re cooking to taste like olive oil? If you do, cook with it! Real[^1] EVOO has a distinct taste that won’t go away when heated (unless you smoke it). It’s great for making stuff like olive oil cake! If you don’t care or don’t want that flavor in whatever you’re cooking, then yeah it’s probably a waste of money. There are many less expensive oils that will work well and have neutral flavors or different flavors that you might prefer, including regular olive oil.
[^1]: All of this is avoiding the issue of regular olive oil being passed off as EVOO when it actually isn’t. If you want something interesting to read about this evening, try researching olive oil fraud.
[^2]: In case you don’t know, smoke point is the temperature where an oil starts to burn, which tastes bad, isn’t very healthy, and will probably set off your smoke alarm.
Generally I keep two oils around the house. High quality, EVOO produced in my area of the world. And canola oil that I buy by the gallon and use for anything where I want more than just a little oil.
I just read up on olive oil fraud, interesting! I took some advice on testing it, and tried eating (drinking?) a spoonful. Even though I felt like a weirdo, I’m pretty sure mine is the real deal.
I guess I’ll continue using it as I have been, as it seems heating it doesn’t turn it into regular olive oil so long as you don’t burn it. Thanks!
Glad you found it useful! When I started writing it nobody else had answered and by the time I posted it a bunch of other people had replied (that’s what I get for walking away while writing it).
you can use it gently, the best EVOO you would just want to leave as is, but the lower quality ones would be fine for say the low temp saute you might do for a puttanesca or whatever.
Im not sure. Im seeing a lot of sources saying it retains health benefits like polyphenols. But also all of the sources are olive oil industry sites...theres a bizarrely large number of different industry PR sites for olive oil apparently.
Oh, if I was (shallow) frying with olive oil, it would be for the olive flavour. Smoke point hasn’t really been an issue, you can still brown things just fine using olive oil below it’s smoke point.
I think that’s probably the distinction though; EVOO has a much stronger flavour than the more plain OO. The latter is totally ok for a saute, or sweating off veg for a sauce etc, or roasting but as you note with a lower smoke point not so great for say doing steaks, or stir-frying - and far too expensive for deep-frying!
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