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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I’ve been cooking at home, and occasionally in restaurants, since I was about ten or so. So, 40ish years.

    No single standard is better than the others. It does suck that there isn’t a single one that is used as a base, and then gets converted by the cook into their preferred units and structure, but even that has issues.

    The good news is that most cooking, and even most baking, is very forgiving of the kind of discrepancies between sizes of lemons, onions, etc. You don’t really run into trouble until you’re dealing with things that react chemically based on the ratio of ingredients, which is still most common in baking, and not even all baking.

    Even in those types of recipes, it’s usually flour that’s the problem, not leaveners, since flour compacts readily and to a high degree. But, then again, most modern recipes like that are going to be in weight measures, or in baker’s ratios. You’d be using a scale for the fiddly recipes.

    So, generally, just guesstimate your produce size the first time you make something. It’s not going to be so far off that the results will suck if the dish itself doesn’t. Then you tweak things until it fits what you prefer, which is what happens anyway as you build your recipe book/collection.

    My old recipe book had scribbled notes in the margins from years of refinements. When I copied that into a digital recipe manager, I added them in directly. Now, I’m able to just enter the original recipe, then add my notes as parentheticals or whatever as I refine.

    Even with those detailed notes, a given recipe won’t always be reproducible as exactly the same. That’s because you just can’t standardize everything. You use good produce, there’s going to be varying water content, slight differences in flavor compounds, more or less sugars, so to get the same results over time, the cook has to know how to adjust for those things on the fly.

    Of equal import is that no matter how scientific your process of recipe development is, the table is never the same as the cook. My taste buds and brain aren’t the same as my wife’s, my kid’s, my cousin’s, etc. So there’s limits to the benefits of standardized recipes on the plate.

    Now, formatting? That’s a huge help.

    You want your ingredient list to include instructions about when an ingredient is used in multiple places. You want lists broken down in sections when a recipe calls for multiple procedures (like making the main dish, a sauce, and a crust).

    In the instructions, make sure the ingredient quantities are included for redundancy.

    If there’s an instruction about duration that’s variable explain what the variables change. As in: bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Okay, great. What’s the difference? If my stove runs hot and I go for the short time, will I see golden brown, and will 15 be burnt or just really dark? Yeah, you can’t expect identical results from one circumstance to the next, but at least drop an “until golden brown” at the very minimum.

    That applies to any variable, imo, but it can get to be too much detail in complicated recipe.

    Cooking and baking are chemistry, physics. But they’re also an art. The more you try to strip a recipe of flexibility, the less successful it’s going to be for the next cook.





  • That’s my exact distro/de combo. Never had any issues with trackpad use that weren’t also there with the win10 that came on the thinkpad. Which was just that it’s prone to detecting even the lightest accidental taps and over reacting. Maybe it’s device specific?

    Edit: by device specific, I mean that it isn’t every touchpad w/Libreoffice’s issue, rather something that’s wonky with some range of hardware and not others



  • Eh, anonymity is great for some things, less so in others.

    But burner emails are pretty much as anonymous as it gets on the fediverse. If you pick a random user name and cycle to a new account fairly often, you’re anonymous to other users. A VPN mostly anonymizes you from the instances.

    Being real though, that’s kinda dickish to the instances because you’re wasting the tiny bit of resources used to create accounts. If you do it often enough to really anonymize, it adds up.



  • The mods do their job. I don’t know for sure which ones are and are not active, but reports get handled same day in every case where I’ve reported, or been reported. I’d have to check the mod log to see if there’s been recent activity in that regard, but don’t have interest in doing so when anyone can.

    On my pen name account, I moderate two communities, and it would sometimes be months before I’d do anything on the account that would show up because those communities were very slow, and I’m subscribed to them on this account. No need to switch to that account when there’s no mod action needed, unless I want to post/comment on it, which is fairly infrequent.

    Lemmy is way more forgiving of relaxed moderation.



  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlLemmy > Mastodon
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    9 days ago

    As long as you’re getting “favorited”, it’s working as intended. Retooting (sorry, I know that’s not what it’s called I just enjoy the term) is less a determinant of what kind of interest there is on your post, but if you’re getting any at all, you’re doing good.

    Mastodon as a whole isn’t really about this kind of discussion. Just like Twitter was not going to have the same degree of interaction that reddit offered. Mastodon serves a different purpose, so it’s very difficult to make it work for threaded discussion, even though you can even use it to interact with lemmy (or other federated services).

    If you don’t want to use Mastodon as just a place to send your thoughts into the world, you have to follow hashtags that are about discussion and engagement. They can be hard to find, and often aren’t great because most people use instances that limit character use. Hard to have a nuanced talk with under 500 characters.


  • I mean, you quoted the line and missed the last two words as umami. That’s absurd, it’s right there to see.

    Up until the term umami spread outside of Japan, nobody called the flavor that. And it still took longer before people figured out that it was its own taste in the same wau sour, bitter, salty, and sweet are; that it has distinct receptors.

    Before that, there wasn’t really a specific term in use. When people referred to what is now called umami, the vocabulary was different. Savory and meaty are the two I remember being most used, and they have other usages for food. Savory is very often just used as an antonym for sweet, and meaty just means “meat like” without drawing a distinction between the saltiness and slight metallic tang of meat from the part that is umami.

    I don’t know how old you are, so you may or may not have been around during the spread of the term and its eventual discovery of having its own receptors. But it was “viral” in the way it initially crept in, then exploded as every cooking show started talking about it and familiarity with the term spread. There was a collective “ohhhhhh! That’s what I’ve been experiencing”, and the word got adopted. Now it’s a part of the collective lexicon.


  • Nutritional yeast, aka flake yeast.

    Intense flavor, goes with damm near anything parmesan goes with, and things it doesn’t. It’s fairly cheap, lasts ages when stored decently, and it packs a nutritional punch.

    People like to talk about how umami’s spread as a specific flavor into awareness in the west was a massive shift. But a lot of people got locked into the soy and fish sauce focus that was the first thing that western tastes became familiar with as umami. Even when folks are aware of other things, they still tend to think in terms of sauces and complex recipes for pastes and fermented products. But good old yeast is right there, cranking out a deep and rich flavor.

    So it gets slept on pretty hard. It doesn’t help that it isn’t marketed well. A lot of people that have heard of it think it’s more along the lines of a vitamin you take on its own, or lump it in with woowoo nutrition in places where it’s called nutritional yeast.

    One of my favourite things that really focus on it as a major flavor component is roasted cauliflower. You mix it with the spice blend, and toss it in a bowl, and it opens up with that rich, heady scent that yeast has. I don’t measure for it, it’s just dumping a bit of garlic and onion powders, salt & pepper, then some paprika. Then maybe two to three tablespoons of the yeast. It’s mouth watering, just the smell. Fuck, my mouth is watering thinking of it.

    You get that amazing caramelized flavor from the roasting, that delicate floral note that some cauliflower has, the slightly sulfuric tang too. Then the spices lift those, and the yeast ties it all together and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.






  • Main one is applicable to any online space.

    Hang back when you check out a new place. Get a feel for things before jumping in because, like reddit, not only does lemmy have a culture, each instance does, and each community on each instance does.

    You go to a meme community in one place and crack a dark joke, everyone laughs. You do it on another, you get banned. Yet another and you’re in a flame war.

    But it doesn’t just apply to things that controversial. It can be simple things like calling someone dude. Or talking about cars, or dogs, or weather. Sometimes, in some places, there’s a culture that isn’t obvious until you’ve scrolled through for a while. Again, this isn’t specific to lemmy, or even only online.

    Always do a vibe check when you’re new somewhere, anywhere.


  • I think part of the problem is that it’s hit or miss whether or not it’s spelled/spoken with ñ or n, in advertising and labels. Here in the US anyway.

    What’s funny is that the ñ spelling and pronunciation has bled over into native spanish speakers. My friend’s husband is from Nicaragua, and his entire family pronounces it ñ. One of my neighbors though, from Guadalajara originally, it’s n only.

    I’d also say that habanero is ñ friendly. It looks like it should be pronounced habañero, unlike a fairly similar word, Enero. It’s easier to say habañero than eñero as well. The a leading into the n does that for some reason I can’t figure out.

    However! Pero and perro blows people’s minds. While I don’t hear it with native speakers, damn near everyone else I’ve run into pronounces them the same. I do, and I know better, because I can’t make my tongue work right.