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[twistofbasil]

Carbonara preparation under pressure....

[twistofbasil]

but on the real though, here is your guide to assyrian rice preparation from your friendly neighborhood assyrian:

start wanting rice. (or, if you are traditional, simply recognize your constant desire for rice.)

measure out two cups of rice. then one more. then two more. then another. this seems fine. you love rice. there is no way that this will backfire on you.

remember that your great-great-uncle’s recipe says it should be soaked overnight.

become consumed with despair.

decide to soak it for half an hour instead, acknowledging that the final product will be inferior and anger your ancestors but will still satisfy your now almost-overwhelming need for rice to be inside your body much faster.

remember that you should have set the water to boil when you soaked the rice. goddammit. 

once the water boils, put the rice in until it is half-cooked. the eyeballing or intuitive method is less effective than a timer but that’s how your aunt does it so you feel compelled to meet her standards.

now that the rice has fluffed up, realize how much rice six dry cups really is. holy shit. you’ve fucked up immeasurably. 

take a minute to dwell upon your failings.

grease a baking dish with butter. this will never be as elegant as you want it to and your fingers will get greasy, but the slightly shameful, self-indulgent joy of licking your fingers afterwards will make up for it.

pour the rice into the dish. wonder immediately if you actually buttered the dish beforehand and if you’ve just fucked up. 

melt approximately one thousand pounds of butter in the microwave and pour it over the rice, pondering your imminent death from rapid-onset arterial clogging. put a small pat of butter on the top to properly gild the lily.

put your pan into the oven, which you have absolutely preheated after your previous lack of foresight. shake the rice once or twice while it bakes to make sure the butter is well distributed. resist the impulse to climb into the oven with the rice. for the last ten minutes, sit next to the oven and count the seconds until it’s done.

remove the dish from the oven. shed a tear or two at the perfection laid before you. if you are dining with others, this is the time to serve the rice while making passive-aggressive statements about how oh no, you don’t need any help, you just made dinner all by yourself, you can serve everyone as well. (this is still fun if done alone, but optional.)

CONSUME THE RICE.

realize that you have eaten half of the dish in one sitting. no matter how much rice you made, this will always happen. 

put the leftovers away, if there are any, and enjoy a cup of chai while marveling at the amount of food you have just eaten. if possible, fall asleep in an armchair, sitting up, head tilted slightly back, like a grandpa.

for the rest of the evening, think fondly of how much rice you have in the fridge now and how many meals it will supplement, refusing to acknowledge that you will almost certainly eat the rest of it in a few hours for a midnight meal.

[twistofbasil]

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat in under 1500 words

Here's my under-1500-word summary of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, a book about the skill of cooking by Samin Nosrat.

There are four basic factors that determine how good your food will taste: salt, which enhances flavor; fat, which amplifies flavor and makes appealing textures possible; acid, which brightens and balances; and heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food.

Salt

Salt amplifies other flavors, except bitterness; it reduces bitterness.

Fine salts can be up to twice as dense as course salts, so measure salt by weight, rather than by volume. Better yet, measure by taste.

It's usually best for food to be salted from within, rather than sprinkled with salt at the end.

In many cases, salt is best added before cooking so it has time to diffuse through the food. For meat (but not fish), salt hours (or days) before cooking. For vegetables (but not mushrooms), salt 15 minutes before cooking.

Taste often while cooking, and add more salt if needed.

Fat

Fat plays three distinct roles in cooking: as a main ingredient (e.g. butter in a pastry or olive oil in pesto), as a cooking medium (butter to sauté vegetables), and as a seasoning (e.g. sour cream in soup, mayonnaise in a sandwich). Knowing which role fat will play will guide you to choose which fat to use for your purpose.

Fat carries flavor. It coats the tongue, allowing aromatic compounds to stay in contact with taste buds for longer periods of time. Take advantage of this by adding aromatics (e.g. garlic) directly into the cooking fat. When baking, add vanilla extract and other flavorings directly into the butter or egg yolks for the same result.

Fat also enhances flavor another way. Cooking fats can withstand temperatures well above the boiling point of water (212°), so they can do what water can't: facilitate browning (which begins around 230°). Browning can introduce entirely new flavors.

An important factor, when choosing a fat, is to match it with the culture of the food you're creating, otherwise it won't taste right. e.g. don't use olive oil in Vietnamese food, or smoky bacon fat in Indian food.

Which fats we use primarily affect flavor, but how we use them determines texture. Depending on how we use fats, we can achieve one of five textures: Crisp (e.g. fried food), Creamy (e.g. chocolate, ice cream), Flaky (pastries), Tender (shortbread), and Light (whipped cream).

Foods that are too dry, or need just a bump of richness, can be corrected with a little olive oil (or other oil), or another creamy ingredient such as sour cream, crème, fraîche, egg yolk, or goat cheese. Use vinaigrette, mayonnaise, a spreadable cheese, or creamy avocado to balance out dryness in a sandwich or atop thick, crusty bread.

Acid

Like salt, acid heightens other flavors. But while the salt threshold is absolute, acid balance is relative. If you add too much salt to a broth, it's unsalvageable, except through dilution. But if you add too much acid to something, you can add sugar, salt, fat, bitterness or starch to change it from unpalatably sour to pleasant. (For example, if you make lemonade from lemon juice, water, and sugar, try tasting it before and after you add sugar, and what was unpleasantly sour becomes good.)

Let geographic tradition guide your choice of acid to use: wine vinegars in Italian, French, Germany, and Spanish cuisine; rice vinegars in Asian cuisine; apple cider vinegar for British and southern American food; lemon and tomatoes in Mediterranean food, lime in tropical climates like Mexico, Cuba, India, Vietnam, and Thailand; dairy can fit in most cuisines.

Acid dulls vibrant greens, so wait until the last possible moment to dress salads or squeeze lemon on cooked green vegetables.

Acid keeps reds and purples vivid, so add acid before cooking purple cabbage, red chard stems, and beets.

Raw fruits and vegetables vulnerable to oxidation, like apples, avocados, and bananas, will retain their natural color if coated with acid or kept in water mixed with a few drops of lemon juice.

Acid keeps vegetables and legumes tougher, longer. Anything containing cellulose or pectin will cook much more slowly in the presence of acid. Fifteen minutes of simmering in water can soften carrots to baby food, but they'll still be somewhat firm after an hour stewing in red wine. If you've ever cooked something with onions and been perplexed at the onions not cooking, it could be that an acidic ingredient - perhaps tomatoes, wine, or vinegar - is interfering.

As in general with cooking, the best way to optimize acidity is to taste during cooking and adjust.

Heat

To determine whether the heat level is correct, the best cooks look at the *food*, not the the heat source. They listen for the changing sounds of a sizzling sausage, watch the way a simmer becomes a boil, and taste a noodle to determine whether it's al dente. Is the food browning, firming, shrinking, crisping, burning, falling apart, swelling, or cooking unevenly?

Food is primarily made up of: water, fat, carbohydrates, and protein.

Water can be a medium in which we cook other foods. At low temperatures, water is particularly gentle. Simmering, braising and poaching provide foods with the sustained low heat they need to develop tenderness. Heat water to 212° at sea level and it boils, giving us one of the quickest and most efficient ways to cook food.

Beyond 212°, water transforms to steam, a valuable visual cue: as long as food is wet and giving off steam, its surface temperature probably isn't hot enough to allow browning to begin. Caramelization and the Maillard reaction don't begin until food reaches higher temperatures.

Make decisions in relationship to steam. Encourage steam to escape if you want temperatures to rise and food to brown. Contain steam with a lid to allow food to cook in a moist environment if you want to prevent or delay browning.

Food piled in a pan can affect steam levels by acting like a makeshift lid; both entrap steam. Trapped steam condenses and drips back down, keeping food moist and maintaining a temperature around 212°.

Control steam in the oven when roasting or toasting food similarly. Spread out zucchini and peppers so steam escapes and browning begins sooner. Protect denser vegetables that take longer to cook, like artichokes, from browning too much before they can cook through by packing them tightly to entrap steam.

At high temperatures, sugar melts. At very high temperatures (340°), sugar darkens and caramelizes, producing hundreds of new compounds with abundant new flavors: acidic, bitter, fruity, caramel, nutty, sherry, and butterscotch.

Cooking fruits, vegetables, dairy, and some grains releases their sugars. As heat penetrates a boiling carrot, for example, its starches break down into simple sugars, and the cell walls enclosing the sugars disintegrate, making a cooked carrot taste sweeter than a raw one.

Heat proteins in the presence of carbohydrates, and the Maillard reaction occurs, heat's most significant contribution to flavor, with notes like floral, onion, meaty, vegetal, chocolatey, starchy, and earthy. It's often accompanied by dehydration and crispness, so the texture is also often improved.

Browning begins around 230°. The temperatures required to achieve this tasty browning will dry out proteins, so beware. Use intense heat to brown the surface of meats and quickly cook tender cuts through. After browning a tougher cut such as brisket, on the other hand, use gentle heat to keep its interior from drying out. Or cook it through with gentle heat first, and brown the surface at the end.

Brown with care; it's easy to burn.

Cooking sometimes continues after removing the food from the heat source, as the residual heat continues cooking. Proteins in particular are susceptible to carryover.

The primary decision is whether to cook slowly over gentle heat, or quickly over intense heat. For some foods, the goal is *creating* tenderness; for others, it's *preserving* tenderness. In general, foods that are already tender (some meats, eggs, delicate vegetables) should be cooked as little as possible to maintain their tenderness. Foods that start out tough or dry and need to be hydrated or transformed to become tender (grains and starches, tough meats, dense vegetables) will benefit from longer, more gentle cooking. Browning, whether for tender or tough foods, will often involve intense heat, so you'll combine cooking methods. For example, brown and then simmer meats in a stew, or simmer and then brown potatoes for hash to ensure browning *and* tenderness in both cases.

Gentle cooking methods (for creating or preserving tenderness)

Simmering, Coddling, and Poaching

Steaming

Stewing and Braising

Confit (poaching in fat)

Sweating

Bain-marie

Low-heat Baking and Dehydrating

Slow-roasting, Grilling, and Smoking

Intense cooking Methods (often for browning)

Blanching, Boiling, and Reducing (an exception to this list - these, of course, don't brown foods)

Sautéing, Pan-frying, and Shallow and Deep-frying

Searing

Grilling and Broiling

High-heat Baking

Toasting

Roasting

[twistofbasil]

I don't think that making or using AI art/image generation is morally wrong, as you guys know, but I have to admit that slotting a wibbly-lined low effort image selected from the first result set from Midjourney in your content is incredibly tacky. At least select something that looks good. Maybe something without the boring AI "sheen" look either.

You see this a lot in clickbaity content like web spam and youtube shorts attempting to algorithm game.

[twistofbasil]

kill the shift manager in your brain

[twistofbasil]

hi (waves) as a fellow eater of vegetarian glops, would you be interested in some of my favorite one pot recipes? I've got recipe for pasta with chickpeas I particularly like, a really nice red lentil/sweet potato glop, and a no chicken no noodle no soup.

Please! Always in the market for new recipes, and-okay 2/3 of those sound delicious, the no soup I'm mostly just curious about.

[twistofbasil]

Incredibly smug about how well this chickpeas curry turned out

[twistofbasil]

I don't cook my chili from a recipe anymore, but rather by knowing what flavors I want and how to cook to achieve them. However, @theoutcastrogue asked for the recipe, so here's a guide, instead.

Before I begin, a couple of caveats. This was developed through trial and error. Nothing was written down. There's little in the way of measurements or exact times. Vibes only

Ingredients

1 lb ground ground beef. Cubed chuck roast or stew meat is great, too. Use whatever you want, I don't care. I'm not the chili cops

1 white onion, diced

3 large cloves of garlic, minced

Chilies. In this case I used 2 Fresnos, 1 jalapeño, and 1 Serrano. De-seeded and chopped fine. This was a spicy chili, but I hate spicy for spicy's sake. It's all about heat and flavor, so soaked my chilies in water and vinegar to take some of the heat out, but leave the flavors. I like to control the spice (because he who controls the spice, blah blah blah) and adjust for heat later, so this gives me wiggle room. You can also use less chilies or sub in poblanos or Anaheims. You can also use dried chilies, but that's all you.

1 can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. From this I took 3 peppers and rinsed them off. Again, reducing the initial heat so I can adjust manually later. These I chopped up, seeds and all. I reserved 2 tablespoons of the adobo sauce to use when adjusting heat (I never had to, btw. It was perfect)

About a half cup of whatever spice mix you like. Again, I'm not the spice cops. I used about a tablespoon each of chili powder, ancho chili powder, smoked paprika, and about a teaspoon of cumin, coriander, salt, pepper, and Tajin. Maybe some others I can't remember

Tomato paste

1 can of diced tomatoes (14 oz)

1 can of kidney beans (12 oz). When I'm making a larger batch, I'll use 2 (two) 12 oz cans of tomatoes and a can of kidney beans, plus a can of black or pinto beans. Do whatever you like.

Fresh lime

Ok, on to the process... heat up a couple of tablespoons of oil in a large Dutch oven or stew pot, over medium heat. Toss in your onions and a pinch of salt and turn the heat down a notch. Sweat out the onion for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently until they begin to get soft and translucent. Now throw in the diced chilies (draining first, of course). Keep stirring for another 10 minutes.

While this is cooking down, take 1/3 of your spice mix and work it into your ground beef (or coat all your stew meat in the spice)

Finally, add the garlic and cook for another 5 minutes. It should all look like this

Now remove everything with a slotted spoon or whatever spoon or ladle like implement you have. Set it aside.

Now turn the heat back up to medium high. There should be just enough oil left in the pot to sear up your beef, so toss that in when it gets hot again. Break it apart, but don't stir that shit yet. LET IT BROWN! Just leave it alone for like 2 minutes. Ok, good? Now toss in another 1/3 of your spice mix and give a stir. Get it good and coated. Stir occasionally until browned.

Drain the fat a little, but leave some. Now toss in your chipotles and about a half a tablespoon of tomato paste and let that cook for a minute or two, stirring occasionally. Add all the onion, chilies, and garlic. Stir it up and let the flavors mingle. It should look like this...

As a brief aside, I'm a huge proponent of letting each addition cook down a little, letting each new ingredient have a chance to make friends with everything else. It builds layers of flavor. It takes time, though. If you're in a rush, that's ok. It'll still taste good if you want to just add things together quicker and add more stuff at once. Might not be as good, but still good.

Next, it bean time. Not much to say here. Beans go in, everything gets stirred around a bit for while. Couple minutes, maybe.

After everything has done a meet and greet for a few minutes, add your tomatoes and the last 3rd of your spice mix. Stir. Wait a minute. Stir. Wait another minute. Stir. Now taste!! It's ok if at this point it tastes a little tinny, or little too much like tomatoes from a can. Don't worry about it. You did just add a big-ass can of tomatoes, but that's gonna mellow out as it cooks down. However, if it's bothering you, like it did me, or if it's already too spicy, here's where you can add your secret ingredients. Bacon, rendered down and chopped up is always a good choice. For this batch I drizzled in maybe a teaspoon of maple syrup (that real shit. No fake butter flavored corn syrup) and a quarter cup cream.

At this point everything should be well mingled and the flavors are starting to really meld. You may be tempted to adjust the heat at this point. You do you, cowboy, but I'd save that for near the end. And we're nowhere near the end, just through the hard part.

Put a lid on it. Turn the heat down to low. Let it simmer. My stove cranks out a decent amount of heat, even at the lowest end of the dial, so that's where I set it. If your stove top isn't a gas furnace the likes of which would make Hephaestus jealous, maybe just a touch above low. Bubbly simmer, but not boiling is what you're looking for.

Brab a beverage of your choice, set a timer for 30-45 minutes, and go fuck off and do something else. I finished up the UC Vanguard questline in Starfield for the 3rd time. Every 30-45 minutes, go stir it. Make sure it's not reducing too much. If it is, add a touch of beef broth or water. Taste it. Savor the anticipation of a good-ass bowl of chili in your future.

Keep that up anywhere from an hour-ish to whenever. I let mine go for 2 1/2 or 3 hours. About 30 minutes before you plan on serving it, give it another taste. Nows when you can adjust for seasoning, spice level, etc. I probably put enough chili peppers in for a batch twice this size, so it was spicy. Delicious, but spicy. I added another 1/4 cup of cream to cut it a bit. It's your call.

After letting any adjustments meld into the rest of the flavors for about 30 minutes, serve it up!! I squeezed some fresh lime juice over it, and served it with sour cream, shreddy cheese, and some pickled red onions I started before I began my chili journey. Bone Apple Teeth!

[twistofbasil]

"This is not how you make cookies!"