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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The problem is that French food in the Anglosphere has literally been the fancy food since 1066. That’s why English has 2 words for every meat: the germanic peasant word and the french nobleman’s culinary word (cow-beef, chicken-poultry, deer-venison, sheep-mutton, swine-pork, etc).

    Being the default “fancy” food is going to do damage to any cuisine as the purpose becomes more about fanciness than tasting good or being what people from the place actually eat.

    For another example, look at American Italian food. In a lot of small towns, Italian restaurants are the de facto fancy restaurant . It’s basically made it so that Italian restaurants in much of the US are either way too expensive and fancy or they’ve gone the opposite route and just overcharge for really basic pasta with sauce (olive garden).


  • If you don’t like truffle oil, you probably just don’t like truffle, and that’s fine. Like the other commenter said, it’s literally just the same compound that’s been synthesized.

    2,4-Dithiapentane

    Real truffles obviously have some other flavoring compounds in there, but like vanilla vs vanilin, you’d probably have a hard time distinguishing between them in a dish in a blind taste test.

    I have eaten shaved truffles, and even that’s really a gamble. The problem is that they aren’t really good until they are “ripe”, but once you dig them up, i don’t think they ripen any more. There’s also a big counterfeit problem since many species look similar. I’ve had good truffles, and I’ve had truffles that literally just taste like nothing.





  • Seconding cooking for sure. You have to eat, so you might as well find a way to enjoy it, save money, and stay healthy in the process.

    Repairing things. Electronics, clothes, furniture, it doesn’t matter what, but try to learn how to repair stuff. It eventually encourages you to buy less, but higher quality items. Also everyone likes if you fix their favorite thing.

    Organizing people. This isnt often treated as a skill, but it really is. You’ll find over time that in your group of friends, someone is always the person to try to put together the next activity. Try to be that person. That’s super useful in all parts of life. Keep in mind that people will end up being lazy and expecting you to keep doing the work, but try not to take it personally.






  • Anyone replying “stretching” is basing their response on grade school gym class, not science.

    Studies have not shown that stretching has a positive impact on injury prevention, and this has been widely known in the literature for over 20 years. Stretching can improve performance in some sports like gymnastics where increased flexibility is needed, but that is unrelated to injury.

    Stretching has a negative effect on performance in other cases because it actually decreases muscle force generation.

    Think about it, would you think that loosening all the belts on a machine would automatically make it less likely to break down?

    So what does prevent injury?

    • Good warm-ups. Walk before you jog before you run. Lift an unloaded barbell before a loaded one, etc.
    • Strength. A joint surrounded by muscle is a stable joint. That means doing exercises that strengthen all the muscles, including minor ones. It’s part of why most people who know what they are talking about will try to get you to do compound lifts with free weights over single joint exercises on machines.
    • periodization/progressive overload. Basically slowly building intensity and then backing off to recuperate.



  • From what i understand “cottage cheese” is a cheese made from milk treated with rennet, lightly strained, and mixed with a little bit of cream. I’m sure there’s regional variation in the terminology and process.

    From like 2 minutes of searching online, I seems like what people call “dry cottage cheese” is basically just what I described. Heat milk, acidify it, and strain. Typically what I do is strain it with a cloth until it’s fairly dry, then I’ll mix back in some of the whey until I get the texture I like.

    The fancier version involves fermentation with bacterial cultures to create the necessary acid, but that’s not something you are going to do with a half jug of milk you want to just use up before it goes bad.





  • Yogurt is super easy to make with any (dairy) milk.

    There are some cheeses that are better with unpasteurized milk, but it still works with pasteurized milk. I think most cheeses made with unpasteurized milk are just done that way because the pasteurization is an unnecessary step. Cheeses that are aged long enough have the pathogens die off. In the US, that threshold is 60 days. In the EU, tradition is deemed more important than safety, so there is no waiting period. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12146498/#fsn370409-bib-0006

    Homogenization is a challenge for curd formation with some cheeses, but you can counteract it with some extra calcium chloride.

    It’s common to add cream to milk to boost the fat content for some cheeses.

    You wouldn’t make rennet-based cheeses of the leftovers from a jug of milk, though, cause that’s not enough bang for your buck. I just make what’s essentially like a ricotta. All you have to do is heat it up, and add a little bit of distilled vinegar or lemon juice which cuddles it, and then you strain it through cheesecloth.