Are you a cook?

[Cristobal]

Not battered. It's wrapped in a spring roll or eggroll wrapper, sealed up like a Mexican burrito when it's folded, then fried in palm oil or coconut oil. Sort of like fried egg rolls in Chinese restaurants but bigger and with no meat or bean sprouts inside, just the seasoned palm hearts.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Chinese- ... 9269304379

Those green triangular things you see in the pictures are puso or "hanging rice". It's just rice that's been wrapped up in woven banana leaf strips and cooked in the wrappers. They're usually eaten to accompany street foods/finger foods like barbecue, at places that don't serve food on plates and offer eating utensils. You just open the puso and eat the rice while holding onto the wrapper. They're called "hanging rice" because they're strung together for transporting, usually by bicycle or motorbike, hanging from the handlebars.

Here's the delivery man.

Indeed, my mistake, I read the article too quickly.

No, you always soak dried yeast in some warm water to revive it before use. I'm talking about a 50-50 flour and water batter that's left out to sit at room temperature, loosely covered, until the airborne wild yeasts or any wild yeast that happens to already be in the flour start growing in it. It's best to use distilled, purified or filtered water to remove any chlorine that may be in your tap water, and to cover the container (a glass jar works well) with a layer of cheesecloth. You use a half cup, more or less, of the starter instead of baker's yeast to leaven the bread dough. It adds a slightly sour tanginess to the bread vs. using a pure baking yeast, yielding a bread that's great for sandwiches among other things.

OK, I understand, you grow yourself the sourdough; it might be even more practical than buying fresh baker's yeast. A recipe I found on the internet, says to use 150g of sourdough (once made) for a 500g lump of bread, and preferably "artisan" flour (maybe they meant organic).
Does the time you leave the sourdough, at room temperature or in the fridge, affect the taste of the bread? I mean, the longer, the stronger will taste the bread?

[JayM]

For actually chopping meat with a cleaver or heavy knife the best cutting board is a tree round, about three inches thick. That's what they use in Chinese/SE Asian meat markets, and also in restaurants and food stalls in those places that sell cooked meat such as lechon baboy. Tree rounds present a cross-grain surface that the cleaver or knife can bite into like a chopping block does when you're splitting firewood with an axe. That helps protect the edge of the blade so you don't need to sharpen or hone it as often. If you don't want a rough porous surface like the Asian ones have it can be planed and sanded.

Regarding the type of wood, cedar is good as the natural oils in cedar act as antibacterial agents, but it might impart a bit of flavor to the food that you don't want. Most cutting boards are made of some type of hardwood like maple or walnut. The best ones, similar to the Chinese tree round ones, are end-grain rather than cross-grain to avoid dulling your knives as much.

A good DIY project, if you have a few basic woodworking tools, would be to beg or scrounge a 2 or 3 inch section from near the bottom of a good-sized maple or other hardwood tree that someone's cut down that doesn't have any rot in the heartwood, debark it, then take an electric plane and a belt sander to it to even up the surface, and Bob's your uncle.

[JayM]

OK, I understand, you grow yourself the sourdough; it might be even more practical than buying fresh baker's yeast. A recipe I found on the internet, says to use 150g of sourdough (once made) for a 500g lump of bread, and preferably "artisan" flour (maybe they meant organic).
Does the time you leave the sourdough, at room temperature or in the fridge, affect the taste of the bread? I mean, the longer, the stronger will taste the bread?

Not really, you just want to leave your starter out long enough that the fermentation of the natural sugars in the flour is well underway, then you can refrigerate it between uses though I wouldn't do so for longer than a week. Let the starter warm up to room temperature and bubbles are forming before you use it. If you don't want to commit to baking bread every week to keep your starter alive there are other things you can make with it such as the raised doughnuts I mentioned (I recommend applesauce and cinnamon doughnuts, made cake-style in which you don't let the doughnuts rest long enough to rise very much before deep-frying, sprinkled with pastry sugar) or sourdough pancakes (American crepes, basically.) Pretty much any baked goods that require a leavener can be made with sourdough, with the exception of Irish soda bread which must be made with sour milk and baking soda, the reaction of the sodium bicarbonate and the lactic acid causing the leavening.

The amount of starter that you use for a batch of bread isn't super-critical as long as you use enough to make the dough rise. Remember, sourdough was invented by the prospectors at the Klondike gold rush back in the day to make their own bread, and they didn't even have measuring cups let alone kitchen scales. They just eyeballed the amounts and baked bread, usually in cast-iron Dutch ovens. I would estimate that a half-cup, or maybe a bit more, of starter would be sufficient for two loaves of bread. If you get too much starter the bread will taste too sour, and if you don't get enough the dough will take longer to rise, so it's better to err on the side of too little than too much.

By the way, the older a starter is (that is, the more time has passed since it was freshly made) the better the bread and things taste. A freshly-made starter turns out pretty good sourdough bread, but one that's a year or two old (or older) makes bread that's absolutely delicious. So use the starter every week and keep feeding it by adding more flour and water then letting it sit until fermentation is going well before you refrigerate it.

[rokytnji.1]

Silicon cutting boards rule here. The real skinny thin ones that come in a pack pf 5 . They fold up to pour work in the cooking utinsel/pot which is pretty handy . Tuck away nicely . Easy clean.

[rokytnji.1]

Also. Once you buy the silicon cookie baking sheets. You will never go back to tin.

[jj1j1]

There's a ton of websites that talk about cutting boards. I think the main consensus is hard maple, walnut, oak, birch and cherry is most commonly used, and an end-grain cutting board is hard to beat. I ran across a site that sells slats already planed. https://www.woodworkerssource.com/lumbe ... woods.html although I wouldn't choose zebrawood, or bloodwood. That doesn't make sense. It's good to know the properties of wood before you go to all the trouble to make a board; toxicity being the most important property. A good example IS zebrawood. From the site; "Be warned that zebrawood may look like an amazing exotic wood BUT it smells like its name sake. It is the absolute worst wood I have ever planed and smells like your toilet backed up".
Some sites state that the open grain of oak isn't good, but it's fine. Just clean the board right after it's used with bleach water solution and a stiff brush so it will clean out the pores of the wood. Another site that's helpful is http://thewoodbox.com/data/wood/
Also this site explains a little about glues to use; https://www.finewoodworking.com/forum/w ... ing-boards

[scottr954]

There's a ton of websites that talk about cutting boards. I think the main consensus is hard maple, walnut, oak, birch and cherry is most commonly used, and an end-grain cutting board is hard to beat. I ran across a site that sells slats already planed. https://www.woodworkerssource.com/lumbe ... woods.html although I wouldn't choose zebrawood, or bloodwood. That doesn't make sense. It's good to know the properties of wood before you go to all the trouble to make a board; toxicity being the most important property. A good example IS zebrawood. From the site; "Be warned that zebrawood may look like an amazing exotic wood BUT it smells like its name sake. It is the absolute worst wood I have ever planed and smells like your toilet backed up".
Some sites state that the open grain of oak isn't good, but it's fine. Just clean the board right after it's used with bleach water solution and a stiff brush so it will clean out the pores of the wood. Another site that's helpful is http://thewoodbox.com/data/wood/
Also this site explains a little about glues to use; https://www.finewoodworking.com/forum/w ... ing-boards

Thanks!

[scottr954]

For actually chopping meat with a cleaver or heavy knife the best cutting board is a tree round, about three inches thick. That's what they use in Chinese/SE Asian meat markets, and also in restaurants and food stalls in those places that sell cooked meat such as lechon baboy. Tree rounds present a cross-grain surface that the cleaver or knife can bite into like a chopping block does when you're splitting firewood with an axe. That helps protect the edge of the blade so you don't need to sharpen or hone it as often. If you don't want a rough porous surface like the Asian ones have it can be planed and sanded.

Regarding the type of wood, cedar is good as the natural oils in cedar act as antibacterial agents, but it might impart a bit of flavor to the food that you don't want. Most cutting boards are made of some type of hardwood like maple or walnut. The best ones, similar to the Chinese tree round ones, are end-grain rather than cross-grain to avoid dulling your knives as much.

A good DIY project, if you have a few basic woodworking tools, would be to beg or scrounge a 2 or 3 inch section from near the bottom of a good-sized maple or other hardwood tree that someone's cut down that doesn't have any rot in the heartwood, debark it, then take an electric plane and a belt sander to it to even up the surface, and Bob's your uncle.

Great info, thanks Jay!

[jj1j1]

A tree round is end grained isn't it? The grain of a cross grained board surface would be perpendicular to the blade motion. No different than using a cross-cut saw to cut across the grain of wood. With an end grained board the blade motion is in-line with the grain like that of a tree round. Also, I have to disagree with ceder being used as a cutting board. I have worked with ceder extensively. I remember sticking my thumbnails deep into ceder many times. It's a softwood , and IMO, a poor choice for a cutting board. A person would end up with ceder in whatever they were chopping, and you are correct in what you mention about the oils in ceder. It's aromatic properties could taint many foods with it's oils.

[JayM]

A tree round is end grained isn't it? The grain of a cross grained board surface would be perpendicular to the blade motion. No different than using a cross-cut saw to cut across the grain of wood. With an end grained board the blade motion is in-line with the grain like that of a tree round.

Yeah, you're right. It's been many years since I took wood shop in school. I got my terms mixed up.