/ck/ - Food & Cooking

Were pre-Columbian chilis actually all that spicy? Or did we only selectively breed them for high capsaicin content later?

I spent all day thinking about the smell of coffee. I've never drank coffee before. So I bought some instant coffee. It was terrible. Bitter as all hell, even with a bunch of milk in it.

Thinking the next step up would be to get a cone, some filters and grind a bag of coffee from the store. I don't want to spend any money on this.

Is coffee even good?

Can dry chickpeas be toasted before cooking in liquid, like you would toast rice for risotto? Would that improve the flavor, or would a pre-toast fuck up the cooking properties somehow?

Is it true French people don't put ham and cheese inside a croissant, and that this is actually just an anglo perversion?

What determines whether the gas in the bread gets distributed into a very large number of small bubbles (like sandwich bread or brioche) or a smaller number of larger bubbles (pain de campagne style sourdoughs)?

In espresso, is the headspace between the coffee puck and the dispersion screen important? I've often heard it advised that you should be able to fit a coin between the puck and the dispersion screen without it leaving an imprint, but I don't know what this is supposed to achieve.

Lately I've been brewing espresso from some shitty, stale non-espresso beans and have been dealing with major channeling, but I've been able to mitigate it by overdosing the portafilter to the point where the puck is touching the dispersion screen. My theory is that by eliminating headspace the coffee has nowhere to go when it's blasted with the water, thus reducing channeling. I also notice I have to grind extremely fine to get the shots to come out in 25-35 seconds, like borderline Turkish grind, which is a feature I've noticed in a few of the not so fresh coffees I've tried.

>>9488435
then how would i get rid of the baking soda odor?

>this entire thread

>>8888901

>fibrous veggies
>fat
>meat
>not filling

Would it be crazy to sear a steak in a deep fryer? I don't think meat absorbs oil in any significant quantity. In my personal experience, it doesn't make the steak any greasier to fry it in a skillet with a quarter inch of fat than frying it with just enough fat to coat the pan, as the amount of fat that ends up on your plate is pretty much just the portion that clings to the surface of the meat. Going from a little fat to a lot of fat in the pan has improved my steaks by making them sear better, but I wonder if the logical extension of this would be to forget about the skillet entirely and just drop the steak in a deep fryer.

>>8766133

So is Princess Bubblegum made of bubblegum all the way through? Could you eat her?