I make bubble tea for a living and I'm wondering if there is a way for cooked tapioca bubbles to not go through starch gelatinization? I'm completely oblivious of preservatives so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I was wondering since I have not used gelatin before. Is gelatin better for sizing paper?

This video by Adam Ragusea details the use of instant pudding mix in making moist yet light cakes, and that the acting ingredient in that use is modified / pre-gelatinized corn starch – replace 10 % of your flour with that for the desired effect.

However, I for the life of me can't find where to order that in Europe (US online sellers don't ship here). Do you reckon it could be simulated by gelatinizing plain corn starch by cooking the needed amount with the liquid ingredient(s) of the cake, then adding it and any evaporated liquid into the cake batter?

Thanks in advance for your insight!

I have been doing some reading on resistant starches and on the chemistry of roux, but I can't find anything that will break down how many impact carbohydrates are in an hour cooked dark roux. It seems after that high heat intense cooking process that gelatinizes the starch making it lose most of its thickening power, that maybe it's impact carbohydrates would lose their impact on ketosis? Anyone know?
I am not hoping for substitutes like almond flour, I am asking about wheat flour specifically.

Edit: Kinda disappointed this is being downvoted for a simple question. If you're downvoting, can you explain why?

Thank you in advance💕 I've tried corn but it always stays white.

I was given a box of instant mashed potatoes and have bought a couple of kilos of salmon pieces (factory offcuts from fillets. Good meat, just in little pieces). I was thinking of using the salmon to make fish cakes.

The recipe says to boil some potatoes and mash them to form the base of the fish cake. Is there any reason why I couldn't use the instant mashed potatoes instead of the "real" mashed potatoes? Has someone tried this before?

Thanks.

There’s a local restaurant here where I live in middle Tennessee, and they have some amazing chicken and rice soup. I can replicate it pretty well but after a few hours of it sitting in the fridge or whatever waiting to be the next meal, the rice swells up so badly that there’s hardly any broth left.

I’ve gone so far as to prepare the rice separately and just add it to the soup at the time it is being served. That works of course for enjoying the meal a second or third time without the rice being severely bloated. But the restaurant’s soup, when I order it to go, and put the leftovers in the fridge, they’re perfectly formed little individual grains of rice, not the chicken and rice blob that mine turns out to be. What am I doing wrong or what can I do differently? Thanks everyone.

Short version: I'm looking for suggestions for better thickening agents for stews that will be frozen that thaw well.

---

Long version: Because I have a busy schedule over the last few years I have done a lot of very large batch cooking (have both a ten and eight quart instant pot!) of various dishes that are almost always meaty stews of various sorts. Most of these meals have to be thickened and I usually use a cornstarch slurry. We consume a portion of what I cook that evening, refrigerate one portion for later in the week and freeze about three to six portions to use over the next month or two.

Because some foods don't freeze well I make some adjustments. For example let's say with a beef stew I'll only use a few of those little round potatoes, have those with the meal for that night and later in the week, and then freeze the rest without potatoes using fresh bread for a starch when consuming after thawing.

The biggest problem I'd like to solve is to avoid the way the sauce tends to separate after thawing. Doing some Googling today I've heard that arrowroot and tapioca may be better for my needs. I've also seen YouTube Chef Jean-Pierre stir in flour through a strainer but he cautions that this needs to be cooked quite a bit more to avoid an uncooked flour taste. Sometimes this can lead to overcooking of the main ingredients.

Anyway, tonight I'm cooking a double sized portion of Pressure Luck's Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon in my ten quart Instant Pot. It's come out great in the past except for the separation of thawed leftovers.

Looking for advice on thickening agents.

Greetings,

What does "modified food starch" really mean? I'm guessing it's evil, and to avoid it like the plague, and to go out and kill and eat my own meat, etc etc — but I'm looking for some easy meat things that I can take with me. Canned sardines are awesome, been loving them. This Costco canned chicken breast has this ingredient, though, and I'm just wondering what it really is. Thanks!

Costco’s pre made chicken noodle soup is pretty good. The broth is just a bit thicker than normal but not creamy. I’m wondering how this is done? What would be a good way to replicate this at home. Maybe a small butter and flour roux? Cornstarch? A type of noodles that thicken the broth?

I'm preparing to brew a Rochefort 10 clone. Rochefort uses wheat starch in the mash, so I'll be doing the same. How many points can I expect from it once it's fully converted?

I have been brewing for a year now and I have had great success overall. Last month I remembered that about 10 years ago, I tried a wheat beer that listed bread as its ingredients. It was quite tasty so I challenged myself to brew one.

As part of the challenge, I decided to not look up for recipes and to start from scratch. My ultimate goal would be to go to the local bakery, get some of their old dry bread for free in exchange for bottles for the employees. For this time, I will make my own bread.

I really wanted the bread to bring something so I went for a sourdough rye bread, I just omitted the oil in the recipe.

Once my loaf of bread was done, I sliced it and put the thin slices in my oven set a 90C for 2h. At this point the bread was rock solid and I transferred the bits in a blender. I did not powdered it, I made coarse bits as I was afraid of stuck mash (I brew in bags).

To make the recipe, I used brewfather and added bread as quick oats in the ingredients. I figured out that would be the closest to bread.

Here are the ingredients for the mash:

1.2 kg vienna malt (39.5%)

1.2kg wheat mat (39.5%)

490g of bread (16.1%)

150g rice hulls (4.9%)

Mash/water ratio : 3.2

Mash temperature 64C.

estimated OG :1.058, FG 1.014

After one hour, I checked with potassium iodide if there was still starch... And there was. I suspected that it was actually due to the bits of bread still floating. I took a sieve and pulled them down under the water. 15min later, there was still starch. 15 min later the starch was gone and I proceeded to sparging.

At this point, I tasted it and the bread was really shining but the sourdough was completely gone. I had two options: kettle souring or using philly sour. I have used several times philly sour with great success however it gives quite a strong red apple flavour that I did not necessarily want in my beer. I decided to go for kettle souring. I have never done kettle souring previously but I had lactobacillus plantarum probiotics at hands. According to Milk the funk it is a great choice for kettle souring at room temperature.

I went ahead, boiled by beer for 15 min, cooled it down with my immersion chiller and inoculated the beer with the content of 3 caps (30 billions bacteria in total). It was a 3gal batch so I though that should do the trick.

I wrapped my chilled wort with plastic foil so nothing would sneak under the lock to my beer. I came back to it 24h

I made a mixed berry curd for a tart about a year ago... unfortunately I cannot find the recipe I used, but I followed it to the letter and I remember that it did not set, even after being in the fridge for a day. What are the different setting agents you can use for curds/tarts, and how do they work to set it just right? I'm making a tart for the holidays and want to ensure it comes out nicely. Thanks in advance!

Hello, old recipe aficionados! I'm back with an update on how my Victorian era (1880) dinner party menu went. Everything was actually delicious and I would make (and eat!) any of it again. The goal of this post is to share the recipes with you all and document the process in a much detail as I have the patience to in the hopes that some of it will be useful.

Here's the original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Old_Recipes/comments/qkltrp/long_time_lurker_first_time_posting_i_collect_old/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

In case you don't feel like opening the link, I have a copy of Miss Parloa's New Cook-Book and Marketing Guide from 1880 and last night I hosted a dinner party to serve a menu for 12 from the book. This is the menu:

Menu text: Oyster soup (two quarts), Smelts a la tartare (three dozen), Chicken vol-au-vent (a large one), Rolled rib roast (about twelve pounds), Polish sauce, Grape Jelly, Cauliflower with cream sauce, Potato souffle, Rice croquettes (two dozen), Larded grouse with bread sauce (three grouse), Potatoes a la parisienne, Dressed celery (two heads), Royal Diplomatic pudding (the rule given), Raspberry sherbet (three quarts), vanilla ice cream (three quarts), cake, fruit, coffee (three pints of the filtered), crackers and cheese.

I ended up substituting several things either because I'm not exactly wealthy or because I had guests who don't like an ingredient. You'll notice this menu implies courses, but it doesn't specify. This is the menu I ended up with, divided up by my interpretation of the courses:

Soup Course: Consommé à la royale, made with mixed stock

Appetizer: Smelts à la Tartare, chicken vol-au-vent

First course: Rolled rib roast, tomato sauce, grape jelly, green peas à la Française, potato soufflé

Second course: Larded guinea hen and chicken with bread sauce, potatoes à la Parisienne, rice croquettes, dressed celery

Dessert: Royal diplomatic pudding, demon cake, blackberry sherbet, vanilla ice cream

By the end of this, everyone was so full and I was so tired that we didn't end up doing the last course of fruit, crackers and cheese, and coffee. It's all familiar stuff, so no real loss there honestly.

The Soup Course

The soup was consommé à la royale. It was, honestly, way better than I expected. It wasn't very photograp

I’m in a foreign country and I can get cranberry juice (Ocean Spray) but no cranberries. Is it still possible to make something close to jellied cranberry sauce (the kind you buy in a can) for Thanksgiving? I am thinking it could be done by reducing the juice (which would replicate strained cranberries and sugar) and maybe mixing with pectin? Any advice is appreciated, thanks!

Often times whenever I see an object with high amounts of starch the first thing I think is “Man, how would that taste in a beer” and so I went to my local ethnic food store and bought 7 pounds of cassava, getting ready for magic.

There was very little documentation of cassava use of beer in the internet, other then some examples from Africa and notably Jamaica in the Caribbean with Red Stripe. However, since Cassava in a chemical level is pretty similar to potatoes in terms of starch composition. I pretty much just followed a guideline for potato brewing, but replaced it with cassava.

The recipe goes as follow: 5 pounds of highly modified pilsner malt 10 pounds of cassava 1 pound of caramel 60

I first did a cereal mash of the cassava for about 30 minutes, letting the starch completely gelatinize. Then after that I mixed the grain together and stepped mashed it first at 120 degrees for 20 minutes. Then I mashed at 152 for 90 minutes, then mashed out at 169 for 10 minutes.

Brew day wasn’t too complex but definitely more than usual. But funnily enough, after the mash, the cassava completely disappeared. The starch had completely converted. I didn’t check with an iodine test however I tasted the wort and it was unfathomably sweet, tasting almost like sweet tapioca. And the wort was maybe slightly off from brilliant clear.

My pre boil gravity was 1.048, which I expected a little lower but was not disappointed in the slightest. Standard boil protocol. 60 minutes, 2 oz of tettnang for bitterness, 2 of hallertau for flavor. OG was 1.053

Fermentation was two packets of w-34/70 2 weeks 55 degrees. I didn’t bother with a lagering but next time I will.

Beer came back looking like this https://pinger-prod-communications.s3.amazonaws.com/communications/1318680477/2021/619fdf29db09a6.58608886.jpg

On the nose was spice expected of the German nobles, and on the taste... barely any cassava. In all honesty it tasted like Samuel Adams, which for me is great since I’m quite fond of Samuel Adams, but I was expecting something more akin to tapioca pudding especially with the wort tasting how it did. But overall not disappointed. Only thing I’d change is maybe a more involved mash schedule, but overall not bad.

Ok, straight to the recipe [final result].

Ingredients for two servings (~550 kcals each):

- 200g [7 oz] of pasta (any dry pasta is fine, just nothing too fancy like rotini or farfalle)

- 100g [3.5 oz] of finely grated cheese (pecorino romano is the gold standard here, alternatively you can use any aged sheep's milk cheese or even mix in some parmesan if you find them too strong)

- Black pepper

Directions:

1) Put some water to boil in a pot. It should be just enough to submerge the pasta while keeping little bit of leeway to compensate evaporation. Too much water makes the starch content diluted, and we need that starch in order to obtain a smooth sauce.

2) Add just a pinch of salt to the water since the cheese is already very salty.

3) When the water starts boiling, add the pasta. DO NOT PUT PASTA IN COLD WATER, EVER. This is not because Italians are attached to useless traditions, but because pasta rehydrates and cooks with different speeds at different temperatures, with the risk of overcooking some molecular compounds even if total water absorption is the same ^((Sorry Kenji, I still love you)). [More at the bottom]. My pasta is tortiglioni (not very orthodox) and the cooking time is 12 minutes, so we have to be swift.

4) Toast the peppercorns in large pan with high heat. This will reactivate and round the flavor. Just be careful not to burn them. Now crush the peppercorns with something heavy (like a beer glass) straight in the pan, just make sure to keep some for garnishing later.

5) Add one ladle of pasta water (we should be halfway through cooking time) into the pan with the crushed peppercorns. This will create a smooth black pepper sauce that will beautifully coat the pasta. Keep adding water if it dries too much.

QUICK SCIENCE CLASS

Cheese is a protein matrix that traps water and fats in it. When the temperature rises the fats begins to melt and the proteins start aligning so that fats and water can freely move. Cheeses with a lot of water (like mozzarella) will melt really easily while aged cheeses will require lot more heat since they have a very dense protein structure.

At the temperature of 40° C (104° F) the fat content will be mostly melted, but you will still see some lumps in it. The more a cheese is aged, the more lumps it will have.

We have a cranberry sauce (dessert) recipe which uses gelatin for texture. The resulting texture is like Jell-O, it wiggles and bounces but does not pour or flow. A spoon easily brings spoonful-sized chunks, which are not sticky, goopy, or slimy.

Trying to adapt this recipe to be fully vegetarian/vegan requires only the elimination of the gelatin. But I don't know what else to use to get the right texture! Modified food starch makes it sticky and too thick, like pie filling. Same with pectin, but worse.

Is there a plant based or synthetic thickener which reproduces the texture of gelatin?

Is it just me or every single bag I buy it's like trying to eat a literal tire, it's so damn tough I'm afraid one of my teeth are gonna go bye bye, any good gummy brands that won't take a tooth out? lol

I made an apple compote, which I wanted to be like an apple pie filling, for an oatmeal topper. However, I've used too much tapioca starch (or did I heat it up too much?) which has resulted in a snotty, gluey texture. Can anyone help me restore it to a pleasing texture without watering down the flavor too much?

Thank you in advance for any of your suggestions. I used a lot of apples and is hate to see this go to waste.

So im trying to get my formula right for making watercolor paper, but no matter what, my paper just absorbs water like a sponge. Ive tested out gelatin and corn starch, both internally and externally, and im using pulp made from pre-sized paper, but everything just yields the same result.

I know many people use methyl cellulose to size their watercolor paper, but the only form of it that i can seem to find is Citrucel, which has an orange pigment.

From my understanding, the reason why methyl cellulose works as a sizing agent is because its slightly hydrophobic, so water doesnt sink into the paper as quickly because the methocel is repelling it.

[QUESTIONS]

Does anyone have a link to a version of methocel that does not contain any dyes?

Are there any alternatives to methocel that have that same hydrophobic property?

Has anyone tested out the following as sizing agents? ▪︎Xanthan Gum ▪︎Sta-flo ▪︎Psyllium Husk powder ▪︎Propylene Glycol Alginate

If so, what were the results?

I’m an idiot. A huge idiot. I (18f) was setting up the Elf on the Shelf and I put him in a bowl with mini marshmallows - not even thinking about my girl cat, Chloe (11f, Siamese-calico, slightly overweight but her exact weight I’m unsure of as of right now) and her interest in them (we have never given her any, but she likes the smell when we eat them & tried to steal them from us in the past). Well I was laying down for the night and saw her walk into the kitchen and thought nothing of it - until I remembered the elf. I shot up and ran into the kitchen and saw her on the counter standing over the elf and marshmallows and licking her lips as if she had just eaten something. I picked her up, sniffed her breath & though I didn’t smell any on it & everything I’ve researched says she’s not in danger, I am still panicking.

The ingredients for said mini marshmallows: corn syrup, sugar, modified corn starch, water, 2% or less of gelatin, natural & artificial flavor, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, and blue 1. The brand is Lowes Foods.

Please answer ASAP so I can know if I should wake my family up & take her to the vet. I’m scared.

I‘m planning to make a bûche with an orange filling and the recipe instructs to whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks. So far so good. Then it instructs to whisk together orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, corn starch and egg yolks in a pot and bring to a boil. I imagine four egg yolks with 350ml of liquid won’t curdle. However, the recipe then instructs me to whisk in the meringue, keep whisking and then add bloomed gelatin and cool the whole thing in the fridge. The recipe doesn’t give any more detailed instructions, unfortunately.

I‘ve never heard of this technique before and I also don’t know if this even works. I imagine the meringue curdling before I can even add the gelatin like it does in îles flottantes. Is there anything I should be aware of? Also, is the consistency going to be mousse-like? And what is this technique called?

I‘d greatly appreciate some pointers.

Edit to say that this is the orange filling part, not the sponge part.

I am not an experienced baker but I have tried David Lebovitz's French tart dough (https://www.davidlebovitz.com/french-tart-dough-a-la-francaise/ - not sure if links are allowed, please remove if not) and it's blown me away.

Pastry case stays crisp and sturdy even if filling is still liquid-like (my custard didn't set and I was still able to lift the whole tart out of mould without falling apart). It stayed crispy overnight in the fridge without a problem. It also doesn't require rolling, just use your hands. It is tasty thanks to the brown butter but it is indeed missing that shortcrust crumbly texture and mouthfeel.

With other recipes that involve blitzing flour with cold butter and adding egg I've never quite achieved a dry solid tart case. There was always the bit in the middle that's less crispy than the edges. And I hate the rolling, I can never seem to roll dough out evenly.

I am wondering WHY is it that this recipe produces such a different result to other more traditional recipes. Is it the boiling butter? Adding water to boiling butter? Adding another type of fat? Adding flour to sizzling fat? What are the mechanics at play that result in such a foolproof result?

One of the things I like the most about my PC is how well rice cooks. I had never been able to make rice I would eat before having a PC. I could never get good consistantcy. I do have an issue though when making rice. When I make rice it starts getting hard within a few hours. I can't freeze the meals I make with the rice. When I pull it out to microwave and heat up, the rice has basically returned to it original firmness that it was in the bag.

I like rice a little on the mushy side. I'll over cook it. Last night when I made a rice dish I cooked it even longer (more liquid). It was more tender but sure enough when I pulled it out to reheat for my dinner tonight the rice was crunchy! Tomorrow, I'm sure it will be even harder and I'll have to toss it. I cut the portion recipe in half, hoping to get a few meals. I only get one good meal when I use rice. The type of rice doesn't make a difference. White, brown, jasmine or basmati it all hardened. I feel like I have tried everything to fix it.

I will PC my rice with chicken broth or water depending on what I am making. I do rinse the rice beforehand.

Any suggestions on what I am doing wrong?