the food rant thread

[Jurek]

With the previous iteration of our Bosch gas hob, I used to be able to turn the teeny tiny ring to "barely there" and cook my porridge without boiling it to deth. With your new Flame Select device I can only choose your pre set flames, the smallest of which is not low enough, effectively not solving a problem that didn't exist.

I had this with my previous hob - I found that a diffuser helped. JLP sell them.

[Ham]

With the previous iteration of our Bosch gas hob, I used to be able to turn the teeny tiny ring to "barely there" and cook my porridge without boiling it to deth. With your new Flame Select device I can only choose your pre set flames, the smallest of which is not low enough, effectively not solving a problem that didn't exist.

Somewhere There ^ there > there v or there < you will find my rant on the selfsame subject, LOOK, we have made gas work just like electric!! removing the prime advantage of gas. They (the neff etc group) appear to be hell bent on replacing functionality with geegaws, viz touch controls where knobs are better and faster for cooking. Grrr. At some point I'll have to replace what has been an excellent Neff hob, some 20+ years old now, it won't be with Neff.

[rafletcher]

Our Zanussi induction hob is pretty controllable, goes 1-2-2.5-3-3.5-4-4.5-5-5.5-6-6.5-7-8-9.  Still not as good as old school fully adjustable gas, but pretty close.

[T42]

Everything's dumbed down so that 90% of idiots can do stuff while the other 10% tear their hair out trying to do what they want rather than what the damned device wants them to do.

Same goes for ingredients.  Around here we can't get nuoc mam but we can get "sauce for nems" which is nuoc mam with a bunch of unwanted crap added.  Ditto 5-spice powder: we can get "wok spices" but not t'other.  It reminds me of what a colleague once told me when I asked how to access a particular system function: you shouldn't want to do that.

[mrcharly-YHT]

With the previous iteration of our Bosch gas hob, I used to be able to turn the teeny tiny ring to "barely there" and cook my porridge without boiling it to deth. With your new Flame Select device I can only choose your pre set flames, the smallest of which is not low enough, effectively not solving a problem that didn't exist.

That is the one problem with our new (2ndhand) gas cooker. I've adjusted the burners right down, but still, on the lowest setting they don't do a decent simmer. You have to turn the flame off/on. Very irritating.

[Slave To The Viking]

With the previous iteration of our Bosch gas hob, I used to be able to turn the teeny tiny ring to "barely there" and cook my porridge without boiling it to deth. With your new Flame Select device I can only choose your pre set flames, the smallest of which is not low enough, effectively not solving a problem that didn't exist.

A double boiler allows porridge to survive even the most rudimentary of gas controls. That said, since the arrival of a microwave in our kitchen c.37 years ago, my porridge has not been troubling the gas supply.

Oats, water, bowl, ding.

[citoyen]

Just need to remember to do it in short blasts and stir regularly.

You really don’t want porridge boiling over in your microwave. DAMHIKT.

[Slave To The Viking]

Just need to remember to do it in short blasts and stir regularly.

You really don’t want porridge boiling over in your microwave. DAMHIKT.

You absolutely don't. Two minutes - no stirring - is fine in mine, but I've occasionally been nastily surprised. Usually when being asked to do a large amount for me and the sproglodites, and, when trying to extrapolate, finding the boilover trend to be logarithmic rather than linear.

I'm a make-with-water, dilute-with-a-splash-of-milk-to-serve porridgist though, so perhaps the boiling over is less of a threat to me. The heating of milk is a much stricter mistress than that of water.

[hellymedic]

Two and a half heaped tablespoons of oats
Half a pint of milk
Two and a half minutes on full in 700W oven.

Works in my kitchen every time.

Suggest you watch like a hawk and use a big bowl.

[neilrj]

Use a big pyrex bowl, 3x milk by volume, for 2 people that's 1 ramakin oats to 3 milk, or is 60g oats to 500g milk by weight. Nuke 6mins and stir, nuke 3 mins, let stand for 3 mins. 900W power level E microwave.

[Ashaman42]

A scoop of oats, a cup or so of boiling water from the kettle and after letting it stand for a couple minutes stir in a big tablespoon of chocolate spread.

Sent from my SM-G525F using Tapatalk

[JonBuoy]

Just been to the local Waitrose.  All of the chiller cabinets were taped off and empty as they had had a refrigeration failure so the shop had been shut from 1400 until 1830 while they fixed the problem and binned all the stock 

I asked whether it could have been donated to local charities but apparently not - it was binned.

Not too sure about the meat and fish but in the interests of public safety I would happily have taken all the cheese off their hands!

I suspect that there may be a lot of local skip diving activity this evening.

[Basil]

The nearest decent chippy failed us tonight.
Chips seemed to have been boiled in warm fat rather than deep fried in hot  fat.
I'm not a great fan of chip shop fare and that has put me off again for several months. 😒

[Jaded]

In the Slow Cooker, overnight.

[Efrogwr]

There was a chip shop in Cwmbran that always cooked chips like that.
It was also a terror with a microwave oven; the speciality of the house was to nuke pasties until they went flat.

[Jaded]

Ah, I see we have moved away from porridge onto Welsh Chips. 

[Basil]

There's a reasonably decent pie shop in Carmarthen.  I made a big mistake.
The big mistake was to say 'Yes please' when they asked if I'd like it warmed.
They put it into an expanded polystyrene burger box, firmly closed the lid, and bunged it in a microwave.
Soggy, Soggy pastry.   
Bin.
 

[Kim]

I expect there's a whole section on such abuses of expanded polystyrene in the Democratic Ruthless Bastards Party manifesto...

[T42]

Went looking for Asian ingredients in BFO supermarket in Haguenau this morning.  Got the pure nuoc mam I've been missing, but they're not that much better than our local supermarket - lots of sauce for this, sauce for that, spices for this, spices for that but rarely the plain simple ingredients.  It's getting to be like our bank's web site - designed for use by people who don't think so unusable by people who do.

[Slave To The Viking]

Ah, I see we have moved away from porridge onto Welsh Chips. 

My erstwhile local chippy (Y Mabinogion, Bethesda) used to do a regular and a large chips. Figuring that large isn't generally twice the size of regular, and as neither of us were massively hungry, I once got us a large to share.

Four pounds.

Not sterling: 4lb.

Lasted a week of chip omelettes* every day.

*A discovery when working in Tanzania: chipsi mayai (literally "chips eggs"). A 500 Tanzanian-shilling streetfood treat, of a two-egg-and-handful-of-chips omelette.

[Efrogwr]

Ah, I see we have moved away from porridge onto Welsh Chips. 

My erstwhile local chippy (Y Mabinogion, Bethesda) used to do a regular and a large chips. Figuring that large isn't generally twice the size of regular, and as neither of us were massively hungry, I once got us a large to share.

Four pounds.

Not sterling: 4lb.

Lasted a week of chip omelettes* every day.

*A discovery when working in Tanzania: chipsi mayai (literally "chips eggs"). A 500 Tanzanian-shilling streetfood treat, of a two-egg-and-handful-of-chips omelette.

Was Brân Fendigaidd a regular customer?

[Slave To The Viking]

Ah, I see we have moved away from porridge onto Welsh Chips. 

My erstwhile local chippy (Y Mabinogion, Bethesda) used to do a regular and a large chips. Figuring that large isn't generally twice the size of regular, and as neither of us were massively hungry, I once got us a large to share.

Four pounds.

Not sterling: 4lb.

Lasted a week of chip omelettes* every day.

*A discovery when working in Tanzania: chipsi mayai (literally "chips eggs"). A 500 Tanzanian-shilling streetfood treat, of a two-egg-and-handful-of-chips omelette.

Was Brân Fendigaidd a regular customer?

Gordon's alive...?!

[Mrs Pingu]

Referring to https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2177.msg2756579#msg2756579
i.e.

Macmillan coffee morning at work tomorrow, so in a fit of the vapours I thought I'd be sociable and go into the office.
Make lemon polenta cake. Put it in oven. Return 40m later and it's still pale and wobbly. Oven is barely 120C, not 160. Bollocks. Finish it off on fan but it's a bit dried out and presumably one of the top or bottom element is gone. The oven was new in April. 
That's going to bugger my bread making schedule.

Everything's been ok recently, no issues with weekly bread, pizza etc.
Last night I made a lasagne. Top & bottom oven. It didn't cook properly. Ate it anyway. Leftovers today.
We had some pies for lunch which Pingu put on fan oven. Got the Chefalarm probe out. 10C lower than advertised, no surprise, so tweaked up and all was well.

Tonight I went to reheat the lasagne, back to top & bottom oven. Probe said about 160C instead of 180 so I whacked it up til the knob said 200 and then shoved the dish in the oven.
30 mins later the probe is telling me it's 125C in there.
Bloody thing 

[Mrs Pingu]

Bloody hell data loggers are expensive. I was thinking there should be some sort of brew it yourself job but they all require Kim like levels of knowledge.

[Tim Hall]

Dear The Internet.

The sort of potatoes often served with a joint of roast beef/lamb/pork ect ect are roast potatoes, not roasties. Similarly the batter puddings served with roast beef are Yorkshire puddings, not yorkies..kthxbai.