A bit late but wanted to say thanks for the recommendation – my old rice cooker was enough hassle that it’s been collecting dust for over a year. So far this has been the exact amount of effort I want to put into rice.
Sure! It’s excellent in exactly that way. I’m glad it works for you!
The first Zojirushi test went well. It made perfectly fluffy rice and the warmer ensured it was still fine about 4 hours later when I finally unloaded the leftovers from the unit. No burnt bottom, no variance from top to bottom on how the rice was cooked (prior to fluffing.)
I also picked up this cookbook, here’s hoping there are some cool things in there:
Glad to hear you had good results and you liked it!
I ended up with the 1.8 liter model because it was CHEAPER than the 1 liter model. I’m not sure how that works. I made 4 cups of dry rice last night with no problem at all, and more capacity to spare if that’s ever needed.
I like the handles on the side of the inner container to keep from burning your hands. I also liked that it had multiple timers and several presets for rice/porridge/oatmeal, etc.
@Chowhound do you guys use yours daily?
4-6x a week. I would guess 3-4 for rice for dinner, and the rest for porridge.
Made some Vietnamese-inspired dishes today, adapted to gf’s taste buds :)
A seared, split pork loin roast marinated in fish sauce, soy sauce, rice vinegar, Sriracha, and 5-spice powder (thanks to Chef John for the nontraditional but delicious twist). Crosshatch-carved for a quick marinade, then sliced thin after cooking.
GF’s plate of Jasmine Rice (from my beloved Zojirushi; sup @Skipper glad yours is working out!), said pork, and some pineapple sauteed with shallots, garlic, ginger, chilies, and some soy sauce.
Banh mi-esque sandwich: toasted French baguette, Japanese mayo, sliced cucumbers, quick-pickled carrots and daikon radish, sliced jalapenos, cilantro, and the pork. No pate. . . yet.
Assembled sandwich, looking tasty. It was.
Boo!
That sandwich looks so damn good anyway, @ArmandoPenblade. I’ve been craving one of those and some decent pho recently. Very nicely put together.
I need some advice on Korean food. My girlfriend wants us to try to make a fish-cake soup together. Does anybody have any experience with that?
-xtien
I actually did make that this summer at my friend’s cabin party. I don’t think anyone got a picture of it, but people seemed to really enjoy it.
It’s not too bad to make, actually; most of the difficulty for me was in acquiring the unusual ingredients, not actually preparing the soup itself. What kinds of questions did you have?
That looks excellent!
Bread!
My wife and I bought our first house recently, and I figured a sourdough starter would be a nice, tasty way to remember the event. (Besides living here. Mostly I just wanted an excuse.)
The starter is still a little young and has a bit of dirty-sock smell to it, but the bread came out okay despite varied and sundry procedural errors. To start with, I probably didn’t let it rise long enough; 12 hours in the fridge and 12 on the counter. It’s a fairly dense bread, although the structure is good. I also changed up my baking strategy. I usually preheat a Dutch oven at about 500 degrees and throw the bread in there for crust purposes. This time, I didn’t preheat the Dutch oven, just put it in the oven when it came to temperature, and ended up slightly overdoing the bottom of the bread.
Such is baking. I’ll work on the process.
Sometime down the line, as this starter matures and develops, I’m curious about using it to sour beer. Perhaps a report in six to eight months over in the beer thread.
My questions center around ingredients and presentation. We’ve got some good Korean markets in the area, so I’m pretty sure we’ll be okay. I’m just wondering if you have any pointers.
Also the fish-cake on the skewer is key to the presentation, I think. As well as to the eating. I’ve just never made any Korean food of note (although I’ve wanted to try to make kimchi for some time), so any insight you can give is great. Otherwise, we’ll muddle through and I’ll post about it later! I’m pretty excited to try this. :)
-xtien
Pointers, pointers, hmmm.
The rice cakes take awhile to thaw, even in water. Plan for that. . . or just finish thawing them in the soup itself. The upside here is that even more of the stew will seep into the outer edges of the rice cakes. The downside is that you’ll need to be careful not to rough it up too much after you add 'em while they finish thawing and get hot, since they can be quite squishy!
If you season with the gochugaru flakes, try to get the coarser ground ones. While finely ground will dissolve better into soup, when you can’t really buy less than a pound or two of the damn stuff, may as well get the option that gets used in more recipes.
Definitely buy the bigger anchovies if you are gonna make the anchovy-and-kombu stock from scratch. Pulling the heads off/guts out of the smaller ones is super tedious. Like in Japanese dashi stock, remember to remove the kombu kelp shortly after the water starts to bubble; leaving it in while boiling tends to make the stock a little bitter and slimy. The anchovies can go a longer time.
A lot of Korean recipes seem to assume access to the giant green onions they prefer as compared to smaller American scallions. If you can only find the latter and like the onion pungency, increase the recipe count a little (maybe 25-50%) to account for the size difference. This is kinda iffy; each site is probably different.
The flat sheet fish cakes are the cheapest ones by far, but kinda drab in terms of presentation and texture. The little balls and cubes and other fun shapes are pricier per pound, but look way cuter.
Korean recipes go HAM on sesame. If you find sesame oil a little overpowering, consider halving the starting point and upping from there to your personal taste preferences.
Don’t be too afraid if things are looking thin right before you add the rice cakes. They’re gonna soak up a lot of moisture, and even more while the dish cools after you’ve eaten. Might even need to add more.
KK, there is Armando’s Assembled Tteoktteokbokki / Korean cuisine in general wisdom :)
Cook’s Illustrated seems to have mostly come to the same conclusion.
Thank you so much, sir!
-xtien
Yeah, they’re very low capacity tabletop convection ovens with timers built-in. Not particularly useful.
I’d be interested in an article comparing a high-end convection toaster oven like my beloved Breville with air friers.
https://smile.amazon.com/Breville-BOV800XL-1800-Watt-Convection-Toaster/dp/B001L5TVGW
No contest?
The Wirecutter’s recommended air frier also costs $250, so it should compete with the Breville at its specialty, reheating grocery store frozen french fries. If it can’t even do that, then you know it’s fully useless, even for the two usecases Consumer Reports pointed out, where demented geriatrics and little kids can’t be trusted with a real oven.
It seems to me that air fryers are aimed at the ‘oh hey, no oil’ crowd. It’s more about not having food soaking up fat. Even though frying at the right temperature can avoid that. And air fryers end up with soggy food anyway.
Made Vietnamese-inspired bun bowls tonight!
Chopped Romaine, green onions, mint, cilantro, cucumber, limes, carrots, and then fried shallots. . . plus the noodles and the lemongrass chicken.
Over here the other bowl of noodles, the pickled carrots and daikon, the nuoc cham sauce (water, lime, sugar, fish sauce, chilies, and garlic), plus some soybean sprouts.
My partner’s bowl with her preferred fixins
And mine with basically everything :-D