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Purposing Extra Egg Yolks
Am I part of one of the last generations that cooks depending on cookbooks instead of web searches? In our house, we a have a set of cookbooks that is the basis of everything we make, so much so, that last year I went to Powells Books in Portland and bought new copies of all our old cookbooks to replace the food-spattered, broken-spined versions we had!
Anyway, after making Alton Brown's Aged Egg Nog (from his website, negating everything I just wrote above, I guess), I had a six egg whites I didn't want to throw away. They needed to be repurposed... well not have any purpose, they needed to be initially 'purposed'. I figured out I could make coconut macaroons with them. I looked up recipes, including one in the Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen cookbook, which had maximum egg whites, so that was a winner, and another one in The Field Guide to Cookies (my favorite cookie cookbook).
The Good Housekeeping recipe had you mix up the ingredients, then cook at a lower (325F) temp for a longer time (25 min). The Field Guide to cookies had a recipe with an extra step of drying out the cookie "dough" (really, sugar, egg whites and flaked coconut) by stirring over a boiling water bath for 20 minutes, and then you cooked at a higher temp than Good Housekeeping--regular cookie 350F--for a shorter time. The extra step was designed to dry out the mix so it would hold its shape better. I felt like that was probably smart, but I figured, hey, the Test Kitchen one probably is fine.
Well, you learn things by doing, or not doing, and I should have done the extra work, which is why my done macaroons all look like hats with brims on them, since the excess liquid pooled off before the cookies set in the oven.
Ah, well, they taste good, and now I know for next time! Tonight's experiment, tempering chocolate with a sous vide machine!
Dec 03 · 2 weeks ago · 👍 lanterm, daruma, drew_bio
👻 darkghost · Dec 04 at 00:42:
One of my prized books is the 1936 edition of The Joy of Cooking. We keep a journal of the things we cook and any modifications we make. I'm also a huge fan of sous vide. I use it to pasteurize eggs. Please let us know if it works well for tempering chocolate.
You're not at all alone, I don't trust internet recipes, and beyond the fact it takes no credentials or experience to post one, many these days are blog posts in disguise anyway.
🐝 undefined · Dec 04 at 03:21:
I'm decent at cooking, but the desserts are way above my level. They take forever, proportions are super precise and any misstep shows in the end. Just really frustrating especially given the price of the ingredients...
for the egg's white (when I do egg Benedict) I make some financier cake on the side, it's a nice mix and make for a really decadent Sunday brunch
We had a Delia Smith cookbook that lived in permanent, solitary residence in a kitchen drawer in my childhood home. Now I've moved out, we definitely *collect* recipe books, but I rarely find myself cooking by recipe, and am not a fan of the common format of internet recipe (90% fluff up top, 10% recipe at bottom). Perhaps I should pick my books back up & choose the "resident book" for our kitchen...
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I love using LLMs for recipes. I can say what I want to make and whatever ingredients I have on hand and I almost always get good results.
I could get similar results by looking through online recipes but with LLMs I avoid all the extra fluff and just focus on the recipe, exactly as I want to make it.
Cookbooks are better than websites but can get damaged easily and take up space and definitely don’t have every single recipe I could ever want to make, with instructions on any adaptation I might care to make.
I'd take a good cook book over a web search any day.
👻 darkghost · Dec 04 at 21:53:
LLMs are ok as long as you ignore the instructions to add ten penny nails and arsenic. I despise the websites that have so much fluff and it takes forever to get to the recipe.
Anybody find good sources for recipes on Gemini? I found this one: