Cooking: August 2006 Archives
Our local grocery chain/monopoly fustrates me. If it was a person it would have multiple personality disorder. What am I talking about? Their inventory. Each store has slightly different products than the other. The biggest difference is a Central Market store compared to a entry-level H.E.B.
The current example is the lack of butter selection. I used to shop at the H.E.B. on 620 and Great Oaks Drive. It was more upscale than the one on IH-35 and 79. But now that the supersized version has opened a mile away from my house, I have changed stores. What I don't understand is the super-sized version is supposed to have a better selection. However, in terms of butter, it plain sucks. It does not carry the above H.E.B. brand butter (which is shipped to the 620 store).
Why do I want that version? In one word, fat! It has one more gram of it on the label. And that gram makes a difference in taste. Although it is an example of a marketing lie. 12 grams out of 14 should give a butter fat percentage of 85.71% But the box clearly says it contains 82%. Which would make it 11.48 grams and that would mean that they would have to round down to 11. Since they only have whole numbers (creating a whole lot of confusion, I say).
Grrr... Damn you, H.E.B.! I really want to only shop at one store!
I tried cooking English Toffee today. And it was fun. Doubly so trying to juggle camera equipment and cook at the same time. Of course, I had to buy the toffee flavored almond slivers!
I bypassed going to Ed's for game day. He had the shingles. And I was feeling gamed out. But I was in the mood for experimenting.
I came across this product at Williams-Sonoma and thought that it was a cool idea. However, it was $99 dollars! I already own a pizza stone and keep it in my oven to help even out the temperatures. So I put it in my gas grill.
I also used another recently purchased toy of mine (an infrared thermometer) to check the temperature. 439 degrees Fahrenheit. Good to go...
I did run into one problem though. My dough was probably too wet. Not enough to stick on the counter but enough to stick on the pizza peel. So, I threw that one away and this time I covered the peel in 1/8" of corn meal. I figured I could scrape it off when it was cooked.
It did slide off of the peel easily enough this time. Getting it back on was not a problem. Although cleanup was surprising. I would not have guessed that cornmeal would flare up that much. It must have more oil in it than I suspected.
Next time I will work on making a dryer dough...
