/sqt/: Stupid Questions Thread

Why do Americans call burgers sandwiches?

You ain't got no arms, Lt. user.

i hate u pedantic semantic people

You should slaughter and consume me for my tasty courage.

i don't even know what you're implying anymore

>Why am I incapable of pushing down a party of meat with a spatula

You were asking for it and got off easy.

fuck you i study linguistics
but what can i expect from a board of autists who only consider referential meaning rather than the pragmatic meaning

>what are jokes

kiddo, if you dont get the humor, why are you here?

i just want to know about frying meat ffs leave me alone

To answer your question, smashing your meat down pushes all the juices out of it.

Thats how i do my scrambled eggs, and they're dry af.

You don't really fit in here, friendo.

thank you! :-)

next time i'll stick to google, sorry

You can stay, just lurk moar

Hey guys, I'm working on a strange project that involves feeding blood to mosquitoes, and I don't want to hassle you with the details, but I need to make something like the blood sausages in pic related but uncooked, nothing except for blood inside it, and I need it to stay fresh and clot-free for as long and as cheaply as possible in a constantly body-warm condition.

I tried Veeky Forums's sqt for preservative suggestions but they drew a blank and just asked about my motivations. I'm sure you guys are much more savvy when it comes to preserving food, and hopefully a little less inquisitive.

He studies linguistics, of course he doesn't have a sense of humor, user.

Baking powder is part baking soda, part double action powdered acids. Both are used to produce "chemical leavening." Why does this difference matter?

Because baking soda, which is sodium bicarbonate, will immediately react once it comes in contact with an acid like vinegar, lemon, milk, or yogurt. If you want a more extended rise then that isn't going to cut it. Baking powder has 1 acid that will start reacting with the sodium bicarbonate once it gets wet, and another acid that won't start reacting until it gets hot. As long as it is cooked sufficiently, most baking powders are formulated to fully use their sodium bicarbonate to create the little CO2 bubbles that rise the dough

So the ultimate answer is that if your recipe has both it is likely that it also contains a good amount of acid. You don't want that acid to shut down your baking powder before it can get through its two stage reaction, so you need to add baking soda to counter the acid and provide additional leavening. I defy you to find a buttermilk biscuit recipe that doesn't call for both and is worth its salt. If the recipe does not have an acid in it, it will likely call for baking powder alone, because baking soda alone will not produce a chemical reaction

pretty good question desu

tradition mostly

What's so hard about this? Put blood in sausage casing (or dialysis tubing). You're done.

If you want it to keep longer without clotting then there are various chemicals used for that in medical/science labs. I can't recall the name offhand, but you should be able to find it easily by a google search. It's typically added to those blood sample tubes that doctors use. The chemical is already present in the tube so that when they take your blood sample it doesn't clot while on its way to the lab.

You might also read some research papers dealing with mosquitoes and find out what methods they use. The experimental setup ought to be described in the paper.

>Why does this difference matter?

It just seems odd to use both.

If the food is already acidic then baking soda is all that is required. The extra acid found in baking powder would be redundant.

If the food is not acidic then the extra acid in the baking powder is needed, in which case baking soda would be useless.

it has to do with heavier creamfat percentages being slightly more yellowed, so some people dyed it to make cheap cheese look more extravagant

alternatively, some cheese molds apparently are slightly yellow

'muh juices released'
test it yourself and find which way you like best, i think it's pretty irrelevant what anybody else thinks. if it really matters one test should make the results apparent

use your body

cheap and effective

this is why we're going to get zombies

You'll squeeze all the juices out and end up with a piece of leather

Is this project related to zika?

If the food is already acidic and you only use sodium bicarb, you will not get a two stage reaction and it will not rise as much as if you added both. Maybe that is what you want, it usually is not.

Baking soda is also much stronger than baking powder. For say, buttermilk biscuits or pancakes, if you only used baking soda then you would end up neutralizing the tang from the buttermilk. Using less soda and a bit of powder will produce fluffier, slightly tangy pancakes instead of less fluffy, not tangy pancakes.

You will not see a recipe with baking soda in it that does not have an acid as well. Only using soda in that case will very slightly rise your product, but it will have a metallic aftertaste. That's not good eats.

So to sum up, the extra acid in baking powder is not redundant in an acidic dough that also contains pure baking soda because it will rise more as a combo and make it possible to rise the dough without completely neutralizing acidic ingredients. Baked goods that are not acidic will not call for baking soda under any circumstance unless it is made by a moron with no tastebuds. If a recipe calls for both it has a not insignificant amount of acid in it, some of which you likely want to preserve such as in a lemony dish. If it only calls for baking soda it will also have a significant amount of acid, but the desired end result is a flatter, less tangy product than one that calls for both.

I have produced a matrix for you to make this more clear, as I am a visual learner and bored at work

here it is with personal opinions

>hopefully a little less inquisitive

Fuck you! What are you doing?

You would have to neutralize the clotting factors if this were to even remotely work. The only thing I can think of is grinding up some plavix and aspirin and mixing it into the blood as soon as possible after extraction, but even that is only going to prevent platelet clumping. I suppose a hemolytic snake venom might work too but I've also seen gifs of snake venom clumping blood so maybe that's not a good idea

>referential meaning rather than the pragmatic meaning
what does that mean

Thanks, I'll see what I can find but from the looks of it I'm just going to have to use smaller sausages and keep them in the freezer to replace the ones that spoil.

It's just a mosquito trap/feeder so I can teach them that biting something that smells like cinnamon is very, very bad for them. Animals of all kinds no matter how small tend to respond when their lives are at stake. It's all theoretical at this point, but I can't wait to see it in action and on a bigger scale.

Effective but not efficient.

That won't work at all, but good luck

Can I cook pasta and broccoli in the same pot?

I don't see why not but a better method would be to steam the broccoli over the pasta water as boiling basically anything removes flavor that you won't get back again

Another linguisticsfag here, he's buttmad because you're violating the cooperative principle.

Are you that one French weirdo on /diy/?

I can't believe I didn't think of this, thanks

Why do Italian-Americans bastardize everything everything?

Short answer is because America is an immigrant country and everybody slowly loses their identity with successive generations. Italian immigrants were still pretty fierce about the region they come from. Like a gut from Sienna wouldn't say he was from Italy, but Sienna.

But as Italians got more and more integrated into American society they started to lose those specific regional identities (beyond Italy vs Sicily which still persists somewhat) and since most of them were from Naples and south of that, Italian food adopted a distinctly pan-southern style, mixed with more broadly American tastes. For instance, meatballs from Abruzzo are the size of tiny marbles, and many Italian meatball dishes end up being soup because they are poor people food and soup is a favorite of that class. But Italian Americans liked their pasta and red sauce so when they became able to purchase a little meat they wanted to stretch it a bit and spaghetti and meatballs were born.

Bigger is better also plays a role. Italian meatballs are smaller, American are huge. Pizza in Naples is thin with few toppings, deep dish meatlovers with stuffed crust is American.

There is also the creep of convenience. The muffaletta sandwich was invented when a gut in NOLA noticed the Sicilian delivery boys would but meat, bread, olives, and cheese and eat those separately for lunch. He put them all together into a sandwich and it was a hit because it was easier

also Italian Americans are a bunch of bastards

...

What does it meant to react in a cooking context? Like how does it manifest and what do I care if stuff "reacts"? I don't know any chemistry btw

what does that mean

In this case it means the bicarbonate reacts with the acid to make CO2 gas. That is what makes the food rise up and get puffy. You know how baking soda + vinegar foams up? Same thing.

ok well the dumbed down version of acids and bases is that acids give hydrogen atoms to bases and bases combine those hydrogen atoms with another hydrogen and an oxygen atom to make H2O... which is water

sodium bicarbonate is a weak base with the formula NaHCO3, which means (in this context) it will take a hydrogen atom, and pop off one of its oxygens and a hydrogen to make water

What you are left with is a NaCO2. Now the important thing to keep in mind here is that sodium bicarbonate is a molecule held together by what we call an ionic bond. When you dissolve it in water the sodium (Na+) has a positive charge and the bicarbonate (HCO3-) has a negative charge. The two charged molecules loosely stay bonded together.

However, when you introduce an acid into this context like I went over above and are left with NaCO2, the sodium ion is no longer attracted to the carbon based molecule CO2, so the CO2 floats away as a gas having lost its affinity for poor mr sodium.

So, in the context of baking, using baking soda (pure sodium bicarbonate) with an acidic dough or baking powder (sodium bicarb and an acid that will give up its proton under certain conditions) will produce little CO2 bubbles that will make your dough rise. This is called chemical leavening and is basically just chemistry. Chemical leavening is typically used when you want to minimize gluten production and produce a more tender, less chewy product. Biscuits, cakes, certain pie doughs and tart crusts will use this method.

The other traditional method of getting a gas into a dough is with yeast. Yeast eat sugars like table sugar and flour and they make CO2 and alcohol as waste products. These types of baked goods require kneading to produce gluten or extra protein (like eggs) to create a lattice structure that will keep the CO2 bubbles in tact long enough for the proteins to denature and set, preserving the bubbles until after baking.

yeast makes the bubbles before, not while, you bake

Not a linguist here, but I think it's like you're supposed to get the meaning behind the message.

I bought some ground beef today. Won't get to cook it until Sunday. Will it be good still, or should I freeze it?

It should be fine, especially if that is within the sell by date, but still if it isnt

Well, it says best before May 29, which would be Sunday. I bought three packages of it because I was planning to do a big batch of slow cooker macaroni and beef tomorrow and have food for the next few days, but I had something come up and won't have time to cook tomorrow.

I don't want to have 3 whole packages of ground beef go bad on me, but I'd also prefer not to freeze it, because it tends to affect the flavor.

oh well you should probably freeze at least one, depending on what you are making. Like if you are making burgers I would freeze one, chili freeze 2

Well, I'm gonna use all of it, it's only about 2 pounds of meat total. I just don't want to wake up Sunday morning and have inedible meat in my fridge.

It will be fine

Alright, just wanted to make sure. Google said 1-2 days, so I was a little iffy about it.

i mean you should also judge your own constitution a bit. most people will be fine but if you have a weak stomach, well, you know

can I use heat resistant gloves to flip things in a pan with my fingers?

Why not just use a spatula?

The amount of dexterity lost by wearing heavy gloves would negate the benefits of using your fingers.

Man up and use your bare hands. You're not going to burn yourself if you're quick about it.

Just gonna leave this here.

>pedantic semantics makin' me frantic wanna crash their antics into the Atlantic.

francois we already talked aabout those damn mosquitoes, you will achieve nothing but pain for them with bloody sausages, now go back to work

FUCK YOU PIERRE YOU'RE NOT A BIOLOGY MAJOR THIS IS JUST A MONEY JOB FOR ME YOU'RE STUCK IN THIS KITCHEN FOR LIFE

...

>'cago 'za
Well done user.
:^)

lithium heparin or potassium edta is what is used as anti-coagulants when drawing blood (which is what i do) so that might be worth a try. i know for certain that heparin is used medically as well... see if you can get that

When using vanilla bean, do I scrape the seeds out, or just boil them into whatever custard I'm making and then take them out after. Is the taste a lot different than using extract?

OP's pic looks fucking revolting.

it's still life photography not food photography

I know exactly what you want - heparin. It is a drug they use to keep blood from clotting. I don't remember what it does exactly to do this but its effects are immediate. For home use it comes as an injectable pen

I have no idea how you would get it without a prescription. Make friends with an anesthesiologist and maybe he can swipe some for you

Can you use oil any time you would've used butter, or are there meals where you *must* use butter

you don't like autists? go back to facebook faggot cuck

you could do that, or you could brown it, cool it then put it in fridge. it would be fine for sunday's slow cooker, plus if you cook it at a higher heat and don't touch it for several minutes you'd have the flavor from carmelization (the browning process). seriously improves flavor. so there you go; you now have choices, user

The fuck is wrong with this person? he would be slaughtered in Little Italy

Other fag here. Thank you for your answer. Very englightening.

Here's my stupid question. What is the OP pic? I know that is a red pear with an ant but what it that thing it's on?

Looks like a table or counter of some type.

I think its cheese. Probably macerated(?) or something.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camembert

You guys are fucking dumb.

I intend to make sake. Will any yeast do or is there some special kind the japs use?

They use all kinds of different yeasts, even year to year breweries may change their strains

How do I get pancakes to be this thick and smooth?

You are the hero Gotham needs; thank you

is nouvelle cuisine the best for homecooking in the 21st century

can you be any more minimalist without sacrificing quality?

I mean the point of nouvelle cuisine is simplicity and freshness of seasonal ingredients, which is basically what italian cooking has been for centuries

"no" is what I would say

Is it really bad I eat burgers, pizza and wings for dinner every day if my overall calorie intake remains below 1500 and I eat a lot of steamed vegetables with it?

sounds fine to me

is there a "best" way to season cast iron pans?

>burgers
just ground meat and marinade, easily made healthy if it isnt covered in cheese
>pizza
bread cheese and tomato sauce, again go easy on the cheese and go thin crust
>wings
high in fat but if the sauce isnt 90% butter or salt you will be fine

Just put a small amount of oil on your fingers and apply a thin film.

Works for me.

I like 400 degrees with a bit of oil for an hour at a time in the oven but that's all i have ever tried

>it's still life photography not food photography
But it's not aesthetically balancing... the color balance, the terrible spotlight lighting, floating void background, etc. are all unattractive.