Modern Vespa

Doh! It was me. I meant to hit thumbs up and apparently wasn't paying close enough attention to what I was doing. Sorry! Fixed now.

For the record, I think mayo in place of butter for grilled cheese is a great trick!

Ha! I guess I will know! I, too, stand corrected.

to me, All-Clad is worth the money and lives up to it's hype. but here's the caveat: you have to know how to cook because it will not suffer fools or inattentive cooks.

I have a D3 12" that's ages old and is awesome and has been from day one. I picked up a D3 10" high side (French style) bonded and honestly, besides the handle being more secure it's not much to write home about and I wind up using my crappy $14 T-fal Marshalls special for omelets instead.

the D5 stuff on an induction cook top absolutely RIPS.

never buy all-clad at full price. their factory 2nds sale is jam. TJ max and Marshalls also sell them super cheap, just be on the look out and you can score a killer deal there

I've worked a flat top as a cook and that's a lil trick I learned early on. I prefer butter for the flavor but mayo crisps up just fine. When I first did it I was a bit surprised. I was expecting something gross.

Me too, I was decidedly suspicious when my wife first showed me the trick. But it works great.

Does it work with Vegan mayo? Enquiring minds are asking...

Does anything work with Vegan stuff?

Probably, but only because vegan mayo has vegetable oil (presumably). But then, you could just use vegetable oil.

Don't see why it wouldn't. The Hellmann's Vegan has canola oil as first ingredient. The "real" stuff has soybean oil as the first.

Edit-Jess beat me to it. What he said!

Probably the thing that makes mayo (regular OR vegan) work so well in this case is its easy spreadability. Not too thick like butter, not too thin like oil. In theory, that makes it easy to put a uniform coat on the bread.

Surprisingly, mayonnaise can be used for grilling all kinds of things.

https://tinyurl.com/2ph3a5tt

Why You Should Be Grilling With Mayonnaise
Los Angeles Times

It's good for grilling salmon. But just a thin layer not like loads of it.

A thin coat of mayo is good for grilling any sort of fish and also works well for dipping chicken in season planko (rosemary mixed in) for a quick crispy chicken breast finished with a squeeze of fresh lemon.

FWIW, I prefer Sabatier professional knives. I've been using the same ones for over 30 years. Like others mentioned mentioned mine are cleaned separately and kept sharp. Nothing is worse in the kitchen than a dull knife.

Me in my infinite wisdom spent half my life thinking that mayonnaise melted at high temperature. I was really amazed the first time I saw it done about 10 years ago.

And Alabama has a mayo-based BBQ sauce called "white sauce". I haven't gotten up the courage to try it. It just doesn't sound appealing to me. At all.

Sabatier is one of those brands I keep an eye out for whenever I see someone selling a bunch of "old" knives. They are excellent knives, and quite a few came to the US with returning soldiers and their families.
The longest Chef's knife I've seen was a Sabatier. I think the blade was about 15 inches long. Somewhere I've got a chef's knife with a 12 inch damascus blade, and it's surprisingly unwieldly. So I can't imagine working with one that was even longer.

Reasonably priced. I'm wanting a new chef's knife so I might take a swing and try one on.

Walk into Williams sonoma and say Gyotu a couple times. You will be glad you did. As soon as you hear "single bevel" hit the door or you will buy $1200 worth of stuff and magic oils so you can properly maintain your $600 knife that looks like a well made shiv for about a month.. After that, it gets expensive.
For the money the Tojiro Gyutou is an amazing knife.

Thanks for the tip. I'm looking at a Tojiro all-purpose 6.7" for $92. Does that sound about right on the price?

Not really a cooking tip but more of a question.

Is there any real difference between a dry measure cup and a liquid measure cup of an ingredient?

Sometimes when I might be baking something to void dirtying two measure I will measure out a dry ingredient then use the same measure for a liquid. Wife saw me doing that the other day and she said YOU CAN"T DO THAT! They are not the same!

I would not use the dry cup to measure say honey then try to use it to measure out flour that would make a mess!

I've become a fan of using a gram/kitchen scale for everything. Then it really doesn't matter what vessel you use.

But technically, yes, there is a difference.

https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos/5450-dry-versus-liquid-measuring-cups

Dry vs. wet measuring cups are a bit of an oversimplification. Technically, they are different, but that's mostly down to how they are used, not how much volume they convey.

The real issue is conflating weights and volumes. One cup is 8 ounces, but only when used for a water-like liquid. So if you need 8 ounces of something that is not a liquid, you should use a scale, not a cup.

The rest of the differences between dry vs. wet measuring cups are about whether you are expected to fill it to the brim or fill it part-way up a graduated scale.

Flour is the notorious problem child when it comes to measuring with volumetric devices (aka cups). Basically, don't. Flour should always be measured by weight. Any recipe that specifies a volume of flour instead of a weight is an unserious recipe that should be viewed with suspicion and contempt.

my Nanna's Christmas Day cinnamon roll recipe thumbs its nose at you.

it was written on the back of a bourbon bottle label. the specific volume of bourbon for the recipe is unstated, but it is believed to be "just enough to tolerate the inlaws".

Well guess I have never be fortunate to see a serious recipe then because I don't ever recall one listing the weight of flour.

And I have known a few inlaws and/or relatives that probably fit greasy125's mixing requirements for somethings!

And if he would be interested in sharing that recipe I would like to give it a try if that would be OK with his nana!

Just go out to eat!

As far as I know, it's only North American recipes that uses volume measurements. I didn't even know what a 'cup' was until a few years ago. Tablespoons and teaspoons are used in older recipes, sure, but those are for small quantities that don't equate well into ounces. Now I'm in the US, I convert every volume measurement into metric - a gram is a very small amount, ~ 28 grams to an avoirdupois ounce.

the cinnamon rolls are store bought and the bourbon was for Nanna.

now, let me tell you about the "two beer roux"...

Is it a Santoku? That's about the going rate. Excellent knives. I don't have the DP series santoku. I've got their Gyotu, paring knife, and I think one of my petty knives is a tojiro DP series.

Once you get to a certain skill level as a baker, and you want to be able to repeat what you just did over and over again, or show someone else how to do it correctly, ingredients need to be broken down by weight. This also makes it easy to scale a recipe.
As was pointed out, the amount of flour in a cup can vary quite a bit by weight. But more importantly, weighing your ingredients allows you to have greater consistency.

if you wanted to make bread, this is a common enough recipe

800g flour
500g water
25g yeast
20g salt

You can instantly take that recipe and half it, double it, triple it, or make it ten times bigger. Now, if you are doing a recipe that calls for

2 1/3 cups of this,
3/4 cups of something else,
1/2 cup of a third thing

and you want to change the amount you make, it isn't quite as easy to work with. To make half the recipe, you've got

1 1/6 cup of the first thing
3/8 cup of the second
and 1/4 cup of the third.

No matter where in the world you get a recipe from, if the ingredients are broken down into grams, you have what it takes to achieve the same results. If it doesn't turn out as well, and you know the ingredients are correctly portioned, a quick glance in the mirror will let you know what the issue with the recipe is.
I still see a lot of fairly new recipes from all over the world that call for tea- and tablespoonfuls of some ingredients and "bunches" of herbs, even if the main ingredients are measured out in grams.

I bake two or three loaves of bread per week. All the measurements are by volume. If there is an inaccuracy, it is easily and automatically adjusted for because I know what the texture and consistency of the dough ball should be. So, a little more water, a little less...

Baking bread is as much art as science. Every batch of flour is slightly different and has a different moisture content.

Pastry may be a whole different thing. I leave that aspect of baking to my wife, at which she excels.

I think you will find that it is bread bakers (home and pros) that are the most militant about using grams and only grams as a measure. This is one of the things that differentiates serious bread baking from Nana's Vague Drunk Bread Recipe.

It's also only relatively recently — maybe the last decade or two — that this message has begun to spread outside of professional kitchens. But the weight vs volume debate is considered settled within the bread baking community at this point.

Flour varies, in how much water it can adsorb, even the same brand, from the same mill

Absolutely. And that's something the baker still needs to be cognizant of, along with seasonal humidity and temperature variances.

Measuring flour volumetrically makes all of those things harder to control.

Brownies, cakes and other baked goods that call for oil always leave a bad aftertaste for me. So I get around this by replacing the cooking oil with yogurt (or yoghurt for you worldly citizens). No more foul aftertaste.

Have you ever tried using avocado oil? It's slightly nutty. I use it to bake brownie and cake mixes. I'm all for incorporating yogurt in stuff though. I eat yogurt(plain greek) with fresh fruit on top every morning before I work out. Solid protein and good for gut health plus very little sugar.

Haven't tried avocado oil but now I will. Thanks!

Avocado oil also has a high smoke point(490F to 520F) so it's ideal for frying as well. Other than olive oil it's the only oil I use. I also use chili oil and sesame oil but that's another subject.

My wife makes delicious brownies basically substituting applesauce for the oil.

I don't know what the actual recipe is.

Also, her Mexican grandmother would substitute yogurt for lard when she made flour tortillas. She was also able to make them so thin they were translucent, almost like parchment.

What varies is the protein content in flour. This is the factor that affects how much water it will absorb. You might see small differences between lots of the same brand name flour, but if a recipe calls for a certain amount of flour, and you use the same amount of the same brand over and over again, it's going to turn out the same. Some of the store brands are going to put whatever they buy in the same bag, so you will see less consistency there.
Volume measurements, combined with experience in how it's supposed to feel, are how a lot of very good food has been and still is created. But when two or more people who are separated by distance, or even work schedule, make the same product, adjusting the quantity of an ingredient based on how the dough feels is not going to get you a consistent product. Using and weighing out the same ingredients will.

I worked in an industrial scale bakery, we used railcars/tanker trucks full of both corn & wheat flour
The guy running the mixer & oven made slight adjustments to the dough, even though the flour/maseca came from the same silo/tanker/pallet of bags & each mixer had load cells for the flour hopper
On the corn side, [continuous process] the consistency of the masa was checked about every 15 minutes both the dough & finished product