MMM BAKING. Basic cooking questions.

[cjsmith]

I came home last night to discover that Rob, when tidying up to leave for the weekend, had tossed three perfectly good squishy brown bananas into the trash. Those are now in a big loaf of banana bread. (It turns out they weren't quite squishy enough yet, but they were fine after sufficient violence from me.)

Then I pulled out the Northern beans I was soaking for soup [original typo: soap] and tried to figure out what to do with them given that the local grocery store didn't have a ham bone. Seriously. They had ham hocks... SMOKED ones. Last time I substituted meat-that-had-had-something-done-to-it for meat in a recipe I was very sorry. So I turned that into a sort of Tuscan white bean and sausage soup. Do you have any idea how hard it is to concentrate on chopping up stuff for soup when the aroma of banana bread is taking over your brain?

Now I could start a yeast bread dough rising, and I should, soon, if I want fondue tonight, but I'm restin' my feet for a bit.

Time for a poll:

[Poll #1143214]

Comments

[brooksmoses]

To explain the "other": On beans, I have no idea (and I figure the poll is asking what I know, not what I could find out). I would look it up if I were sufficiently curious. :)

Dried herbs are worthless when they've started to go beige and dusty. They lose flavor before that, which can IMHO be compensated for by using more of them. Spices also vary; I gather that freshness makes a significant difference to the strength of powdered paprika, for instance, whereas whole cumin seeds I would expect to be pretty much unchanged after a few years. But you asked about worthless, rather than "less perfect than they could be" -- and, for that, most herbs lose so much by being dried that it seems to me to be a bit odd to be picky about the freshness of one's dried herbs.

Anyhow, if one's feeling dubious about one's herbs or spices, tasting them is always the easiest way to check.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

They lose flavor before that, which can IMHO be compensated for by using more of them.

That is what I've been doing for the last (mumblemumble too many digits) years. :) Nothing's gone beige and dusty yet, but I do wonder if it's worth replacing some of the older specimens.

[brooksmoses]

tiger_spot may or may not have some of the herbs that came with the spice rack they bought from someone who got it as a gift and never used them for probably a decade. Those were some very sad-looking spices; it was quite obvious.

It may be useful to do some experimenting -- pick a jar that's well-used, and get a fresh one of the same thing, and do a taste-test and see whether it seems to make a difference or not, and whether it's enough that you care.