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

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Huh. I know squat about corned beef, so thanks for the info! That explains why the major result I experienced was YIKES THIS IS WAY TOO SALTY TO EAT. :)

I was a bit worried about the smoke flavor. I should note that I don't know how smoked ham hocks SHOULD look, but those things looked like they'd been smoked for weeks.

[brooksmoses]

Yup. There's probably a reason that the usual way of preparing corned beef (so far as I'm familiar with, anyhow) is to boil it with lots of water (and usually with cabbages, carrots, onions, potatoes, etc.) for several hours. The boiling undoubtably leaches out quite a lot of the salt in the beef.

[inflectionpoint.livejournal.com]

The potatoes help pull out some of the salt.

If things are ever OMFGBBQ too salty, toss a potato in. Cook for a while. Remove potato and add to compost pile. Do not eat it. A sacrificial potato can pull out some salt and sometimes bring something back from the inedible. However, there are situations beyond what even a potato can fix.

Another thing for insanely salty meats... rinse and presoak to get some salt out. This is also good for things like capers and sauerkraut, otherwise their salty flavor will take over the world.

[jtidwell.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't put something that salty into my compost pile! Methinks the plants wouldn't like all that salt... The basic potato idea is sound, though.

[inflectionpoint.livejournal.com]

Point taken. It might make the rest of the pile Unhappy.

I don't know what to with it at that point, it's kind of food toxic waste.

But it saves the meal, which is FTW.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

On general principle it seems that the ocean might like a salty potato. But in practical terms, I don't know what that means: put it down the disposal, toss it over the gunwale, what? :)