@ElmerCat yes, that's the point.

It's obvious so people don't do it as much anymore, but it's still a way for the manufacturer to advertise, so it's reasonable for them to sponsor things like that.

But sponsoring the recipe can easily just mean sponsoring the author/blog/cookbook, it doesn't mean they sat down and created that recipe as an ad.

@Jefromi That only makes me less likely to choose the recipe because it seems like someone made it up as a way to use that specific product, instead of just wanting to create the most delicious dish.

A small unrelated question: how long do mungo beans need to cook_

yes, that's what we said - they tend to sponsor in less clumsy ways now.

I want to make dinner and have it ready in no later than one hour, so wondering what I should make. Found a pack of mungo beans in the pantry.

@rumtscho is that the same as mung bean?

yes, the same.

healthaliciousness.com/blog/mungo-beans-vs-mung-beans.php

not according to that

although im not sure how reliable that source is.

haha. I bought them in a specialized Turkish shop, where they are sold as "Asian food", and the small print specifies they were grown in Australia.

@Jay my package is labelled in several languages. Some say "mung", others "mungo". There is also a "munke" and a "moong" variation.

@rumtscho Are you using a pressure cooker? I use the reference on this site for times:

missvickie.com/howto/times/timingframe.html

@rumtscho Are they green or black?

no, I have no pressure cooker.

They are green.

Though, she recommends the beans soak for four hours.

If they are lentils, they should be done soon enough

but if they are really beans, probably not

@rumtscho But dried, not fresh?

dried

ok, I won't cook them now

maybe I'll try making them for lunch tomorrow, and if they turn out to need several hours, make something else for lunch and use the beans for dinner

I feel like I remember Chinese things (zongzi I guess?) where you soak them for a long time then they steam in the same time as the rest. But... maybe you tend to use split mung beans for that, oops.

@Jay - A random question: Have you ever been to NoLibs?

@ElmerCat in philly? yes

now that's the weirdest thing I've seen

I just cut up a tomato for salad

the seeds have sprouted inside the tomato

I admit it might be an older tomato, these supermarket ones tend to keep for a longish time without becoming obviously spoiled

but still, I have never seen that happen

@rumtscho oh take a picture

that sounds ridiculous

@Jay When I read the Philadelphia news, I sometimes laugh at the neighborhood names. People were complaining about some of the names in Boston yesterday, and it made me think of your city. The "NoLibs Festival" sounds like it would be something exclusively for conservative people!

universalhub.com/2016/…

It's shortened form of Northern Liberties

When they write about Delco, my first thought is it's something happening in an auto parts factory.

A part of the town is called Fishtown

right next to nolibs actually

Fishtown is cute — it sounds like a good place to get seafood!

well its not lol

it has nothing to do with fish

"The name "Fishtown" is derived from the area's former role as the center of the shad fishing industry on the Delaware River. The name comes from the fact that a number of 18th and early 19th centuries German and German American families bought up the fishing rights on both sides of the Delaware River from Trenton Falls down to Cape May, New Jersey. Also, in the early 18th century, an English colonist was fabled to have caught the largest shad in the world in the Delaware River."

But not so nowadays

A large area of Boston is called "Back Bay", but it's nowhere near the water. The bay was filled in 150 years ago to make more land.

would it be advisable to buy chicken stock or just try to do it myself as a beginner?

(for a different recipe)

@Huy Making your own isn't difficult, but it does take time, and of course, chicken.

I never use canned or boxed stock, but I will often cheat by using bouillon cubes.

A can of chicken stock isn't much better than a bouillon cube dissolved in water. Bouillon cubes are very inexpensive and take up very little space in your cupboard.

oh, ok

I have plenty of bouillon

They're a cheap, quick shortcut — but make some chicken stock when you have time.

so I'll just try using that instead

is Marsala a very versatile wine? the recipe I wanted to try uses it, but I don't want to buy a bottle just for one recipe

I'm sure there are people who will disagree with me and insist that canned stock is better — so try that sometime too, so you can judge the difference for yourself.

@Huy Yes, I have a bottle of Marsala in my cupboard right now.

@ElmerCat: any easy suggestions? I'd like to make chicken & chicory in marsala sauce, and then use it for something else. :D

I'll sauté up some vegetables — onions, garlic, celery, peppers, and/or whatever else I have, add some seasonings — salt, pepper; maybe some garlic powder, cayenne, curry, cumin, oregano; things like that, perhaps a bouillon cube (or part of one) — and add some Marsala. Then toss in a can or two of (drained and rinsed) beans — black beans, kidney beans, there's many to choose from. I'll serve this either on top of brown rice or some kind of pasta.

In lieu of beans, I might use canned tomatoes, in which case it tastes best on pasta — Marsala adds a nice flavor!

that's way to "open" for me ._.'

but at least it's good to know that I can do plenty of different things with it

@Huy It's also good to know that so-called "fortified" wines like Marsala, Sherry, and Madeira have a much longer shelf-life after opening the bottle, than other red or white wines you might use in cooking. So you don't have to use it up quickly.

what are usual shelf-lifes and what are the ones from Marsala, roughly?

Also note shelf-life in this case is just for quality, not food safety

Opinions probably vary — the wine might still be safe to drink, but its taste will deteriorate.

and what are those shelf-lifes in numbers? :D

Wine has high enough alcohol content that it won't go bad in terms of food safety but it'll oxidize and turn sour

Here's a source that says 3-5 days for red and white wines, and 28 days for something like Marsala:

winefolly.com/tutorial/how-long-opened-wine-lasts

That's really really low estimate

I would use normal wine for several weeks at a time

But then again I also have aerating corks

@Jay Red wine, opened?

Basically its a rubber cork you put on a wine bottle. it comes with a pump that lets you pull the air out of the bottle so it doesnt oxidize as quickly

also just buy things you'd like to drink (assuming you drink wine) and you won't have to worry about keeping it forever

Actually, boxed wine works pretty good because air never gets into the package — if you'd like to keep inexpensive wine on hand for cooking.

boxed wine

wat

To be honest, We have a 5liter jug of white wine at our house that we've kept for close to a year now for cooking purposes

@Jay Have you tasted it recently?

It's certainly not the best quality anymore but it serves its purpose

We've kepted it in a dark cool location

@Huy The idea is off-putting at first, but once you get past that, it's really quite convenient, economical, and better for the environment.

:o

Interesting read:huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/…

did an American just tell me about what's good for the environment :o

@Huy Yes, an American who's voting for Bernie Sanders for president!

r/politics is here, too? :P

@Huy Not very often, but always cordially — I'll say no more right now, I only wanted you to know that not all Americans think alike.

@ElmerCat Pretty clear from the fact that our elections tend to be relatively close to 50% popular vote.

@Huy if it ever gets as bad as I assume r/politics does, it won't be here, so... yes and no :)

@ElmerCat don't worry, I was just joking, because in my mind all Americans drive a jeep or something similar.

@Huy I prefer riding bicycles and using public transit.

that's good for you and the environment! :)

@Huy Do they not have boxed wine where you live? — I've even see a lot of it in Quebec where they're picky about wines.

@ElmerCat: I've never seen any in my life, but maybe I wasn't looking hard enough

@Huy In this review of cheap wines, the boxed wine did best of all:

@ElmerCat: no worries, I believe you if you tell me it can be good (or even better than bottled wine), I'm just saying I haven't ever seen it anywhere

that blue stuff looks disgusting

@Huy You certainly wouldn't want to serve boxed wine to guests at a lovely dinner — but you might keep it on hand for a party where someone might ask for a glass of wine. One box can hold several liters, but they're sold in smaller sizes too, right down to "juice box" containers, which are very convenient to take on a picnic.

at my parties, there's only whisky.

(and beer is acceptable too)

@Huy So, the next time someone at your party turns their nose up at beer and/or whisky, hand them a box of Pino Grigio. You don't have to bother with the glass — if they don't want to drink right out of the box, just give them a straw.

ok

@Huy That was partly meany as a joke — but you can see how convenient that packaging is, especially if you wanted a little bit of white wine on hand for cooking.

@ElmerCat: I don't know cooking jokes yet, I'm a beginner.

@Huy It's probably also my use of fuzzy sarcasm.

Adventures in food etymology: rectangular brownie-like things called "bouchons", presumably because the recipe is the same as the chocolate bouchons from Bouchon Bakery, so-named because they're shaped like corks.

When I saw this, I started wondering if "bouchon" is maybe a derivative of "bouche", French for mouth. Because it is a stopper for the bottle's mouth.

> From Middle French bouchon ‎(“bundle of hemp or foliage, oakum”), from bousche ‎(“handful of straw, bundle of twigs”), from Vulgar Latin bosca ‎(“brush, bundle of branches”), from Frankish *bosc ‎(“bush”), from Proto-Germanic *buskaz ‎(“bush”). More at bush.

and once again etymology provides one of the clearest examples how something which is intuitively correct can be very untrue.

That was my first thought for the food itself, didn't occur to me to try to associate it with "cork" though!

Like "Amuse bouche"?

Yup!

I know that a lot of grocery stores in the US sell "two bite brownies"... I think they're made in muffin tins. I bet they're similar to that.

The Bouchon bouchons are a bit taller.

Wow:

Ah, so that would make them resemble a cork more.

williams-sonoma.com/products/7879265/…

Oh, I remember seeing those when I worked at Sur La Table.... well, not the silicone ones... the aluminum ones.

so maybe the dessert name came before the bakery, but in any case, a pretty specific thing

also I'm pretty late on this, but if you haven't seen Zootopia and want a bit of a feel-good movie, you should see it!

It's a good film and has a lot of messaging about not taking people at face value, which is something I can get behind.

yeah, feel-good in the end but also pretty meaningful.

Also the dancing tigers in the last scene.

@Catija The awkward thing about that brownie oil answer is that a lot of the other answers give a lot of things that don't explain inconsistency either.

I should probably look at all of the answers instead of just the most recent one... I usually click on the "answered" link on the main page so I just see the newest answer rather than the rest of them.

Yeah, the "pan is too big" one doesn't really fit, either...

Meh, the only ones that look good are Joe's, Jannelle's, and tomjedrz... the rest seem to have only read the title.

if a title doesn't match a question, the best option is to edit the title

I thought that perhaps the OP changed the question at some point to address some of the point in the answers but it's never been edited.

people should be able to trust titles

I was thinking something like "Why are my brownie results inconsistent?"

hmm, I just saw the question

do you really think the title is bad?

It doesn't convey the reality of the question, which is that the brownies are sometimes hard.

To me it reads like Joe's answer doesn't match the question

it implies that the OP didn't realize that he's inconsistent

the way I read it, the OP realizes that there must be an inconsistency in some of the things he does, and simply lists the ones where he does not see any

Well, the problem with Joe's answer is that 90% of the content is in another link.

but the main question seems to be "what am I doing wrong when they turn out hard"

and not "why are they sometimes hard and sometimes not when I'm doing everything the same way"

if my interpretation is correct, then title and body do match

If the OP is claiming that they are perfectly consistent using the same recipe, ingredients, and equipment every time... and Joe points out that that might not be the case... The linked question is actually a good answer but Joe didn't include that content in his answer on this quesiton.

I'm tempted to edit the answer to include it so that it's not a "your answer is in another castle" issue.

that edit would be good

I also may be wrong in my interpretation, seeing that the OP accepted Joe's answer, which puts the inconsistency in the limelight

There's also the "what's useful to future readers?" bit, since this is a nearly 6 year old question.

And I figure most people who manage to find that question aren't necessarily having inconsistent results but consistent recipes.

Well, the OP seems to still be active on the site, so it's possible that if we address some questions towards them, they may answer.

But that seems like a major alteration of the question's intent. We have many different questions along the lines of "Why doesn't this recipe work correctly" with request for help adjusting it to be the way the OP wants... I don't think that this is that sort of question. Consistent results is an important issue to a lot of people who bake and I feel that it's worth keeping that frame.

I wouldn't want the intent modified significantly before/while people are answering, but after the fact it feels a little different.

A lot of people gave answers to a slightly broader question than the one stated, and the OP didn't complain or downvote.

Editing the question to fit the answers is not a good practice... You'd be better served to ask a new question that fits the "more useful" question you imagine than to edit the existing one... it makes all of the voting look weird.

Again agreed in general, but not sure about this case.

The second-highest answer is full of things that wouldn't apply to consistent recipe inconsistent results.

Even Joe's has advice about how to get the baking time right, despite the OP saying they didn't vary that.

Probably because it was upvoted by people who only read the title of the question which is why the title needs to be changed.

But if basically no one interpreted the question that strictly, not the voters, and the OP only sort of...

then editing the title and deleting now-clear-non-answers isn't exactly fair

There's a lot of information here that's potentially useful to future readers, and I'm reluctant to throw it away.

Baking time being the same every time you bake is a problem... when I bake cookies, the first batch almost always takes a minute or two longer than subsequent ones... time alone is never a good metric.

But this isn't about batches.

But if he turns the oven on 30 minutes before he uses the oven one day and 10 minutes before another day... that can effect the outcome.

Yup, sure.

Which is why mentioning timing is still a valid point for consistency reasons.

Okay, well, the OP might be mismeasuring the oil, so all the oil answers are okay.

And if they can't figure it out, they might want to know how to make them more reliably soft, so all the answers about substitutions that'll soften them are okay.

etc etc

The OP doesn't say what type of fat is in the recipe...

So, given the available information, the oil -> shortening answer is reasonable.

How is the OP supposed to predict whether they're going to get hard brownies or soft ones on any given day? Substituting the fat may be overkill if it happens to be a "good" brownie day...

hygrometer?

but to back up a bit, my point is mostly that, looking at the entire page, we can see how the question was generally interpreted and what information came out of it, and so at this point, changing it to be strictly about the inconsistency issue (by editing the question, deleting some answers, and editing to remove parts of others) is also messing with the meaning

If you really don't want to get rid of crappy answers that don't have any actual supporting facts and only tangentially relate to the question, then don't. That's your option as a moderator... I'm doing my job by flagging them and you get to pick if you agree or not. The question has a crappy title that lead to crappy answers because no one fixed the title in 2010 when the question was asked. That doesn't mean it's acceptable to change the question to fit the answers.

@Catija yikes, let's not get carried away here. I haven't entirely decided, I'm just mentioning and discussing a concern.

And I think it's unfair to dismiss answers in that way; the "good" answers don't really have supporting facts either, and tangential sounds like a bit of an exaggeration.

I'm just so frustrated at this site's need to treat every answer like a magical snowflake... I know we're not every site but answers like this on SFF would be downvoted to oblivion and deleted... but no one here votes because it's "mean".

We're drifting a lot here...

I'm just trying to avoid removing a possibly significant amount of useful information if I can help it, in the spirit of our primary goal being to produce useful content.

I've deleted an awful lot of answers, and I wholeheartedly advocate downvoting.

I went ahead and did the deleting and editing there, though.

in the spirit of lesser of two evils, I guess

@Catija By the way, assuming I know how to search right, 17% of answers on the site have been deleted.

From data.stackexchange.com, 6.75% of votes cast here are downvotes, while on SFF, 7.10% are.

data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/471226/upvotes-downvotes

You don't need to appease me. I'm not throwing a temper tantrum to get my way... or that's not my intention. I feel like we've talked about this in the past and clearly it's a difference of opinion about which answers are worth saving and which aren't... and when I hear a user talking about editing the question in a significant way to "save" answers that don't answer the question but because they do answer a question... that bugs me.

If that question is unasked and deserves to exist, I support someone asking it... which you've done in the past.... and if there's not a way to transfer answers from one question to another, then maybe that's something that should be brought up as a Mod option on Meta.SE... as a way to save quality answers that are put in the wrong place...

It's a little more subtle here; I'm saying that in this case, in practice there was some confusion about what the actual question was.

If that question were asked today and I saw it, it wouldn't have ended up in that state.

The percentages between here and SFF are really misleading because their vote count is extremely more active than ours. Questions and answers average more votes because their user base is more active and more likely to vote.

I mean, they just have more users plain and simple, right?

Yes. But I would imagine that that would slant their up/downvote percentage to some degree.

Hm, not sure I follow that...

If you double the number of users, it wouldn't change the downvote rate in principle... unless there's some kind of "only one downvote is needed" thing going on?

It does affect the amount of things sitting at 0 score though.

People generally don't like to down vote... there are users on SFF I've talked to who refuse to do it on principle... the question is what percentage of their users are willing to and do actively downvote... vs what percentage does here. I have a feeling that it's somewhat related to average amount of rep... but that could be because I avoid downvoting because I don't have much rep to spend on it.

Right, and the overall ratio of downvotes to total votes is an answer to that question.

downvote to total vote ratio for users who've voted at least 100 times, here: data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/471246/… and scifi: data.stackexchange.com/scifi/query/471246/…

I don't think I understand that graph... it doesn't have any info on what each bar is showing

y-axis is number of users, x-axis is ratio of downvotes to total votes, rounded to the nearest 0.01

i.e. most users on both sites never downvote

data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/471248/…

mean downvote ratio vs reputation

So... if I'm reading it correctly, there's one user on SA who has more than 100 votes and has cast a DV every time?

@Catija uhhhhh that's interesting

let me figure out who that is haha

I'm the person in between .4 and .5...

There seems to be one of those on the SFF chart, too... It's possible it's an error?

It's community.

cooking.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community

I think the community user owns the automatic votes.

So all the times something has gotten a downvote from an approved low-quality flag or something...

Ah. That makes sense.

Wow, almost 4K downvotes.

That's odd... why is the community user's percentage so different on SFF I wonder...scifi.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community?tab=topactivity

...huh

What causes community to award upvotes?

I think it might own votes from deleted users in some cases?

Is there a way to delete without removing votes?

Oh, so if the account gets deleted after the votes are finalized, they get attributed to community.

Yes. If the vote is over... 30 days old... I think? There's a time element to it.

So, highly active users who've left the site.

Here are the "mean" people: data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/471249/…

You are indeed pretty high up :)

I dunno if ratio is exactly the best notion of meanness, of course.

Downvotes per day might not actually be bad.

SFF certainly does seem to have a lot more users prone towards downvoting. considering they have about 1000 users with 100+ votes and we have about 220 users with 100+ votes... we have three users with > 30% dv and SFF has 30... adjusting for their larger user base, let's multiply SA by 5, which is 15 vs 30 users who dv >30%.

Oh, crud, I did my math wrong before when I came up with the 40% because that was the ratio of Up to down rather than down to total. Silly me.

Yeah, but on the other hand, it doesn't exactly matter if there's one person downvoting 100 times or 100 people downvoting once, right?

Okay this query has got to be wrong, I don't downvote 30x a day.

Sure... someone who only downvotes once or twice out of 100 votes is likely to only vote on horridly egregious content... someone who DVs regularly is doing more to help moderate bad content.

mm could be

okay, "age" doesn't mean what I thought

It's a rounded-up age based on your (secret) birthday...

HA HA... which means that half of the data's probably wrong because people lie about their birthday all the time... or they simply don't provide it.

but in terms of downvotes per year of age, I am at the top of the site!!!

YAY!

so, you are our resident old curmudgeon?

no, young

the younger you are the higher that ratio is

but why let facts get in the way of a funny interpretation?

all right, you are our young curmudgeon then.

wow the community user is really old

data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/…

top users by downvotes per day

Downvotes per day vs reputation: data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/…

That version does look like a much stronger correlation.

The part that really matters is the say <5k rep area, where there are actually plenty of users.

What... higher rep = higher dv ratio/day?

Maybe? It's not actually a ton of users, but

data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/…

zoomed into the <5k part, it does look like it's a thing

I'm still limiting to people who've voted 100 times, dunno if that's fair

SEDE doesn't think I'm human.

Looks pretty similar without that though!

yeah I get captchas now and then too

okay I should stop fiddling with that... those queries are probably enough to figure out a bit more if you're curious though!

(also apologies for my horrible SQL if anyone's looking, I don't know it at all)

I'm confused... there's not a dot at my current rep. I know SEDE can be a week behind but I don't think I earned 800 rep in a week... though that carrot question...

Anyway, I should do some actual work... whatever that is.

Your rep in the data dump is 5690.

Oh, and I rounded the reputations to group them and average on that graph, so it wouldn't be super-noisy.

It should really be a histogram but... that's the graph you get.

Hmmm... so how many people per dot?

however many are in that range, it varies, sorry

I can make another graph...

@Catija data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/471264/…

Also maybe interesting, total downvotes contributed by users in each bucket: data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/471265/…

Oh, you can graph two things at once, yay.

Same thing with # users per bucket overlaid: data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/471265/…

Ah, that's more useful.

And the 4 K bucket is pretty low, too, compared to the two on either side.