Hi!

you can order it at meilleur du chef, they have the louis francois brand which I use in the restaurant. https://www.meilleurduchef.com/fr/achat/patisserie/ingredients/conservateur/lfr-citrate-trisodique.html

For cheese fondues it's usually white wine warmed to scalding with either some acid (vinegar, lemon juice, gastric, verjus, whatever) or some alcohol (cognac or something 40% ish) and then whisk in the cheeses bit by bit until emulsified. If it's 'wet' cheese most add a little starch. Not really my cuisine though so maybe there are other tricks.

If you really can't find any off the shelf, you could try making it yourself. The reagents are cheap and common -- anhydrous citric acid (powder), water, and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda).

e.g. https://survivorshipnowvt.org/how-to-make-sodium-citrate/

I see other instructions online for making it with sodium hydroxide (lye). Don't try that unless you have a hot plate, pH test strips, and safety gear like goggles, gloves, and a lab coat. Lye is strongly alkaline and fairly dangerous at high concentrations.

For cheese emulsification purposes any of the chemicals listed under E331 should be fine, as the only difference is the amount of salt attached to the molecule. It shouldn't affect the taste, since you use such a small amount.

Thanks for the suggestion. I might go that route but I generally try to avoid non-vegan options. I can’t avoid cheddar without making a notable compromise, but I use almond milk instead of dairy. I’ve seen evaporated milk sold in cans. So I suppose I would use ¼ of a can, then try to find a use for the rest of it before it spoils.

One option is to use a different recipe. Evaporated milk can serve as your emulsifier; equal weights of dry pasta, that, and your choice of cheese can yield great results.

The real question is what "conocut extract" really is.

Makes sense. In fact I have seen just that. I opened a can of coconut milk and the top ⅓ or ½ of the can was a solid block and all the liquid was below it. It actually wasn’t a disaster for what I was making. Better even. I just used a scoop of solid stuff to melt in the wok and fry with it like oil and it took the curry paste well. Then the liquid was useful later in the cooking to keep it all wet. But it’s certainly less versatile in that form than if it were the normal consistent stuff. Couldn’t be used for drinks.

I imagine the emulsifiers are to prevent the situation where you open the can to find a plug of fat and solids on top. Though I've mostly seen this with coconut cream, rather than milk.

I wash 3 times in cold water utilizing a strainer and a bowl. The rice goes in the strainer, and the strainer in a bowl. Cold tap water is turned on and the bowl filled and the rice is covered with water. Now I agitate the submerged rice with my fingers for a few seconds, although agitation with a large serving spoon would also be fine. After sufficient agitation, I lift the strainer with the rice, let it drain until it has a slow drip, then dump the bowl of water. The strainer of rice is put back in the now empty bowl and is ready to be filled again with cold tap water. I repeat this 3 times.

The final rinse is done in boiling-hot water for 1 minute before the rice is put in a second pot of boiling-hot water for the cook.

It is possible the rice I buy is cleaner than the rice you buy. One step you could try with the mud problem is one of the cold rinses could be acidified with a little vinegar to lower the pH of the rinse water. Vinegar at 1% of the water weight is somewhere near a usable amount.

Good luck.

My mom used to mix cream cheese with caramel, the kind found in jars sold as ice cream topping. Caramel is easy enough to make yourself with brown sugar and butter. Not the healthiest of options, but very addictive.

I'm geussing they mean custard in the same way as a properly cooked French cruller. The center of the choux dough is cooked but the mouth feel is very custsrdy. I haven't had a pancake like that, but it sounds good.

Pankkake.

If the inside of my pancake is custardy I'm sending it back to finish cooking. They're literally called cakes for a reason.

Every time I buy one, I find I never use it, give it away after a few years, and then decide I need one again. It's a viscous cyclei can't batter my way out of. Maybe this time I'll rise to the occasion.

Absolutely get one. They're cheap and reliable.

+1 for kitchen scale. It should be gram accurate at least. Half/Tenth of a gram precision if you're making weird micro-batches. When I was experimenting with cupcake recipe creation, I basically made one cup cake at a time iterating and adjusting ratios until it came out how I wanted it. Only really possible with the scale.

It's ok. They should be soft enough that you don't have to chew. But they definitely need to have an internal structure closer to bread than custard.

The inside should be light and custardy, not dense and bready... A pancake that requires chewing has failed at its only job

The pancake should be tall without being cakey.

Wait, wait, what?

They're called panCAKES for a reason, are they not?

Custardy? I don't think I've ever seen someone slurp a pancake without chewing. I can't be sure of this, though, because if I ever did see someone do this, I would have surely suppressed such a traumatic sight from my memory.

One of us must be living in an alternate reality. Tell me it's not me. Please, commiserate with me.

You should get one. I was late to the party, but it's made a huge difference convenience-wise. Instead of dealing with (and washing) various measuring cups, I just pour directly into the mixing bowl and zero it out after each ingredient. I think a cheap one only set me back a little under $20.

but what if I'm a barbarian and I don't have a kitchen scale

Unless you are cooling it down to a really low temperature before adding the miso, any probiotics are killed either way. Like it would probably need to be less than 50°C for anything to survive. To cook something like a chicken breast to be safe to eat, you typically are cooking to a 7 log reduction in bacteria (e.g., only 1 in 10,000,000) survive, and the temperature they are telling you to cook to only needs to be held for 1 second.

Like you said, though, the science around probiotics is still a little unclear. There are a lot of variables to account for. Fermentation of various forms can change the nutrition of a food irrespective of whether you end up eating live cultures. Stomach acid destroys most of what you eat, anyway. I've seen evidence that probiotics help reduce upper respiratory infections, though, so maybe it helps there because it's "upstream" of your stomach.

To actually answer your question, miso, and many fermented products like it, have a high enough salt concentration (and potentially low enough pH), that they are shelf stable. The only reason to keep it refrigerated is to keep the flavor. Alcohol seems to be added as a preservative in a few types of Asian food; i think it might prevent mold growth a bit. Personally the miso i have in my fridge right now has alcohol in it, and it says "keep refrigerated for quality".

So fear of liability steers them away from a living probiotic, but at the same time they are not going to instruct consumers to refrigerate after opening? I’m betting competency is the culprit.

Salad dressing is a good idea. I had not thought of that but I do like miso salad dressing as it’s sold in a bottle. So I’ll have to try making some for sure.

Never boil Miso. Those directions are wrong. It has nothing to do with probiotics. It will denature the enzymes that give it flavor, and end up tasting bitter. 160F or lower is the target

Your initial thoughts on this were correct.

Edit: for the alcohol bit. Alcohol is a normal byproduct of fermentation, but the introduction in miso is a very small amount that won't kill off everything that contributes to the ferment. The salt and minor alcohol content ensure other nasty things don't take hold and grow in the paste, which otherwise would be a great medium for mold or bad bacteria.

being aware of the probiotics does not relieve the company from liability.

Mix it up in a salad dressing if you want all that goodness (oj, sweet chili, mayo, miso, sesame oil, some water or light soy to thin)

@plantteacher Oh no, how annoying. Luckily it's published in a lot of places, here's another one: eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprIf that doesn't work doing web search on the paper title ("Improved rice cooking approach to maximise arsenic removal while preserving nutrient elements") should show others.Hope that helps.Cheers!