If even Netflix made a series on pizza chefs, you know that making pizza has to be more than a straightforward process. I keep trying, and get a little closer each time, but something’s always just a little…not quite. I’m my harshest critic, which means my approach is scientific. If I considered myself an artist, my criticisms would originate with others and I would hate everyone and do more drugs.
But this attempt wasn’t too bad. I liked the dough, which I can never crisp in an electric oven but I got the oil/water mix to a point where the result was flaky and just a little chewy. The sauce could have used some improvements. Oh well. I did like the sausage on it, which was my own creation.
It kind of looks like a Red Baron. I wonder if I can freeze these things.
Ta-daa.
I’ve also taking to mixing different white cheeses. It add some more flavor depth to an otherwise bland mozzarella. And I made the crust edge smaller this time.
Salmon’s an acquired taste. One of my sisters never liked it as a kid, and I know a couple adults with a lasting aversion. Of course, like chicken, salmon’s flavor profile is strongly influenced by preparation. Everyone appears to like Lox. My mustard-baked attempt, however, was not well received. This honey-ginger glazed version went over better, although the kid complained about ginger. Ah well – can’t please everyone.
It’s important to pull the salmon at 120 degrees (provided it’s been properly frozen prior).
The foodsaver also shorted out during this project. But it was just a bad power cord and I was able to cut out the bad portion and re-splice the wires. Not a project that warrants its own post. But still worthy of mention because – manly skilzzz!
I’ve talked before about how you’re probably cooking meat wrong, because you’ve probably listened to a bullshit article that was regurgitated second-hand information that swam the backwaters of the internet cesspool until the original source was lost to digital entropy.
I get it. Spending 5 minutes instead of 5 seconds to verify information and perhaps seek out alternate opinions is hard. You just want to get back to wasting time on ADHD social media feeds. And if you’re bothering to still be reading this post at all, you’re probably angrily scrolling past my intro to get to the information.
But the real tragedy is SEO – search engine optimization. They won the algorithm battle, and search engines no longer prioritize delivering meaningful content. I usually ignore page 1 search results by default now.
Okay okay, so on to the real article.
Store-bought ground beef sucks. Here’s what you can get:
Pre-packaged tubes. This is throwaway meat from the worst livestock, and an amalgam of pink slime and pure fat – often from different suppliers, mixed to the USDA-certified proportions and squirted into an opaque tube so you can’t see the contents. It will be greasy, dry, adulterated with lots of water, and if you get sick you’re out of luck because no single slaughterhouse of origin can be pinpointed since their contracts prohibit the manufacturer from listing them on the package and the FDA will never be able to track it down as a result and so other people will get sick too.
Low-cost bulk case meat at your local grocery meat counter. They would like you to think this is a bargain because they’re grinding up all their scrap meat, so you might be getting ground prime ribeye after all! And indeed you might be getting some of that. But the bulk of these grinds isn’t trimming, it’s frozen blocks of bull meat. How do I know? Because I used to do this myself as a college job. Of interest to me is I don’t know how to find a source for the giant meat blocks. It’s very well hidden from internet sleuthing, so it must be a USDA supplier arrangement with ConAgra or something, with commercial license required. But here’s what the machines look like: https://berkelmiami.com/collections/frozen-block-chippers/products/biro-fbc-4800ss-frozen-block-chipper. Basically, junk meat is frozen and molded into blocks designed for these machines which slice them into chips that will fit into a grinder. Mix the chips with the day’s trimmings, and there’s some ground beef. It’s actually not too bad, but there’s still the issue with questionable multiple suppliers and the subterfuge that annoys me. Plus, we can do better.
Local grocery packaged ground beef, labeled. The labeling is no joke – you can’t lie about this, but the USDA still allows a degree of fudging the words. If it’s expensive, it’s probably what it says it is on the package, but it’s still a gamble and could just be what the bulk meat is in the case, albeit with a hefty markup.
You pick out meat and and ask the butcher to grind it for you. Probably your best option, if you trust what’s going on back by the grinder. And how clean that machine is.
What’s the point of this post? No reason, other than this information doesn’t appear to be available anywhere else, and certainly not in once concise location. And it’s all part of my perfect burger journey. Don’t trust beef you didn’t grind yourself. Grind your own.
I got one on Thanksgiving over at the in-laws. I used the Fox Model B again. I like that old double-barrel, though it lacks the accuracy and range of my 870. Still, it’s a lot easier to carry and maneuver. Tradeoffs.
We’re all familiar with bags of potato chips, having cried out in irritation upon opening a large puffy bag of salty cholesterol, only to find a lackluster final count of individual product settled in oily mylar at the bottom of the false abyss.
Boo! Hiss!
And we accuse Lay’s of shrinkflation, and they say “Nuh uh! We didn’t do that.”
And we post pictures of historical trends in product reduction, and they say “We didn’t decrease the percentage of product to packaging ratio.”
And then we say “Nuh uh! You totally did!”. And while not experts, none of us buy into 1.034569 ounces being a standard serving size, to which Lay’s replies “Okay, we reduced size but it was to be more aligned with healthy serving size diets. See, we’re actually looking out for your wellbeing. You’re welcome.” And we might almost believe that, were it not for the price increase alongside product size reduction.
But potato chips are just the most obvious example, because the size reduction also made slack fill more obvious. When a bag was big and product content was 50%, we didn’t notice as much because faces could still be stuffed. When bags shrunk 30%, it didn’t matter if product content may have actually remained at 50%, because faces couldn’t be as effectively stuffed. And then we noticed!
Surely some government agency is out there to protect us from these shenanigans!
And indeed there is: the FDA:
So presumably, while shrinkflation is totally legal, slack fill isn’t necessarily, so if indeed the percentage of potato chips has remained constant, then Lay’s is in the right, despite the public’s resentment on limited face-stuffing. But they’re still jerks.
Anyway, on to the next point. One might notice that nowhere in this document is the word “medicine” used. Obviously prescriptions wouldn’t fall under this, but one might assume that OTC medications – a consumer retail product – would. And yet, it doesn’t.
Even ignoring the packaging waste, it’s rather egregious that everything in the left highlighted box easily fit into the bottle on the right. And there were already prior pills still in that bottle!
So why don’t these anti-consumer rules apply to medicine? Why did the FDA, whose very name has “Drug” in it, make this decision? I don’t know, because I can’t find any such explanation on their website. Someone tell me if you find out. Until then:
Fuck you, FDA
Fuck you, Lay’s (Frito-Lay/Pepsico)
And fuck you, Astra AB/AstraZeneca
And maybe Costco too, because they might have had a hand in it.
