I just finished reading "Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages" by Stanley Marianski. Good book with lots of interesting information, though it feels in sections like it was written as separate books and merged. Anyway, Mr Marianski says several times that fresh garlic is not a good idea, bu...

Cokmar in Malay - pronounced chokmar - used to be used in a long, stringy form on the top of one of the famous Penang desserts, ice kacang. My favorite stall in Georgetown tells me they stopped using it several years ago when they could no longer get it at the wet market. We used to be able to get c...

I have a microplane nutmeg grinder that i am sure would work well on a nutmeg that had not been husked. purchase or collect a bag of whole nutmegs and grind what you need fresh each time. It doesn't take more than about ten minutes to grind a whole nutmeg to powder. That is likely the best route wh...

Hi Thewitt - you can substitute nutmeg for mace 1:1. That's what I do, because they are expensive here and I don't want to buy both. Cheers, Jeff They do have a different taste, and in fact this one recipe calls for both. If I can't source it i will just use nutmeg, but so frustrating living in the...

This is just a rant from a frustrated spice shopper - in the spice capital of the world! We grow Nutmeg in Penang. Lots of it. Harvesting Nutmeg it is a tradition that goes back centuries. We have Nutmeg farms here, and you can buy candied nutmeg, nutmeg jams, visit the Spice Garden and see how it's...

Terima kasih from beautiful Penang!

..... free running vegetarian chickens (!!)... Having raised chickens for many years, how do you keep a free running chicken from eating every bug, grub, worm, frog, lizard or other small creature it can catch so that it's a vegetarian? :roll: -t PS Sorry for posting in such an old thread, I just c...

Does anyone own this model meat grinder? I ran a few kilos of pork, lamb and chicken through this yesterday to try out different combinations of blades and plates, and it seems to work very well. I was even able to make a pretty decent emulsion with the smallest plate and 4 blades running the meat t...

Thanks for all the advice, and I wanted to pass along an even more frightening recipe comment regarding saltpeter. A friend here in Malaysia shared with me a recipe for glutenous rice, made with coconut milk, that also included saltpeter. She says "It's just another spice, like salt..." When I tried...

I ran across a couple of recipes from the Philippines that add 1/4 tsp saltpeter to fresh sausage recipes. Both of these then say to leave the mixed sausage meat out at room temperature to stand for an hour before stuffing the casings. I assume this is to allow the nitrate to change into nitrite in ...

I'm reading Marianski's book now. Very interesting. I'm an engineer and have been an avid cook for 40 years. The meat science in his book is fascinating. I owned a restaurant many years ago for a short period of time, but I still consider myself an infant in meat processing. I've browsed the recipe ...

Thank you. That's sort of what I thought, but not having used anything but an old hand grinder from the 1920s, these options were a bit confusing. The two 4 blade knives are identical. There is no stuffing plate, but the large hole plate has 6, 18mm holes so I'm going to treat it as a stuffing plate...

redzed wrote:Email the forum geek, Vtec. Click on his name at the bottom page.

Thanks. Emil sent!

ssorllih wrote:No dog in this fight . What's an ipad?

An iPad is a specific type of hard cased, flat sausage, designed in Cupertino and made in China...

I bought a reasonably heavy duty Meat Chopper made by Orimas, model TBS 200.

It comes with 4 discs of varying sizes, along with 4 knives. Two of the knives have 4 blades, one has 3 and the other has only 2.

Can someone shed light on what purpose the 3 and 2 blade knives serve?

-t