plantteacher

Indeed.. now that we can simply enter a couple ingredients into a search field and get countless recipes, and also w/Youtube, I would expect people to be better equipped in recent decades.

The article covers that: “Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can't afford a basket of groceries.”

Weren’t bread machines all the rage because you just dump in the ingredients and it’s autopilot from there? I see a lot of them at 2nd markets and in dumpsters, so I wonder if their usefulness was overestimated.

.. or farmers trying to sell obscure things like celery root!

seriously though, the article seems reasonable and balanced to me. E.g:

• “Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can't afford a basket of groceries”
• “It's important to note, however, that cooking skills alone cannot solve the affordability problem”.

What’s Kenji? Is it the cookbook mentioned here:

https://www.kenjilopezalt.com/

?

If you read the whole thread, I would not have to spell this out. These are preservatives (source):

• honey
• salt
• garlic
• sugar
• ginger
• sage
• rosemary
• sage
• mustard
• mustard seed
• cumin
• black pepper
• turmeric
• cinnamon
• cardamom
• cloves
• vinegar
• citric acid
• lemon/lime juice

They generally work by killing/repelling/deterring microbes that to a notable extent happen to be of the unwanted variety. Before yesterday, I thought salt worked similarly to the others on that list. Yesterday I learnt that salt is uniquely functions as a preservative due to a different mechanism (a drying effect).

Your logic is nonsense. To claim that because substance X does not kill /everything/, it cannot serve as a preservative -- this is broken logic that you brought to the thread. Nothing on that list of food preservatives kills or deters every microbe - not even every harmful microbe. Of course they selectively mitigate /some of/ “the bad bacteria” (but note it’s a bit straw mannish for you to use the article “the” in your phrasing imply /all/ unwanted microbes). Most preservatives mitigate enough unwanted microbes without unacceptable overkill to beneficial microbes to justify use as a preservative. They are selected as preservatives for this reason. Foods that fail to significantly select against unwanted microbes (i.e. most foods) don’t get tagged as a preservative. How are you not grasping this?

You also have noteworthy bad assumption: that evolution does not happen outside of the ocean. The claim that because life started in the ocean, the ocean is therefore suitable for everything -- this is bogus. Try putting a freshwater fish in the ocean. If a complex organism can evolve to become intolerant to the environment of its ancestors, why wouldn’t microbes also evolve to develop intolerances?

Actually that logic is broken IMO. A food preservative need not make life impossible for all organisms. E.g. hops (and consequential acidity) preserves beer to some extent by making life hard for some unwanted organisms. But hops do not kill everything (of course, because you intend to drink the beer). Beer can still spoil despite the hops.

But as I said in my correction, salt works as a preservative through a drying effect, which I did not previously realize (TIL).

I could always transfer it to glass or plastic to protect the pot but I guess laziness was the original motivator. Salt is cheap enough that I’ll probably just toss it going forward.

i get 403 forbidden w/that link. And archive.org chokes on it too for some reason. Does your source counter this source?

(edit) ah, I see the problem. Salt only works as a preservative by drying out food.

Well it’s not actually clear to me whether the soft water is to protect the dishwasher, or to make cleaning more effective. Soft water dissolves soap better which makes it more effective in cleaning. It also means I can use powdered detergent (which is cheaper than liquid detergent, but in hard water powder doesn’t perform as well). Soft water has the down side that it’s actually /more prone/ to corrosion than hard water (at least according to youtube plumbers). So I’m tempted to conclude the built-in water softener is just for cleaning effectiveness.

Starchy water sitting around is a breading ground for bacteria. Don’t do that.

That water is brine, if you do it right. Salt is a good preservative. I’ve tested it with up to 2 reuses.

Also, dishwashers don’t clean with salt water. They use the salt to reset their internal water softener.

Not sure why you thought I thought dishwashers clean with salt water. The manual’s advice was to mitigate salt grains that did not get into the salt reservoir that would sit on the stainless steel potentially for days.

Ah, I wondered if I needed to explain that, since dishwashers in N.America do not take salt. European dishwashers tend to have built-in water softeners (because it’s somewhat uncommon to have whole house water softeners). So we periodically have to fill a salt reservoir in the dishwasher to feed the water softener.