Re- SC - help oop

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Mark Harris wrote:

> Huh???! Ok, I can see the garlic flavor getting out through the *peel*(?),
> although it would seem to work better loose in the juice. But you are now
> grinding up this peel into the sauce? I must be missing something. Although
> I guess it does add more fiber...

The deal is that a food mill, as I said, is more or less a strainer with
a device for pushing food through it, usually a sort of helical
propellor. It forces the food through the strainer, and the harder bits
do the Newton's First Law boogie, with that ol' Equal and Opposite
Reaction action. There's a spring between the propellor blade and the
perforated screen, which prevents the blade from exerting too much
pressure, so that things like tough skins, seeds, and other fibrous bits
stay inside the mill.

So, both the garlic juice/flavor, made much richer but milder by the
long cooking, as well as the soft, perfectly edible garlic pulp, goes
into the sauce, flavoring it and thickening ver so slightly, which is
often all you need. 
> 
> Do you do this with onion skins, too?

Personally, I haven't done it with onion skins, but I suppose you could.
Onion skins have some useful pigments in them, which are good for things
like coloring stocks a yellowish brown (assuming you wanted that). For
some things like English pork pies, the big raised ones that are
expected to keep for a week or so, whole unpeeled onions are added to
the stock both for the color and the flavor, and then removed, since
actually adding the onion to the pie would reduce its preservative
qualities. Also, it's perfectly possible and reasonable for cooked onion
puree to flavor and thicken a sauce: it's pretty much the one immutable
principle behind 98% of the curries in the world.

Adamantius 
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================