This confirms what my rudimentary knowledge of chemistry tells me, but does not explain what I encountered. Using baking soda to tenderize meat is common in chinese recipes, if you’ve had a disk like orange beef it may have been prepared that way. I also use baking soda in the place of lye when making bagels and soft pretzels to help get a firm brown crust, and as I mentioned before, I know how lutefisk is made and tastes. So i am stuck here for an explanation, and don’t especially want to try it again, but I’ll find some way to try this. But I can tell you that baking soda alone won’t produce that result.
Besides the original fish-based sauce and the Mushroom Ketchup someone else mentioned, I’ve seen recipes for Walnut Ketchup from the 19th century.
Never had it, though.
I used to go with work friends to lunch on Mondays. We called it Noodle Monday, because we went to this Chinese noodle restaurant in San Gabriel (Alhambra?). I always got the Shanghai chow mein and never the Hong Kong chow mein. Shanghai style was stir fried (not steamed) but made with soft wheat noodles. Hong Kong style was with the crispy noodles as you described. Not my thang.
This is called velveting, though I’m more familiar with using corn starch than baking soda.
I think it’s useful to distinguish between “chili”—the fruit of the capsicum—and “chili con carne”—a stew of meat, beans, or both flavored with chili And other spices.
Cooks Illustrated has recipes that call for adding baking soda to ground beef to tenderize it. I tried to find a detailed explanation, since they often go into the science behind their recipes, but so far all I’ve found is this sentence: “To keep the meat tender, we treated it with baking soda, which raised the pH and kept the proteins from bonding too tightly.”
The fruit is usually spelled chile.
“Chili” by far is the most common spelling in the United States for the fruit. It is also the preferred spelling of the Associated Press.
Depends on where you are. It’s not that simple. Chili and chile can both refer to the plant, as well as to foods or sauces flavored with it.
I wouldn’t say beans are required, but they weren’t part of the original 19th century San Antonio recipes either.
I’d guess chili’s one of those things where the original term has lost all real meaning; you have stuff like a Greek meat sauce (kima) being finagled a bit in Cincinnati and being sold as “chili”, you have stuff like “white chicken chili”, which is sort of absurd, and everything in between.
I’d say that the original stuff was the stew of beef, peppers and onions that developed in the greater San Antonio area in the 18th and 19th century from spicy tagine style stews cooked by Canary Islander settlers to the area in the early 1700s and that got adapted with local conditions and with local food traditions. No beans in any of that though.
Also chile, chili, and chilli aren’t different enough to serve as distinctions. Most people are going to pronounce them identically.
I’ve seen chili used for the fruit but don’t recall seeing chile used for the stew with the possible exception of some things like tomatillo-based green chile which has little in common with the red stuff from Texas and Wendy’s. I’d be curious to see an example of a product commercially packaged & available in America that calls the peppers chilies or the stew called chile.
For me it’s pad thai made with a sweet ketchup based sauce.
I’ve been fortunate enough to travel extensively in Thailand on many occasions and I’ve never once come across pad thai made with ketchup. That seems to be a very North American thing.
I can’t say it absolutely doesn’t exist, but if it does it’s pretty rare. Normally it’s fish sauce, lemon/lime juice and palm sugar or plain sugar. No ketchup or tomato based ingredients at all.
You’ve never seen it because anyone who attempted it in Chicago was most likely terminated with extreme prejudice, and the remains fed into a woodchipper before you got there.
If the rigid fundamentalist fanaticism for Chicago Hot Dog Correctness expressed on the Internets is any indication, taking utensils to that sacrament would be like visiting the Vatican and blithely picking one’s teeth with a splinter of the True Cross.
(I started to write “wiping one’s fundament with the Shroud of Turin”, but the Shroud has been discredited in the eyes of all but a few resurrect-hards.)
You can’t use a fork? Then how to you avoid spilling the ketchup everywhere?
Complaining that words with similar pronunciations are confusing is a very cold attitude to take. Positively Chilly!
As for food names/recipes vs. content.
At least 50% of the examples listed here are due to regional preference differences. For example, whether ketchup should contain sugar or not. Or even be tomato-based or not. (the original was not!)
The other 50% are due to linguistic variances. Where people eat the same foods, but cal it something different. The classic example would be a Brit ordering “chips” in the US, or an american ordering “biscuit” in the UK.
The other 15% are due to people with bad statistics.
Definitely bastardized, because for this born-and-bred Spaniard a “torta” is most definitely a slap in the face applied with full-force and an open hand or, by extension, any kind of big impact.
All the examples given here for non-tomato ketchup here been historic, like a century or more old. Show me something labeled as ketchup today that can’t be described as “tomato ketchup.” That’s what I’m asking for.
Geo Watkins Mushroom Ketchup, still produced and sold today.
Thanks. How is it? Should I try to get some?