Do I Need to Refrigerate Ketchup? An A-to-Z Guide to Storing Condiments
Soy sauce? Peanut butter? Maple syrup? Settle some scores with this breakdown.

You keep mustard in the fridge, but your partner (or roommate or dad) balks at the idea. Who’s right? The fine print on the bottle, on nearly all of the bottles — “refrigerate after opening” — isn’t much help.

Turns out, that urging is rarely about health risks and more about quality, said Abby Snyder, the associate professor of microbial food safety at Cornell University.

Dressings separate, bright sauces darken and fiery flavors fade, given enough time. Spoilage microbes might even get a foothold, making condiments and other ingredients unpleasant but not unsafe to eat. All of these processes are slowed or even halted in the fridge, but they’re already heavily inhibited by low levels of water (which bacteria need to survive) and high levels of their nemeses (salt, acid, sugar, active probiotic cultures or other preservatives).

So do you even need to refrigerate? “A good rule of thumb: If you bought it from the refrigerated section at the store, it should stay in the fridge at home,” said Carla Schwan, the director of the National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia.

For everything else, other than a handful of examples below, consider your lifestyle. “If you use it often and it’s shelf stable, keep it in the pantry or on the counter,” said Lisa Cheng Smith, the founder of the Taiwanese pantry shop Yun Hai. “If you use it more rarely, put it in the fridge to make sure it stays in peak condition.”

A few other tips for making your condiments last: Keep shelf-stable bottles tightly sealed in a cool, dark, dry cabinet — not over the stove — as light and heat will speed up oxidation. (If you live somewhere hot and humid, you might need to move through them faster or keep more in the fridge.) And always use a clean, dry spoon or knife — no fingers — to avoid planting bacteria or the moisture they crave.

Below you’ll find everything you need — informed by food safety microbiologists, fermentation experts and the manufacturers and purveyors themselves — to help you make the call on 22 common staples, and set any debates to rest. (Yes, you can move the peanut butter to the cabinet now.)

Making some homemade rum.

Base is feed corn ($10/50lbs near me).

Pictured is the result of 8lbs of corn, 1.25L of 60% spirit, aging with some toasted applewood chips, and various spices (basically pumpkin spice).

Final result was good, but not great. Still had a very 'fresh' taste to it, that was pretty sharp. Might let it age longer next time: this was only aged a week (is much faster to age in a jar with chips over a barrel, due to surface area, for better and for worse).

Saw these advertised and had to make a trip to Lidl just for these as I am a person of sandwiches*, like many around these parts are and these vegan "deli cuts" are great. We make all our own sourdough bread (been doing it from well before covid) and sandwiches are a pretty big part of our diet as a whole. This weeks bread is spelt & oat sourdough.

These faux deli meats have all been pretty expensive so it's nice to find a more affordable version. Definitely going to be consuming this from now on.

These are made from and peanis.

(*This does not mean subs, burgers, toast or anything warmed up, but open sandwiches with some type of cold cuts, veggies & a spread. These are eaten for breakfast, as a snack, meals, they are also a part of festive foods. The bread is often rye bread. We basically grow up on oatmeal and various kinds of open sandwiches between meals.)

Had to go get stuff from Ikea, so got myself a treat and ate plant balls and got a few bags of them to take home for easy meals. Still think Ikea does the best plant balls around, at least where I live.

I like it how this plate of food is now cheaper than the meatball version.

They contain lots of soy- .

Edit. Remembered the plant protein wrong, it's peanis (pea protein) not beanis.

The Scramble

• 1 block firm tofu
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 tsp turmeric (for color)
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp onion powder
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp water
• salt n pepa (and heavy D up in the limousine)
• tomatoes and onions (I used about half a cup of each)

1. Heat oil in a pan over medium heat.
2. Sauté tomatoes and onions (or use different veggies if you want) for about 3 minutes.
3. Crumble tofu in the pan with your hands.
4. Add in all seasonings/dry ingredients (turmeric, garlic powder, onion powder, smoked paprika, nutritional yeast, salt, and pepper).
5. Add soy sauce and water, and let the tofu and veggies cook for about another 3 minutes, stirring very well in the process.
6. Enjoy!

The SPAM Imitation

because I love plant-based slop

i got a jar of mint chutney to try for the first time and i really love it! i added it on a whim to this pasta and it turned out so good! what do you like to pair mint chutney with?

I was never a real big fan of peaches until about two years ago, i made someone i was dating a peach pie and the bottom crust was likely the best one ive ever made and that pie turned me in to a real big peach boi ever since. peach ice cream. Cobbler. Peach upside down cake. Grilled peaches. Peach preserves on almost burnt toast for breakfast makes me happy. Peach tarts. And fucking peach pie? I cant get enough. Its replaced key lime as my favorite desert ever.

Its the beginning of texas peach season and last weekend when i went camping at a sorta nearby lake, i stopped at a roadside stand where this older than dirt farmer sells local peaches, pecans and onions. I bought two bags of peaches; one Early Flavorich, and one Dixieland, and ate the whole bag of Dixieland peaches and a couple of the Early Flavorich while i was camping. I saved some so i can make a peach pie ive been slobbering over like a dog for the last week-ish. Tomorrow when i get off work im prepping peaches and baking a pie. I am staying up til it sets so i can have peach pie and i dont give a rip what time it happens to be at either. I might even make ice cream to go with it if i can bribe my daughter to help with pie and ice cream.

Real peachhead hours whos awake? Anybody have a particular variety they're fond of? Does anyone prefer early season over late season? Or is it just one of those things nobody really cares about and im the only one acting like a dumbass for fruits?

Thanks for coming to my peach talk i appreciate it.

I don't necessarily mean specific recipes, I mean concepts. A western sandwich is bread, (vegan) meat or cheese, sauce, tomato, something pickled, some salad, mostly, all layered and/or thinly sliced. Cross out maybe some of them for simplicity, like the mayo tomato or the british cheese and cucumber.

A döner kebap is sort of layered but everything but the protein layer is more of a mix up and not like tomato followed by onion or whatever.

A Banh Mi is sort of western of course, but it does a twist. The layers are there-ish, but they don't matter so much. Sort of a hybrid between something like a kebap and a pita if you catch my drift.

What other sandwiches are there, conceptually?

there's so much wild shit out there like, they got a cross between brussel sprouts and kale now, it grows little kale nuggets, it's weird

Im a huge fan of broccolini except idfk what to call it because that's apparently a trade mark of the Del Monte corporation and other places call it "sweet baby broccoli" but that's INACCURATE because it ISN'T BABY BROCCOLI it's actually a cross between BROCCOLI and GAI LAN which yields the succulent floral broccoli tops combined with the crisp crunchy asparagus like stalk of the gai lan and altogether a super premium ultra vegetable. I love that shit

If you want broccolini tips i've been tossing it in a light lemon garlic vinaigrette and then throwing it on the char grill until it's charred and people go omg your broccolini, it is a so amazing

Anyway what are some other good weird brassicas y'all enjoy

i made my weekly batch of beans and this time i went with pinto beans, which i havent made before, and green chilis. I opted to skip any meat as I'm short on cash (and also havent found things like TVP at my local grocers yet). They turned out ok, like they dont taste bad, but theyre missing something and I dont know what. The word I keep thinking of is bass but i dont really know what i mean by that foodwise. Umami?? How do I add more bass to my beans? mushrooms?

ingredients i used:
pinto beans
green chilis + onion + garlic
oregano, cumin, some chili powder, garlic powder, s&p
cooked in faux-chicken stock

do it

i have like 5 cans of chickpeas i got for a discount and want to use them.

especially if you have one that uses cumin

I just bought an ice cream machine with a compressor for half price. I thought it would be easy (it isn't) but I am nerding out.

I will explain to you all, to my best understanding, some theory about frozen deserts.

First, about ice formation: Imagine some water-ice mixture. Liquid H₂O molecules will, with some probability pertaining to their low kinetic energy and being next an ice crystal, join the ice crystals, making the ice crystal grow. At the same time, water molecules on the surface of the ice crystal, will, with some probability related to their kinetic energy, break loose of the crystal structure and join the liquid water.

If more molecules go from liquid to ice, more ice will form. If more molecules go from ice to liquid, the ice melts. What effect dominates depends on the average kinetic energy of the water molecules aka the temperature. Above 0 °C, more ice melts than freezes onto crystals; below, more freezes than melts.

Now, if, instead of pure water, you dissolve sugar (or salt or ethanol or whatever) into the water, that will make it less likely for liquid water molecules to join the ice crystals, because the sugar is in the way of the water molecules wanting to join the ice. It makes the liquid-to-solid transition less common, less probable, because there are just less liquid water molecules next to the ice surface. Because the sugar doesn't join the ice crystals itself, the ice is is just pure water, and the opposite ice-to-liquid transition is not affected by the sugar.

So, in a sugar-in-water solution, for the same temperature, less H₂O molecules will join the ice, while the same amount will melt as in the pure water case. This effectively depresses the freezing point. You now will need a lower temperature than 0 °C to form ice in order to make up for this. You can approximately calculate this temperature quite easily because the drop in freezing point is proportional to the amount of sugar (or salt ...) molecules in the solution.

Interestingly, the mass of the sugar doesn't matter, only the number of molecules does: If you dissolve a certain amount of sucrose (a double sugar) molecules, it will affect the freezing point the same way as adding the same amount of glucose molecules, even though glucose is half the mass. The same goes for salt: One NaCl, because it splits up when dissolved in water, will depress the freezing point approximately like two sugar molecules.

The second important point: The concentration of sugar in the water increases as ice forms. The sugar stays in the liquid solution; the ice is pure water. So more ice means a higher sugar concentration in the liquid that remains, depressing the freezing point of the remaining liquid. This means that for any specific temperature, sugar-water will freeze only partially to a certain percentage. You can calculate (for example), if you have 500 g of sucrose dissolved in 1 l of water, and you freeze that to -18 °C, about 79% of the water will be in ice form.

I just discovered this recipe in Ian Knauer's book 'The Farm' only to find out it was an even older recipe so here's a picture from a print thats from the 70s. (Image from reddit.)

I LOOOOOVE citrus desserts and had to share this.

so today's mushroom and tofu siopao turned out soooo much better than the batch i made the other day. last time i think i made the mistake of letting the dough dry out so they were very difficult to work with but this time i left them in a plastic container so they stayed soft and malleable while i was filling each one. i was able to stuff them with so much more filling too! idk i'm pretty proud of these ones!!!! :D

inside look

I'm going to start off by saying this is inauthentic as hell. This recipe is made to be quick and to be done in a western home kitchen with no smoke and ingredients you can find at most supermarkets. Substitutions can be made, quantities of ingredients can be changed to tasteIf you're good with a knife, you can realistically have this done in 30 minutes. This is also a recipe I made to cook for 8 people so cut the recipe in half for less

Ingredients

Sesame oil (any oil will work, just don't use butter) 1 bag of green onions, sliced 1 white/yellow onion, diced 2 tbsp of garlic 2 inch knob of ginger 2 tbsp red pepper flakes 1 bag of frozen stir fry mix of choice 1 bag of broccoli 2 cups of Soy Sauce/Coconut Aminos 1 cup of Lime Juice 1/2 cup of Rice Vinegar 1 cup of Chicken Stock 2 tbsp white pepper (black pepper is fine) 2 tbsp salt 3 tbsp brown sugar (white sugar is fine, use less if you used coconut aminos) 2 tbsp garlic powder 2 tsp peanut butter Whatever chicken you have laying around (idk, I just used leftover rotisserie chicken) Cashews (I also just used leftover cashews for this)

3 tbsp corn starch 3 tbsp of water

3 cups of Jasmine rice (any rice works, Jasmine just cooks quicker) 4.5 cups of water

Steps

1. Start by preheating your oven to 450f and getting your rice water boiling. You're going to bake your vegetables. You do not have a big enough pan to brown all the vegetables at once, and you don't want to do it in batches, that will take forever. Oven. Start this before you start on the stovetop, because it's pretty involved once it's started.

2. Start by cutting up your stuff. Dice your onions, slice your scallions. Use a cheese grater to grate the ginger, it's way faster than dicing it.

3. Fry the white onion in your oil of choice for about 5 minutes on fairly high heat, char is completely fine, preferable even. Add in the white parts of the green onion after this and fry those for about 2 more minutes.

4. Add in garlic, ginger and cashews, keep it moving at this point, don't burn the garlic. This should take about a minute

5. Once everything starts smelling fragrant, add in your liquids to keep it all from burning and add in all your spices except for the salt.

6. Let it simmer for a bit and taste it for flavor after the acids have boiled off a bit. It will taste too sour at first, but the acidity will boil off as it heats up more. Add more sugar, chicken stock, or sesame oil to balance out the acidity.

7. When the vegetables are done, throw them in the sauce and stir them in. Add in your leftover chicken at this point too. Give the chicken a few minutes to warm back up

8. Make a corn starch slurry (cold water and corn starch whisked together) and stir it into everything to thicken the sauce and boom you have yourself a "stir fry"

Have fun cooking!

it was my first time making these and i struggled a bit with the dough and stuffing technique but they turned out tasty so it was all worth it! my partner ate them growing up and they really liked it so i'm very happy!!! i have lots of leftover filling so we're gonna make more tomorrow but now time for rest.

It turned out so pretty! Only problem is was a flat so i used coconut oil to add fat, it wasn't bad at all but coconut definitely seemed incongruent.

Meat is fine with me, but also open to vegan recipes.

Whatcha got?