CUISINART RECALL!

[lordkenmore]

I think many bakers have problems with the first loaf vanishing fast... My father baked bread when I was young, and my mother years later said she thought one reason he lost interest was that the first loaf of bread went bye-bye in such a short time.

 

When I first started baking bread, I also noticed the first loaf tended to go quickly. I'd often end up baking late at night (the actual baking), and it was really funny that some nights the bread would be in the oven after my mother had presumably gone to bed. And yet, she'd suddenly materialize after the bread came out. (Yes. we would often cut into bread before one was "supposed" to...)

 

It's been 20+ years since I kneaded by hand, so I'm not as bothered by single loaves now that vanish quickly.

 

As for bread machines, they are convenient, but I've never been impressed by the bread. It's probably better than some stuff one can buy, but it's not the same as something baked in a regular oven. Histrorically, my big gripe with bread machines was that they weren't cheap (although now they are a lot cheaper than they had been), and they only do one thing. The advantage of a food processor is that it can do a long list of jobs past bread dough.

 

[tolivac]

Plastic kneading-mixing blade-I remember in one of my Cusinart food processor manuals-they tell you to use the kneading blade if you are making the max recipe of dough in the machine-not only to prevent cutting gluten-but also to prevent overheating the motor!

 

[sudsmaster]

So put a 1/4 baking sheet on the floor of the oven and toss the ice cubes onto that.

Simple problems often have simple solutions.

Use common sense.

Also, if you are making multiple loaves of bread in a day, then you're getting into commercial kitchen territory anyway. Forget the Happy Homemaker excuses.

 

[earthling177]

True, but I also think that the cast iron pan *is* a simple solution, with the advantage that the cast iron has enough thermal inertia to make steam.

Also, for most ovens you do not want a lightweight sheet on the bottom of the oven.

And no, not a commercial kitchen by any stretch. Since I am going to make a mess one way or another, I might as well get 4-8 loaves of bread out of it and clean up just once. That produces enough bread for us for a few days and a couple or so more to give to the neighbors. It's not something I do all the time, it's when I'm in the mood to bake bread. It happens often enough that I don't mind investing in the equipment, but I'm not saying everyone has to do it.

I'm just saying people have a right to know it can be done if it's what they want.

The other side of "simple problems often have simple solutions" is that many people only use a mixer to whip cream, maybe make a cake from a boxed mix every once in a while and, for most people, a simple, inexpensive hand mixer is just fine, but they use a food processor for lots of other things, so it's already there. There are probably more kitchens today with just one food processor, a hand mixer and an immersion blender than what used to be common, which was one countertop blender, a stand mixer with lots of attachments and no food processor.

Either way, we home cooks have a strong incentive to find out ways to cook with equipment/workflows that is available to the average home, just as professional cooks have a very strong incentive to stick to the methods/workflows they were taught in school so as to maintain a consistent product and work environment as well as produce safe food.

What I object to is one side saying the other side is stupid and/or wrong. And I also strongly dislike when ordinary people automatically assume that only the pros have the answers.

That kind of mindset only tends to produce results like some friends of mine who insisted that the only way to make some of the foods was this hard process that such and such a TV personality showed, then finally I go to the kitchen, make it work for a fraction of the time and effort and they lose faith in the pros completely, which was also not my objective. What I do in the kitchen is optimized for home kitchens, in fact if you double the recipe it might fail and be hard to scale up or down -- what people frequently fail to accept is that commercial/industrial methods are optimized to be scaled up/down and to consistently keep the food safe from spoiling, for example.

One of the best examples of where home and commercial/industrial methods clash spectacularly is canning. We've seen it even here, over and over again. All of the official food canning guidelines encompass everything they've learned in over 100 years of experience with stuff that works and/or can go wrong, so, of course, their recommendations reflect all of that. Meanwhile, there'll be no shortage of people who'll say that their families have been canning without a pressure cooker and just boiling or putting the jars in the oven and inverting them when taking them out etc and "no one ever got sick". Or worse, that their method was the official recommendation back 75 years ago. Yes, it's true that small carefully made batches might be sufficiently safe, but that fails to take into account that millions of people replicating the old methods in not quite the right ways might get food to spoil, or make the glass jar explode and hurt people nearby.

Anyway, sorry if it feels like I'm jumping on your throat in particular or even in general. This has not been the best year for a variety of reasons, and I think that stuff that I ordinarily just let go/pass by are pressing my buttons way more heavily and I feel like I *have* to respond when it's probably best to ignore it. One of those buttons is when people who went to expensive training to be chefs tell me I can't do stuff that has worked consistently in my family for generations. I always go "WTF? If *I* can do it and I have no formal training, shouldn't they also be able to do it?" and then you get my rants. Sorry.

And Happy New Year everyone, here's hoping it's better than 2016!

Hugs all,
-- Paulo.

 

[twintubdexter]

GOOD GRIEF !!!

I certainly did not intend to open an extra-large, family-size can of worms! I was simply stating something I recall Julia Child saying on her early PBS show in keeping (slightly) with the Cuisinart blade topic. She also said "use genuine vanilla extract, the other (imitation) has a cheap, bad taste". I'm sure many people use a good quality vanilla flavoring and get excellent results. No food connoisseur could ever tell the difference. With my baking skills, I could use the most pricey vanilla extract or a quart bottle of flavoring from the 99 Cent Store and the results would be the same...lousy.

 

 

 

[sudsmaster]

Well my eyes had glazed over before I got to the line about cast iron. Yes, that would be better than a 1/4 baking tray. And I imagine a lot of older ovens simply have thick iron bottoms anyway, especially the big monsters from France. Others I've seen have lost their enamel long ago, if ever they had it to begin with. Of course some anal retentive cooks may be sitting there with a sponge on a stick to catch any drippings before they cause a problem ;-).

 

[dermacie]

Recalled

Mine is recalled thanks for the info. I used it today to make cheese ball. I bought this machine two years ago barely used it.

 

[sudsmaster]

Well I stand corrected...

It was my educated guess that the problem was with the bend at the tips of the blades.

However after doing some more internet searching I found some photos of failed, or close to failed, riveted chopping blades. It appears that the problem is at the rivets, and the blades start to fail there when the metal cracks.

I still think the problem is improperly heat treated stainless steel, that is too brittle to be able to stand the stresses from the riveting, and being held in place during high speed impacts by only rivets.

Like I also said, I have rarely used the chopping blade, and used it yesterday with no sign of cracking or separation. It will probably be a while before Conair is able to manufacture enough replacements to ship me one, so I will be reluctant to use the riveted blade again, and if I must, it will get a very close inspection both before and after use. Then it will go into the curio cabinet with red tag. LOL.

That said, the rivets on my blade do like a bit different from those in the attached second photo. In that one, the rivets are thicker and more squared off than mine, which are more shallow and rounded. I wonder if the more shallow rivets put less stress on the blade metal. On the other hand, the rivets in the first photo look more rounded than those in the second photo, although it's hard to say if they are as shallow as the one that came with my food processor.

Also, I read that some of the failed blades were made in Japan, so this is not exclusively a Made In China problem, and points more to a faulty initial design.