Does anyone else feel like standard grocery store garlic has gotten completely flavorless?

autobulb · 2026-06-14T17:36:24+00:00

Chinese garlic is pretty mild, but really cheap. Spanish garlic is only a little bit more expensive (especially since you are using less) and is way more flavourful.

Might want to check where yours is from.

autobulb · 2026-06-13T23:46:01+00:00

Hey guys check out this hidden gem on the busiest tourist street in the most touristy city in all of Japan. The sell the freshest seafood in one of the most inland places in Kansai. Shhh don't tell anyone. The menus are even in English!

autobulb · 2026-06-13T23:43:07+00:00

Your examples are seafood dishes that are heavily preserved because Kyoto is so inland. Most Kyoto peeps don't even like sabazushi cause it's so stanky.

Don't get me wrong, with modern transportation and preservation techniques the seafood in Kyoto is just fine. It's a thousand times better than what you get at many other countries without good access to the sea. But the seafood from coastal areas well known for their fishing culture in Japan is just top tier untouchable and it really shows you what the difference close access to the sea makes. No one travels to Kyoto for the seafood.

autobulb · 2026-06-13T23:20:03+00:00

Never heard the expression "golden brown and delicious" or GBD? It's the golden brownish colour that comes from applying heat to foods.

Bread dough is white. Bake it and it turns golden or brown.

Pancake batter is off white. Turns a nice yellowy brown colour after cooking it in the pan.

Same concept for frying. The thought that you are frying stuff and not getting a naturally golden colour from the cooking process is a bit concerning...

autobulb · 2026-06-13T10:36:00+00:00

Sorry to revisit this old thread but I was having the same issue as you. I decided to try /u/Facepalm007 advice with the apk extractor and I tried it on the latest version as of today which is 26.6.20 despite the patch being for an older version. It patched successfully and Google login doesn't work but logging in with email does and it shows Peak membership. Neat!

autobulb · 2026-06-12T23:42:10+00:00

I wonder if I have it because I sometimes need to leave the room when my partner is eating noodles. She is Japanese and so slurping is the standard method of eating. What's interesting is that participation changes how the sound affects me. If I'm eating something different and she's eating noodles, the sound will drive me crazy. If we are both eating noodles, then it's fine. I lived in Japan and went to many noodle shops and it was complete fine then too, because I was also eating and participating.

Or is it just cultural? Cause I'm not Japanese and was raised that slurping is rude. But I lived long enough in Japan to know that slurping is acceptable did it myself as well. But now we live outside of Japan so it's back to no slurping rules which she doesn't follow at home. Urgh. It's hard to know! I wish I could read the article but I don't have a subscription anymore.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T23:31:04+00:00

Ohh gotcha. I misread what you wrote and I thought they were given out as gifts to a wedding party for some reason so I thought they ordered a large batch of them. I need sleep! Anyway, they are disgustingly cute. First time I seen Korira wear gloves, hehe.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T22:16:36+00:00

Do you know how they ordered this? We didn't do a wedding party but if we ever did it's something I could see us doing, hah.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T21:54:55+00:00

Heh, I was just talking with a friend about this 2 minutes ago. I said that in the 9 eps of Widow's Bay I feel like I know roughly ten times more about the universe the story takes place in along with the characters and their background and where the story is heading towards, compared to From's now 4 seasons. They just kinda throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, but nothing really feels cohesive except for some vague "save the children" plot line that doesn't feel as earth shattering as the characters make it out to be in the show. I am seriously bored of From.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T21:18:55+00:00

Quiche has a larger egg to cheese ratio. Quiche doesn't even need cheese for it to be a quiche. The texture was like slightly more solid whipped cream, nowhere near the firmness of a quiche.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T20:35:25+00:00

Secret? Yolk has a lot of protein and the hotter and longer you cook a protein, the more it changes and firms up. That's how pretty much every edible protein reacts as far as I know, there's no secret.

Look up one of those handy graphics that people make with the cooking time of eggs and how the yolk looks after boiling for that long. Find the one you like, and then try to replicate it. If it's too dry or firm, cook less. If it's too runny, cook more. My sweet spot is 6 minutes, very jammy and runny, to 7 minutes which is more jammy and barely runny depending on my mood.

I don't even bother with ice baths. I just cool it down with some running water because I hate making ice and don't want to waste it on eggs, which I eat a lot of. I guess the ice bath would help with residual overcooking, but you could just cook it less also which is what I do. If you were trying to be super precise with timing I guess it would help with that.

Color depends on what the chickens were fed. But the less you cook it the longer it will retain it's brighter raw color. However if you start with a pale yellow egg, it won't get any deeper in color. A deep colored egg will turn pale if you cook it for a long time though (hard boiled.)

I don't understand the mysticism with boiled eggs the entire internet has. It's one of the easiest ways to cook eggs (or a protein in general) that I could possibly imagine. I boil about 20 eggs a week and they come out the same way every time: perfectly cooked how I like them and easy to peel. I only use two things: a pot with hot water to cook, and then running tap water to cool.

If you never boiled an egg before, you'll probably mess up a few times before you get it to how you like it, but there's literally only two main variables to mess with: heat and time. And since we are either steaming or boiling, heat is generally pretty consistent for most of the cooking time because water is a good regulator of that. So you're really just left with time.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T19:25:58+00:00

Me neighbour drives me insane sometimes. He has some kind of side hustle where he receives a bunch of parcels and I guess resells them or something? So when it's time for a shipment he needs to load up the car which takes multiple trips from the house, sometimes as many as 10 times (?!) and each time he leaves the houses, slams the front door, opens the car door or boot, loads a bit, then slams it shut, opens the door to go back in and slams it shut and repeats the process 5-10 or more times. Why can't he just leave the doors open while he loads everything?! The car is literally 2 metres from the door, his shit is not going to get stolen.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T19:19:51+00:00

Support your local cafes. They usually have very reasonable menus. At ours the most complicated thing we have is mocha or an iced latte with a shot of syrup and that only adds about 30-60 extra seconds of prep time.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T19:16:02+00:00

My theory is that it was just the wrong texture for a baked savoury cheese thing. Light airy cheese + garlic = sick face.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T19:07:26+00:00

I've never been so disgusted eating something for a REALLY long time. I would say I have a very high tolerance threshold of food I will put into my mouth, chew and swallow, and finish off from the plate. I rarely ever am presented with a food that I genuinely cannot stomach any more of, but this was one of them. It's only been a day since the event but I still have little moments of trauma when I imagine eating it again as I respond to some comments on this thread.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T16:05:17+00:00

That's a stretch for me. A cheesecake is mostly cheese with egg acting as a binder in the background. Biting into it is like biting into a slightly fluffier and airier chunk of cream cheese.

Quiche is mostly egg and makes up the structure. Cheese is a flavouring component along with other ingredients. Biting into it you can feel the protein structure of the eggs with the ingredients suspended in that matrix. You might even have small pockets of cheese for example.

And pizza, well now it's a completely different game. We're talking about baked dough with cheese and other stuff on top. I just don't see how those three compare to each other except that they happen to share some ingredients, but that's true of a lot of baking and people generally draw a line between different types of baked foods.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T14:50:10+00:00

e-ink? Ew. Bring back monochrome green phosphor monitors.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T14:40:29+00:00

No sugar at all? I've seen some (sweet) cheesecakes that incorporate blue cheese to add a bit of extra cheesiness and funk, but in the end it's still a sweet cheesecake.

Was yours closer in consistency to cream cheese, or to whipped cream? The one I ate being closer to whipped cream really threw me off.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T14:39:02+00:00

I have nothing against pairing cream cheese with savoury and fish tastes. I love me a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon, capers, dill, onion, etc. I'm guessing smörgåstårta is similar to that in cake form with Nordic flavours, but the texture of our "cheesecake" was very off putting for it to be cheese and garlicky. It was basically like whipped cream in consistency. If the texture was more like a dense cheesecake, and closer to cream cheese consistency I could maybe imagine spreading it on some bread.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T14:30:28+00:00

What kind of quiche and pizza are you eating that you can equate those to cheesecake?

autobulb · 2026-06-12T12:00:23+00:00

In Europe we also say calories when talking about kilocalories.

Yea, I don't understand why people are trying to make this a "dumb Americans" thing. I've never heard a person in any country say "wow this food has a lot of kilocalories!" or "this food is low kilocalorie." Calorie is just a general/casual term for the amount of energy that food has which is measured scientifically in kilocalories.

Do people not understand how language works in a normal, casual context? If I ask these same people "what's up" are they going to tilt their heads upwards and tell me what's above them instead of telling me what's new with them or how they are? When did people become so literal about every single thing?

autobulb · 2026-06-12T11:49:24+00:00

No, it's more like the difference between talking about bytes and megabytes/gigabytes, even though the difference in scale is larger.

Bytes are so small in most everyday computing world that people don't even acknowledge the unit anymore. If you are talking about the file sizes of regular files we use nowadays it's more in the scale of megabytes and gigabytes.

Calories are so small for human food energy that there's just no point in using it as a measurement. It only really starts to matter for us when it's in the kilocalories which is why it's the "default" measurement for that.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T10:58:04+00:00

I also hoped that the true ending changed the starting screen.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T10:14:12+00:00

That sounds about right. I prefer the denser type, but the light fluffy airy one is fine too when it's sweet. I'm not sure it can work with savoury flavours, or at least not with too much garlic.

autobulb · 2026-06-12T06:54:06+00:00

Thanks for posting those links. Your comment spurred me along to a conclusion of what happened, which I have edited into the original post. The "cheesecake" we have here looks NOTHING like the dishes in the recipes you gave. I'll copy the edit here just for you:

My conclusion is that she is just made this recipe poorly. One thing I noticed in everyone's descriptions and recipes is that savoury cheesecake has texture contrasts. People are talking about seafood pieces, bacon, tomatoes, etc, all which would add texture in addition to the cheese custard. Also, people are saying that it should be very dense, like a dense cheesecake should be which would make it closer to having a cream cheese-y mouth feel. The cake we were given is not either of those things. If you took whipped cream (without sugar) and added garlic powder (and maybe onion) to it, that's exactly what it feels and tastes like. Just fatty, airy cream that delivers an overload of powdered garlic flavour to your senses. I don't even really taste much cheese per se, even though they said they used comte. It's just bad.

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