(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

[cw: food]


(previously on)

Variety is a nice place to *visit*, but god I would *not* want to live here. How do y'all *cope* not eating mostly the same things at mostly the same times of day?

The *occasional* break is nice, but for the most part I like predictability, and not-being-overwhelmed-by-options, and diets that have been carefully spread out across a bunch of food categories in hopes of avoiding malnutrition (apparently successfully).

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Also to be totally clear - I didn't think you literally never changed your diet but drift in tastes/optimizations over a scale of years and drifts in tastes/optimizations over the scale of days are not comparable

[brin_bellway]

>>I mostly make it bechamel-type and it usually comes out excessively floury. I think that means I need to use less flour and cook it longer?<<

Yeah, probably. I do have trouble with flouriness sometimes when I make it that way. Another way we do it sometimes is to use heavy cream and no roux, instead simmering down the cream to the desired thickness. More diabetic-friendly that way, for Mom.

While flouriness has been an issue, the main problem I'm having is greasiness. It seems to be worse with the roux method--perhaps because of the butter--but even the cream method is often too greasy. I've been getting more sensitive to greasy foods over the years, and I worry that someday I won't be able to enjoy cheese sauce at all without a stomachache. (Although eating fruit immediately after a problematic food seems to help, so that's something.)

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>>drift in tastes/optimizations over a scale of years and drifts in tastes/optimizations over the scale of days are not comparable<<

Fair.

[contrarianarchon]

>> greasiness

- I don't have this problem myself but my memory of serious eats attributes greasiness in cheese sauces to the cheese breaking and that you need an/a better emulsification? IDK if "this food has large amounts of fat in it" is your problem though, this wouldn't help with that?

See: https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/01/how-to-use-cornstarch-and-evaporated-milk-to-make-stable-emulsion-cheese-sauce.html
https://www.seriouseats.com/2015/10/the-food-lab-fifteen-minute-stovetop-macaroni-and-cheese-recipe-food-lab-book-excerpt.html
?
Note: I haven't tried these because it would require buying new ingredients I don't normally keep around, so it's on the metaphorical back-burner.

[brin_bellway]

Good to know, but yeah, I'm pretty sure the problem is with the fat itself. Reheating cheese sauce in the microwave breaks the emulsion pretty hard, and while the resulting sauce *tastes* subjectively greasier, it actually causes *fewer* problems (now that a lot of the fat is sitting in a drainage puddle of oil at the other end of the bowl, rather than in my food).

There's a couple of foods--spanakopita, pizza from a specific local pizzeria (homemade doesn't need this, and neither does Domino's)--where I deliberately prepare/obtain them in advance because I like the texture of their microwaved versions better. Maybe cheese sauce will end up like that, albeit not for textural reasons.

Or I might go looking around for and experimenting with ideas on lower-fat cheese sauces. Low-fat recipes tend to carry a lot of assumptions I don't share about "weight loss" and "calorie counting" and "guilt", and I hear Mom complaining about them a lot because of all the people who tried to push her into eating that way (which is exactly the wrong move, for her particular physiology), but there's probably some useful stuff in there. Even as a kid, when this was much less of an issue and I could happily eat as many cheese crackers as I wanted, I noticed that when 3 Musketeers switched to a new "45% less fat" formula, I was abruptly able to eat an entire bar without a stomachache.

[contrarianarchon]

Makes sense! And yeah, I suppose those won't help, then. Good luck finding suitable substitutions!