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Comment by tomkinstinch | Hacker News Reader

Kenji's (cook)book, The Food Lab, is also great, though it doesn't include everything he has on the blog.

It's also inexpensive enough to make a great random gift for foodie friends, despite being a hefty hardcover:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393081087

If you like his stuff, you might also enjoy the Cooking Issues podcast, particularly the earlier episodes.

It's a bantercast mixed with food science, cooking call-ins, and random interviews with culinary cognoscenti. The host is the energetic and interesting Dave Arnold, who recently won a James Beard award for his book on cocktails, and who used to teach food technology at the French Culinary Institute in NYC (now the ICC). It's my favorite podcast of the year.

http://heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking-issues/

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Agreed on Kenji. Searching for Kenji + name of dish you need a recipe for is the pro-est of pro-tips.

I would throw Pioneer Woman on as the second Google option. She doesn't have the geeky bent that Kenji does, but has amazing recipes.

Except that eating Pioneer Woman recipes on a regular basis will take years off of your life. You will have have delicious years but fewer of them.

This is unbelievable. The last months I've been enjoying his crazy good lasagne and ragu recipes. Like the best I've ever had, made by me. Yesterday I bought this book and now it's in hn...

If you love food and try to be a better cook, here's some good material. Too bad some ingredients, like chilies are a bit tough to find in Germany...

Chilies are pretty simple to grow yourself, even just by using the seeds from a dried one. A happy plant produces lots of chilies and the freeze fine for most uses. They don't like the cold, though, so depending which part of Germany you're in you might need to keep it indoors (but still with access to a few hours of sun a day).

Planning to do that chili con carne next Sunday, so no time to grow the plants... Also electricity is super expensive in Berlin, so any artificial growing lights will break my monthly budget.

I'd love to visit (or work in) Berlin. Can you find whole dried chili peppers, or canned? They're obviously not as good as fresh, but they'll still be delicious.

Dried chiles are very lightweight, so probably not very expensive to have shipped to you in bulk. They're easy to rehydrate (and you can use hot stock instead of water for extra flavor):

http://www.chilipeppermadness.com/cooking-with-chili-peppers...

Germans don't like spicy food in general. There are a handful of restaurants serving something that actually burns in your mouth, but you have to beg them to actually cook it for you. For chiles in supermarket, you get the basic jalapenos and if you're really lucky, habaneros with a premium price.

I did a huge batch of Kenji's chili con carne yesterday, probably my fourth time. You won't regret it.

Edit: this place looks promising in Berlin: https://potandpepper.de

According to Google, there's a place called Pfefferhaus in Berlin, all things hot.

http://pfefferhaus.de/de/Pfefferhaus-Berlin.html

Don't you have Turkish supermarkets? They should stock chilli.

If not, mail me, maybe I can help a fellow nerd (ie mail a bag of dried bird's-eye).

Peppers aren't that hard to find in Germany. You appear to also live in Berlin. As a Texan and significant cooking hobbyist (I ordered Kengi's book from the US before it was available in Germany), here are some tips:

Major grocery stores:

- Real usually has fresh cayenne peppers, bell peppers, and some long sweet peppers. Occasionally they also have habaneros.

- Edeka more often has habaneros, and often tabasco peppers too, but less often cayenne peppers. Usually also a couple kinds of non-spicy peppers.

- Organic stores usually have peppers too; I have an LPG-Biomarkt around the corner that virtually always has a couple kinds of peppers.

Markets:

- The Turkish market on Maybachufer usually has some peppers available. What is a bit of a mixed bag. As suggested, other Turkish markets and shops are likely to have similar.

Online:

You can get dried chilis here:

https://chilliesontheweb.co.uk/chilli/

They're shipped from the UK, so no (at least for a couple years) customs to deal with.

Don't get too hung up on the specific cultivar of chili. Most chilis are actually cultivars the same species and exist on a couple of spectrums of flavor and heat. Substituting fresh green cayenne peppers for jalapeños isn't going to radically change a recipe.

Thanks for the chilies on the web tip. They have a bit pricey postage, to Berlin almost 10 euros... But let's try them, because they have all the chiles needed for the chile paste. These Berlin shops mostly have the basic chiles. Once there was a chili hamburger place in Neukölln selling home grown chiles with different variety and they went bankrupt in a year. It seems germans don't like spicy food that much.

I don't know whether the postage from these UK guys will be any better - I'm just mentioning them as they are relatively close to me and I have been in their shop a few times:

http://chillipepperpete.com/

Cooking Issues has been my favorite podcast for several years. tptacek also enjoys it.

Kenji has a bunch of practical advice and he's a great writer (even though at times his own bias steps in prominently at time), but Dave Arnold is really a step above.

We all lament the loss of Jacky Molecules. :'(

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