Nomad Kitcheneer

We've all heard of stories of some famous beauties including milk in their beauty routine (e.g. Cleopatra, royalties, celebrities). For the longest time, I've been intrigued by milk soap. In my imagination, I'd have these flawless snow white delicate bars of soap to lather up. Then comes the reality... Lactose (in Milk) + Heat (from Soaping) --> Caramel Color + Weird Odor As usual, I consulted Google and Youtube and pored over tons of articles/videos. Most "successful" authors tell you to make milk ice and dissolve lye (sodium hydroxide, NaOH) slowly and carefully dissolve it over a ice bath. Full disclaimer, from the videos, it works. I'm just lazy, i.e. I don't like to bust out additional bowls and invest in precious freezer space to make this happen. Fast forward to my half-hearted first attempt with milk ice + NaOH, but without ice bath. The mixture still had a hint of yellow in it (even though it didn't warm up too much during the pr

Have you ever made your own soap? Maybe it's time for you to give it a try. I developed skin allergy for surfactant (aka hand soap, detergent, dish soap, you name it) over the years, that I had to wear rubber gloves to do basically any chore in the house. Recently, I started trying to make my own soap to eliminate contact to allergen. I stumbled across this "house chore soap" concept from Chinese/Taiwanese websites, and they are AMAZING! These days, these house chore soaps are the only ones we use to do dishes, clean kitchen, stove etc. They work even better than the commercial ones! S always exclaimed, why would these soaps not be more popular? We don't know...but I hope you'd give it a try. The basic soap making procedure can be found pretty much everywhere on YouTube. The key is to ensure safety and have quality ingredients (not that you need organic certified etc, but more importantly, they need to be free of impurities). When it comes to chemical

If you asked me 10 years ago, I'd never believe that I'd be baking bread, let alone sourdough bread. I always thought baking bread is hard, it lacked the "rigorous" measurement that pastry baking provides, especially when it comes to giving predictable results every single time (blindly following recipes).  Yet here I am, standing in front of my sourdough baby, Sauerteig Bob, staring at it and examining it every day, wondering how he's doing... I started Sauerteig Bob more than 6 months ago, I'm happy to report that it has given me my first best tasting bread ever. I'm now hooked!