Brain food: What is the correct way to eat dinner rolls?

How do I get my meatballs brown like they do on the telly? K. Wade

There is an ingredient that you will never see on a cooking program. It's called "patience". A cook staring blankly at a frying pan waiting for meatballs to brown does not make great TV. You need to cook meatballs and any meat that requires browning in small batches. It's all about getting heat and mass. You want the metal to be hot, about 160C, to brown the meat. If the meat is sitting in its own liquid, the temperature is never going to get above 100C – the boiling point of water. If the pan is crowded you will drag too much heat out of the pan and the balls won't brown; instead they will exude liquid and stew. Divide your balls, chicken pieces, or beef cubes into batches and cook each batch separately. Heat the frying pan or pot first. Add the oil, then the meat.

What is the correct way to eat dinner rolls? My girlfriend told me off for using a knife to cut one open. J. Rogers

I think you may be punching above your weight, son. If you're old enough to have a girlfriend, you should have been taught some simple dinner table manners. Look, I don't care if you tie your hands behind your back and chase a dinner roll around the plate like a pig with a turnip, but if you're dining in public you should at least know how to hold a knife and fork and eat bread properly. Dinner rolls are broken open with the hands, never cut with a knife. Butter is taken from the butter dish with the butter knife and placed on the side of the bread plate. Never butter bread directly from the butter dish. Pieces of bread are broken from the roll, buttered and eaten using the hands. Slices of bread can be buttered in the same manner then cut into pieces on the bread plate. Table manners are like road rules. They can be learned, should be observed in public and there are considerable penalties weighed out when they are transgressed. Listen to your girlfriend.

How do I clean up my bread dough bowl? The raw dough doesn't come off when I wash it. J. Hoffman

Proteins coagulate at about 70C and if you have very hot water coming out of your tap, don't use this to wash off raw dough as it will cook the dough on. The same goes when washing bowls with sausage mince, terrine and so on. . Rinse and scrub in cold water first to remove the dough or mince and then wash with hot water and detergent.

Letters

A few weeks back we suggested one way of getting rid of fruit flies hanging around the fruit bowl in the kitchen was to place a piece of old banana in a small container covered in plastic film with a hole punched in it. We had several letters informing us that what I was referring to are actually "vinegar flies" from the Drosophilidae​ family. True fruit flies, the ones that caused us to have heavily enforced patrols on the state border where we had to hand over all our bananas when we reached Albury, come from the Tephritidae​ family. Thank you.

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