Useless Cooking Tip #2: Fast Soaking Beans
Feb 16, 2010 cooking, groceries
Two years ago, in a night of cooking and drinking, a YouTube video was born
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Thanks to the power of iMovie, it now has a sequel of vastly superior production quality
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Tags: Beans, Rancho Gordo, ridiculous drunken cooking tips, Useless Cooking Tips
Lunch Dilemma?
Feb 12, 2010 cooking
You’re working from home and it’s lunch time. Your wife thawed hamburger that needs to be used, but you can’t find a bun. But, ah, there’s some red wattle applewood-smoked ham. You can make a sandwich. But there’s not enough ham for a sandwich. What do you do?
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Tags: hamburger, lunch, red wattle, The Church of Burger
The Unofficial Dried Pasta of stlbites.com
Jan 1, 2010 cooking, groceries
Short of that scene in The Godfather where Michael whacks Sollozzo after going to the lavatory and pulling the pistol out from behind the toilet with the totally sweet, gravity-fed, pull chain flusher, Francis Ford Coppola is not a name most people would associate with pasta. As it turns out, however, along with his wine and olive oil businesses, Coppola owns Mammarella–a company that specializes in pastas and pasta sauces. While I won’t (or don’t) condone the use of store bought pasta sauces because it’s just too easy to make your own, dried pasta, on the other hand, is a staple in most of our homes and, hands down, my favorite is Mammarella’s Farfallone.
Tags: bathroom, Farfallone, Fra ncis Ford Coppola, Mammarella, pasta sauces, restrooms, Straub's
Truly Happy Meat
Dec 30, 2008 cooking, farming, groceries, sustainable agriculture
I’m only singling her out because she made a post about something I’d been meaning to comment on previously but, in the forum thread “Food Related Goals for 2009“, Merridith wrote:
…I want to restrict my meat eating, as best I can, to sustainably produced, naturally raised, animals. First choice will be to buy direct from the farmer, if I need it fast, I will buy it from the organic grocery.
The idea of this is absolutely great, but the reality is that even meat at an organic grocer isn’t really all that happy because terms like organic, free range, and pastured have all been picked up by agribusiness and distorted wildly. You can have “organic” pork that was confined just as you can have “pastured” beef that is really just pumped full of corn. And that’s not to say I don’t occasionally buy meat in a store like Whole Foods,
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Tags: American Grass Fed Beef, Local Harvest, Riverfront Times, sappington farmers market, Whole Foods, Winslow's Home
Lauren, my dear, it is not the brunoise
Nov 15, 2008 cooking, general food
Although I fell asleep with boredom in my first attempt to watch Top Chef New York, I was awake just long enough to take personal offense to Lauren’s comment that the brunoise is “the hardest knife cut.” Having spent countless hours practicing for the first portion of the Jr. Culinary Olympic competition (a knife skills practical exam) I know a thing or two about knife skills and brunoise being hardest is simply not the case.
Technically, a brunoise is a 1/8” x 1/8” x 1/8” dice. Period. Because a julienne is 1/8” wide people will sometimes say a brunoise is a julienne turned 90 degrees and cut again. That could be the case, but a julienne is technically 1/8” x 1/8” x 2-2 ½”. If you were cutting a lot of brunoise you’d probably want to start with something longer.
The classic knife cuts…Large Dice – 3/4” x 3/4” x 3/4” Batonnet 1/4” x 1/4” x 2-2 1/2” Paysanne – 1/8” thick squares – 1/2” x 1/2” x 1/8” |
These are classic French knife cuts. They’re what the American Culinary Federation uses for their competitions and they’re what culinary schools teach. They have these standards so that as you roll from one kitchen to another there’s no need for a chef to explain what size they’re looking for when you’re asked to cut something up. Your chef could simply say, “Everyone prep me up a 9-pan of brunoised carrots.” Then, because everyone knows what a brunoise is, he could collect those pans from the entire staff and mix them all together. They should all be identical. It’s a beautiful thing when a few people in a kitchen can all be so precise with their knife skills that they can each brunoise a different vegetable to later combine into an identically brunoised mix of vegetables. They can then drop them into something like a consommé and leave informed diners quietly applauding their skill and attention to detail.
Of course your chef could also be
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Tags: brunoise, classic knife cuts, competition, french knife cuts, Top Chef, Tourné
How not to be a chump when buying knives
Jun 27, 2008 cooking, general food
Cruising in once again with useless kitchen information, I have a pretty strong opinion about knives. Mostly this is the result of people spending gobs of money on fully forged knives that aren’t chef’s knives. By my estimation that is the ultimate in kitchen waste, but before I go waxing on about all that, lets talk instead about a knife people either don’t own or get bamboozled on: the bread knife.
When I started culinary school I didn’t want the F.Dick knives that Forest Park was cramming down our impressionable throats. Sure they were German, sure they were fairly priced, but somehow I knew not to buy them. This turned out to be the right choice. While they do not dull quickly, they are rock hard knives and notoriously difficult to sharpen.
At the time (1996) Wüsthof Trident was the knife manufacturer that had become most popular for two reasons
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Tags: Bertarelli Cutlery, bread knives, crostini, F.Dick, Forschner, knives, Lisa Slay, Victorinox, Wüsthof Trident
Strawberries + Beer = YouTube
Jun 3, 2008 cooking
Q: What happens when you get home from work early and you begin drinking and eating strawberries as the start to your weekend?
A: You start making incredibly lame videos that offer little value and make your wife think you’re stranger than even she had initially believed.
The Forschner isn’t necessary but a serrated paring knife is more useful than you’d ever imagine because it mimics sharpness far longer than actually having a wicked sharp knife (which is obviously better). I really like Forschner knives though because they are insanely cheap meaning they’re almost disposable. Plus, they are relatively soft knives which means they are easy to sharpen so that you can learn how on the disposable knife before moving on to the coveted Misono UX-10.
As an aside I wasn’t going to post this because it makes me look like an idiot, but hey, it’s like bonding with the readership no?
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In Other Sur La Table News
Apr 24, 2008 cooking
Have you been eying that totally awesome flame colored Le Creuset French oven for years? Maybe it’s the grill pan your heart has fluttered for but you just couldn’t bring yourself to pull the trigger, plunk down the dough, and walk away with it for fear you might not use it.
Well if poop brown will do instead, they’re 25% at Sur La Table because most people apparently are not okay with poop brown; meaning they’re on clearance.
Side Notes…
It really bothers me that this is the bestselling Le Creuset item at Amazon.
is the bestselling Le Creuset item at Amazon.Has anyone tried one of these Lodge enameled Dutch ovens? They’re about 1/4 the cost of Le Creuset.
Update: Mike Sweeney pointed out that the 1/4 cost Lodge ovens have two coats of enamel and the heavier duty six coat ones are quite a bit more; though they’re still cheaper than Le Creuset.
Update2: It would have been so much cooler if I’d have actually had the right link in the first one.
Tags: le creuset, lodge, Sur La Table
Do you scream for bacon ice cream?
| David Lebovitz apparently does.For those of you maybe wanting to try this at home, not nearly the oddity it once was, Lebovitz posted today about Candied Bacon Ice Cream.
I’ve got a stash of yolks going in my freezer so I think I’m going to make some with chocolate as what once seemed disgusting to me has now become something I’m utterly addicted to. |
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Tags: bacon, david lebovitz, ice cream
222 Baking Class
Feb 26, 2008 Illinois, cooking, events
The first post went up last week, and for the high-rolling wanna-be-baker, Matt Herren and 222’s new(ish) head baker Paula will be teach some classes for the adoring public.
So for years now people have been asking me to teach them to make bread. I have always grumbled about “some day” and “when I have time” Well the time is now! Paula our head baker has been inspiring me, and freeing up some time for me as well, and we are going to offer a class…it’s going to be two weekends from 2-5 each Saturday.
They’re only taking six people so head to the blog for more details if interested.
Paula by the way is the one responsible for all the braided loaves they’ve been turning out lately as well as some of the new varieties like chocolate pomegranate.
[As a side note, Bill did this website for South Wedge Farmes' Market in Rochester, NY (where he now lives), and it's pretty slick considering he used the same CMS I do for stlbites.]
Tags: 222 Artisan Bakery, Edwardsville, Goshen Coffee, Matt Herren
From the mountains of Panama and Ethiopia, to the urban-jungles of Portland and Chicago, journalist Michaele Weissman takes us behind the scenes for a look at the world of third-wave specialty coffee. How did we get to Starbucks, and where we go from here?