I feel like babbling today. So I'm going to just rattle off a couple of tricks that I've picked up cooking and hope that some of them will be useful to you.
1. Wash your damn hands.
2. While you're at it, use your hands more. There is no tool in the kitchen as versatile as the ones at the end of your arms. They can smash, scrape, stir, fold, peel, and form. Get in there and play with your food.
3. Sure, you could put a towel under a bowl, pull out a whisk, blend vinegar with mustard and seasoning and spices and carefully drizzle oil while whisking constantly to build a properly emulsified salad dressing, or you could just put all that shit into something with a screw-top and shake it like a British nanny.
4. Just use a bigger cutting board, man. C'mon.
5. Why buy tupperware when you can just order too much soup from a Chinese place?
6. Onions make you cry because the sulfur you release into the air when you break their cell walls is mixing with the moisture in your eyes to make sulfuric acid. If you have four onions to chop and you do them one at a time, you're going to be sobbing uncontrollably by Onion #3. Halve and peel all the onions. Then score all the onions. Then chop all the onions.
7. Get a bunch of very, very large bowls. Nothing's sadder than trying to mix something in a bowl too small for the job. You wind up being too gentle to mix properly and shit winds up spilling over the edges anyway. At most, the material inside the bowl should be around half the carrying capacity of said bowl.
8. Get a tablespoon, a teaspoon, and a half-teaspoon. Measure out salt in each, then dump it in the palm of your hand. See how it looks, how it feels. Do that every time you measure spices. After a while, you'll be able to freehand measurements.
9. If you have two cast iron skillets, you have a panini press. You also might have one too many cast iron skillets.
10. Save the waxy butter wrappers in a zip-top bag in the freezer. They're shockingly useful when it comes to greasing pans.
11. If you keep your cooking oil in a squeeze bottle, you'll save yourself the trouble of brushing oil onto crostini or glopping too much into a frying pan. What's that? You don't have a squeeze bottle? How about one of those fifty thousand water bottles you picked up from all the 5Ks you've run and expos you've gone to for work?
12. Do you have a food processor or a blender? Then stop buying hummus, you dumbass.
13. Mise en place, motherfucker. Learn it. Love it.
14. Bacon makes everything better because it drowns out all other flavors and replaces them with bacon. Take it easy there, cowboy.
15. Everything is more flavorful than water.
16. Taste as you go. Don't just wait until you get to the finish line to discover you've created a hot steaming bowl of shit.
17. Use thermal mugs for soup. Or hollandaise. You get the extra bonus of surprising the fuck out of whoever tries to steal a sip of your coffee.
18. If you drop something in the kitchen, don't try to ninja-catch it. Either it's really sharp or really hot (or both!) and you're only going to severely wound yourself, or you'll fumble it and make the mess that much worse. Just step back. Caveat: kicksaves are acceptable when it's glassware.
19. Don't try to grab anything hot with a wet towel.
20. If you fill a jar halfway with milk and shake it until it doubles in volume, then drop it in the microwave until it hits around 155F, you can mimic steamed milk. Think about that the next time you're thinking of springing $3 for a cafe au lait.
21. Acidic things like vinegar and tomatoes will dissolve aluminum over time. It is less dramatic than it sounds, but it is exactly as gross.
22. The more moving parts a kitchen tool has, the less useful it will be in terms of multitasking. Also, the more pain in the dick it will be to clean.
23. Be aware of what the stuff around your kitchen actually is. Your salad spinner is a colander and a bowl. Your 8oz. coffee mug is a measuring cup. Your shot glass is two tablespoons. Your high-end rotary foamer is a weak paperweight. Your dog is a mop.
24. If you double-wrap your sheet pans in foil, you'll never have to clean them again.
25. Macerated fruit and sweetened whipped cream in a martini glass is an easy dessert for a dinner party that is also classy as fuck. Don't forget to put a sprig of mint on that shit. 'Cause garnish is real, son.
26. Store leftover guacamole in zip-top bags. It's crazy easy to keep properly deoxygenated.
27. Just toss your stale bread into the freezer. You can toast it off and make bread crumbs out of it later. And then you can look back on how much you've spent on bread crumbs in the past and weep.
28. Every time you open your oven door, you're losing like 100 degrees. Turn on the goddamn light and look in the window like a civilized human being, you ass.
29. Cutting a whole lot of shit over an extended period of time is like driving. It feels monotonous, and you want to distract yourself by having a conversation or letting your eyes wander. But the instant you stop concentrating, boom, there's blood everywhere and everybody's screaming. Pay attention to what you're doing.
30. When you love what you do and take pride in your work, it shows in the final product. Don't just treat cooking as something you have to do because you'll die if you don't eat. Treat it with love and respect, and it'll pay you back every day of your life.
All right, guys. This seems like a good place for me to stop for now. Take it easy.
Oh, hey. Bonus tip: When in doubt, put an egg on it.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Friday, April 11, 2014
On knifery.
Let's talk about knives. They're an essential part of any cook's arsenal - you don't get far in a kitchen without having to cut something. Or smash something. Or slice something or dice something or whatever the fuck. But it's surprising how little the average home cook knows about this sort of thing, how many people cut the shit out of themselves using the wrong tools for the job. So let's see if I can't save a couple of fingers here, huh?
What do I need?
There's an old saying bandied about in culinary school that all a good cook needs is a chef's knife and a paring knife. And you know what? They're pretty much right.
A chef's knife is a straight-backed, curved-edged blade ranging in size from 8" to 12". This is your workhorse, the knife you'll do most of your slicing, chopping, dicing, watermelon peeling, and chicken disassembling with. You want something that fits comfortably in your hand, first and foremost. Something you can grip the shit out of with confidence. Some people use santokus for this kind of work, and those work just fine. Hell, my daily knives are santokus. But I bust out my chef's for when I'm being serious about something I need to rock-chop or when I need to take a bird's spine out.
A paring knife, somewhere around 4" long, is for your detail work. Your scoring of onions to get a fine dice, your deboning of meats, your carving Tony Danza into a squash. I don't know about you guys, but nine times out of ten I'm using a paring knife, I'm holding it like a pen. The other one time I'm peeling something because someone else is using my peeler.
At this point, I'd like to point out the importance of using the right-sized knife for the job. If you're using a paring knife to slice down a bunch of celery or dice garlic, you're doing it wrong. Alternately, if you're using a chef's knife to cut the strings off a roast or peel an apple, put the goddamn thing down and grab something more manageable.
The one addition I'd like to add to the list is a good bread knife. The longer the better. You can't really get good slices from a 10" boule when you're using an 8" bread knife, yeah? Plus the serrated teeth situation really comes in handy with particularly cut-resistant surfaces, like the outsides of tomatoes or the skin of a pork belly. If your chef's knife is meeting resistance, don't force it, just grab something toothy.
How do I take care of them?
Get a honing steel. Seriously.
Next, learn the difference between honing and sharpening. Honing, which you do by alternating strokes along the ridged steel at a steep angle, is realigning the edge. Every time you use your knife, you're making little bends and dents along the edge that increase drag and generally fuck up your cutting power. Using a steel before and after you cut things brings everything back in line. You wouldn't bike on a bent wheel, would you?
In general, wash your knives by hand. Use a sponge. The edge of a knife is a very, very delicate thing, so you probably don't want to be tossing it into the dishwasher, where high-pressure water jets have the poor thing banging around like an airplane passenger in the bathroom during turbulence. Now here, I say in general because if you don't give that much of a shit about the knife, knock yourself out. My daily-use knife is a banger with chips out of the handle that I got for free. 90% of the work I do in my kitchen is slicing cooked meats, chopping aromatics, and other sundry stuff that doesn't actually require a razor-sharp edge, so I just use my beater to carry the brunt of the abuse. Of course, that being said, the INSTANT it can't cut through an onion without me applying a moderate amount of pressure, it's headed off to Valhalla. A dull knife is an extremely dangerous thing to have around.
Keep your clean, honed knives somewhere where the edge won't get banged about, like a knife block or a... well, a knife block.
Now, in order to keep your edge healthy, pay attention to how you cut. Sure, it's fun to use it like a cleaver and just chop the shit out of things, but a) that's incredibly dangerous to start with, and b) you're literally slamming your edge into a flat surface at a high velocity. What part of that seems like a good idea? Take it easy, cowboy. Don't just go up and down. Work it back and forth in long strokes and you'll go a long way in keeping your edge. That's what she said. Sorry. Couldn't help myself.
And while we're on the subject, use a goddamn cutting board. And use something with give, like wood or plastic! I don't know who the fuck came up with glass cutting boards, but what the shit. You may as well be banging your knife into a granite counter or steel tabletop. Save your glass cutting boards for serving canapes, or better yet, hang it up on your wall as a dry erase board.
Well, this knife is fucked. How do I sharpen it?
Sharpening is the act of actually grinding away the steel to create a new edge, as this mildly racist video explains. Sure, you could do it yourself (I like to do this annually with my regularly-used knives), but if you've got a knife store near you, get them professionally done. Face it, no matter how often you practice doing this, you're not going to beat a professionally machine-sharpened edge.
This does bring me to an interesting little trick I've picked up. Say you're traveling, and your unit's kitchenette has, as is typical, a set of ridiculously shitty knives for you to maim yourself with. Being a creature of dignity, you'd like to sharpen the knives at your disposal so you don't lobster yourself trying to take apart a tomato. What do you do? Grab a coffee mug from the cabinet and flip it over. See that coarse ceramic ring on the bottom? Works surprisingly well as a grindstone. Just soak it in water for a bit, then put the mug on a towel so it doesn't slide, and grind away.
So there you go. Take care of your knives, people, and they'll take care of you. Now if you'll pardon me, I have to go cut slices off a meatloaf for sandwiching purposes.
What do I need?
There's an old saying bandied about in culinary school that all a good cook needs is a chef's knife and a paring knife. And you know what? They're pretty much right.
A chef's knife is a straight-backed, curved-edged blade ranging in size from 8" to 12". This is your workhorse, the knife you'll do most of your slicing, chopping, dicing, watermelon peeling, and chicken disassembling with. You want something that fits comfortably in your hand, first and foremost. Something you can grip the shit out of with confidence. Some people use santokus for this kind of work, and those work just fine. Hell, my daily knives are santokus. But I bust out my chef's for when I'm being serious about something I need to rock-chop or when I need to take a bird's spine out.
A paring knife, somewhere around 4" long, is for your detail work. Your scoring of onions to get a fine dice, your deboning of meats, your carving Tony Danza into a squash. I don't know about you guys, but nine times out of ten I'm using a paring knife, I'm holding it like a pen. The other one time I'm peeling something because someone else is using my peeler.
At this point, I'd like to point out the importance of using the right-sized knife for the job. If you're using a paring knife to slice down a bunch of celery or dice garlic, you're doing it wrong. Alternately, if you're using a chef's knife to cut the strings off a roast or peel an apple, put the goddamn thing down and grab something more manageable.
The one addition I'd like to add to the list is a good bread knife. The longer the better. You can't really get good slices from a 10" boule when you're using an 8" bread knife, yeah? Plus the serrated teeth situation really comes in handy with particularly cut-resistant surfaces, like the outsides of tomatoes or the skin of a pork belly. If your chef's knife is meeting resistance, don't force it, just grab something toothy.
How do I take care of them?
Get a honing steel. Seriously.
Next, learn the difference between honing and sharpening. Honing, which you do by alternating strokes along the ridged steel at a steep angle, is realigning the edge. Every time you use your knife, you're making little bends and dents along the edge that increase drag and generally fuck up your cutting power. Using a steel before and after you cut things brings everything back in line. You wouldn't bike on a bent wheel, would you?
In general, wash your knives by hand. Use a sponge. The edge of a knife is a very, very delicate thing, so you probably don't want to be tossing it into the dishwasher, where high-pressure water jets have the poor thing banging around like an airplane passenger in the bathroom during turbulence. Now here, I say in general because if you don't give that much of a shit about the knife, knock yourself out. My daily-use knife is a banger with chips out of the handle that I got for free. 90% of the work I do in my kitchen is slicing cooked meats, chopping aromatics, and other sundry stuff that doesn't actually require a razor-sharp edge, so I just use my beater to carry the brunt of the abuse. Of course, that being said, the INSTANT it can't cut through an onion without me applying a moderate amount of pressure, it's headed off to Valhalla. A dull knife is an extremely dangerous thing to have around.
Keep your clean, honed knives somewhere where the edge won't get banged about, like a knife block or a... well, a knife block.
Now, in order to keep your edge healthy, pay attention to how you cut. Sure, it's fun to use it like a cleaver and just chop the shit out of things, but a) that's incredibly dangerous to start with, and b) you're literally slamming your edge into a flat surface at a high velocity. What part of that seems like a good idea? Take it easy, cowboy. Don't just go up and down. Work it back and forth in long strokes and you'll go a long way in keeping your edge. That's what she said. Sorry. Couldn't help myself.
And while we're on the subject, use a goddamn cutting board. And use something with give, like wood or plastic! I don't know who the fuck came up with glass cutting boards, but what the shit. You may as well be banging your knife into a granite counter or steel tabletop. Save your glass cutting boards for serving canapes, or better yet, hang it up on your wall as a dry erase board.
Well, this knife is fucked. How do I sharpen it?
Sharpening is the act of actually grinding away the steel to create a new edge, as this mildly racist video explains. Sure, you could do it yourself (I like to do this annually with my regularly-used knives), but if you've got a knife store near you, get them professionally done. Face it, no matter how often you practice doing this, you're not going to beat a professionally machine-sharpened edge.
This does bring me to an interesting little trick I've picked up. Say you're traveling, and your unit's kitchenette has, as is typical, a set of ridiculously shitty knives for you to maim yourself with. Being a creature of dignity, you'd like to sharpen the knives at your disposal so you don't lobster yourself trying to take apart a tomato. What do you do? Grab a coffee mug from the cabinet and flip it over. See that coarse ceramic ring on the bottom? Works surprisingly well as a grindstone. Just soak it in water for a bit, then put the mug on a towel so it doesn't slide, and grind away.
So there you go. Take care of your knives, people, and they'll take care of you. Now if you'll pardon me, I have to go cut slices off a meatloaf for sandwiching purposes.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
On eating something new.
I want to talk to you guys about a sandwich. Lillie's Q in Chicago has a particular item on the menu - the CLT. It's not the sort of thing you walk into Lillie's for the first time and order, because let's face it, when you walk into a BBQ joint of this particular reputation, you want to slather ribs in any one of their amazeballs sauces or cram a tri-tip sandwich into your facehole. And you would be correct to do so.
But on your second go-round, check out the CLT. The description alone was enough to catch my eye: "Chicken Skin Bacon, blah blah, blah blah blah." Chicken skin bacon, you say? My mind flicked immediately to the simple delight skin brings me. From chicharrones to sneaking the skin off a Thanksgiving turkey, that crispy, fat-laced savory burst holds a special place in my cholesterol-choked heart. So when I came back to Lillie's for the second day in a row, naturally I had to order it.
And it was fantastic. Smoked chicken skin fried crispy with a toothsome snap with fresh tomatoes, crisp Bibb lettuce, and a smear of mayo on white bread. It was everything I wanted it to be. And as I chomped my way through bite after bite of this painstakingly simple, yet delicious sandwich, I realized a few simple truths that drove home just how well-run the kitchen here was.
1) Total utilization of product. This is something that's beaten into us from Day 1 in culinary school. Restaurants operate on thin margins, and you never really realize how much it costs to throw shit out until you're shopping for dumpster contracts. Basically, the more you use, the better the situation. Vegetable peels and onion roots go in the stockpot, zested lemons get juiced to make a house vin or a homemade lemonade.
I had the smoked fried chicken the day before (which was a brilliant plate in its own right - you could see how deep the smoke took by the pink in the meat, which had that pillowy texture that only buttermilk can get you BUT I DIGRESS), and I noticed it had been skinned. A fairly common practice, actually - the skin is a well-known slip zone, as anyone who's taken a bite out of a thigh and come away with half the fried knows. So what do you do with all that excess skin? Most places would chuck it, but it turns out you can also smoke it, flattop it, and sell it as a sandwich. Brilliant. Speaking of...
2) Fry it flat. Skin's freakishly delicious, but also notoriously difficult to work with because of all the proteins in it that REALLY want to curl up and ruin your plans for even cooking. Sure, you could work your way around it by dropping it in the deep-fryer, but if you're trying to emulate bacon, you need flat, layered protein to build a sandwich the customer can actually get their mouth around. The chicken skin bacon here was paper-level flat, which implies a big ol' griddle and a weight to ensure the skin was cooked consistently. Food isn't just about what you cook - more often than not, it's how it's cooked that separates the champs from the chumps.
3) Context. When you really want to feature something unique, there's a temptation to pull out all the stops, to serve it with herb-pickled tomatillos, fern greens, and a chipotle aioli on rosemary brioche. Resist that urge. You don't do a side-by-side comparison of a Ford Focus on its way to the supermarket and a Lamborghini Countach driving through a ring of fire while a castle explodes in the background and girls in bikinis applaud underneath. You don't show off your new jeans by wearing them with a ruffled shirt and an LED-laced broadsword on your back. Lose your frame of reference and you lose what makes your idea special. Proper context is exactly what this sandwich does. A ripe, flavorful tomato, some easy-going tender-leafed lettuce, a glob of mayonnaise and good old sliced bread was all the chicken skin bacon needed as backup. And it sang.
Whoever came up with this sandwich was a genius. It's a magnificent idea with a flawless execution, turning an iconic sandwich on its ear with one simple substitution. Well done, Lillie's Q; and to the rest of the eating world, I hope we all learn something from it.
But on your second go-round, check out the CLT. The description alone was enough to catch my eye: "Chicken Skin Bacon, blah blah, blah blah blah." Chicken skin bacon, you say? My mind flicked immediately to the simple delight skin brings me. From chicharrones to sneaking the skin off a Thanksgiving turkey, that crispy, fat-laced savory burst holds a special place in my cholesterol-choked heart. So when I came back to Lillie's for the second day in a row, naturally I had to order it.
And it was fantastic. Smoked chicken skin fried crispy with a toothsome snap with fresh tomatoes, crisp Bibb lettuce, and a smear of mayo on white bread. It was everything I wanted it to be. And as I chomped my way through bite after bite of this painstakingly simple, yet delicious sandwich, I realized a few simple truths that drove home just how well-run the kitchen here was.
1) Total utilization of product. This is something that's beaten into us from Day 1 in culinary school. Restaurants operate on thin margins, and you never really realize how much it costs to throw shit out until you're shopping for dumpster contracts. Basically, the more you use, the better the situation. Vegetable peels and onion roots go in the stockpot, zested lemons get juiced to make a house vin or a homemade lemonade.
I had the smoked fried chicken the day before (which was a brilliant plate in its own right - you could see how deep the smoke took by the pink in the meat, which had that pillowy texture that only buttermilk can get you BUT I DIGRESS), and I noticed it had been skinned. A fairly common practice, actually - the skin is a well-known slip zone, as anyone who's taken a bite out of a thigh and come away with half the fried knows. So what do you do with all that excess skin? Most places would chuck it, but it turns out you can also smoke it, flattop it, and sell it as a sandwich. Brilliant. Speaking of...
2) Fry it flat. Skin's freakishly delicious, but also notoriously difficult to work with because of all the proteins in it that REALLY want to curl up and ruin your plans for even cooking. Sure, you could work your way around it by dropping it in the deep-fryer, but if you're trying to emulate bacon, you need flat, layered protein to build a sandwich the customer can actually get their mouth around. The chicken skin bacon here was paper-level flat, which implies a big ol' griddle and a weight to ensure the skin was cooked consistently. Food isn't just about what you cook - more often than not, it's how it's cooked that separates the champs from the chumps.
3) Context. When you really want to feature something unique, there's a temptation to pull out all the stops, to serve it with herb-pickled tomatillos, fern greens, and a chipotle aioli on rosemary brioche. Resist that urge. You don't do a side-by-side comparison of a Ford Focus on its way to the supermarket and a Lamborghini Countach driving through a ring of fire while a castle explodes in the background and girls in bikinis applaud underneath. You don't show off your new jeans by wearing them with a ruffled shirt and an LED-laced broadsword on your back. Lose your frame of reference and you lose what makes your idea special. Proper context is exactly what this sandwich does. A ripe, flavorful tomato, some easy-going tender-leafed lettuce, a glob of mayonnaise and good old sliced bread was all the chicken skin bacon needed as backup. And it sang.
Whoever came up with this sandwich was a genius. It's a magnificent idea with a flawless execution, turning an iconic sandwich on its ear with one simple substitution. Well done, Lillie's Q; and to the rest of the eating world, I hope we all learn something from it.
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