Let’s talk about cooking gear. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a number of questions about cooking equipment from friends (hey Cindy!) to students at the cooking school I’ve started working with.

Needless to say… I have thoughts.

The gear marketed to home cooks is overpriced, underfunctional, and primarily designed for aesthetics over application. And don’t get me started on the gimmicky crap that clutters many home cook’s drawers (egg yolk separators?).

It’s not the home cook’s fault. We’ve been marketed to with an endless stream of nonsense for decades in nearly every consumer category, why would kitchen equipment be any different? What’s worse, the outlets meant to provide advice and direction on what to buy take a cut of all purchases made through affiliate links on their site, resulting in an incentive to promote a. expensive stuff that b. we don’t need.

It’s all designed to take money out of your pocket and put it into their pocket, usefulness be damned.

Cooking: Essential Non-Affiliate Gear List

So here’s my affiliate-free list of must-have equipment every home cook should acquire that I think can have an immediate impact, based on what I’ve used and bought along the way. In most cases, these are links to the exact same products I use in my own kitchen, and I don’t make a dime from anything you may buy.

Knives: Don’t buy a knife set. Instead, buy the knives you want individually. You’ll get better knives, and won’t wind up with “filler” knives you don’t need. Here are the knives I use:

• Chef Knife: Miyabi Evolution 8-inch

• Boning: Mercer 6-inch

• Paring: Mercer 3.5-inch

• Santoku: Henckels 7-inch

I don’t have a cleaver yet, but am planning to pick one up soon.

Other cutting tools:

• Japanese mandolin slicer

• Cut resistant glove (if you own a mandolin, you’re gonna want one of these.)

• Y-Peeler (better than the other kind)

• Wooden Cutting Board: Boos Butcher Block

• Large Plastic Cutting Board: Winco 1-inch (for breaking down chicken/fish)

Mixing Bowls: Skip the heavy, expensive glass and ceramic bowls. They look good on TV, but professional kitchens use tin or plastic. They’re lighter, cheaper, and don’t break. Also, don’t buy the nested combo kits. Buy several in the same size you most want to use.

• Small Bowls

• Med - Large

• Tin Ramekins (great for holding minced herbs, small amounts of sauces, etc.

• Delis: get the 1 cup, 1 pint and 1 quart options. Good for both prep and storing.

• Cambros: These are ubiquitous in professional kitchens, and come in multiple sizes. Essential for stock/sauces, fermenting dough, etc.

Pots/Pans: Most pot/pan sets are overpriced, poorly functional, and include items you don’t need. I buy them individually, either from restaurant supply stores or online. I’m going for function over form here. I want handles that are easy to grip, not some fancy curved or grooved thing that looks good on a shelf but slips in my hand. Also, with only one exception, I’m only buying stainless steel, aluminum, or carbon steel. Nonstick should be used exclusively for eggs, and therefore one is enough. (NOTE: I’ve not tried HexClad or Madein or any such brands.)

• French saute pan

• Nonstick

• Carbon steel

• Cast iron

• Stock pot

• Dutch oven: Yes, there are cheaper options that work just as well, but I’m a sucker for the original Le Creuset.

• Sauce pans (you can go aluminum here, but I prefer the non-reactive stainless steel just to be safe).

• Sheet Trays: I like Nordic Ware. Get both half- and quarter-sheet options, several of each, and be sure to include the rack insert. Most of what you would use an expensive roasting pan for can be accomplished (often better) with a racked sheet tray.

Utensils: Throw out your black-plastic collection and start from scratch.

• Wooden Spoons: I don’t recall exactly which I own, but it’s a mix of traditional spoon-shaped spoons, and a few flat-head “spoons.” I use the flat ones more, because they’re better for stirring risotto and polenta, as the flat edge scraps the bottom of your bowl far better than a rounded spoon.

• Tweezers: not for finicky plating, but for cooking… much better than bulky tongs.

• Tongs: Sometimes you also need tongs. But don’t get any that include a closing function (like a sliding bar, or a push/pull lever at the end) as those always break.

• Cooking Spoons: Forget the traditional spatula. Use a cooking spoon. Helps with plating too. (Be sure to add a slotted one as well)

• Spatulas: These are the only spats you need…

  • Offset: good for both pastry and general use

  • Fish: for, ahem… fish, and other things

  • Silicone: for eggs & pastry

• Tasting spoons: Just use those teaspoons that most likely came with your flatware set, which you never use. Keep them in a jar next to your range for easy access.

• Spider: You probably already have a colander, but those are best for washing product. Spiders are better for transferring food out of liquid as there’s no need to pick up a heavy pot of boiling water, and they won’t damage your ingredients the way pouring into a colander will.

• Gloves: Your hands are the best cooking tool ever invented.

Other

• ThermoPro Thermometer: Perhaps the biggest gamechanger on the list. (see Heat)

• Mesh strainers: super important for making sauces. Upgrade to a chinois when you’re ready.

• Towels

  • Terrycloth: for cleaning and protecting hands against hot pans.

  • Tea/linen: for using directly on food.

• Butcher’s Twine

• Cake tester: not just for testing cakes, but for checking on the doneness of roasted or boiled vegetables (potatoes, carrots) or to check the internal heat level of anything.

• Squeeze bottles: Oils, Sauces. Decorations, etc.

• Salt cellar: for kosher salt. You will never, ever, have a need to grind salt. Grinding salt does absolutely nothing better than just using coarse kosher salt. Use your fingers. You’ll be fine.

• Pepper mill: conversely, grinding whole pepper is infinitely better than buying pre-ground pepper, as the oils in freshly ground peppercorns are more pronounced. I have one each for both black and white peppercorns.

Appliances: These can get pricy, but they make an outsized difference in the kitchen:

• Immersion blender: also called a stick blender. Essential for soups and sauces.

• Stand mixer: I’ve had my Kitchen Aid for 20+ years.

• Food processor: I think most are too big, and I don’t like mine, so no link until I settle on a new one. (I’d prefer a kick ass RobotCoupe like they have in restaurants, but can’t quite justify that expense just yet).

• Blender: Like I mentioned in a previous post, the Vitamix is the way to go.

This is by no means a complete list, but rather cover the most commonly asked about items, and some things many home cooks don’t realize they even need. If you’re worried about space, review your current collection and ask yourself how essential that avocado slicer is (hint: it’s not).

Eating: MakFam

Solid Chinese food just off Broadway in the Baker neighborhood. I’m still dreaming about the Mala Wings and Fancy Wun Tun Tong (pictured). Bonus: you can buy their jarred XO Sauce (which I’ll work into a future recipe soon).

The menu is short and tight, made less for exploring and more for revisiting favorites. I’d easily go back and order the exact same thing: the two small plates mentioned above and the Beef Stir Fry Noodles to share. Plenty for two.

And don’t skip the equally short-but-focused wine list, featuring all natural wines (the orange wine goes with everything… can’t go wrong).

It’s all served in a small, diner-like setting filled with loud diners and louder hip-hop and a friendly, knowledgable staff. If I lived closer, we’d be there weekly I’m sure.

Drinking: Leven Supply Wines

I had the pleasure of attending the media preview for the initial opening of Leven Supply earlier this summer, and since attended their debut wine club gathering. I’ve returned repeatedly for not only their essential oatmeal cookies, but also an impressive selection of wines, including the Ette above… a simple Italian white blend that’s light, crisp, and citrusy.

It’s another “orange” wine, meaning it’s made from white wine grapes that’s macerated with its skins for a few days to add depth, flavor, and color. But it’s not nearly as sour as some orange wines can be. There’s a 0% chance this pounder isn’t gone the night it’s opened.

Reading: The Life and Death of the American Foodie (Eater)

A fantastic essay and exploration of how food TV and social media has turned food culture from a niche subculture into a pop-culture affectation of sorts, with ramifications both pro and con.

I find myself nostalgic for the era when “foodie” was a badge of honor… I miss when the coolest thing you could do was geek out over where your food came from, who was making it, and what made it special… But just because that legwork is now part of the cultural fabric, and just because it’s easier to do, doesn’t mean it’s not still work. You can watch a million TikToks, but to engage, you still need to go to the hot bakery. You still need to actually make the ramen you saw on YouTube. You still need to get the reservation.

I’m both a product and critic of this multi-decade development, and as a food writer struggle daily not to add to the douchbaggery of “foodie” culture (while still skirting as close to it as possible).

Watching: Pig (Netflix)

This was a much different movie that I expected. For some reason I thought it was going to be some kind of violent revenge fantasy, but it was actually a touching exploration of the power of love, the pain of loss, and the way food connects both.

Nicolas Cage — who seems to be slowly emerging from the punch-line era of his career — plays a truffle hunter and former mastermind chef living life as a recluse in the woods of Oregon. He returns to the city to find out who stole his truffle hunting pig (nevermind that most truffles are actually hunted with dogs), where the full depths of his history and influence become clear.

Look, it’s no Oscar contender, but it’s a worthy watch if just for the scene where he lectures a former employee (now star chef) about the true nature of his calling.

That’s it for now. More recipes, techniques, and discoveries to come. Thanks for reading!

Why now? Well… a lot’s happened since I put the newsletter on hiatus and I’ve got a whole lot more to say about food, cooking, restaurants, wine, and more. I’m keeping the name and the focus on food, but changing up the format quite a bit to something that you’ll hopefully find even more interesting than the first iteration.

What’s New/Different?

Now that I’m done w/ culinary school (today’s actually the 1-year graduation anniversary) Cooked/Uncooked will focus more on the the culinary discoveries I’m making as a freelance food writer. In the last year+, I’ve had the good fortune to contribute to several local publications, including 5280, Dining Out Denver, and Westword, and I’m starting to pitch national pubs as well.

I come across a lot of interesting places to eat, cooking experiences to share, wines to recommend, and stories/books/TV/movies to enjoy all under the Cooked/Uncooked culinary umbrella. There are also a lot of outtakes, insights, and behind-the-scenes stuff that don’t make it into my published stories I think subscribers will find interesting.

So without further ado…

Cooking: Donut Bread Pudding

The EPA estimates that discarded food represents about a quarter of all solid waste found in municipal landfills. An obvious way to reduce that is to find uses for ingredients you might otherwise throw away.

Fortunately, many of the most popular and delicious dishes ever created were designed to do exactly that. Before there was fine dining and haute cuisine, there was the “cocina povera” or “poor kitchen” where home cooks found delicious ways to make use of everything they had. Throwing away food just wasn’t an option.

A perfect example of this is bread pudding… an easy-to-make dish designed to make use of stale bread. But it’s not only limited to bread. I’m writing a story about the many donut shops along a stretch of street in Denver’s south burbs, and as such have bought a fair amount of donuts. One trick to staying in reasonable shape as a food writer is to not eat everything you’re served. So I had a lot of leftover donuts going stale on my kitchen counter (since the wife and daughter weren’t exactly doing their part).

I also had some staling bread heels. Normally I’d make croutons from those, but I figured combining them with the donuts could be a great dessert. After all, you can make bread pudding with pretty much any kind of bread-like product: donuts, cake or cupcakes, hell maybe even bagels (I’ve not yet tried bagels, so don’t hold me to this). I had glazed donuts and half an apple fritter.

Now you don’t really need a recipe to make bread pudding. It’s a pretty straightforward ratio that you can apply to whatever you have on hand. There’s actually two ratios involved: one for bread-to-custard, and another for the custard.

• Bread Pudding Ratio: 1x bread to 2x custard. That means weigh the bread/donuts you have on hand, and then make twice that weight in custard. I had 8oz of mixed bread and donuts, so I needed 16oz of custard.

• Custard Ratio: 1 egg for every 1 cup of dairy (whole milk or half-and-half). We know that 1 cup of liquid = 8oz. So two cups of dairy plus 2 eggs (and 3-4 tbls of sugar) makes 16oz (actually slightly more, but it’s always good to have a little leftover just in case).

Blend the dairy, egg, sugar, and about a half tsp of vanilla on high for several minutes until the yolks are fully emulsified into the dairy. (If you don’t blend it enough, the egg will separate during baking, resulting in an eggy bottom of the bread pudding.)

Tear your donuts and bread/whatever into bite-sized pieces and place in a baking pan that will hold it all. Maybe throw in a little fruit (I sliced up a banana). Sprinkle it with some cinnamon. Pour in custard until it covers the solids, and let sit for at least a half hour for it all soak in.

Then bake at 375 for about 1.5 hours. The bread/donuts will swell and rise a bit above the custard, but that’s good because you want a sort of crispy top to contrast with the custardy interior when serving.

Serve as is, or with a sauce. You can even pour melted ice cream over it and call it creme anglaise (which is what ice cream is before churning).

I promise you it’s that easy. You don’t need to search for a bunch of recipes, most of which don’t have the right amount of ingredients you have on hand. Just weigh what you have, use the ratios, and you’ll have a perfectly acceptable dessert.

Eating: Havana Street Recommendations

I had written a few stories for Denver’s alt-weekly newspaper Westword when food editor Molly Martin asked if I’d be interested in writing a series profiling a different restaurant each week located along Havana Street in the suburb of Aurora. This is known as the most diverse street in Colorado, where you can find restaurants representing the cuisines of a wide range of cultures. Korean, Chinese, Japanese, African, Mexican, Middle Eastern… it’s all there.

Since I’ve always wanted to explore Havana Street and it’s restaurants, this was a dream gig, so I jumped at the chance. I’ve been writing this series all year ever since. There are over 30 restaurant profiles live now, with another dozen or so left before I reach the end of the street.

Here are some of my favorites so far. If you’re in the Denver area, make sure to give these a visit:

• Shin Myung Gwan Korean BBQ

• Yemen Grill

• Taqueria Corona

• Tofu Story

• Seoul BBQ & Hot Pot (the Hot Pot)

• Katsu Ramen

• Chef Liu’s Kitchen

• Nile Ethiopian (not yet published)

Drinking: Where’s The Love Denver?

Writing about wine in Denver is like trying to write about skiing in Florida. Sure there are plenty of people here who love wine. But it’s not considered a “wine town.”

Since I started freelancing, I’ve been trying to establish myself with at least one outlet as the go-to wine guy. Problem is, most of them don’t care much about wine stories. Beer writer? Yes. Food truck writer? Sure. Cannabis writer? Of course! But wine writer? Meh.

Even so, I’ve managed to get a few published locally, and am now looking for a foothold in national outlets. I’ll have the opportunity to visit Paso Robles in a few weeks as part of a press tour of local producers, so more to come on that. Meanwhile, enjoy these articles:

• Somebody People Serves Up Vegan Food, Vibes and Vino (Westword)

• Inside Hop Alley’s James Beard–Recognized Wine Program (5280)

• Denver Is Finally Tapping Into the Keg-Based Wine Trend (5280)

Reading

Interesting stories about food, wine, and restaurants worth sharing:

• Denver’s Restaurants Are Dying (Slow Boring). My take: Yes, things are bad. I see and hear it from nearly every restaurant owner I interview. But there are plenty of people also making it work. I’m not smart enough to have the answers. But if I get a vote, I’m all for giving the people actually making the food more money, even if that’s at the expense of the owners or the servers. Come find me.

• Opening A Restaurant In New York Is No Picnic (NYT). Read this, and then consider that even New Yorkers say that opening a restaurant in Denver is harder than doing so in New York.

• Swag, Soul & Skin Contact: Inside Vino Out The Trunk’s Cultural Revolution (Nothing Added). This is a fascinating snapshot of everything that most traditional wine writing is not. A group of friends holding a monthly wine-fueled hangout just for the pure pleasure it brings. No tasting grid. No douchy, pretentious faux insights about terrior. I wanted to profile the event in Westword, but the folks hosting it declined. Admirably, they wanted to keep it a private hang. My loss. But a great read.

Watching: Dinner Time Live with David Chang (Netflix)

The episodes can be hit or miss depending on the guests. But what I love about it is how Chang doesn’t hide his cooking mistakes. In fact, he draws attention to them, and you can see how upset it makes him sometimes. As a home cook, it’s refreshing to be reminded that even the best cooks screw up too.

Fun side note: I got excited watching a recent episode when he said he was going to make a Colorado Slopper. (A Slopper is a open-faced cheeseburger smothered in green chile). But what he made wasn’t even close. A few days later I mentioned it to Molly at Westword, and she suggested I write up something “fun” poking fun at Chang for falling far short of the Slopper mark.

The result is the story in the photo above (click the photo to read).

That’s how fast a story can happen… from side comment to published story in a day.

Snarky clickbait story aside, it’s a great show that I love watching, and I’ve always been a huge Chang fan.

Recommending: Prime Day Vitamix

I’m not a huge fan of over-consumption in the retail/shopping sense (all for it in the gastronomic sense!) so typically not a big Prime Day groupie. But… each time they feature a sale on what I consider a must-have kitchen item — the Vitamix blender.

These are VERY expensive blenders, but absolutely worth it. Professional grade. Powerful as hell. You need that power to break up sautéed solids into liquid form, which form the basis of elevated sauces and purees. I use mine almost weekly.

Typically they’re close to $500, but the Prime Day sale is $350. Buy it here. (This is a clean link. No affiliate revenue coming my way on this. Just 100% from the heart).

Many years ago I was in a grocery store meat section and saw a woman with a child of about five years old selecting ground beef. The kid was in the child’s seat of the shopping cart and doing what kids do… reaching for this, asking for that, lots of “Mommy.” 

But suddenly, things took a turn. 

“Mommy, there’s blood in the package!” the kid said with terror as the mom selected a pound of ground beef, wrapped in clear plastic on a styrofoam container. “They put BLOOD in the packages!” 

Things pretty much disintegrated from there, with the kid going full meltdown with what I can only imagine was a conviction that we were trapped in some kind of medieval house of horrors disguised as a supermarket where leather masked men in dark back rooms injected blood into packages of what was meant to be food. 

I’d bet money that kid remains a vegetarian to this day. 

Yes Jimmy… meat comes from animals. Animals that are raised, slaughtered, and butchered into neat little packages for mommy to take home and make those cheeseburgers you love so much. 

As adults, we’re of course aware of this. But on a certain level most of us remain not too far off from little Jimmy there in the store, with little thought for exactly where that cut of meat we just put into our shopping basket actually came from. I don’t just mean what ranch or farm. I mean what part of the animal we’re actually eating, where it came from on the body of the cow/pig/chicken, and how it got from walking around the pasture one day to laying on my plate as a slab of overcooked protein. 

I was thinking about this and little Jimmy the other night in class when we walked in to see an entire hog laying on cutting boards, complete with a range of knives, what looked like a saber, and what were definitely three or so hacksaws.

Welcome to Meat Fabrication.

Fabrication is the chef term for cutting large cuts of meat into menu-sized portions. It’s the third step in that process of pasture to plate. Someone already slaughtered the animal, and someone else already butchered it. That whole chicken you see at the supermarket? That’s a butchered chicken. That sleeve of chicken thighs? That’s a chicken that’s been fabricated. 

Rarely does a chef actually “dispatch” an animal themselves (the culinary term for killing something). Live lobster and fish are the only exceptions I know of. 

Most of us buy whole chickens when we plan on roasting a whole chicken. We don’t carve it up until after it’s been cooked. Chefs buy whole chickens to not only roast whole, but to fabricate (or “break down”) that chicken into parts — breasts and legs — and use the leftover carcass for stock. 

I’ve started exclusively buying and fabricating whole chickens for many reasons. First, practice. Second, freshness… a freshly fabricated chicken just tastes better than a bunch of parts sitting in their own fetid juices for God knows how long. Third safety… the more steps of industrial processing your meat has gone through, the higher the chance of contamination. (The riskiest meat you can buy is ground meat. A Consumer Reports investigation found salmonella in a third of the ground chicken packets it tested.)

It’s also cheaper. On a pound-for-pound basis, you’re paying far less for two breasts and two legs from a whole chicken than you are for an equal weight of chicken parts. And, you’re getting proper cuts. Bone-in chicken breasts from the store are worthless hack jobs with the ribcage still attached that makes it impossible to sear that side without removing it (which if you’re going to do, you may as well just fabricate a whole chicken to begin with). 

Now hogs… nobody other than a professional chef is likely buying a whole hog and laying it out on the kitchen floor to break into pieces. But getting in there and learning how the different parts of the pig work together is fascinating. 

Maybe you’ve seen one of those charts outlining the different cuts of a cow or a pig a la: 

But until you’re actually in there, carefully separating the loin from the ribs, and struggling with the joint where the leg meets the hip, or slicing pork chops rib-by-rib, you don’t really know. 

It may sound gross, cutting away at a carcass like that. But once you get in there and start separating the different cuts, you actually forget it’s an animal and it becomes more like a puzzle. You can actually see the color difference between the cuts of meat, the line of fat, muscle, and bone between the different cuts. And most importantly… how and why each cut has a different culinary use (both eating and cooking). 

For instance, you’ll forever learn the difference between spareribs and back ribs: spare ribs are the portion of the larger ribs towards the front of the animal left over (“spared”) after cutting away the bone-in pork chops (chops are the sliced section of the loin, which you can also buy whole without the bone). Back ribs are the smaller ribs towards the back of the animal, which are smaller and have less meat.

When we say “cuts” what we mean are what’s called “primals” and “sub-primals.” Primals are the main section of the animal, like for instance the chicken leg. That leg is composed of two sub-primals… the thigh and the drumstick. When you’re fabricating a chicken, you can very quickly and easily see the difference between the leg and the breasts not just based on their location, but their color and texture as well. You can see (and better understand) the difference between “white meat” and “dark meat.”

There’s also “secondary” cuts, like feet, tongue, ears, etc. And of course everyone’s favorite… offal (the liver, organs, and other stuff).

If you want to experience this with a hog or a cow… take a class. But anyone can easily buy and fabricate a chicken at home with just a quick trip to the grocery store. I highly recommend doing at least once. And maybe you’ll become like me and it’ll become a near-weekly habit (just like baking your own bread or making your own pasta). 

I could write out a lot of words telling you how to fabricate a chicken. But instead I’ll just post the video of how I learned in class. 

Step 1: 

Remove the wing and “french” the drummette: 

Sept 2: 

Remove the wishbone. (Astonishingly, I didn’t actually know where the wishbone was located until this class.)

Step 3 +4

• Pop open the leg bones and flatten the chicken

• Score the keel bone and remove the breasts

Step 5

Remove the legs, being careful to retain the “oyster.”

Then just trim the fat/skin from the leftover carcass and retain it for Stock. 

Have fun!

“No,” I replied. 

“Well, you’ll never cook it another way again,” he promised. 

And he was right. 

Quick backstory… I volunteered to help out in the kitchen during one of the school’s recreational classes a few weeks ago, and found it eye opening. In this scenario (called a “stage”) I was no longer teaming up with someone to practice a new skill and then eating the results ourselves. This time I was cooking for other people. Paying customers. With a chef telling me what to do and who would be judging how I did it. 

In other words, the bar was raised dramatically. 

The most important job of the night was to fire off 12 chicken breasts (for both the customers and the staff) to be served with the sauces the class was learning how to make. Now chicken breasts can be finicky things. They’re quite lean, so the line between undercooked and dry is very thin. 

What’s more, I’m cooking these dozen chickens all at once. No cooking off one first just to test. It’s 12 at once… all in. Pass / Fail. 

Needless to say I was nervous. I’d like to continue helping out in the school kitchen after the program ends, so I wanted to make a good impression. I already took twice as long as was needed to finish my prep assignment that night (ok, maybe three times longer than it should have ), so I felt I needed to redeem myself. 

Fortunately, the chef had a very specific process he wanted followed. Here’s how it goes…

Prepare your chicken breast… bone-in, skin on airline chicken breasts. These should be from chicken breasts you carved off a whole chicken, not those crap chicken parts they sell in the store with the ribcage still attached. Season with salt and pepper. 

Preheat an oven to 500. That’s right… full whack. Then bring a cast iron pan to high heat on the stovetop. Cast irons can take a minute, so give yourself time. Add just enough sunflower oil to coat the bottom of the pan… don’t let it pool up. 

Just when the pan’s ready to start smoking, add the chicken breasts, skin side down, and press down hard to seal the skin flat against the hot surface of the pan. You’ll feel it bubbling underneath, and that’s what you want. You’re literally pressing the air bubbles out from under the chicken. 

Then let it cook on the stovetop until you see the edges of the skin against the pan starting to brown. Go ahead and give it a look… it should be a golden brown, but not black or burned, and the flesh just above the skin on the side should start turning white, while the top flesh remains pink and raw. 

Don’t turn the chicken over. Instead, transfer the cast iron skillet into the 500 degree stove, keeping the chicken skin side down. Keep it there for about 15 minutes, starting to check the internal temperature at around 10-12 minutes. 

When the internal temp reaches around 155-160, remove the breasts and let them rest, skin side up, on a rack (you want airflow underneath). Let rest for about 10-15 minutes, then slice and serve (or serve whole). 

That’s it. It’s easy and nearly foolproof. 

Here’s the rationale behind this method… it’s common (and certainly not “wrong”) to flip chicken breasts after first searing the skin side down to briefly brown the bottom and then finish it off in a low oven on a rack (see the post Heat for an example). Some recipes even call for flipping the chicken and adding the whole pan to the oven, skin side up. 

But… when chicken is cooking, it’s expelling moisture. And at hot temperature, that means expelling steam. Steam rises from the bottom up. Letting a skin-on chicken cook in an oven (or stovetop) with the skin up means steam from the uncooked bottom of the chicken is rising to the top and making the skin soggy. Or at least not as crisp. 

There are ways to solve for this. For instance, you can flip the chicken in the pan, skin side up, and then baste the skin with hot butter in the pan (a technique known as “arroser” which just means “baste” in French). That’s all well and good when you’re cooking one chicken breast. But when you’re cooking 12… you can see the complication. 

So by leaving the chicken in the pan in a blazing hot oven skin side down, the skin remains crispy against the hot pan, and the steam rises to cook the tender flesh up top. The result is a crisp skin and moist meat that’s a joy to eat. 

The risk of course is burning the skin. So you have to get it into the oven at the right time. Too long on the stove before transferring it to the oven increases that risk. So pay attention and check your chicken as the edges start to brown. 

And use your thermometer to check doneness when in the oven. 155 - 160 is when you take it out. As it sits/rests, it will increase in temp through carryover cooking to the recommended internal temp of 165. 

To properly take the temp of an airline chicken breast, insert your thermometer needle into the thick side of the breast opposite the drumette. Also, if you’re using a digital thermometer, make sure it’s not accidentally on celsius. (This happened to me in a later class, and I nearly ruined my duck). 

Sorry no pictures. I’ll update with photos next time I make this. 

Hidden in the corner of the culinary school kitchen is a VERY large pot filled to the brim with what can only be described as liquid “stuff.” 

It sits on a very low burner that’s almost constantly on, but the liquid in the pot is not simmering. Every now and then, it emits a small bubble. It’s still, silent, and radiates hardly any heat. But it’s impossible to ignore because it fills the kitchen with a gloriously rich, satisfying aroma. 

This is stock. 

Any serious kitchen is going to have a stockpot like this going. Sometimes multiple. Most commonly it’ll be chicken stock. Often you’ll see beef stock, which many times will be reduced to a demi glace (more on that below). Sometimes you’ll even see fish, shellfish, or even vegetable stock. 

But stock there will be, because a good, rich stock is an essential ingredient in cooking a wide variety of dishes. Stock IS flavor. It forms the base of dozens of sauces, soups, braises, and stews. It can be used to cook rice, quinoa, and other grains. Sometimes it is just good to sip on its own. 

So if you’re cooking, you’re gonna need some stock. And without question, or without fail, a properly made stock you make yourself will pay far greater dividends than any stock you buy in a box at a store. 

I’ve made my own stock for years. Then I started culinary school, and realized I’ve made my own stock improperly for years… purely out of ignorance. But once I learned to just adjust a few levers (literally) I’m now churning out a regular supply of rich, flavorful, useful stock. 

“Stock is the first shortcut home cooks make, but the most important to do yourself. Once you make your own, you won’t go back.”

“Stock is not a trash can.” It’s an intentional act for a range of useful purposes. It’s the fond, the foundation of flavor. so important to do properly.

So here’s how…

Broth vs Stock

First, let’s clear a few things up. Broth and stock are not the same thing. If you are still buying stock in boxes at the store, but are buying broth, you’re likely buying the wrong thing. 

Stock is made by extracting gelatin from bones. Broth is made by extracting flavor from flesh. So poaching a whole chicken to use in a soup will result in a pretty good broth. Simmering the carcass left over from a roast chicken is making a stock. 

Because stocks are based on bones, they are full of gelatin, giving them a jello-like consistency that can be used to thicken and flavor. Reduce a stock long enough and you get a glace… which is more like a paste of highly concentrated flavor. Broths don’t have gelatin, and as such can’t be reduced to a glace. 

So, how to make a stock: 

Chicken Stock Recipe

Ratio: 3:2:1

• 3 parts water

• 2 parts bones

• 1 parts poix

How much of each will have to peg off how much chicken bones you have. Generally, two chicken carcasses = about 2 pounds. So let’s say: 

• 2 chicken carcases (2 pounds)

• 6 cups of water (3 pounds)

• 2 cups poix (1 pound)

Additional ingredients will include:

• 1 apple, quarted

• Half head garlic

• thyme/parsley stems/bay leaf tied together

• 1 T black peppercorns

Step 1: Process Bones

Stock should be clear, not cloudy. One step to ensure a clear stock is to purge the chicken of blood. There are different options for this: 

1. Purge: Cover the chicken in a bunch of salt and cover it with steaming hot water. 10-30 minutes. Then rinse

2. Brine: Let chicken sit in salted cold water overnight. 

3. Roast: rub a few tablespoons of tomato paste on the raw carcass and roast it until browned. 

(note on roasting: roasting will reduce the amount of gelatin available in the stock. So if using roasted carcasses, throw in a few raw chicken pieces… unused chicken wings work best)

Once the bones are processed, cover with cold water and bring it to a simmer. Not a boil… a simmer. As it comes close to a boil, the chicken will shed what can only be described as a foamy scum. Skim this off (the technical term for this is “depouillage”) using a fine mesh skimmer or a spoon. 

Now add your poix, the apples, garlic, peppercorns and the thyme/parsley/bay. This will cool off the liquid and stop the simmer. Wait for the water to just barely start bubbling again and then turn it down. It should steam and be warm, but just below the point where water surface bubbles (about 190). 

Don’t stir the pot. Don’t let the water get agitated. Both will cause the stock to get cloudy. 

Let it be for about 4 hours. Done right it really shouldn’t reduce at all. The warm water is just extracting the flavor and gelatin from the chicken and nothing more. 

After four hours, strain it twice (either two times in a row or through two separate strainers at the same time, depending on your gear). Get all the sediment and such out. Then store. 

Beef Stock

The process is much the same for beef stock, only the simmer time is 24 hours, which is why I even still buy beef broth at stores. Between the time involved and the fact that I don’t eat nearly enough meat to compile 2 pounds of bones, it’s just reality. 

Another great shortcut is buying demiglace, which as noted earlier is just hyper-reduced beef stock concentrating the gelatin into a paste. Just add that paste to different sauces, braises, stews and you’ll have a magnificent flavor bomb. (I add it to bolognese sauce to give it an extra silky texture). 

Fish Stock

The big difference here is that you can only use raw fish bones/pieces. Not cooked like w/ chicken. Only needs about 2 hours of simmering time. Technically called a “Fumet.”

Vegetable Stock

We haven’t learned that yet. 

Notes

• DON’T add salt. A salted stock will affect how things cooked in it turn out. For instance, simmering lentils in a salted stock will result in mushy lentils. Add the salt to the dish while cooking (just like using unsalted butter). 

• “Stock is not a trash can” said chef, so don’t just add whatever you have laying around. It’s great for scrapes, but only specific scraps (onions, carrots, celery). Remove the paper from the onions. Don’t use the bitter carrot peels. Remember you’re developing flavor, so be mindful of what you put in the pot. 

• Strain the stock every time you change containers. 

• Stock will last about 10 days in fridge. To extent life, boil it and restrain to a new container to kill any bacteria. 

• Leave the fat layer on top. This is both flavor, and protects/preserves the stock. 

I’m sure you’re dying to know… what was I doing wrong all these years making stock? 

1. Boiling it

2. Stirring it

3. Salting it

4. Not processing the bones

Make stock! It’s the “fond de la cuisine” … the foundation upon all else rests. It’s what sets cooks apart. I promise… you’ll notice the difference. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I like to cook… what draws me to it and why I’m taking up so much of my free time to get better at it. 

Of course there’s no one, simple answer to that question. But pretty high among the many possible reasons I could give is a fascination with seeing ingredients transform into something delicious. 

Sauces in particular were of great interest to me early on for exactly that reason, and still are. But recently I’ve realized that perhaps the most perfect expression of the transformative act of cooking is the humble braise. 

Braising is such a cool form of cooking because it allows for the development of highly complex flavors with deceptive simplicity. It’s a largely hands off and forgiving method to cook, and once done provides protein, sides, and sauce all in one pot. 

In its simplest terms, braising is the act of cooking browned proteins in a mixture of wine and stock with aromatics and vegetables. Sounds a lot like a stew, but there are several distinctions that separate the two.

1. Braised proteins are kept in larger portions, usually only partially submerged in liquid, and meant to be cut into bit-sized pieces while eating. Stewed proteins are cut smaller, and are fully submerged in stewing liquid while it cooks. 

2. Braised proteins are often removed from the liquid once cooked, after which the liquid is reduced down to a thicker sauce, which is then applied back to the protein upon plating. Stews are served as is. 

3. Braises are cooked at lower temperatures for over two hours. Stews at higher temperatures for under two hours. 

Since the protein pieces are larger in a braise, they require ambient heat to break down and tenderize. It’s like roasting, only the liquid the protein sits in keeps it from burning. This liquid also absorbs the drippings given off by the protein, which in turn absorbs the flavor and moisture of the sauce. 

The result is a delicate dance between the protein/solids and the liquids involved. Each give something of themselves to a result far greater than the sum of their parts. Perhaps that’s why braising is such a common technique employed by nearly every style of cuisine: 

• French (ex: Coq Au Van/Coq Au Riesling, Beef Bourguignon)

• Italian (ex: Chicken Cacciatore, Osso Buco)

• Asian (ex: Rou Jia Mo “Chinese Hamburger,” Braised Pork Ribs)

• Latin: (ex: Carnitas, Adobo Chicken)

Braises are also incredibly easy to execute, and for the most part very forgiving. It’s just time and temp. A good braise will take a few hours. But what’s cool about them is that you can make one a day or so before you need to serve it and it just gets better as it sits. 

Sure pan-searing a steak is faster. But try pan searing 8 steaks a la minute for a dinner party by yourself. That’s a stress factory. It’s far easier to just warm up a dutch oven full of a braise you made leisurely the day before and plate it out with no sweat like a rock star. 

I say it’s forgiving because you can set it and forget it without worrying much about precisely how long it has cooked, sat, or reduced. The only thing you need to be cautious of is the temperature of the liquid. You don’t want the braise to get to a boil or the protein will come out tough. Water boils at about 210, so you’r shooting for under 100 here. Low and slow is the game, whether you’re braising on the stove or in the oven. 

I prefer stovetop because it’s easier to see what’s going on and adjust as needed. But if you’re going to use the oven, I wouldn’t go over 275 (recipes calling for 350 are just plain wrong). A lot depends on the vessel you’re cooking in and the cut you’re using. 

Steps

Most braises involve the following steps (with some variance depending on the ingredients used) 

Browning 

You going to sear your main protein/solid first. (There are plenty of vegetable only braises worth pursuing as well, and they will also get a nice sear.) The point of this is to give it some flavor and color, and also to develop the fond on the bottom of the braising pot. (Fond is the carmelized, brown residue left on the cooking surface). It won’t be cooked through by a long shot, so this is a hot and fast step. Remove once seared. 

Aromatics

Then you’ll brown and tenderize your aromatics and other vegetables the recipe calls for until they release their liquid and keep the fond from burning.

Deglaze

Hit it with wine and/or stock. This loosens up the fond, which you scrape up with a spoon. 

Cover and Simmer

Add the protein back and enough additional stock/wine to mostly cover it all. Then let it simmer low and slow for at least two hours. Again… watch the heat. It should be at the gentles bubble to keep the protein from seizing up, getting tough, and drying out. 

Rest

Once the cooking is done, let the braised protein cool off in the braising liquid. This allows the protein to relax and soak up the liquid it’s sitting in. 

Reduce

Then remove the proteins and reduce the remaining liquid, with all the aromatics, etc, to the desired consistency. In some cases, you’ll add a mixture of butter and flour just before serving to bring get the viscosity right. 

Serve

Give the proteins a quick reheat either by adding back to the liquid, or by searing it under a broiler or even in a pan (depends on what the braise is), and then serve, pouring the sauce over it and whatever else you’re serving it with (rice, potatoes, noodles). 

A Note About Wine

Many braises use wine, which acts as both a flavoring agent and a tenderizer (the acid in the wine helps break down tough proteins). Don’t sweat choosing the “right wine” to use here. You’ve got some leeway. Pick a wine you could drink, but don’t waste your $50 cellared bottles. Stick with dry and unoaked wines. Because reducing wine will concentrate its flavor, oaked or sweet wines will taste even oakier (ie: bitter) or sweeter (ie: sugary) in the finished sauce which you don’t want. 

Both white and red wine have the same chemical effect… they will tenderize equally. White is just a bit lighter both in flavor and color. I have read that white wine can be reduced longer than red without becoming bitter, but I think that really depends on the kind of red wine you’re using. As I noted above, oaky or tannic red wines can become bitter when reduced for a long time. But the solution there is to just use a low-tannin, unoaked red wine.

Even a mediocre braise will result in a fork-tender dish balanced perfectly between fat, acid, and salt. So long as you have a few hours within 2-3 days of when you plan to serve, you can get ahead of it and have a stress-free dinner for the family or friends. And with a few little finishing touches during plating, it can be dead sexy. 

Here’s a fun one to start with…

Coq Au Riesling

This is a derivative of Coq Au Van which is French for “chicken and wine.” Actually “coq” means rooster (the French have as many names for chicken as Eskimos do for snow) and braising it in wine helped break down the tough old bird. But today we just use chicken. 

Traditional Coq Au Van uses red wine, but this version uses Riesling. Why Riesling? Because this version hails from the Alsace region of France, which is the northern part of the country that borders Germany, known for its dry Rieslings.

Look for a dry Riesling to cook with, as most Rieslings are too sweet. How can you know if it’s dry? 

• Choose a Riesling from the Alsace region of France, which are known to be drier. 

• If using a German Riesling, look for “Troken” on the label, which means dry. 

But the best way to ensure the Riesling is dry is to check the alcohol content. The higher the alcohol percentage, the drier the wine. For Riesling, look for an alcohol content of 12% or higher. 

This is a great dish for this time of year because the white wine delivers the same satisfying umami/acidic comfort of a braise, but is lighter and seems more appropriate for warmer weather. 

Ingredients (serves 4)

• 4 chicken legs (thigh and drumstick)

• 3 c chicken stock

• 2 c Riesling

• 1 bouquet garnis (bay leaf, thyme sprigs, parsley stems, tarragon sprig)

• 2 c poix, small dice (or just onions if you like)

• 6 cloves garlic, minced

• 4 shallots, halved (optional)

• 1 lb mushrooms, sliced (don’t use baby bellas or anything w/ large gills)

• 4 slices bacon, diced

• 1 oz each butter/flour mashed into a ball

Method

1. Put diced bacon in cold dutch oven and render fat over low heat. Remove/reserve bacon. 

2. Season chicken and brush with dijon mustard. Sear in bacon fat on high. Remove/reserve. 

3. Add poix, garlic and mushrooms and brown until their juices are released. Remove/reserve.

4. Deglaze with the wine and scrape up the browned bits (fond). Reduce by half. 

5. Add the stock and whisk until smooth. 

6. Add the chicken and bacon back to the stock with the bouquet garnis and optional shallots. Add additional wine/stock until mostly covered. 

7. Simmer on very low for an hour or so until chicken legs are done (internal temperature of 170-175)

8. Turn off heat and let sit for half an hour. 

9. Remove chicken and return braise to a simmer, reducing to about the consistency you want. (This can be a harder simmer than when the chicken was in it, but don’t boil it). 

10. Off heat, add the butter/flour paste and stir/season. 

11. Reheat the chicken legs under a broiler to crisp them up, or sear in a pan if preferred. 

12. Plate chicken and ladle braise over it and any sides 

I served this with simple boiled potatoes and a salad. Don’t forget a nice chunk of crusty bread to soak up that glorious sauce!

Our culinary program is moving into a series on world cuisines — French, Italian, Mexican, German, Asian, etc. The idea is to apply the techniques we’ve learned to date to specific applications based on the culinary traditions of different regions. 

This is where the science meets the art. Where we use the techniques to paint a picture. So it’s worth breaking that down a bit. 

What makes one country’s cuisine different from another? How do those culinary traditions form? And why do we still adhere to them today? 

Cuisine is created through necessity. Hundreds of years ago, you cooked based on what was around you… what vegetables grew in your area, or what animals were domesticated/hunted in your area. The further back you go, the smaller that area was, and the greater the differences between those areas. 

Today we think of cuisines in terms of countries, but that’s not accurate. Every country has microclimates that create subtle differences in how the same ingredients taste or are used. Even when a country shares a common language, different regions have their own unique dialect. The same goes with food. 

For instance, The taste of a pig raised and cured in the mountains will be different from a pig raised and cured near the sea. What they eat, and the temperature or humidity of how they’re stored, affects their taste.

How you used those ingredients depended on the season, and how/when those ingredients were harvested. Ingredients harvested at the same time were naturally cooked together, and therefore “go” together well (“what grows together, goes together” is the saying). 

That’s a bit hard to wrap your head around in today’s era of mass food distribution, when you can buy an eggplant in January. I know that until I started gardening I had no idea what produce was in season at any time. But it’s helpful to understand these regional differences when you’re cooking (or ordering) food. 

So to me a country’s cuisine is more than just a restaurant “concept.” It’s more than a fad or a food trend (hello “cacio e pepe” variations). Cuisine is memory. It’s history. It’s language. Cooking or eating a dish made from traditional ingredients in the traditional style, using recipes and techniques passed down from generations, is more than simply a meal. 

It’s a communion. You’re communicating with your ancestors. You’re tasting something they tasted hundreds of years ago. It’s a shared experience across generations. It’s a time machine, not unlike the passing down of folk songs, or holiday traditions. 

For those of you who don’t come from a strong culinary culture, that might be hard to understand. To many people, regional cuisines simply represent different flavors, or restaurant decor. It’s just variety. And that’s OK. 

But for others, eating your family’s cuisine is experiencing something more than just filling your belly or being entertained. For those of that culture, it's a constant reminder of who you are and where you come from. 

And if you’re a guest at that meal, or a visitor in that restaurant, you’re being welcomed into that history. You’re getting a glimpse of another world, another perspective. It’s a chance to read a story that’s not yours and maybe, just maybe, understand something you didn’t before that meal occurred. 

That’s why I say that cuisine is communication. When someone makes and shares dishes from their cuisine, they’re inviting you to know something about themselves. And speaking from the perspective of the cook, that’s often done often with a mix of both pride and vulnerability… I’m proud of my culinary heritage, but anxious about whether I did the best job of communicating it through my cooking. 

We live in an interesting age where access is easy, but connection is scarce. It’s easy to find information, yet increasingly difficult to truly understand. 

But eating a meal is easy. You don’t have to travel long distances, or learn a new language. You just need to eat (or cook) a meal from a region, and you’ve established a connection. You’ve gone back in time. You've traveled continents. You’ve learned languages. You’ve started a conversation. And you’ve opened the door to understanding. 

One of the reasons I decided to enroll in a culinary education program is because I wanted to better understand the intricacies of cooking. That means more than just cooking techniques, recipes and ingredients. 

It means process. Learning how a chef thinks from start to finish. Anyone can conceive a meal. That’s the fun, creative part. But like any creative endeavor, the rubber hits the road when it’s time to execute those ideas. And in the kitchen, that often comes down to managing time. 

Time is a chef’s biggest challenge. Time is not your friend in the kitchen. Time management is a chef’s secret weapon, or biggest foe. The best conceptualized dish in the world falls apart when rushed, under pressure, under planned. 

We had a test this week… In two hours we had to: 

• Make a cream anglaise and spin it into ice cream

• Cut onion, celery and bell peppers into uniform, small dice

• Paste garlic

• Use the vegetables to make a red pepper coulis

• Break down a whole chicken

• Cook a piece of that chicken to perfection and serve with the coulis

Totally doable. I was confident. But one little bump in my plan caused a slight spinout. Although I recovered from it, the result was a serious omission that hurt my score. And through it I gained a valuable lesson.

From the start I was strangely on edge. Knowing there’s a clock ticking somehow messes with your head. Yet at first I was calm, steady. Good dice on the vegetables (or so I thought. The next day chef gave us all a scolding on how our small dice was actually closer to medium). Mixed and tempered the anglaise properly. Got the cream into the ice cream mixture just as I added the stock to the coulis in perfect multitasking coordination. 

I was saving the chicken to the end. I felt I had time, so I added a quick mincing of fines herbs. The ice cream was even ready early, so I started scooping it out, planning to get it in the freezer, then moving on to the final step of breaking down and cooking the chicken. 

Now for the chicken, we were going to be judged both on the fabrication part and how well we cooked it. On the fabrication, chef John said he specifically would check how well we cleaned the drumette on the chicken breast. (The drumette is the part of the wing that is attached to the breast, and has the most meat on it. When you order chicken wings and some of the pieces look like little chicken drumsticks… that’s actually the drumette.)

Proper chicken fabrication involves keeping the drumette attached to the breast, “frenched” — meaning you scrape the meat away so the bone is exposed. An airline chicken breast is the breast with the drumette still attached. That’s what we were going for and being judged on. 

So, that’s the task left for me to do as I was scooping out my ice cream. And then the hiccup occurs… my ice cream was really stuck to the sides of the ice cream machine. The ice cream itself was perfect. But I had to clean it out for the next guy to use. 

Usually that means just scraping out the ice cream and wiping it out with a warm towel. But I had a really thick layer of ice cream frozen to the side of the machine. And I’m that guy who obsesses over getting every last bit of whatever out of whatever it’s in before moving on. So I’m scraping the side of this frozen ice cream machine with a soft spatula, which is barely separating the ice cream from the metal. 

This is now pissing me off, so I turn off the machine to let it thaw and better get at the ice cream. Meanwhile time is ticking away like the tyrant it is, oblivious to my obsessive need to scrape out a clean bowl of fucking ice cream. 

Then I see the time. I’ve only got about a half hour left to break down the chicken, cook it, and let it rest. So I go into high gear. Screw the ice cream machine… I’ve got plenty to serve for the test. So I just blast the cold bowl with a steaming hot towel (which I should’ve done from the start), wiped it dry, and rushed to the chicken. 

Now I’m pretty confident in my fabrication skills. So I grab the boning knife and get to work. First step, remove the wings and clean the drumette. In two swift, practiced moves, I slice off both wings and put them aside, then I move on to the breast and drumette and…

Dammit! I sliced off the entire wing, drumette included! Both wings. So now I have two chicken breasts with no drumette to review for my score. It’s like burning a page of a test before it’s turned in for grading. Just nothing there to review. 

I stop to collect myself. This is bad. It’s a mistake I can’t correct, and it’s gonna affect my score. Score aside, I absolutely hate making stupid mistakes like this. And there’s no way to fix it. 

But it’s not a disaster. Interestingly, the impossibility of fixing it provides a strange sort of peace. I spent the whole test until this point with a faint sense of unease… don’t make a mistake, don’t lose track of time. And now, both those things happened. I lost track of time on the ice cream machine and that led to making a big mistake.

The only solution was to put it behind me and move forward. Time was ticking. Worrying about the mistake wasn’t going to slow it down. I still had to execute the chicken and the sauce, both of which I could still control. I had to put the drumette mistake behind me and not let my disappointment over what I can’t control result in even more mistakes with the steps remaining.

It’s like skiing… you can’t un-fall. You just keep turning. And like skiing, after that first fall of the day, this mistake has the counterintuitive effect of putting everything into focus, and I just relax. I can see all the steps that I need to take in front of me, and I just go to work. 

Looking back on it now after the fact, I can see the entire kitchen was in the same state. The friendly banter is gone. Everyone is just moving and cooking. There’s a flow that’s balanced somewhere between rushed desperation and fluid efficiency. 

Which is good, because there were more hiccups to come. I had the coulis still simmering and reducing on the clickburner at my station, so I grab a carbon steel pan and get it going on the big kitchen stovetop. My plan is to sear off the chicken, finish it in the oven, and let it rest.

D’oh… oven’s not on! And I realize there’s no time for that anyway… no chance that it’ll come to temp in the oven and have time to rest before serving, so I’ve got to cook it fully on the stove. That’s another problem, as I’d planned to (calmly) finish my sauce while the chicken cooked undisturbed, then cut the herbs, then blend/strain/balance the sauce while the chicken rested. Instead I’m actively searing and basting the chicken on the stove, trying to ensure it gets cooked fully without overcooking it so it’s not tough. 

And then I noticed the click burner ran out of gas, so it’s not simmering/reducing anymore. I grab the pan and put it on the bigger stove next to the chicken. Now I’m basting and turning chicken, while stirring and keeping an eye on the sauce, while checking the chicken temp, all while keeping an eye on the clock to make sure I have time for the chicken to rest. 

That’s a lot of adjustments to make in the last 30 minutes of a timed test. Welcome to cooking. 

At that point, time suddenly becomes your friend. It’s an immovable factor. It can’t be adjusted. You can only adjust to it. That means your choices become limited, and by that I mean they become more clear. There’s no discussion or debate. There is just doing what needs to be done. 

It’s like being back on deadline as a reporter. There’s no time to rewrite a lede 20 times to make the pithy pun land just so. On deadline, there’s just bang it out and turn it in. It requires a degree of focus, tunnel vision, that while on the surface seems restrictive, is actually highly liberating. You’re freed of second-guessing, analysis, reconsiderations. Instead you just… do. 

As it turned out, I got the chicken finished in time to let it rest, so I was able to blend, strain, and finish the sauce undisturbed and mince the herbs. This is where establishing a good mise en place is essential. Everything I needed was already there… no need to run around searching for tarragon or whatever. 

In a time crunch, searching for things becomes harder. You forget where things are. You forget the elements you need. You forget to check on whatever is cooking while you’re searching for things. It’s an icy road that will cause you to slip out of control if you’re not prepared in advance. 

So that was my saving grace. Everything I needed was at my fingertips. 

Despite the drumette misstep, I was able to properly rest the chicken and get it sliced to show it off. The sauce was at the consistency and flavor I wanted. I got it plated and ready for tasting with the minced herbs a few minutes before time was up. 

Overall feedback was positive. Maybe a bit more salt on the sauce (and the next-day dice lecture), but save that I think I did OK. Except, of course, for the drumette. 

In the end, this turned out to be less of a test and more of a lesson in time management. That’s not a lesson you can teach, only experience. 

All the components of what we cooked I’ve done successfully several times before. I wasn’t even using recipes. But the time lesson is one I’ll not forget. I omitted (ruined?) a key element of what needed to be reviewed simply because I let my mind get seized up by the time pressure I felt. And… I was saved by preparing my mise en place in advance. 

Chef John didn’t quite come out and say it, but I suspect this was the lesson all along… to gain an appreciation of how time can be as big a factor, if not more, than all the other variables involved in cooking (like heat, ingredients, flavor). Time is the ultimate leveler. Preparation is your best defense. Presence is the key to success. 

I feel like this test was a turning point in the program. We’ve been given plenty of tools. Now it’s time to use them. Forcing us into an uncomfortable scenario was a deliberate move to break our routine… to test our resilience and expose our illusions. To discover where our sharp corners are so we know where to smooth them. 

You don’t learn anything until you push yourself and discover the outer reaches of your abilities. That’s where you need to be to grow. 

After all, if you can’t stand the heat… 

We’ve been on a streak of dessert preparations lately, including cakes, cream puffs, ice cream, sorbet, frostings, and so on. On an unrelated note, I’ve mysteriously gained 5 pounds. 

But seriously, building off the ideas I raised in Pastry, it’s amazing how connected cooking is once you’re taught the underlying fundamentals of how things are made. This is particularly true with desserts, and demonstrably true in the case of creme anglaise. 

Fancy word, sure. After all, it’s French. But it’s deceptively simple to make. And once learned, it has many applications that suddenly turn one technique into multiple dessert options. Which is why it’s called the “mother sauce” of desserts by some. 

You may not realize it, but you’ve almost certainly had creme anglaise many times. In its purest form, creme anglaise is often drizzled over baked desserts like bread pudding. But most of us are familiar with its chilled and stirred form — ice cream. Or it’s baked form — creme brulee. 

Add corn starch during the mixing process and you have pastry cream (the custard filling in pastries). Add butter and you have cake frosting (buttercream). Add gelatin and you have panna cotta. 

While creme anglaise is technically “vanilla sauce” it’s not only for vanilla flavors. It’s the base for any other dessert cream… chocolate, fruit, caramel, etc. You can infuse it with booze (bourbon sauce) if you want. 

But sticking to the basic recipe, creme anglaise is an eyerollingly simply thing to make that can instantly sex up nearly any dessert and make you look like a rock star. Just don’t look for a healthy version. 

Note: you may read recipes calling for half and half. That’s half milk, half cream. You probably already have both milk and cream in your fridge. You don’t need another container of half and half… just mix the two in equal parts. 

Creme Anglaise

(makes ~2 cups)

8 oz whole milk

8 oz heavy cream

4 oz sugar 

7 egg yolks, whisked

1 t vanilla extract

• Mix milk, cream, vanilla, and sugar in a pot and slowly bring to a scald (where the edges start to bubble just before it breaks into a boil. Don’t let it boil). Stir to incorporate the sugar until it dissolves. 

• Once at a scald, slowly pour about a third of the hot dairy mixture into the eggs, whisking quickly. (This is called tempering. The idea is to get the temperature of the eggs close to that of the dairy so it’s easier to combine the two without curdling the eggs). 

• Pour the tempered eggs into the pot w/ the dairy, whisking while doing so. 

• Continue cooking and stirring (and not letting it boil) until the sauce is thick. (Test by coating the back of a spoon w/ the sauce and drawing your finger across it. If the streak you made with your finger holds, it’s thick enough. This is called “nappe”).

• Pour through a fine mesh strainer into a metal bowl sitting in an ice bath (which is another bowl filled with water and ice). Stir strained sauce until cool. 

• Cover and refrigerate until ready to use. 

Of all the steps here, the most important is the tempering. Adding cold egg yolks to hot anything will create scrambled eggs. The key is to slowly bring the egg yolks to the heat of the liquid before fully combining them. 

Uses: 

• Drizzle it over brownies, coffee cakes, pies, or other store-bought baked goods

• Pour over caramelized bananas, fruit compote, or just plain strawberries

• Add it to oatmeal if you want to a sweet breakfast, or even better… French toast. 

• Spoon it over bread pudding with some berries

It’s useful to know what each ingredient is doing while cooking. The half/half provides the creaminess. The yolks, when heated, cause it to thicken and provide more fat. The sugar sweetens it. The vanilla flavors it. So if you want to make variations, these are the levers to pull. Want a looser sauce, use less yolks. Thickener sauce = more yolks. Less sweet = less sugar. 

Once you get going with it you can replace the vanilla with other flavors by simply infusing the half and half (mint, cinnamon sticks, whatever), or start playing with the other variations mentioned above, like creme brulee or ice cream. 

(Note: you need an ice cream maker to make ice cream. No workaround on that. I asked my instructor what do do if you didn’t have an ice cream maker and her response was “Don’t make ice cream.”)

So if you’re ever following a recipe for a dessert that requires cooking dairy, egg yolks and sugar on a stovetop, that step of the recipe is making creme anglaise. Breaking recipes down by component like this makes them not only easier to follow, but also easier to successfully pull off.

Yes… cheese. 

Cheese is one of those things that despite being so simple feels very complicated. I know I get very frustrated when browsing the cheese selections at the grocery store, speciality shop, or restaurant menu. I just don’t know what most of this stuff is, how it tastes, or how to use it. 

So getting an overview of the cheesemaking and cheese pairing process was an illuminating night, and I’m still reading up on it further. Bloomy rinds, washed rinds, natural and brushed rinds… it’s a lot, to be sure. 

Fortunately, all cheese is made pretty much the same way. What differentiates them is the type of milk used, and the finishing process. The steps are pretty straightforward: 

• Add acid to warmed milk (cow, sheep, goat) until the curds separate from the whey

• Skim off the curds

• Salt, shape, ripen

Ok there’s a bit more to it than that. But that’s the general outline. The only way to really understand what’s going on is to try making it yourself. 

Now many of you are thinking “why on earth would I make my own cheese?” Well…

1. It’s fun. Simply put, the world is made up of two kinds of people… those who find the idea of trying to make your own cheese fun, and those who don’t. 

2. It tastes better. Just like bread, or pastry, or stock or many of the other things you can buy in the store out of convenience, the stuff you make at home has far fewer ingredients, less preservatives, and as a result tastes better. 

3. It’s cheap. A gallon of whole milk, a pint of cream, and you’re good to go. 

I’m not talking about making your own artisanal, cave-aged Gruyere in your basement. Many many cheeses undergo a long aging process, or use complicated flavoring techniques (like literally injecting penicillin into it). So most home cheesemaking starts with the fresh cheeses — ricotta, mozzarella, mascarpone —  which don’t require a lot of ripening techniques. 

We learned to make ricotta, which is a great place to start because it’s easy to make and versatile to use. 

Note: This is the quick/easy version using whole milk and cream. Traditional ricotta is made from the leftovers from making mozzarella or other cheeses, which is a similar process but not one we’ll get into today. 

It’s this simple….

How to Make Ricotta

Combine 2 cups whole milk with 1 cup heavy cream and add a half tablespoon of salt. Gently warm the milk/cream to a scald (that point just before it starts to simmer, when bubbles start to form around the edges of the pot). Then add a tablespoon of champagne vinegar (white wine vinegar works too).

Gently let simmer until the curds form

Keep cooking at a low simmer until more solids form and you can see through the water left beneath them.

Then gently strain it over three layers of cheesecloth and a sieve to catch the curds.

Chill curds and save whey for another use. (Like, um… making traditional ricotta, or use instead of water when making bread or pizza dough)

That's it. The whole thing takes less than a half hour, and you now have ricotta that’s probably better than the bland watery stuff they sell at the store.

What To Do With Ricotta

“Great,” you say, “what do I know do with all this freaking ricotta?”

1. Put it on some toast and top with… anything. Honey and olive oil. Grilled vegetables. Pesto. Charred tomatoes. Arugula. Whatever.

2. Make ravioli/tortellini filling.

3. Serve alongside a simply pasta pomodoro.

I like to take it a step further and make whipped ricotta. Just put about 2 cups of fresh ricotta in a food processor, and while blending drizzle in about a quarter cup of olive oil. 

The whipped ricotta will firm up a bit, yet still be airy and spreadable with just a bit more flavor from the oil. 

Whipped ricotta can then serve as the base for a lot of fun things. I use it often as the base for composed salads. 

Just roast carrots or sear some asparagus and mix it with arugula and spinach, dress it in a vinaigrette, and placed it atop a base of whipped ricotta. Sprinkle the crushed nuts of your choice (pine nuts or pistachio work best) and you got a great light lunch or dinner. 

Or you can use it as a sandwich spread. Lay it on thick to a good crusty baguette, add grilled zucchini and bell peppers, some dressed spinich/arugula and some pickled onions/carrots. You won’t even miss the meat. 

You can spoon whipped ricotta in small rounds atop pizza (even one you order) for a pop of cool, fresh sweetness. Spread it on a piece of toast with olive oil or honey or pesto. Add it to a bowl of simple pasta with red sauce. Or just serve it alone as a straight up dip. 

Whipped ricotta is a staple in my fridge and I use it almost every other day. And now that I can make my own ricotta, it’s even better. Here’s a few other ways I’ve used it:

I’ll give mozzarella a shot soon as well, and probably mascarpone (which is basically ricotta with more cream and a little sugar). 

I’ve always had a fascination with Mother Sauces. Learn how to make one, and you’re 50% along the way to knowing how to make multiple types of sauces. I find that idea both comforting and appealing.  

These are called daughter sauces or (as I prefer to call them)... derivatives. In my previous post about sauces, I focused on the different thickening agents used to turn a liquid to a sauce. This time I’ll dig into each Mother Sauce and their various derivatives, compiled by the type of thickener used. 

Amazingly, it’s very difficult to find a simple, at-a-glance resource that lists all the Mother Sauces and their derivatives, with details of each included. They’re either too detailed, or not detailed enough. So I decided to make my own, and hopefully others will find it useful as well. 

I’ll say upfront that this is not an exhaustive list. But that’s kind of the point. These are the basics, from which you can build your own as you like. It also sticks to the classic Mother Sauces, not salsas, vinaigrettes, or pasta sauces (like ragu) because there’s really no set base sauce to start with for any of those… they’re more techniques than sauces based on a common Mother. 

And, it’s not complete… some of the derivative sauces still need exact measurements for the individual components, but I’ll update as I learn them. The point is to have a clear understanding of the building blocks of nearly any sauce. So if you’re making a chicken, or a fish, or a steak, and halfway through you suddenly need or want to add a sauce you can just make one without Googling a whole start-to-finish recipe around what you’ve started with. You can customize and create; adapt, react, and improvise. 

So many recipes lay out the process for making these sauces, but they bury them in the process for the rest of the dish… spreading out the steps so you have to jump from the sauce, to the protein, to the side dish, back to the sauce. That makes it nearly impossible to see clearly any single component. 

That’s what makes component cooking so appealing. A 12-step recipe suddenly becomes three steps — protein, sauce, side. But recipe writers rarely organize their dishes that way, because few people have learned the relationships between these different components… particularly the sauce. 

But this is not a recipe blog. I’m far more interested in learning the underlying principles and fundamentals of cooking which can then be applied to any recipe or any dish I dream up at the moment. 

It’s freedom. And it’s fun. 

(For details on each thickening method, refer back to the original Sauces post)

Roux Sauces

Remember, a roux is equal parts butter and flour, cooked on low until it no longer smells like cookie dough.

Veloute

4 oz roux + 1 qt light stock (chicken/fish/veal)

• + Pan Drippings = Gravy

• + 1c Cream = Supreme

• + 4 Egg Yolks/1 c Cream = Allemande

• + 1c Pureed Tomatoes = Aurore

• + 1c Reduced White Wine = Bonnefoy

• + 4T Curry Powder (optional 1/3c cream) = Curry

• + Tarragon = Estragon

Espagnole

4 oz roux + 1 qt dark stock (beef/veal)

• + White Wine

  • + 1c Mushrooms/ ¼ c Shallots/ ½ c Cognac/ 1T Tarragon = Chasseur

  • + Shallots/Tomato/Paste of mushrooms, onions, herbs, and pepper) = Duxelles

  • + ½ c Chopped Onion/1t Dried Mustard = Robert

• + Red Wine

  • + 2 c Demi-glace/ ¼ c Red Wine/1T Butter = Madeira

  • + 1 c Reduced Red Wine/2t Lemon Juice/1/2 c Marrow/4T shallots = Bordelaise

• + Vinegar

  • + Mirepoix/Meat/Wine/Pepper = Poivrade

  • + Shallots/Wine/Gherkins/Parsley/Chervil/Tarragon = Piquante

  • + Shallot/Bread/Parsley/Lemon = Zingara

Bechamel

4 oz roux + 1 qt milk

• + 1c Gruyere = Mornay

• + 1c Pecorino Romano = Alfredo

• + 2c Cooked Onion Puree = Soubise

Tomato

1.5 c poix + 2 oz roux + tomato paste + bouquet garni + 1 qt. crushed tomatoes 

• + Anchovy/Fish Stock = Marinara

• + Capers/Olives/Anchovy = Puttanesca

• + Parm/Cream/Tomatoes = Napolitaine

• + Onion/Olives/Tomatoes = Nicoise

• + Ham/Parm/Mushroom = Milanaise

Emulsions

Hollandaise

3 egg yolks + 1 cup clarified butter + vinegar 

• + Tarragon/Vinegar Reduction = Bearnaise

  • + Tomato = Choron

• + Whipped Cream = Mousseline

• + Blood Orange = Maltaise

• + Mint = Paloise

Mayonnaise

1 egg yolk + 1 cup oil

• + Garlic + Lemon = Aioli

  • + Anchovies/Worshistere = Caesar 

• + ¼ c Dijon Mustard = Dijonnaise

• + Capers/Cornichons/Herbs/Anchovies = Remoulade

• + Chives/Cornichons/Capers/Hard Boiled Eggs = Tartare

I made a freaking croissant!

By that I don’t mean “I” made a croissant. I mean I Made a croissant. I made a CROISSANT. 

That’s not something I’d ever thought I’d be able to say. 

Pastry is totally new for me. Sure I’ve worked with dough in making pasta, bread, pizza. But pastry is a different beast. Seeing pastries in the bakery window is like peeking into a different world. Those who make pastries seem like practitioners of the Dark Arts, with magical secrets and lore reserved for a different kind of cook. 

But over the course of the program so far we’ve dabbled in the pastry in and out, with which I’ve had varying degrees of success. Pie crust and pastry cream… pretty easy actually. Mousse… not so much. 

But this week took it to another level and created a lightning bolt of awareness and understanding. See, other lessons in the culinary program so far have been tweaking details on skills and techniques I already have and am familiar with… leveling up things I have experience with. 

Croissants, on the other hand, is greenfield territory for me. Breaking new ground. 

Now I love croissants. But the idea of actually making one myself never occurred to me as something that was possible. It just seemed like too big a lift. Too much science and technique that was beyond my skills or ability. 

I imagine the way I viewed croissants was like how many view cooking in general — something too mysterious and unreachable to try. But just like any other kind of cooking, once you’re taught how to do it, it’s really not that hard. 

I mean… it’s a little hard. As you’ll see below, it’s actually a lot of work. But the difficulty lies in knowing what to do, and taking the time to do it. In other words, it’s not at all intuitive and is very time intensive. But once you’re shown how to do it and you dedicate the time to make it happen, it’s a highly rewarding payoff. 

So when I actually made a batch of croissants (with a lot of over-the-shoulder direction), pulled them out of the oven, and ate them without embarrassment… I was just amazed. 

I haven’t had that feeling of “I made that'' in quite some time, at least not on this level. By the way, that’s not pride or boastfulness. It’s not showing off. It’s amazement. I was downright flabbergasted. I was expecting an abject disaster that would be good for a laugh. 

But instead it was an awakening. Once you realize that this thing you’ve eaten many times can be created with your own hands, you see both the food and your ability a little differently. You suddenly see possibilities. 

Your perspective changes. Knowing not only that it CAN be done, but HOW to do it. And that YOU can do it. 

At my age and experience, that’s rare. It’s a return to childlike wonder… experiencing that flash of understanding that you see in kids’ eyes when they see or experience something new. 

For me it was croissants. For you it might be toasting bread, or simply making anything at all after years of ordering Costco dinners (ahem: Lea). What the food is doesn’t matter. So long as it opens your eyes and mind to a new way of experiencing the world. 

It’s something that once seen, can’t be unseen. It can’t be untasted. And for me, that’s addictive. That revelation of knowledge. Suddenly seeing the world in a slightly different way. 

It can’t be turned off… only ignored. It demands to be fed. And feeding it is satisfying. 

–

Croissants

Croissants belong to a category of pastry known as Laminated Dough, a reference to the process of folding butter into dough multiple times to create a series of thin, flakey layers of dough. 

What’s interesting about this is the interplay between the dough and the butter. Throughout the process, these ingredients are actively working against each other, so managing it requires a strict adherence to a schedule of alternating activity and waiting. 

It comes down to time and temperature. 

Croissants use a yeasted dough, which when worked creates gluten. Gluten makes dough tight (eg: when you’re trying to roll out dough and it contracts, that’s the gluten working). Putting dough in the fridge allows the gluten to relax and makes it easier to work with. 

But it also has butter. A LOT of butter. That butter can’t stay too long in the fridge or it becomes too hard to work, and risks poking through the layers of dough… essentially ripping, which is no bueno. The butter has to be soft enough to have some plasticity, but hard enough to not squish out when rolling. 

So what you have is a series of short windows in which you work the dough, cool it in the fridge, work it again, cool it again, etc. And once you start, you have to finish or it’s all ruined. 

On yeah, and it takes three days. Here’s the process (for insight only, not a series of directions to follow). 

Day 1

• Mix the dough (called the detrempe”), which is milk, sugar, yeast and flour. 

• Stuff it in a plastic ziplock bag 

• Let it rest overnight

Day 2

• Prepare the butter (called the “beurrage) which is at minimum a half pound of butter pounded down to a quarter-inch thick rectangle. I mean you have to pound the shit out of this, as it can’t be at room temperature. It’s about 55 degrees. 

• Roll out the detrempe to a rectangle three times long as wide.

• Lock the beurrage into the detrempe. The beurrage should cover ⅔ the length of the detrempe rectangle. Then fold the top third over bottom third like you’re folding a paper to fit into a letter envelope (it’s literally called a “letter fold”). 

• Roll out the folded detrempe/beurrage again to 3x long as wide, and letter fold again. The beurrage is now locked into the detrempe. 

• Put in fridge and let rest for 45 minutes to an hour. 

• Repeat this process three times (roll/fold/roll twice and put in fridge for the same period of time). When you take the locked dough from the fridge, the butter will be kinda hard. So you have to pound it out w/o letting the butter break the dough or tear against your board. 

• Wrap and let it rest overnight

Day 3

• Roll out the dough (and with the pounding) to a ¼ - ½ inch thick in a roughly 12x18 rectangle and cut into triangles

• Roll the wide end of the triangle to the pointy end ala a traditional croissant shape and let proof until they’re double their size. 

• Brush with an egg wash, and bake at 400 for about 30 minutes. 

(Technically you can do all this in a day, or even two (convert the 24 hour rest to a 3 hour rest) but the croissants won’t be as good.)

Now as you can see, there’s a lot of work, time, and technique going into this. But this is what creates those flakey layers of dough you see in croissants. Between the various folds and rolls, you’re creating dozens of layers. 

When those layers of butter and dough hit the oven, the cold butter steams and creates those thin layers of dough you get once the baking is done. (This is called “mechanical leavening” by the way, which is defined as a method of making dough rise through physically manipulating the ingredients to hold or release air.) 

By the time I rolled my croissants, they were somewhat torn, and had weird butter bubbles erupting over what should be a nice smooth dough. They looked like pastry lepers.

So my confidence level as they went into the fridge was pretty low. But here’s how they turned out. 

As you can see… a nice, crispy flakey crust, all the expected layers inside, and they pulled apart when eating in highly satisfying, long strings of dough. I’m thoroughly hooked and will definitely make them again when I have the time. 

But until then, I’m ruined for “average” croissants. Only by them at a proper bakery (no Kings Soopers or Costco “croissants” for you!). Look for a dark brown exterior like those pictured here… that’s the sign of a proper croissant.

And be extra sure to tip the baker now that you know how much work goes into these things.  

The technical definition of a sauce is “a thickened, flavorful liquid.”

That is at once both terribly simplistic and incredibly insightful at the same time.

It’s simplistic in that a sauce is perhaps one of the most powerful tools a cook has. It elevates, complements, contrasts, refines (and sometimes saves) nearly any dish you add it to. Reducing it to simply a “thickened, flavorful liquid” seems criminally unpoetic.

Yet, it’s also perfectly true. Throughout the culinary program we’ve been introduced several times to the concept of “base + thickener/lightener” … you thicken a sauce, you lighten a mousse. In other words, it starts with the base of flavor, and then you do things to it to create the consistency you want for the purpose it serves.

That’s cooking. It’s the sacred and the profane intermixed.

Sauce Sophistication

At home, it’s perfectly acceptable to serve a dish of protein-starch-vegetable without a sauce. But in the professional kitchen, a sauceless dish is a sin.

In Bill Buford’s fantastic culinary memoir Dirt — where he lives and interns in French kitchens for several years — one of his duties was to make the staff meal. The requirements for what that meal needed to be were pretty simple… make whatever you want, as long as it has a sauce.

Sauces can elevate the most sophisticated dish to a higher level of refinement, or save a sub-par dish from disaster to acceptability.  That’s a powerful, and versatile, weapon. Think about it… how many overdone Thanksgiving turkeys have been saved by a good gravy? How many bland fish dishes have been turned around with a nice vinaigrette? Would Eggs Benedict be the popular breakfast choice that it is without the Hollandaise Sauce (pictured)?

Maybe that’s why categorizing different types of sauces was one of the first concepts codified by Antonin Carême into the French culinary lexicon back in the early 1800s — the Mother Sauces:

• Bechamel: milk thickened with roux

• Velouté: light stock thickened with roux

• Espagnole: dark stock thickened with roux

• Tomato: tomatoes reduced and/or thickened with roux

• Hollandaise: egg yolk and butter emulsification

• Mayonnaise: egg yolk and oil emulsification

• Vinaigrette: acid and oil emulsification

Odds are if you’re cooking at home and following a recipe, you’re already using one of these sauces without knowing it. But making a sauce can be intimidating if you don’t know what pieces to put together. Few recipes explain the building blocks involved in their list of ingredients or instructions.

The Forumula

Regardless of which sauce you’re making, all have a common formula: flavor + thickening. In other words… it’s a base of flavor, thickened to the consistency of a sauce.

There are six ways to thicken a sauce. In Vinaigrette, I dove into one of those… emulsification. Here’s all of them, with a little more detail.

Thickeners

Reduction

This is probably the easiest and most recognizable to home cooks. It’s simply letting a liquid simmer so that it evaporates a degree of water content, thereby reducing in volume. When a recipe asks you to “reduce by half”… that’s a reduction.

Reductions work best with sauces that contain some kind of starchy vegetable as an ingredient, as the process of reducing will draw out that starch and thicken the sauce along with the evaporation of water. That’s what makes this such an easy method.

But… it takes time. The lower the heat, the better the result. You should never boil a sauce. A low simmer is best, with the low heat slowly drawing out the flavor and thickening agents without shocking them with too much heat.

Also, reducing tends to result in a heavier tasting sauce. It loses its freshness. That’s why you often see a note to add a squeeze of lemon or other acid at the end of the process to quickly brighten it up before serving.

Examples: Tomato, Pan Sauce, Glace

Emulsification

I talked a LOT about emulsifying in vinaigrette. But what I didn’t get into was that there are different ways to emulsify a sauce. One of them is to use an animal fat (egg yolk or butter) as the emulsifying agent.

Eggs are a key component in Mayonnaise and Hollandaise sauces. They emulsify either oil (mayo) or butter (Hollandaise) incredibly effectively, and with greater longevity than a vinaigrette. The “container vs contained” concept still applies, but yolks are just more stable of a container.

The way it was explained to me is that the egg yolk acts as a sort of net. When first cracked, that net is condensed. But whipping yolks expands that net and allows it to capture the fat added into it and form a semi-permanent bond. That’s why you can make mayo and store it for weeks without it breaking, but a vinaigrette will always need a quick shake before using.

Typically, an emulsification is a core part or making the sauce. It’s not like it’s a thickening “option” you can choose to thicken something that wasn’t going to be made with and emulsion in the first place (the way these other thickening methods can).

Examples: Vinaigrette, Mayonnaise + Derivatives (Caesar, Ranch, Blue Cheese), Hollandaise

Refined Starch Slurry

This is a good go-to option to thicken a sauce that’s being stubbornly thin despite how long you reduce it. It’s simply taking equal parts refined starch and water, mixing it into a paste, and tempering it into your sauce.

Let’s unpack that a bit:

• Refined starch: think cornstarch, potato starch, or even tapioca starch. Just not raw flour. Refined starches have been processed so they’re not raw (which tastes sour). Flour needs to be cooked before added to a sauce (see roux below)

• Slurry: Mix 1 teaspoon starch with 1 teaspoon water and stir to a paste. That’s enough slurry to thicken 1 cup of water. Increase the amount of slurry as needed based on how much sauce you have to thicken.

• Temper: You don’t want to pour a cold slurry into a simmering sauce. Instead, once the slurry is made, you stir a bit of the warm sauce into the slurry to bring it to a matching temperature (called tempering) and then pour it all into the sauce.

Once done, bring the sauce just to a boil to activate the starch in the slurry, and then back to a simmer to thicken. Just be sure to stick to the radio of slurry to sauce or you risk making the sauce taste too starchy. Give it time to thicken before adding too much.

Examples: add to reductions that are too thin

Vegetable Starch

Some vegetable are naturally starchy, and thus act as a thickener. Think potatoes, onions, etc. You can make great, flavorful sauces with these kinds of ingredients, which I’ll note below.

Generally these sauces are made from equal parts solids (the vegetables) and liquid (stock, milk, etc). At most, you’d use 2 parts liquid to 1 part cooked veggies. Any more than that and you wind up with a thin sauce that needs to be thickened again.

Examples:

• Soubise: Etuve onions until sauce, blend with milk/cream, and strain.

• Coulis: Cooked vegetables or fruit pureed with equal part stock, and strained.

Roux

Ah, the roux. Most people know about roux as a component of making gumbo. But ironically gumbo roux does very little to actually thicken that stew, as roux looses its thickening power the longer you cook it. In gumbo, roux flavors more than thickens.

But let’s back up. A roux is equal parts flour and butter, cooked to a paste like consistency, and added to liquid. Cooking the flour in butter takes away the sourness of raw flour, and makes it something you can use as a thickener.

You don’t want to brown the butter or the roux. Just put butter into a cold pan and heat it until the butter bubbles and clears (ie: stops bubbling, which means the water content has evaporated). Stir in the flour. Don’t whisk. Whisking activates the flour’s gluten and makes it gummy. Use a spatula.

You also don’t need to stir constantly either. It’s done when the mixture stops smelling like cookie dough and resembles more like toasted almonds (and the bubbles get bigger too). If you can pull the spatula through the roux mixture and it doesn’t immediately combine (ie: “nape”) it’s ready. Either add in your liquid, or remove for later use.

1 oz of roux thickens 1 cup of liquid (4 oz = 1 qt).

Roux is the thickening option chefs use most, for several reasons. It’s easy. You can make roux in advance and store it to use whenever you need it. It’s stable. And it packs a lot of thickening power without affecting flavor.

Ever made a gravy recipe where it asks you to cook a little butter and flour before pouring in your pan drippings and stock? Congratulations, you just made a velouté! (A velouté is anything sauce blending a white stock in roux. Gravy, marsala sauce, etc.) Ever made mac and cheese? Great, you just added cheese to a Bechemal (milk and roux), otherwise known as Mornay. They both use a roux to thicken.

Examples: velouté, espagnole, bechamel.

Fat Mounts

Finally you can mount a sauce in fat… typically cream or butter. It’s a quick, short-term thickener you add just before serving. The longer you wait, the more likely it’ll separate. So think a pan sauce where you reduce a little wine and stock in the pan you just seared a chicken or steak in, then off heat you add butter at the last minute to thicken before serving.

On using butter… the butter has to be COLD. I mean right from the fridge cold, or even laying on a bed of ice cold. The warmer the butter, the quicker it’ll separate and not actually thicken your sauce.

Examples: reductions, pan sauces.

Notes

• On Straining: You don’t HAVE to strain. But straining is what makes the difference between a refined sauce and a rustic sauce. Coulis are strained by definition. Anything made with a roux should be strained. It’s certainly a step you can get away with skipping. But if you want your sauce to have an impact, straining packs a bigger punch than meets the eye.

• On volume: Figure about 2 oz of sauce per plate per course. If it’s a main course, do 4oz. If it’s pasta sauce, double that.

• On Thickness: Most sauces are either too thick or too thin. The best way to tell if its right is to pour some on a plate and test its surface tension. You’ll never accurately guage the viscosity of a sauce by looking at it in the pan/pot.

• On Plating: Sauce the plate and then add the protein atop the sauce. Saucing on top will turn a crispy skin soft. Obviously not the case with noodle. Hollandaise is the exception.

So the next time you’re following a recipe that involves a sauce, take a moment to read between the lines and figure out what kind of sauce it’s asking you to make. The ingredients and thickening method will almost always tell you what you need to know. And when you know the foundation of the sauce, and the thickening methods at play, you can more successfully execute the dish.

Too often, salad is an afterthought… a lazy way to add some greens and vegetables to a plate full of meat and starch. And sometimes that’s OK. 

But as a cook, salads can be incredibly exciting and full of opportunity. There’s a wide variety of vegetables, combinations and pairings of tastes and textures, spices, and techniques that can be brought to bear in composing a full meal out of a salad. 

It just takes a bit of creativity, and focus. As a cook, I find that challenging and rewarding. However there are so many options available and choices to make, it can get overwhelming. Typically I like to practice what’s called “arm’s reach cooking” — which is making something from the ingredients you have at hand. The choice is easy, because the choice is limited. 

When the choices are endless, you have to practice a little discipline. 

I was reminded of that this week, as we have our first practical exam in the culinary program coming up. The assignment — create a composed salad using one of the cold sauces we’ve learned to date (either a mayo or vinaigrette based sauce) and use at least five ingredients. 

A composed salad is basically a mixed salad with a protein or other “main” that stands out. Putting together a composed salad requires thinking of each element as a component, and thinking through what each of those components adds to the dish and how they support each other. 

Here’s how I think of it. (This isn’t an “official” list, just my thinking): 

• Greens: think leafy, raw, and somewhat bitter. Kale, arugula, spinach, or just regular old lettuce. 

• Grains: something chewy, starchy, and filling. Farro, rice, quinoa. 

• Fat: this can be a creamy sauce (mayo-based) or an element of richness from cheese or eggs to balance out the acidity if you use a vinegar-based sauce.

• Crunch: nuts, toasted breads, seeds. Something that gives a little pop of texture and flavor.

• Sweetness: fruit, honey in a sauce, even tomatoes.

• Tanginess: you can get this from your vinaigrette, or from additions like pickled garnishes, olives, anchovies.

• Raw and cooked vegetables: The raw can be your greens, or things like avocado, cucumber (which also adds crunch).

• Meat: chicken, steak, fish, shrimp, etc. (totally optional).

Now, the key to approaching something like this is to make a few, smart choices, and execute them simply. I did not do that. I got spun up in the tyranny of infinite choices and decisions, and just spiraled out of control. As I was conceptualizing what I wanted to create, I just kept adding, and adding, and adjusting, and compensating, and rationalizing. 

The result was a muddled mess of too many ingredients, lots of work, but no vision, flavor, or enjoyment. I was struggling, cooking blind… chasing a half-thought-out idea and hoping for a happy accident that never came. It wasn’t fun. And if I’ve learned anything about cooking, it’s that if I’m not having fun doing it, then I’m probably doing something wrong. 

So I threw out the entire concept and started from scratch. I did keep the original motivation though — I wanted to make a vegetable-forward dish, not a big showoff protein (chicken, salmon, etc) supported by other ingredients. I wanted the salad to be a salad. 

But I needed an anchor… one component against which the choices for all other components could be made. It’s like a forced limitation that keeps you focused and provides clarity. 

I chose carrots. Carrots are kind of like meat in that you can sear the surface, but you still need to cook the interior enough to not be raw (just not too much, or it’s overcooked). I wanted to apply the lessons I learned about heat to a vegetable, and use it like one would a protein atop the salad, sliced like you would chicken or steak. 

That’s where I started. Here’s where I ended up…

Carrots al Forno with Brussels Sprouts, Arugula, Farro, and Pancetta-Scallion Vinaigrette

Vinaigrette

Nearly half (40 of the 100 points) of the score for this test is on the vinaigrette, so stands to reason I’d sort this out first. Since I wasn’t using a protein, I needed a powerful vinaigrette that would pack a lot of flavor without being overly acidic. 

Originally I wanted to do a spicy, chimichurri style vinaigrette using the green carrot tops. But as cool as it sounded, it didn’t really taste much of anything and just didn’t work. So switched to a pancetta/scallion/shallot vinaigrette,  using the rendered fat as part of the emulsification and reserving the crispy bits as part of the garnish. 

• Cut 3-4 oz pancetta into a small dice and add to a cold pan and a drizzle of oil. Put heat on medium and let the fat slowly render and collect in the pan. Turn off heat and remove half of the crispy pancetta (reserve for later). 

• Add 2-3 sliced scallions, 1 sliced shallot, and 1 sliced chili pepper (I used a red serrano for heat and color). Stir into the still-hot fat until soft. 

• Add ¼ cup vinegar (I’m using apple cider vinegar). 

• Pour into bowl, and whisk in ½-¾ cup oil until emulsified

• Optional: add golden raisins

• Season, adjust for taste, and set aside

Farro

• Heat a 2 qt pot over medium until warm and add a drizzle of oil. 

• Add a smashed clove of garlic and cook until light brown.

• Add ½ cup raw farro and toast until fragrant (3-5 minutes) … watch the heat!

• Add a bay leaf and a cup of water (or more, depending on the farro you use). 

• Bring just to a boil, then lower to simmer, cover, and cook for 20 min. 

• Drain, remove garlic/bay and lay out on a sheet pan to allow farro to fully cool.

Brussels Sprouts

Remove just the outer leaves (not the core) of the Brussels sprouts, to get about a cup per serving. You can use these raw, or give them a blanch. If blanching, allow them to fully dry before using. Then toss the sprouts with the farro in roughly equal parts (your choice on the ratio) and toss with at least half the vinaigrette. Let it sit and soak up the dressing for a good 20-30 minutes .

Carrots

• Roast carrots whole with just a drizzle of neutral oil and salt at 400 until they start to show a little color and are a bit soft (but not fully cooked through)

• Remove and let sit until close to plating. 

• When ready, cut carrots in half lengthwise and lay in a hot carbon steel or cast iron pan to sear. 

• As they sear, cut side down, at a tablespoon each of butter and honey until melted, and baste the carrots with a spoon. 

• Turn and continue basting

• Remove to a sheet pan to cool  

Topping

• Roast and crush a handful of hazelnuts

• Chop the hazelnuts with golden raisins, orange zest, and parsley… enough for a good cup or so total

• Add the reserved crispy pancetta and wait for plating

Plating

• Toss the Brussels sprouts/farro/vinaigrette with arugula and a bit of the crunchy topping. 

• Mound above on a plate.

• Sprinkle all but a tablespoon of the rest of the topping over the salad

• Lay the honey butter based carrots over the top like you would sliced chicken 

• Drizzle with a little more of the pancetta/scallion vinaigrette if needed

• Add the rest of the topping 

• Enjoy!

Note: the photo for this post did all the above, but included a base of whipped ricotta. I decided to lose the ricotta b/c while really good, it dampened the impact of the vinaigrette. Seeing as we’re being judged on the vinaigrette (not the ricotta) it had to go. I may pipe a little of the ricotta atop the carrots instead… we’ll see.

Stop buying salad dressing. 

I bet if you pulled every jar of store-bought salad dressing from your fridge right now and read the ingredients, some kind of sugar or corn syrup is second or third one on the list. It’s overprocessed crap that’s pretty much only useful poured over a bed of salad greens. 

But a true vinaigrette is more than just salad dressing. Think of it more like a sauce that can be used to enhance not only salads, but cooked vegetable dishes, meat, fish, and more. 

Chimichurri is a vinaigrette. Pesto is a vinaigrette. Any herbed dressing is a vinaigrette. (I particularly like pouring an herbed vinaigrette over pan-seared fish with mashed potatoes.) It’s a quick, simple sauce that levels up anything you make. 

Of course first, you need to know how to make it. 

Most first-time vinaigrettes are thin, runny messes. That’s because by definition, a vinaigrette is a combination of fat and acid… literally oil and vinegar, two things that naturally don’t mix. The trick to doing it right is learning to create a proper emulsification. 

An emulsification is the process of mixing two liquids that don’t dissolve into each other. You’re dispersing one liquid into another, through force. That takes either a bit of whisking effort, or getting a blender/processor dirty, in order to break up the droplets of the liquid small enough to allow them to combine. 

Here’s something I read that helped me understand this process better:

The two liquids in an emulsion can be thought of as the container and the contained: one liquid is broken up into separate droplets, and these droplets are contained in and surrounded by the intact mass of the other liquid. 

• On Food & Cooking, McGee

In other words, one liquid is the container, and the other liquid is the one being contained. 

Usually, the container is the acid, and the oil is the contained. The tricky part about this is the ratio, typical one part acid to three parts fat… meaning that the liquid with the smaller volume (the vinegar) is asked to contain a liquid three times its volume (the oil). 

That’s why you start with the container (vinegar) first, and slowly drip in the oil. In this early stage, the vinegar container is larger in volume than the oil you’re trying to contain in it. As you slowly add the oil, the oil and vinegar begin to combine, gradually increasing the size of the container to then accept more oil. 

Once the size of the container is larger than the amount of oil you have left to add, you can pour the oil more quickly. But if you just impatiently pour in the oil from the start and hope your vigorous whisking will make up for it (like I pretty much did for years), you’ll likely wind up with a good workout but a shitty sauce. The vinegar just can’t contain all that oil. 

A few notes: 

• Mustard: Adding a thickening agent to the vinegar before pouring in the oil helps. In most cases, this is a dollop of dijon mustard. Whisking the vinegar with a little mustard thickens the vinegar container, making it more viscous, which creates more “drag” on the oil droplets being whisked in. 

• Time: A vinaigrette is really just a temporary emulsion. Given enough time, it will eventually separate and the oil and vinegar will revert back to their separate states. Which brings me to…

• Chemistry: A true emulsification is a chemical reaction, bonding molecules permanently. Emulsifications like mayonnaise use an egg yolk, which when whisked with oil in the same manner creates a more permanent bond that does not separate over time. The dijon in the vinaigrette is not an emulsifier, but rather a thickener. The amount of mustard you’d need to create a permanent emulsion would be so great that it would overpower the vinaigrette and just be another mustard sauce. 

• Too much heat will cause a vinaigrette to “break” — meaning revert back to its individual parts. So be careful when making a warm vinaigrette. 

Basic Method

• Put a tablespoon of vinegar into a bowl with a dollop of dijon mustard and salt. Whisk until combined and thick

• Vigorously whisk while slowly pouring in three tablespoons of oil until thick. 

Fancy Method

• Muddled fine-diced shallots into the vinegar with salt and let sit a few minutes to let the acid mellow the bite of the shallots (this is technically a quick pickle).

• Add dijon, and some finely chopped herbs, and even a little honey if you like

• Whisk until creamy. Then add/whisk the oil

More Notes: 

• Red vinegar is pretty standard, but champagne vinegar is a level up

• Use a neutral oil like sunflower, not olive oil. Or if you really want olive oil, make it just 25% of the total oil added, and do so at the very end. 

• Add salt to the acid before introducing the oil, as salt dissolves slower in oil. 

Once you get the basic vinaigrette down, you make all sorts of variations. Use citrus (like orange juice) as the acid, or blend in tomatoes or other pureed vegetables, or saturate it with chopped herbs (like a chimichurri or pesto), use the fat from a pan seared chicken (or bacon!) instead of oil and whisk it all right there in the pan to pour over the chicken your just seared. 

One technique/concept, many uses. And it’s the understanding of the “why” behind it that makes it all possible. 

I know what you’re thinking. Barely two months into the culinary program and he’s already become Mr. Fancypants throwing around the French. 

But, as you can imagine, we do a lot of cooking in the culinary program, which means using a lot of French terms. While I can spare you a lot of it (ie: slicing onions rather than emincé) this one is actually worth knowing. 

It’s a technique that we’ve used over and over again called étuve, and it’s already proven a game changer. 

To étuve just means steaming vegetables (or other products) in their own juices, covered, after sauteeing in fat. (Note, don’t confuse étuvé w/ étouffe. The latter means to smother — i.e.: crawfish étouffe — and is a totally different thing.) We’ve used this technique with onions and other vegetables as the start of several different applications — preparing onions for soup or sauces, making a coulis, creating a base for steamed fish — which I’ll break down in more detail below. 

But first, the actual technique. So far we’ve only étuved using vegetables, so that’s how I’ll describe it here, but you can also étuvé meats as well.  

1. Slice up your vegetables into ⅛ -¼ inch slices

2. Saute them in butter in a saute pan until just beginning to wilt but not browned

3. Lower the heat and cover with a cartouche (yes, more fancy French… more on this below)

4. Let steam, stirring occasionally, until soft

A cartouche is a lid made of parchment paper. Here’s an easy diagram on how to make one. We also cut a small hole in the center of it to let some steam escape. Cartouche just means “false lid.” Because it’s paper, you can (and should) push it down to literally touch the vegetables, unlike a regular lid that leaves plenty of air between the veggies and the top of the pan. 

The benefit of this method is that it traps the steam and blocks evaporation. As a result, the vegetables soften quicker, and with more flavor, while controlling browning. (You can totally still brown vegetables though, as you’ll see.)

What I love about this method is that it cooks vegetables without destroying them. I’ve always had a problem cooking down vegetables on the stovetop. I either brown them too quickly, resulting in a crunchy, hard bite, or I cook them so long they sort of shrivel up and lose their shape. I’ve never, ever, successfully made caramelized onions. 

But the étuvé makes this easy, and has become a critical technique to pull off multiple applications. All three listed below can be used as a powerful accent to many meals, elevating what you’re already making to “wow” status.

This kind of falls into the “cook smart not hard” category. It’s not a shortcut. Not a “secret technique.” Not a fucking “hack.” It’s science. But what’s interesting to me is that I’ve not seen étuvé referenced much in recipes. Try Googling it and you won’t get many useful results. My guess is that it’s just a chef thing that mainstream cooking sites just blow off or never learned. 

But in this program anyway, it’s one of the first things we learned, and so far anyway the technique we’ve continually used most. Here’s a few examples of what we’ve done with it… 

Onion Soup/Gravy

• Étuve 2 - 3 sliced onions 

• Remove cartouche and cook at a low temp until onions are caramelized and the bottom of the pan is browned with fond

• Add a clove of pasted garlic and cook for another minute

• Deglaze with about a third cup of wine (we used equal parts madeira, white and port, each added one at a time until dry)

• Cook down until pan is dry

• Add a tablespoon of butter. Once melted a ¼ cup flour and stir until pan is dry

• Add 4 cups chicken stock. If you have it, add a teaspoon of demiglace

• Bring to a simmer and cook for ~15 minutes. 

• Season and enjoy

As a soup, it’s a nice first course. You can probably use this as a base for French Onion soup. Or, use less stock and maybe more flour to turn this from a soup to a gravy to serve with chicken, bangers and mash, etc. 

Red Pepper Coulis

• Étuve a sliced onion in 1 tablespoon of butter until soft

• Add 2 cloves of pasted garlic and 2 - 3 julienned red peppers and continue cooking until soft

• Add another tablespoon of butter, melt, and then dust w/ flour, cooking until the pan is dry

• Add 1.5 cups chicken stock and simmer until reduced by half

• Puree in a blender and strain through a fine mesh. 

• Add another tablespoon of butter, and season to taste

As the pictures above show, this goes great with seared/roasted pork loin, or with seared scallops, among many other things (fish, eggs, whatever). 

Q: What’s the difference between a coulis and a puree? 

A: A coulis is passed through a strainer after being pureed.

Q: What’s the difference between a coulis and a sauce?

A: A coulis is a specific type of sauce, usually thinner and smoother than most and used as an accent. Sauce is a very broad category that takes multiple forms.  

Soubise (Onion Sauce)

• Étuve 2 cups sliced onions

• Put while hot into a blender. While running, add just enough heavy cream to create a puree (as thick or thin as you like. I’d go thick, and simply add more cream later to adjust). 

• Optional: strain if necessary to form a smoother sauce

• Taste and adjust seasoning as you like

You can use this as is, or spice it up w/ curry powder, garlic, or whatever. 

This sauce is great with roast or pan-seared chicken. I mean it really pops what is usually a boring weeknight dinner to a fancy French-style meal with minimal stress. 

Those are just three applications of étuvé. I’m sure it can be applied to any vegetable preparation where you want the veggies soft, but not browned or withered. But I don’t think I’d use it for dishes where you want the vegetables to retain a little bite (like ratatouille). 

Random Notes: 

• Equipment: Most of the stuff marketed to home cooks is overpriced and under functional. You’re paying for looks over function. A typical stainless steel saute pan from All Clad or other consumer brands is gonna set you back over $100. While they cook fine, their fancy-schmancy concave handles are very hard to grip properly. Meanwhile, this professional grade French saute pan is only $30, has multiple uses (saute, sauce, etc.) AND it has a nice, round, easy-to-grip handle. 

Saucing: Cover your plate with the sauce (coulis, etc.) and then place the protein/veggies on top of the sauce. Not only does it look better, but it helps retain texture (ie: crispy skin chicken becomes soggy skinned chicken if you pour sauce over it, but stays crispy with the sauce beneath).

Helping us swallow that particular pill is a vast array of easily available alternatives to making and cooking with dough ourselves. Grocery store shelves are lined with dozens of bread brands. You can find a ready-made pie crust in nearly any frozen aisle. And there are both dried and (sometimes) even fresh pasta options to choose from. 

Most of it is terrible. 

Nearly all the bread and pastry sold in U.S. supermarkets would be illegal to be labeled as such in several European countries. In fact, most of the raw flour in this country is bleached, a process that is flat out illegal in Europe. (Buy organic flour to avoid this). 

But hey, what do you expect? In Italy, food is treated with such reverence that a food historian received death threats for suggesting carbonara was first made with Gruyere cheese. Meanwhile in the U.S., we we take our best known culinary contribution to the world — the burger — and happily whore it out by serving it between two donuts. 

Grocery stores here don’t sell food. They sell products. The production and packaging of dough-based products in this country are designed from the ground up to maximize profits. The brands behind them focus on how fast can it be made, how long can it keep on shelves, and at what profit margin. 

Flavor, nutrition… these things mean nothing to either the manufacturer or the store. To the industrial food complex, you’re not an eater, you’re a consumer… a wallet, not a mouth. 

Yet we buy it up because we’ve been convinced that making dough is too hard. You’ve been fooled into thinking that bread, pastry, or pasta can only be made by practitioners of some kind of culinary dark arts whose mysteries take years of training and funny hats to master. 

But while that may hold true for making GREAT doughs, making pretty-damn-good dough is actually pretty easy. In fact, turning wheat into dough was the first real act of cooking in our evolution as a species, after cooking meat over a fire. 

I guess what I’m saying is that if our Stone Age ancestors wearing animal skins could make a loaf of bread, you and your KitchenAid and GE oven could probably sort it out too. 

It all comes down to a simple ratio of readily available and cheap ingredients.

Ratios

For this post, I’ll only dig into the ratios and basic creation of the dough itself. Each dough can be used for multiple purposes. Bread dough can be used to make boules, baguettes, even pizza dough. Pasta dough can be used to make hundreds of different pasta cuts and shapes. Pastry/Pie dough can be uesed for, well… pies, but also tarts and even savory applications like quiche.

But for the sake of length and sanity, today… just the dough. 

Bread Dough

5 parts flour : 3 parts water (plus salt and yeast).

First question you’re going to ask is “how much yeast” and I’m going to say “It depends.”

It depends on how fast you want to bake the bread. A teaspoon of yeast will cause a dough to rise far faster than a quarter teaspoon. But the one that takes longer to rise will taste better. 

Another way to look at bread dough ratios in particular is using a Baker's Percentage. Using this math, the amount of water you use will always be a percentage of the total amount of flour.

So using the ratio above, 1000 grams of flour (five units of 200 grams) and 600 grams of water (3 units of 200 grams) will result in a dough with 60% hydration, which is a good place to start.

Steps: 

• Assemble: Combine water and flour only and mix thoroughly into a ragged ball. Let sit for 30 minutes for the flour to fully absorb the moisture. This is called autolyse. (DON’T add the salt yet as it will cause the dough to tighten up and not absorb the water as much.)

• Mix: Add the yeast first and mix it in. Then the salt. I don’t like to add them at the same time b/c the salt inhibits the yeast (which is good to control the rising process, but not so good if you kill the yeast)

• Fold: Fold the dough three times, once every 20 minutes. To fold, pull the dough into a long narrow rope. Place it on your cutting board and roll one end up like a beach towel. Stretch it out again from the narrow ends and repeat. Like this…

• Let it rest for 20 minutes, and do this again. By the third fold, the dough should be smooth and less sticky/tacky. 

• Bulk Ferment: This is also referred to as the first rise. Just let it sit, covered. Again, how long depends on how much yeast you added. But you want it to double/triple in size. 

• Shape: Don’t “punch down” on the dough before shaping. Just gently tip it out of the bowl onto a lightly floured board and cut it into the sizes you need. That’s enough “degassing” needed. 

• Proof: This is called the “second rise.” Just let the bread sit in whatever shape bowl you’re using for an hour. 

Pasta Dough

2 parts egg : 3 parts flour

But… that’s only helpful if you have and use a scale (which you really should). So another rule of thumb is to START with: 1 egg to 100 grams flour = 1 serving. Just know that you’ll likely need to add a little flour as you go until it feels right.

Steps

• Mix: mound the flour onto a wooden cutting board and use an egg to create a well in the center. The width of the well should be the same as the total # of eggs you’re using (1 egg = 1 egg wide. 2 eggs = 2 eggs wide). Break the eggs into the well and scramble them with a fork, slowly incorporating the flour from the edges. 

• Fold: continue mixing until the eggs and flour create a thick batter, like pancake batter. Then use a bench scraper to cut in the flour, starting from one side only (ie: left to right). You may not need all the flour, so push away the excess flour on the opposite side from which you’re using the bench scraper. Continue until you have a very wet, shaggy ball.

• Knead: Add flour as needed just a little bit at a time and begin slowly kneading the dough. The outside will feel dry and soft, but the inside may feel a bit tacky/sticky. Resist the urge to add more flour and simply knead for about 5 minutes until the tackiness is gone and the dough is dry but soft. 

• Wrap in foil and let it rest for at least 30 minutes. 

Pastry Dough

3 parts flour : 2 parts butter : 1 part water

Both the flour and the butter have to be COLD.

Steps:

• Sheeting: Add cubed cold butter into flour and “sheet” the butter into the flour with your fingers. You’re kind of snapping your fingers with the butter into the flour so the turn into thin “sheets” of butter covered in flour. 

• Water: add the cold water and stir into a mass. Reserve a little water and only add it you feel necessary. 

• Fold: Don’t knead. Gently fold the dough into layers until it’s all come together. The dough should stick together if squeezed into a ball, but also break in half easily if pulled apart.

• Form a round disc, wrap, and let sit in the fridge for at least 30 minutes or until ready to roll/use. 

Notes

• Scales: Get a kitchen scale that can measure in both U.S. and metric units. While the weight-to-volume ratio is constant with liquids (“a pint is a pound the whole world round”) flour and other solids are not. 

• Yeast: There are different types of yeast, the most common are Active Dry vs. Instant Yeast. Active Dry is a coated yeast that needs to be “activated” by mixing it with water. Instant Yeast is not coated, and can be added directly to the flour as part of the mixing process. I exclusively use Instant Yeast. 

• Flour: The difference between Bread Flour, All Purpose (AP) Flour, and 00 flour comes down to protein percentage (and how fine it's ground). The higher the protein content, the tougher (or sturdier) the dough. I use all three, for different things. It’s worth having all in your pantry, so long as the’re organic. It’s one of the few times when organic options actually matter.  

Now, these ratios of course are only the start. You may want to use a book/recipe/video for the granular details to turn the dough into something to eat. 

But honestly don’t sweat it too much at first. You are almost certainly going to make a lot of mistakes your first few times. It won’t be perfect. But it’ll be edible.

My point here is that these are cheap and readily available ingredients – flour, butter, eggs, salt, yeast.  Once you realize that even “wrong” dough is still pretty good, THEN you can work on it with your favorite book or video.

Just try it. These are cheap ingredients. You’re not even losing time, because time spent learning from mistakes is the most productive time you can spend. 

Last week I wrote about Heat, which was really just shorthand for the different cooking methods used to apply heat to food.

So it seems logical to follow up by focusing on one of the few ingredients that you can apply every cooking method to — the humble egg. Of course it helps that class this week focused on eggs and the many ways they are applied in cooking.

If you want to practice your different cooking methods, there’s really no better place to start than with eggs. They can be scrambled, poached, fried, boiled, baked, sous vide, cured and even fermented in over 100 different ways. They can be used as a binder in meats (meatloaf), an emulsifier in sauces (hollandaise, mayonnaise, carbonara), a thickening agent for custards and fillings (pastry cream, quiche, cheesecake), a clarifier of soups and even wine (consommé, broth, stock), and a leavening agent (souffles, cakes, meringues).

What’s more, they’re relatively cheap, can be stored for a long time, and are remarkably consistent in portions (1 standard large egg = 2 oz, with the shell contributing .5 oz, the yolk another .5, and 1 oz for the whites).

When you think about it, hiding beneath that plain, unassuming eggshell is a culinary superhero with a wide range of powers. Honestly I don’t know how vegans get through the day. 

In fact, the fundamental role eggs play in the culinary arts is encoded in the classic French toque – the tall, white, pleated hat that chefs traditionally wore (and in many cases still do). There are 101 pleats in the classic toque, said to represent the 101 different ways to cook an egg by itself, let alone all the ways eggs are included in other dishes. 

Egg Components

Take away the shell and you have two very different but equally useful components — the white and the yolk. 

The White

Also called albumen, egg whites contain most of an egg’s protein, but are 90% water. The role of proteins in cooking is to coagulate. The definition of coagulate is to thicken or become solid/semi-solid. As such, egg whites alone are used to create structure (think meringues), preventing crystallization in frozen preparations (like ice cream), and act as a leavening agent (souffles and cakes).  

The Yolk

Yolks contain the egg’s fat (specifically a yolk is 50% water, 32% fat, 16% protein). Fat’s role in cooking is to provide flavor, but also to emulsify (meaning combining 2 or more ingredients together). That’s why yolks are used to bind, but also seal (prevent steaming), add color, and of course enrich. 

In short, whites = firmness / yolks = creaminess. If I were to dig into every application of each of these here, this would be a very loooong post indeed. (There’s an entire chapter dedicated to eggs in the textbook “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of The Kitchen” and it's 50 pages.) 

Instead, let’s talk about that omelette…

Application: French Omelette

First, a few quick notes on what’s going on when you make an omelette. 

• Mixing: Beating the eggs into a foam encourages the fat (yolk) and protein (white) to bond, thereby extracting both their attributes (firm, yet creamy).

• Heating: Remember the egg is mostly water. Applying heat coagulates the proteins and causes them to firm up (curds). But you want moist and creamy, not firm and rubbery. So your options are hot and fast, or low and slow. 

• Time and Heat: Scrambled eggs should be cooked low and slow with constant stirring so no “skin” forms. Omelettes are the opposite. You want a firm (but not thick) skin to contain the soft eggs inside. So they’re cooked at a high heat very quickly with near constant stirring in order to create a thin but colorless skin. (The word “omelette” actually comes from the latin lamella which means “thin plate”).

There are different types of omelettes. 

• American Omelette: whisked eggs cooked in a pan, with fillings added on top (vegetables, meats, and way too much cheese) and then the cooked egg base folded over the top. Typically a bit brown (read: overcooked).

• Frittata: Filings cooked in a pan into which whisked eggs are poured to fill in at a 50/50 ratio, and finished in the oven. 

• French: see below…

The French Omelette in my opinion is the one to master. Not only does it taste the best, but it takes the most skill and is the least forgiving to error. It’s why chefs used to be evaluated by their ability to make a French omelette. It’s the ultimate test of manipulating heat with control, finesse, and accuracy.

Your goal here is a thin, colorless outer layer of lightly set eggs that, when rolled or folded, contain soft/curdy scrambled eggs inside.

Below is an outline of how we were taught to make a French omelette in class. But let me be very clear… I’m no expert. I was pleasantly surprised to have largely succeeded on my first try in class, but have yet to replicate it either on subsequent attempts in class, let alone at home.

This is the kind of thing you’ll need to practice again and again. The result is either perfect, or wrong. There’s no fixing it when things go sideways. It’s either live with the result, or start again.

Process:

First assemble your mise en place. That means having anything you expect to put inside the omelette or use to cook it in arms reach. Typically that’s shredded cheese and minced herbs. Any vegetables should be cooked beforehand and ready to add immediately. (Note: the vast bulk of a French omelette should be the egg, so keep your ratio of filling to egg low.) Once you start cooking, things will happen fast, so you’re going to want everything at the ready.

Process: 

• Whisk 2 - 3 eggs with a pinch of salt until they are completely combined. I mean completely. There should be no distinction between egg and white, and the mixture should be a bit frothy and bubbly on top. Figure about 2-3 minutes of continuous whisking (really). 

• Put a tab of butter in a cold 6 - 8 inch nonstick pan and turn the heat on to high. (If your home stove is slow to heat up, you can experiment with heating the pan first).

• The butter will first melt, and then begin to froth. These bubbles are the result of water evaporating out of the butter. Wait until no new bubbles are formed (it’s ok for old bubbles to remain) and then pour in the egg mixture. 

• Using a rubber spatula, immediately start stirring the eggs, starting around the edge of the pan in a circle, then push through the center when the spatula meets where you started. Repeat. 

• As the eggs start to form curds, continue the stirring process and also shake the bottom of the pad a bit to keep things loose and spread across the base of the pan. Lift the pan off the heat if necessary. But keep things moving. 

• You’re looking for the eggs to form small, soft, moist curds, but no loose liquid. Think glistening but not wet. Then turn off the heat, stop stirring and add your filling. 

• Now, tip the pan to one side, and using gravity as an aid, use the spatula to roll the top edge of the egg over the middle of the pan, over the filling. Then roll again over to the bottom edge of the egg and again over onto a plate. 

Done right, there will be no color on the egg at all (ie: no browning from the heat). The outside of the omelette will be perfectly smooth and intact, just firm enough to contain the creamy interior. Once on the plate, sprinkle with chopped herbs. (If you want to be really slick, first rub the top of the omelette with a little butter to create a glistening glaze). 

The whole process will take maybe 2 minutes, and the margin of error between perfectly cooked and overdone is a matter of seconds. You will likely not get it right the first time, or the next. But hey… if the result is not a perfect French omelette you still get to eat pretty good scrambled eggs. 

See below for my attempt. Or put more accurately, the best of the three attempts that I filmed (and it still fell short of the goal). If you look closely, you’ll see the outer skin is kind of wrinkly, not smooth like it was in class.

I’ve since bought a huge carton of cheap eggs (as well as a new non-stick pan and rubber spatula… because clearly it’s the equipment’s fault) and plan to practice a few each day until I’m getting it right on around ever other attempt.

Have fun!

For something so basic, so fundamental to the process of cooking, the application of heat is wildly misunderstood. As a result, most food cooked at home is mostly commonly either overdone, underdone, or at best uneven, but rarely cooked to perfection. 

There’s plenty of blame to go around on this. Recipes in books and online are a big part of the problem. They commonly offer cooking directions using overly simplistic terms — “cook this or that at this temperature for this period of time.” 

But ask a professional chef how long to cook something and you’ll get a deceivingly simple answer — “until it’s done.”

Few home cooks have developed the understanding or confidence to tell when “it’s done.” And we’re partly to blame as well. When blindly following a recipe, we’re just doing what it says (ie: roasting chicken in a 375-degree oven for 1.5 hours) without thinking about what’s actually happening to the food along the way. 

Instead of educating ourselves, we’ve demanded simple algorithms in lieu of actually understanding what the application of heat is doing to whatever it is we’re cooking. 

Complicating our understanding of heat is the fact that heat can be applied in many ways. There’s wet heat (boiling, simmering, blanching, poaching, steaming, braising, and stewing) and dry heat (roasting, baking, grilling, broiling, griddling, frying, sautéing, smoking). Each cooking method has a different effect on whatever food you’re preparing. 

But a common concept that applies to all methods is an understanding of how much heat to apply, for how long, and to what end. In short… cause and effect. 

Across all cooking methods, there are only three types of heat you need to focus on — high heat, low heat, and no heat. 

• High heat typically causes a fast reaction of some sort (browning meat or blanching vegetables). 400 degrees or higher

• Low heat more slowly “cooks” the food from raw to edible. 325 degrees or lower.

• No heat is the process of letting the food rest as needed. 

Forget medium. Medium means you’re either not using high enough heat when high heat is required, or too high a heat when low heat is required. Medium is the kind of middle-of-the-road, safe-but-ineffective bullshit that’s been fed to home cooks for years. Be bold! Go big or go home!

To best explore these concepts fully, let’s focus on a simple weeknight dish that uses a combination of several cooking methods and heat levels — pan roasted chicken marsala with mashed potatoes. 

Chicken

For this version, I use skin-on chicken breasts, with or without the wing joint attached (aka: frenched or airline chicken breast). You can buy these pieces already packaged in the store, or break down a whole chicken yourself. 

Let the breasts sit out until they reach room temperature (about 2 hours). 

• Why: Cold chicken from the fridge reacts more slowly to the application of heat. 

Pat breasts dry and salt.

• Why: Salt will draw water out of the chicken skin, which will result in crispier skin

Put a carbon or stainless steel skillet big enough to hold all your chicken breasts without crowding them over a high heat. Preheat your oven to 325. Take out a sheet pan large enough to hold all your chicken, with a rack inserted. 

When the air around the pan is sort of shimmering like a hot sidewalk, it’s hot. Add just enough neutral oil (I use sunflower oil) to coat the bottom of the pan without pooling. 

• Why: Heat opens the pores of the metal, which the oil then fills, creating a more non-stick surface. 

Pat dry the chicken breasts one more time to remove any moisture pulled out by the salt. 

Place chicken breasts skin side down to the hot pat and press down hard on each for about a minute. 

• Why: Pressing the skin hard against the hot pan will push out any air bubbles created by the hot oil bubbling up against the flesh. If you use your hands, you’ll actually feel this happening. This will create a more even sear.

Leave it alone and let the chicken sear skin side down until you see the edges of the skin start to brown. Only then is it OK to take a peek. You want a very dark brown sear, but not black. 

• Why: Searing creates a flavorful crust. And while it doesn’t exactly “seal in the juices” it does fill the meat’s pores with fat which minimizes the release of moisture. But only if it’s seared at a really high heat in order for this browning crust to develop fast and violently. 

Once the skin is browned, flip and sear the non-skin side. No need to press down this time.

• Why: There’s already enough fat in the pan, and the pan is now at a slightly lower temperature from the meat, so you won’t get the same bubbling reaction. Press again w/ your hands if you want, and notice how the bubbling effect of the skin side is no longer present. 

Once browned, remove the chicken to the sheet pan with rack and place into the preheated oven at 325. Let roast until internal temperature is 165. 

• Why: While the high heat of the pan seared the outside skin of the chicken, the inside is still pretty much raw. Roasting at a low heat will allow the interior to cook more gently and evenly, without overcooking the seared outside flesh (which will just gently crisp up nicely instead). Also, lower heat provides more flexibility in cooking time (see note below). 

A note on time: Since chicken breasts come in different sizes, and how long you seared them will differ, it’s impossible to give a set time for the slow roasting. As a rough guide, let breasts sit in the oven for 10-15 minutes before checking the temp w/ an instant read thermometer. Better yet, get a probe thermometer that allows you to monitor the temp remotely until it reaches your target. 

Once the temp is reached, removed the entire rack/pan the chicken is in and let it rest. It’s OK to let it rest on the same rack it was cooked in. How long? Half the time that it was cooked for. 

• Why: Meat is a protein, and proteins seize up when heated. It’s this seizing that presses out juices and fat. Cutting it straight from the oven when the protein is still tight will push out all its moisture. What’s more the meat will chew tough. Resting allows the temp to come down, and the proteins to relax, resulting in a moister and more tender meat. 

Sauce

Using the same pan you seared the chicken in (no need to clean), add a bit more neutral oil to coat the pan. Once about to smoke, add chopped mushrooms. Don’t add salt. Let them sear until they expel all their water and begin to brown slightly.

• Why: mushrooms are full of moisture. They’re basically sponges. Unlike the meat, you want the heat to push all this moisture out first before you add any additional flavors, liquid, etc. Nobody likes soggy mushrooms. 

Once the mushrooms begin to brown, add small diced shallots, pasted garlic, and thyme leaves. Add a little more oil if necessary (for both fat/flavor and to cool off the pan a bit if needed). Once shallots are translucent, add a little flour and stir until pan is dry and vegetables are coated. 

• Why: Adding shallots/garlic after the mushrooms avoid burning them in the hot pan needed to expel the mushroom’s moisture. Adding flour keeps the vegetables from burning and will help thicken the sauce in the next step. 

Add 1 cup marsala wine (madeira works too) and 1 cup chicken stock. Turn heat down to a rapid simmer and reduce by half. You want a silky, unctuous consistency here, not a thin/watery sauce. 

• Simmering rather than boiling retains the flavor of the vegetables. Boiling will just evaporate everything. 

Mashed Potatoes

Cover potatoes (whole or chopped into 2+ inch chunks as you prefer or as needed based on the size of the potatoes) with no more than an inch of water and heat until a low simmer (190 - 200 degrees). Don’t boil. 

• Why: Potatoes are dense. Boiling them will cook the outside faster than the inside, resulting in a mushy exterior by the time the interior is cooked. The lower heat of the simmer will cook the large potatoes more evenly, much like the lower heat of the oven cooks the chicken more evenly. 

Once you can stick a fork or toothpick into the center of the potatoes without resistance, they’re done. Drain and either mash or rice potatoes into the same hot pot as you simmered them in, adding butter and milk/cream as needed to reach the consistency you like. 

Serve: mound the mashed potatoes on a plate and push down on the center to create a crater. Slice the rested chicken breasts into three pieces at an angle. Place desired number of pieces of chicken in the cratered potatoes and top with the sauce. 

Enjoy!

A few random notes: 

• You can do the same sear-roast method with an herbed pork loin, only roll the loin in the herbs after searing (before roasting) to avoid burning off the herbs. 

• You can simply roast a whole chicken without pan searing but getting the same effect by first roasting the whole bird on high (425) until fully browned (about 30 minutes) then turning down to low (325) until internal temp reaches 165 (about an hour). 

• I haven’t tried this yet, but you can even try roasting either chicken or pork in the oven by starting it at 500 degrees until browned, and then simply turning off the oven and leaving the meat inside until the oven is cooled. Whole thing should take about 90 minutes and result is a perfectly cooked/rested dish. 

Finally, take the time to test out where the hot and cold spots are in your oven (like the photo at the top of this post). Place sheet pans of vegetables in different spots (lower/middle/top racks, right to left) and roast them at the same temp for the same time. Do any brown more or faster? Slower? Do the same for your grill. Adjust accordingly.

This was a humbling week.

Remember, the current format of this blog is to chronicle my weekly culinary school classes. And at the moment, those classes are focusing very much on the fundamentals.

By fundamentals, I mean first steps, and the first steps of anything are the most critical. They’re often where the line between success and failure is found. So it’s no accident that the first steps taught in culinary school are the same first steps taken when cooking a meal — knife skills.

Let’s pull that thread a bit…

If you improperly cut your ingredients before cooking them, odds are you’ll wind up with a result other than what you expected. And if you cut your ingredients wrong, the likely culprit is in how you prepared your ingredients for cutting in the first place.

For most of us home cooks, dicing to a degree of accuracy is good enough. Roughly the same size/shape serves our purpose. But I didn’t invest thousands of dollars in culinary school to be just good enough. 

With any pursuit of mastery, the key to reaching next-level ability usually starts somewhere in the mundane beginnings… the foundational steps that most overlook or ignore for want of getting to “the good stuff.” 

So taking the time to cut a few pounds of perfect quarter-inch diced carrots is what separates the good enough from the perfect. And this is a blog about the perfect.

Let me back up…

Our task this week was to learn and practice the most common knife cuts, listed below (roughly in order of size):

• Fine Brunoise: 1/16 cube

• Brunoise: 1/8 cube

• Small Dice: 1/4 cube

• Medium Dice: 1/2 cube

• Large Dice: 3/4 cube

• Julienne: 1/8 x 1/8 x 2” matchsticks

• Batonnets: 2” sticks of the size dice to prepare (ie: ¼ vs ½)

• Eminee: 1/8 slice of onion half cut down the equator (ie: sliced)

• Supreme: pithless, seedless section of citrus. 

• Concasse: small diced, peeled, seeded tomato

• Chiffonade: ribbons of herb. Literally “made of rags”

Our first task was to small dice carrots, onions, and celery. Small dice again is a quarter inch. Now, dicing vegetables takes several steps. First, you “square off” the product, which means cutting it into flat, pieces that can be cut without rolling. From there, depending on the vegetable, you cut it into batonnets, basically “sticks” the height of the final dice (i.e.: ¼ or ½ inch). These batonnets you then cut into the cube of the final dice. 

Here’s a pretty good source of how-to videos for basic knife skills and cutting. If you wondering why I’m not making videos myself: 

1. I don’t have the gear 

2. I don’t have the talent (I’m still just a student, remember?)

3. There’s already plenty of knife skills content out there, I don’t need to pile on that heap, so I’d rather just point you to the better ones rather than leave to you sort through a load of clickbait Google results.

In this, I fell far short. I thought I was good at knife skills. Knife skills was the first cooking class I ever took 20 years ago, and for nearly 20 years it was the only class I ever took until recently.

But this week I learned that there’s a big difference between conceptually knowing how to dice and onion, vs doing it with precision and consistency. Remember those words — Precision and Consistency. 

Getting the fundamentals right is critical to learning anything new. But it’s also just as critical when trying to improve something you already have some experience in. In fact it’s harder.

When I was a ski instructor, it was always easier to teach total beginners because you could build those fundamentals from scratch. Trying to teach intermediate skiers advanced techniques was much harder, usually because they had years worth of bad habits ingrained as muscle memory that needed to be broken down and rebuild.

This week, I was that intermediate skier riddled with bad habits. My quarter inch dice was closer to half-inch dice and everywhere between, even using a Culinary Ruler the whole time to check my proportions. And even though I made a point of trying to cut smaller, I just kept on fucking it up, over and over again. 

So the next day, I spent some time at home working on carrots, and had a revelation. I discovered my error wasn’t so much in the final dicing, but in the initial steps of preparing the product for dicing where I went wrong — the initial batonnet. They were too big, which caused a cascade of mistakes in every step after.

Determined to train my eyes to recognize what a quarter inch cube looked like by sight, I spent an hour or so focused on making perfect batonnets before proceeding with the rest of the dice.

I even pushed each batonnet through the quarter inch hole in my Culinary Ruler, and re-cut them to fit when necessary (which at first was nearly every one… there were a lot of F-bombs in the house that day). 

Once I had a pile of correctly sized batonnets, I started to get an eye for what the size looked like, and the batonnets started passing through the ¼-inch cube hole with ease. From there, cutting them into the correct sized cubes was easy. 

Why would I do this? Besides it being on our practical test in a few weeks, there are several reasons why taking the time to learn good knife skills is important:

• Safety: Knives are sharp and meant to cut things. Preferably not you. 

• Uniformity: The size of your food affects the time it takes to cook, so uniformity of size = uniformity of cooking time. 

• Efficiency: Read: speed. That doesn’t necessarily mean fast slices, but efficient methods of cutting that even when performed slowly is quicker than rapidly hacking away. 

• Presentation: Looks like you know what you’re doing. 

During class, Chef Zach added another interesting reason that got me thinking… professional pride. I didn’t take that as arrogance, but rather of a sign of care and dedication. Cutting and prepping ingredients well is the mark of a good chef. We can all cut. Some of us can even cut fast. But cutting precisely with consistency AND fast is what separates the great from the good. 

The Takeaway:

Practice with precision, not speed. It’s like learning how to pronounce a new, long, complicated word… you sort of have to sound out each syllable and get the right before you try to combine it into something understandable.

Take an hour just to dice up a few quarts worth of Mirepoix (onions, carrots, celery) and save it for a future use. Think of it as meal prep. Diced ‘Poix will keep for weeks in the fridge (just keep the onions separate). Or you can give it a quick saute and then freeze it. Or you can caramelize it real soft and save it almost like a paste (which keeps for months). 

See below for a practical application. But first… the hail of bullets: 

A note on types of knives: 

• Chef Knife: the 12” workhorse is the main kitchen tool you’ll use

• Boning Knife: great for breaking down and carving chicken, fish, etc. (I mean… gamechanger). 

• Serrated: only for cutting bread and cakes. Not for tomatoes! 

• Paring: a mini version of the chef knife good for detailed work (Supremes for instance)

• Cleaver (optional): good for cutting through large, thick vegetables like butternut squash. Plus they look fucking cool. 

Anything else is a waste of space/money

A note on sharpening: 

• Keep your knives sharp! Skip the motored knife sharpeners and get a whetstone, then learn how to use it. Another good option is the laser-guided knife sharpening machine that hardware stores like Ace have started offering. Get it done every few months.

• Use a honing steel. This doesn’t sharpen the knife, but rather straightens it. A quick 5-6 swipes on each side of the knife before EVERY use and you’r knife will stay sharp longer. 

A note on cutting boards: 

• Wood it best for most cutting. I like Boos. Be sure to keep it oiled, etc. per instructions so it doesn’t warp. Buy one larger than you think you’ll need… you’ll be happier for it. 

• Plastic is good for breaking down raw chicken, fish, meat. Again… go bigger and thicker. 

Application: Ratatouille

This is a great way to practice lots of different knife cuts and get a meal out of it in the end. 

We’re not talking about the ratatouille you saw the rat make in the movie. Technically that’s a tian, and you’d likely use a mandoline for that. 

This is the original, rustic ratatouille that originated in France from farmers throwing whatever leftover product they didn’t sell at market into a communal pot.

Technique wise, it involves cutting different types of vegetables into different sizes, and cooking each individually so they maintain their individual flavors and texture. The tomatoes added as the last step simply marries all the flavors together as a sort of base. 

It makes a highly versatile side dish for chicken or fish, or as a main served over rice if you like. It can be served hot, or cold, and it keeps for days (in fact, likely even better the day after made). 

Ingredients:

• ¼ inch dice ‘poix (about 2 cups total)

• ¾ inch dice eggplant (about a pound)

• ½ inch dice squash (about a pound)

• ¼ inch dice bell pepper (2 cups)

• 1.5 cup concasse tomato (see note)

• 3 garlic cloves, ground into paste (DON’T use a garlic press!)

• 2 tbl Chiffonade basil

(Note: It’s January, and I never buy tomatoes in winter b/c they suck. So knife skills aside, it’s likely better to use quality canned diced tomatoes instead this time of year). 

Process: 

• In a large dutch oven, saute the eggplant first in plenty of oil over high heat (eggplant sucks up oil like mushrooms. Use twice as much as you would for other vegetables). Don’t salt (same reason). Remove once browned and slightly soft.

• Add squash, brown and lightly salt. Remove when soft. 

• Add bell pepper, same as above. Remove

• Add ‘poix. Salt and sweat until soft

• Add all the previously browned ingredients back to the post w the ‘poix, stir to combine, then add tomatoes and stir to combine again, being sure to scrape up browned bits (fond) from the bottom of the pot. 

• Add pasted garlic. Stir. Taste and season as necessary. 

• Add basil. Stir. 

• Serve or store

The entire process — cutting to cooking — took me about an hour. I next want to explore making one using winter vegetables to stay seasonal, but that’s another post.

Until next week…