If the past several years of the pontifications of many food writers are to be believed, the best foods are also the leanest. And if you can’t get beautiful, uniform, pristine, fatless pork, you are in some way unworthy of being considered a real cook. But fat is flavor, and don’t let anyone tell you [...]
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I bought this silly looking, and even sillier named, kitchen gadget because I chop a lot of garlic and this seemed to be just the thing for the garlic junkie in me. It works pretty well, but I use it only when I need more than one clove. It’s easy to use, although I find [...]
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As I may have mentioned, I like steak. And pulled pork. And sausage. And roasted beef marrow. And cheese. And butter. Oh, I’ll admit it; I like fat. But as many of us must eventually admit, my waistline and coronary arteries are less enamored than my taste buds of those luscious lipids. Besides, there are [...]
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I am a fan of big, bold flavors in my food and grand gestures in the kitchen to match. A blazing hot pan, a 3-inch ribeye, big lobsters, 500-degree ovens, triple-cream cheeses…I could go on and on. There is something exciting about seeing a huge hunk of meat, not too many cuts removed from primal, [...]
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One of the things that frustrates me when I try new recipes is the almost universal inability on the part of most cooking editors to gauge correctly the time it takes to complete certain steps in a recipe. I’m not talking about baking a cake, or roasting a chicken; they seem to be able to [...]
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As you no doubt know by now — and probably are sick to death of hearing — I like duck. But my attempts at brining the little critters did not do them justice, so I decided to try just once more. The problem with brining is that there are many variations, most of which will [...]
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No, I’m not running out of things to write; I just really like duck, and I roasted one today. But a few weeks ago, I left the whole brining question with a vague sense that I hadn’t quite beaten it to death. So, with apologies to William Shakespeare, once more into the brine, dear friends.
I’ll [...]
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One of the things I find irritating about most cook books is the insistence upon using subjective measures rather than weight. For instance, I made onion soup over the weekend. Nothing special about that, but I used the Balthazar Cookbook, so I should get credit for choosing well. Anyway, the recipe called for four [...]
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And it was fun too! The end result was a nicely crisped chicken, with absolutely spectacular roasted potatoes and carrots (yeah, I caved and added something healthy). I cleverly used duck fat instead of oil, because I have a pint of the stuff from my Thanksgiving multiple-duck-roasting™. Duck fat has a fairly high smoke point, [...]
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Not of lemon, but of technique. Recently, I watched our chef friend cook a chicken, and I thought that I could steal and then modify his method. Not really, because he roasted it whole, then carved it into pieces and continued roasting, and he knew when each piece was done without the benefit of a [...]
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