My usual technique was to beat the eggs with salt (and maybe a touch of milk) and cook them immediately. The other day I got distracted and the salted, beaten eggs sat for about 30 minutes before they went in the pan. They were unusually good! So I did some research and turns out I was not imagining it.
When eggs beaten with salt sit for a while, the salt causes some physical changes. You can see this in their color–after sitting, the salted eggs take on a deeper, richer yellow color. It also leads to particularly moist and tender curds when cooked. Beating in the salt just before cooking gives fine results too, just not quite as fine! And adding salt near the end of cooking gives tougher curds that may be watery. So, salt early when you can!
Sure, it’s easy to throw cooked potatoes, milk, butter, etc. into your stand mixer and whip them up. In fact, some people ever refer to whipped potatoes! But this is actually the worst way to do it. You see, potatoes contain tiny starch granules, and if they stay intact they do no harm. But if they are burst by the mechanical action of a mixer, they make the potatoes gummy. Mashed spuds should be fluffy, and gummy is yucky! So, what to do? Fortunately you have several options.
The hand masher is the old stand-by, preferably the kind that has a plate with holes rather than a serpentine wire. The result with this will not be perfectly smooth but that’s OK with a lot of people, myself included.
A ricer works really well. This is essentially a huge garlic press with a piston that forces the potato thru a perforated plate. A food mill does much the same thing, using a rotating blade in place of a piston. They both have uses other than making mashed potatoes.
Some folks think that letting a steak sit out at room temperature for 30-60 minutes before cooking leads to better results. The reasoning is that bringing a cold steak up to room temperature results in more even cooking and a better crust. It just ain’t so. For one thing, the steak warms up very little during this time. And even if you let it sit out a lot longer it does not, in tests, make any noticeable difference in the results.
So take your steak out of the fridge ahead of time if you wish–it does no harm–but if you forget, fret not.
It seems to be a common belief that once frozen meat has been thawed, freezing it again is unsafe. This is false. There may be some loss of quality and texture, but the refrozen meat will be perfectly safe. This is of course assuming you always follow the usual precautions regarding meat while the meat is thawed.
For years I have made hard-cooked eggs by putting them in a pan covered with cold water, bringing to the boil, then covering and letting sit off the heat for 20 minutes. The eggs cooked fine but they were sometimes very difficult to peel, particularly as I always use very fresh eggs from the farmers market. The problem was that the thin membrane just under the shall would sometimes stick to the egg white like glue. I recently found out that the problem with this technique is the relatively slow heating of the egg, which encourages that membrane to stick to the white. In contrast, rapid heating lessens the sticking, so putting the eggs into already boiling water is better from the peeling standpoint. But boiling like that can cause cracking because the eggs bounce around, so better yet is to steam the eggs.
Bring 1 inch of water to a boil in a saucepan. Put the eggs in a steamer basket and lower into the pan, then cover. Steam for 13 minutes then cool as peel as usual. I think you’ll appreciate the difference!
I wince to hear some people, including a lot of people who should know better, use the term “deboning” to refer to removing the bones from a fish, chicken, or whatever. Do you “depeel” a banana, “descale” a fish, or “dehusk” a coconut? No, duh. The correct term is simply “boning” – the “de” prefix is an unneeded and incorrect prefix. This may sound like “grammar nanny” crap, but why speak like an ignoramus if you don’t have to?
If only it were so! Salt is an essential ingredient in so many dishes, that’s just the way human taste works—we like salt (but not too much). With too little salt, savory dishes just taste flat and uninteresting. But over-salted – blech!
The problem is that all salt is not the same. Some salt is saltier than others when measured by volume, strange as that sounds. This is because different salts have different size crystals, and smaller crystals pack tighter than larger ones. So, a tablespoon of standard table salt (the stuff in the cylindrical container) weighs more than a TB of Morton kosher salt, which has larger crystals. And a TB of Diamond Crystal kosher salt weighs less than the Morton’s. It’s the weight that matters, of course. Sea salts vary because they are all different. So, here’s a guide to equivalents:
1 TB standard table salt equals:
1 TB + 1 scant teaspoon Morton kosher salt equals:
1 TB plus 2 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt.
So what do you do when following a recipe? Some just specify “salt” while other specify “kosher salt” without saying which brand (and I am sure there are other brands I have not tried). It’s best to play it safe and undersalt—you can always add more but it is deucedly difficult to take it back! For dishes that are difficult or impossible to salt later, such as terrines, sausages, and meatloaf, it’s worth the trouble to cook a TB or so of the mixture to taste for seasoning before completing the process, and then adding salt if needed.
Both the terms “stock” and “broth” refer to a flavorful, savory liquid made by simmering ingredients in water for a long time until all of the flavor is extracted, then straining and discarding the solids. Meat is usually part of the recipe, but not always. Some people will insist that the two are different. Stock is made with bones, they say, and broth is not. Broth is for drinking, they claim, and stock is for cooking. It’s true that some cookbook authors make these claims, but they are not consistent–what one famous chef says is stock is another chef’s broth. Let’s face it–who cares? Good stock/broth is essential to many kinds of cooking. Bad stock/broth should be fed to the pigs.
This seems to make sense, right – I mean, fresh is always better than canned. Or is it? It turns out that canned tomatoes often beat out fresh for making sauce. There are several reasons for this:
- The makers of canned tomatoes can grow multiple varieties with different taste characteristics and blend them for an ideal taste profile in their product.
- The tomatoes are grown for canning near the processing plant, so they can be left on the vine until ideally ripe and at the peak of flavor – no need to account for transport time.
- The tomatoes do not have to be bred to transport well or to look pretty on the shelf in the market. As long as they taste good, they can be delicate and ugly.
This is not to say you can’t make great sauce from fresh tomatoes–of course you can, but only if you have the ideal locally grown and perfectly ripe tomatoes. My point is that you should not dismissed canned tomato products just because they are processed. And, you do not have to buy the super-expensive imported and/or organic varieties. In fact, one of the US’s major brands beat all of those out in a taste test held by a notoriously fussy cooking magazine.
Here’s an interesting Mark Bittman article on this topic:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/not-all-industrial-food-is-evil
