"Reluctant Gourmet" - 5 new articles
How To Line A Pie PanYesterday I wrote a post called Pie Crust - Store Bought or Home Made that showed you how to make a scrumptious flaky pie crust at home and today I’m going to explain how to line a pie pan with it. How to Line a Pie Pan
To line a pie pan, remove the rolled crust from the refrigerator or freezer and let sit on the counter, wrapped, until pliable. Carefully peel off one of the pieces of parchment paper. Center the dough, on the pie plate, and peel off the remaining piece of parchment. The dough will probably still be a little stiff. Let it sit on the pie plate until the center of the crust starts to “slump” down into the pan. At this point, it should be soft enough to manipulate. Lift an edge of the crust and ease it down into the pie plate. Try not to stretch the dough, or it will be more likely to shrink in the oven. Using a piece of leftover dough, gently press the dough into the edges of the pan. Trim any ragged edges about ½” larger than the rim of the pie plate. Fold the ½” under to make a smooth edge, and then crimp. I find that crimping with a fork is easiest - just press down gently all around the edge with the tines. Dock the dough using a small paring knife. Poke a lot of little holes in the bottom of the crust and up the sides. This will help keep the crust from bubbling up in the oven.
Crumple a piece of parchment into a little ball. Then, uncrumple it and use it to line the frozen crust. Fill the parchment with with dried beans or pie weights, if you have them. Bake in a 350° F. oven until the edges of the crust are set and no longer shiny. Take the crust out of the oven. Carefully remove the parchment and beans/weights. Brush the bottom of the crust and up the sides with a thin layer of well beaten egg. This is an egg wash. If you are filling the crust with a filling that requires further baking, return the crust to the oven until the crust is no longer shiny and the egg is dry. Don’t let the dough color much, if at all. This is called parbaking. The dried egg acts as a kind of shellac and will help to keep the crust from getting soggy. If you are filling the crust with a filling that needs no further baking, continue to bake the crust until it is deep golden brown. You might need to cover the edges of the crust with some foil to prevent over-browning. That’s it. Easy and much less expensive than store bought pie crusts and without the extra “stuff”. Related Topics Pie Crust - Store Bought or Home MadeHow to Make Pie Crust at Home
My wife makes a fantastic apple pie. She is really good at it and can put together a perfect apple pie in about fifteen minutes. She uses commercial pie crust found in the refrigerator section of the supermarket, and feels no guilt about it at all. Being a full time working mom with very little extra free time for baking on the weekends and staring at a basket of gorgeous apples from the farmer’s co-op, she doesn’t mind a shortcut. But does she really need a shortcut when it comes to pie crust? Store bought pie crust (which can be frozen by the way) is certainly convenient, and if my wife can use it to make a great homemade pie, I’m all for it. Then, I started wondering what’s in commercial pie crust. Here’s what I found out. According to the back of the box, Pillsbury refrigerated pie crust contains the following ingredients:
Now, homemade crust only contains three main ingredients - flour, fat and water. So it makes me wonder what all these extra ingredients are for. I guess I can understand some preservatives, because they can’t know how long you’ll keep the dough in the freezer. Citric acid could add a subtle “zing.” Most home bakers get that with a little vinegar. But partially hydrogenated fats that contain trans fats? BHA and BHT? Xanthan gum? Food coloring? I’m not suggesting that any of these ingredients are harmful. After all, they are all FDA approved. And, if it gives busy people a leg up on making homemade desserts, then that’s great. But, if you’re interested in making your own crust with just a few ingredients, all of which are pronounceable, here’s how to make your own pie crust. Flaky Pie Crust12 oz. all purpose flour
As you can see, it’s a pretty basic list of ingredients. But, if I ask ten home cooks what they find most intimidating about baking, I bet that at least seven of them would answer “pie crust.” That’s because making a good pie crust takes a light hand and a feel for the ingredients. It takes practice, but once you get it, you’ll have it for life. How to Prepare a Flaky Pie Crust Whisk together the flour, salt and sugar in a large bowl. Cut the cold fat into ½” cubes. Toss the cubes of fat with the flour mixture until all the fat is coated with flour. Using just the tips of your fingers (the coolest part of your hands), begin breaking the fat into smaller pieces, rubbing some of the fat into the flour between your thumbs and fingers. This is easiest to do with butter, since it is the firmest fat at refrigerator temperatures. Keep breaking up/rubbing in the fat until the largest pieces are no larger than pea-sized and the rest looks like coarse meal. Be careful not to overwork the fat and flour mixture or you’ll end up with paste. Make sure that if the fat begins to get too soft while working with it, put the whole bowl into the freezer for ten minutes or the refrigerator for half an hour. Sprinkle about 2 tablespoons of ice water as evenly as you can over the flour/fat mixture. Toss the water and the flour with your fingertips. Try to go in down the sides of the bowl and then toss the flour up a bit. You don’t want to start mixing right on top of the water, or you could end up developing too much gluten, making your crust tough. Once you’ve thoroughly tossed the flour/fat and water, sprinkle on another 2 tablespoons of water and toss together as described above. At this point, take a small handful of dough - it should still look very sandy at this point - and squeeze it gently in your fist. If it holds together and doesn’t break apart when you gently press it flat, you have added enough water. You heard right. The dough will still look very sandy. If the dough does not hold together, or it splits apart into sandy chunks when you press on it, sprinkle on another tablespoon of water and toss. Continue adding a bit of water at a time, tossing, and testing by gently squeezing a bit of dough. If you’re not sure, err on the side of a little too dry than a little too wet.
Rather than dumping the sandy/floury dough out on the counter, it’s easier to just compact it in the bowl you mixed it in. So press the dough together in a disc at the bottom of the mixing bowl. Cut in half. Take each half out and shape them into ½” thick discs. Roll each disc between two pieces of parchment paper to a thickness of about 1/8”. Put the rolled discs in the refrigerator for an hour. This will let the flour completely hydrate. After the hour, you will notice that if the dough was a little dry before, it is no longer sandy. At this point, you can either use the dough or freeze it for later. To store in the freezer, remove from the refrigerator until pliable. Then gently roll the dough, parchment and all, into a cylinder. Wrap the cylinder in heavy duty plastic wrap and store in the freezer for up to two months. Who says you can’t make frozen pie crust at home? And for the cost of one box of commercial pie crusts you can make a whole lot of fresh ones yourself. Tomorrow, look for my post on How to Line a Pie Pan. Related TopicsPounding Chicken Breasts, Smashed Potatoes, Egg ExpirationCooking Questions & Answers I get email from you guys all the time asking me questions about various cooking topics. The questions come from all over and I do my best to answer them. If I can’t give you a good response, I recruit the help of one of my many professional chef friends. Here are a few questions I bet many of you would like answers to. Pounding Chicken Breasts
 photo from goodhousekeeping.com You do not need to slice full breasts any thinner in order to pound them out. I would use the smooth side of a meat mallet or even a fairly heavy, smooth bottomed frying pan. Spray a little oil on the meat so the mallet will slide and then start in the center, pounding and sliding off to one side (as opposed to just crashing straight down on the meat). Continue pounding, sliding off in a slightly different direction each time (or, conversely, turning the meat between each blow) to create an even thickness. I’ve also seen this done with the meat between two pieces of plastic wrap and I have used wax paper. Keep pounding until the meat is roughly 1/4″ thick and all your frustrations have melted away. Another great reason for learning how to cook. Take your time; this isn’t a test of strength. In fact you want to do this a gently as possible (if pounding can ever be considered gentle) because you don’t want to tear the meat. This same technique can also be used on any other type of lean meat–turkey, pork or beef. Smashed Potatoes
Okay, here’s what you do: use red bliss potatoes, or some other type of potato with lovely red skin. If they are very small, boil them whole in well salted water until easily pierced with a fork. Cut larger potatoes in half or quarters. When tender, drain well, then put back on the heat and let them dry for a couple of minutes. This will keep them fluffier–the dryer, the better. Leave the skins on. Since you want to keep them chunky, add all your add-ins before you start smashing: some warmed dairy–either milk, half and half, cream, sour cream (don’t let the sour cream boil), etc. Salt and pepper to taste, butter to taste and perhaps some roasted garlic. Then, smash away with a potato masher that has large openings - the kind that has one thick metal tube that curves back and forth is a good one for this. Smash to your particular smashiness and enjoy. For garnish try sprinkling with fresh chives or parsley. Egg Expiration
That is an “eggcellent” question, and no, I couldn’t help myself! Eggs stay usable for a surprisingly long time as long as they are refrigerated. The best way to tell if an egg is still usable without cracking it open is to put it in water–at least 4 inches of water. If it stays on the bottom, you’re good to go. If it’s a floater, toss it away. Why this works: All eggs have a membrane between the shell and the albumin (the clear, viscous liquid inside). There is no air between the membrane and the shell in a freshly-laid egg, but as the egg ages, the air pocket inside gets larger and larger due to osmosis through the permeable shell. Once the egg has enough of an air pocket to float, it has definitely passed its prime. I have also been told by a egg farmer that if you hold an egg with the pointy side down and shine a flashlight on the top of the egg, you can see a space between the egg and the shell with older eggs. I’ve tried this and either it doesn’t work or my eggs were all very fresh. Prolong egg life by storing eggs in the containers they came in on the bottom shelf of your fridge. Don’t store them in those cute little egg holders that come in some refrigerator doors. It’s warmer in the doors because of all the opening and closing. Soy-Glazed Mahi Mahi with Cilantro Pesto ShrimpThe 2009 Winner of the LG Electronics / Bon Appetit’s Life Tastes Good Competition Kristine Snyder Interview featuring her winning Mahi Mahi recipe.
I have been following this cooking contest and am thrilled to have been able to interview the winner, Kristine Snyder, who will be traveling to Thailand to compete in a global cooking event. If you want to read more about the contest, the judges and other competitors, go to Taste of Something Better. Kristine is from Maui, HI and prepared a Soy-Glazed Mahi Mahi with Cilantro Pesto Shrimp dish that I will share with you in the interview. I would like to thank LG Electronics and Bon Appetit for helping make this interview possible. So let’s get started by asking how you became involved with the LG Electronics/Bon Appetit Life Tastes Good Cooking Competition? I am a member of a website called Cooking Contest Central which lists recipe contests and when I read about LG’s fabulous prize packages, I decided to give it a try. I emailed my entry the day before the deadline (I never submit a recipe early because I usually want to change something) and was notified that my recipe was in the top 10. After that, Bon Appetit prepared the 10 recipes and narrowed it down to the 3 finalists (I was on pins and needles during that waiting time!) Did you think from the start you had a chance of winning the New York competition and be on your way to Thailand to compete in a global cooking cook-off? Always hopeful but I am realistic which meant having a 33.3% chance of going to Bangkok. I also didn’t know anything about my competition which probably was a good thing since their recipes looked and sounded delicious! What was your strategy for choosing your recipe for mahi mahi and shrimp flavored with soy, lime and cilantro? I really didn’t think of it as strategy - I just put together some of my favorite Hawaiian flavors (which also includes ginger, garlic, and Hawaiian Portuguese Sausage). After moving to Hawaii in 1998 I immediately fell in love with the Pacific Rim ingredients and tastes and I cook with them about 80% of the time. I had created a recipe similar to this one for another contest but it wasn’t chosen so I decided to try again. The two lessons here are 1) how difficult it is to get into cooking contests and 2) if you know you have good recipe, stick with it and keep trying! By the way, do you mind sharing your recipe with all my readers? Love to….
Soy-Glazed Mahi Mahi with Cilantro Pesto Shrimp 3 tablespoons Japanese soy sauce
3/4 cup clam juice
3/4 cup (packed) fresh cilantro
1. Combine the soy sauce, sesame oil, 2 tablespoons ginger, 1 tablespoon garlic, and 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes in a 1 gallon sealable plastic bag. Add fish and sausage to marinade, turning to coat. Refrigerate 1/2 hour. 2. Combine clam juice, broth, vinegar, and sweet chili sauce in a small saucepan. Boil over medium-high heat until reduced to 1/2 cup, about 10 minutes. Set aside. 3. Puree cilantro, macadamia nut oil, remaining 2 tablespoons ginger, remaining 2 teaspoons garlic, lime juice, zest, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and remaining 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes in a food processor. Reserve 2 tablespoons for shrimp and set remainder aside. 4. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Remove fish and sausage from marinade, scraping off excess, and place on a parchment-lined baking pan (sausage should be in a single layer on pan). Bake 7 to 9 minutes or until just cooked through. 5. Meanwhile, to finish sauce, reheat broth mixture over medium heat and stir in cilantro pesto. Gradually stir in butter and season to taste with salt. Melt reserved cilantro pesto in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat and sauté shrimp until opaque, about 1-1/2 minutes per side. To serve, divide watercress onto 4 warmed plates and top with fish. Drizzle sauce over the fish and top with shrimp. Garnish with tomatoes. Serves 4
 Kristine with Judges Richard Blais, Cat Cora, Jonathan Lindenauer You won a complete kitchen makeover with LG Electronic products. How exciting is that? Can you talk a little about how this will inspire your cooking? What a dream! I have always wanted 2 ovens and a 5-burner cooktop! LG set up a beautiful kitchen at the Bon Appetit Supper Club for the NY cook off and their products were fabulous. Their refrigerator is the nicest I’ve ever seen and the ovens were easy to use and worked perfectly. I found out that the microwave works as a warming oven as well (how clever! ) and the dishwasher cleans with steam. Having these wonderful new appliances will definitely make cooking easier and more fun (it’ll be like having a room full of new toys to play with!). Are you nervous about going to Thailand to compete? Of course! I get nervous when cooking for a dinner party so the idea of a global competition is a bit overwhelming! LG’s global contest is being judged differently than the US contest and there are many details that I won’t know until we arrive in Bangkok. I found out the recipes will be judged on being light and healthy as well as taste and we will also be judged on our cooking skills which is very scary since I tend to cut myself in every contest (I’m a professional harpist, not a chef!). We’re also cooking our dishes in LG’s SolarDOM oven which cooks food using light. It’s exciting to be able to use a new high-tech cooking method but it also adds the fear of trying something new. Let’s talk a little about your culinary background - Where did you learn how to cook? My mother was a wonderful cook so I grew up loving food and cooking but I learned the most in my 20’s when a few girlfriends invited me to join them in starting a “Bon Appetit Club.” We alternated hosting a monthly dinner, choosing recipes out of Bon Appetit and assigning everyone a recipe to make with an emphasis on trying something new. We had a great time and I learned a lot at as well. When do you think you really became passionate about food? Or better yet, when do you think you realized it? Was there an “ah ha” moment or was it just part of your nature? As I mentioned, I’ve always loved food (sometimes too much!) but my “ah ha” moment was in 2001 when I very unexpectedly won $20,000 in Sutter Home’s Build a Better Burger contest by creating a salmon burger. After that win I became much more passionate about cooking and creating my own recipes. Did you ever have any fears about cooking or trying something new and if so, how did you overcome those fears? I still have fears that something won’t turn out as I want it to but my main rule is to only try new dishes out on my closest friends and never try more than 1 new recipe at a time. When creating my own recipes, my poor husband is my guinea pig and when I’m working on a contest, we can eat some strange dinners. Fortunately he’s a good sport and also a good judge of food tastes. When it comes to cooking contests, you can’t overcome the fear of making a mistake but I try to make my recipe as many times as possible beforehand. I think that practicing cooking is just like practicing a musical instrument or training for a sport. Have you ever thought of going to culinary school to become a professional chef? If so, why didn’t you? I would love to go to culinary school to learn more about cooking but would never want to become a
I receive lots of email from home cooks who feel like they are in a “cooking rut” and they prepare the same 5 or 6 “safe” meals week after week. What advice would you offer these frustrated home cooks? Swap recipes with your friends or try joining an internet recipe exchange. Anytime you think of something you’d like to eat, write it down and then search for a recipe off the internet. Cooking magazines are great too. To me, there are at least two types of cooking styles and each has its pros and cons. There are those who find a recipe in a great cooking magazine like Bon Appetit, shop for every ingredient and follow the recipe exactly as written. Then there are others who look through their Bon Appetit for ideas and go prepare a unique dish using what they have on hand in their pantry and refrigerator. I was wondering if you have a favorite style of cooking? Although I don’t condone it as being the best method, I’m unable to follow a recipe exactly as written. I usually add or substitute a different ingredient or two and sometimes I’m just too lazy to measure the ingredients. Fortunately you can get away with a lot of little changes in cooking but that’s not the case in baking. I suppose that’s why I don’t often bake! But my husband hates it when I create a “throw together everything in the refrigerator” dish because when it turns out well he knows I’ll never be able to make it exactly like that again. What are your favorite ingredients to cook with, why and can you give us an example of how you cook with them? Garlic and ginger are my favorites because they enhance and brighten anything they’re added to. Plus, they are great for your health! I put garlic and ginger in stir-fries, sauteed veggies, soups (makes a fabulous Asian chicken noodle soup), meat, fish, and chicken marinades, coconut curries, rice dishes, and just about everything else I cook! I also love using citrus (lemon or lime), cilantro, and soy sauce or fish sauce (I consider them sort of a complex-tasting salt). What 5 cookbooks would you recommend every home cook own? Personally, I utilize the internet for recipes and ideas more often than cookbooks because of the multiple sources available with the search engines but I also like to create my own cookbooks and files with recipes I’ve cut out of magazines or printed off the internet. What are the top 5 cooking tips or suggestions you would give a novice cook? 1. Make cooking fun! Try fun-sounding recipes or try to make something you’ve always wanted to eat. 2. Don’t try something too difficult. Learning takes patience so start slowly and remember, great recipes don’t have to be complicated. 3. Use good quality, fresh ingredients - yes, it matters! 4. Don’t try new recipes out on guests unless they’re VERY close friends and make dinner parties a
5. Practice makes perfect. Mistakes will still happen but the more cooking you do, the fewer mistakes you’ll make. Soon you’ll be a great cook! Thank you so much for this interview and good luck in Thailand. How Do You Know When The Chicken Is Done
You’ve all seen those directions in your roast chicken recipes: “Roast until Done.” Gee, thanks for all the help. The same directions can be found in recipes for grilled chicken, sauteed, pan fried or any other way there is to cook this favorite bird. Intuitively, we know what “done” looks like - the meat should be white all the way through, not pink. It should also be completely opaque, no translucent spots. And pink or bloody liquid is a no no. The juices should always run clear. That’s all well and good, and important, too, especially with salmonella’s being such a problem when it comes to poultry. But how can we tell for sure when the meat is done all the way through to the bone and not overcooked? The skin can be golden brown and the chicken can smell great, but it might not be done in the center or it may be completely overcooked and dried out.
For starters, and most importantly, it is almost impossible to go by stated cooking times in recipes. Start looking at those times as estimates and estimates only. There are so many different variables at play when it comes to timing recipes; the size and make of the oven, whether or not it’s a convection oven, did you preheat the oven and the precise size of your chicken and its temperature when you put it in the oven in the first place. If you pull a chicken out of the refrigerator and it’s 40ºF, common sense tells you it will take longer to cook than a chicken that’s sat out for 30 minutes and reaches a standing temperature of 60ºF. For these reasons, “350º F for 45 minutes” is not very helpful. Why? Besides all the variables just mentioned, most of us are so afraid to undercook food that we tend to let it cook longer forgetting that all meats and poultry need to rest to redistribute the juices and while it is resting, it is continuing to cook. At best, consider “time and temperature” a ball park estimate. Set the oven to 350º F, but start checking the internal temperature at 35 minutes, realizing it could take well over an hour. Forget the notion that the time and temperature estimations for doneness is the holy grail. Sure it’s much easier to cook this way, but also a great way to get over or under cooked chicken. Remember - Time & Temperature is just an estimation Whether you poach, grill, saute or roast your chicken, you need to find a reliable measure of doneness. Cooking a bird for several hours “just to be on the safe side” is just as bad as serving undercooked meat. It might be even worse. You can always cook the chicken more, but there is no way to uncook it. Popular Suggestions That Don’t Work Many cooking resources advise that you cut into the leg to see if juices run clear. There are a couple of problems with this method. For one, and rather obviously, not everyone cooks whole chicken, and often we cook boneless cuts. Another issue is that when juice runs out of the chicken, as it most certainly will when you slice it open, you end up with dry chicken. So, even if you haven’t overcooked the bird, it might still taste overcooked just because it is drier than it should be. Other cooking resources advise you to jiggle or tug on the leg to see if the bone feels loose in the socket. I don’t think much of this method, especially since it’s the way I test for doneness when I’m slow cooking a rack of baby back ribs. Yes, the meat will be done when the bone is loose in the leg socket, but most likely it will be overdone, as the looseness is a sign that the connective tissue that holds the bone in place has gelatinized. This is a good thing when what you are looking for is lip-smacking goodness. It’s not such a good thing when you want tender, juicy, perfectly cooked roast chicken. Plus, as I stated before, you might not always have a bone in a socket to wiggle. How to Know When the Chicken Is Done The most reliable and accurate way to test for doneness, regardless of cooking method, is using an instant read thermometer. Just pierce the meat in the thickest part, being sure not to hit bone (the bone will be hotter than the meat). Try to aim for the center of the piece of meat. If you’re not sure, go ahead and pierce all the way to the bone (or all the way through, if you’re cooking a boneless cut) and then back it out halfway. You’re looking for a final internal temperature of 165º F for white meat and about 180º F for dark meat. Keep in mind that these are the USDA recommendations, and many people feel that they are set too high. They are set for your safety though, so I find it is best to stick with these temperatures, especially when dealing with poultry. Once you take a piece of meat out of the oven, its temperature will continue to rise. How much it rises depends on the size of the piece of meat and the temperature at which you were cooking it. For smaller pieces of meat, such as breasts, the temperature may only rise one or two degrees. For larger cuts and whole birds, the temperature can continue to rise as much as 10-15 degrees over a half hour to forty-five minutes. Keep carryover cooking in mind when you roast any sort of meat, and allow for it in your temperature readings. For example, when roasting a whole chicken, take it out of the oven when the breast reads an internal temperature of 155º F-157º F, cover it and let it rest, allowing the temperature to rise to 165º F. When roasting a chicken breast, remove it from the oven at an internal temperature of 162-163F, letting it rest, covered, until it reaches 165º F. Not only will resting the bird allow for carryover cooking, it also gives the juices in the bird time to redistribute evenly throughout the meat, resulting in a juicy, tender bird. Experience You might ask if professional cooks use instant thermometers and I can tell you they all carry them on their person at all times because it is the law and I imagine most of them use them. I’m also sure after cooking thousand and thousands of chickens they intuitively know when they are done. I’ve even been told by one chef she could hear when a chicken breast is perfectly cooked while sauteing. Cooking by ear - sounds interesting. You may find it a pain at first to check everything you cook with an instant thermometer but I think after a few perfectly cooked outcomes, you will make it a standard part of your cooking experience. Your Experiences Please share with us your tips for cooking delicious, moist chicken in the comment section below. Related Topics |
