Aroma Cucina

Kitchen Confidence at an all time high!

The results of our Kitchen Confidence survey are in! There are some surprising food and cooking trends: 23% of you use your microwave as a butter melting device, and no one buys bottled salad dressing. Oh, really now.... ?

Here are the delicious details:

1) Kitchen Confidence: Most of us are decent cooks, with an almost even split between novices and Supremely Good Chefs.  Which means that a whopping 82% of us know when to whisk and when to fold.

2) Making dinner for friends: The responses fell into three broad categories: Show-Off, Adventurer, and the Spontaneous Forager.  Obviously the Show-Offs are our Top Chefs,  the Adventurer hits the web and cookbooks for inspiration and isn’t afraid of trying out new recipes on friends, the Spontaneous Forager waits until the last moment and is confident they can pull a rabbit out of the hat.

3) How would we cook a rib eye steak? 98% of us are going to grill or sear that steak. Happily the 5% of us that would give the steak away, can give it to the 5% that are going to make steak tartare.


4) Overwhelmingly we all want more cabinet space (74%) instead of a microwave.

5) What do we do with a microwave? I put this question in because I don’t own or use a microwave and I was curious what people do with this hunk of equipment. It takes up a lot of space, so it better be seriously useful. My favorite response was “Clock” because you know we all use for it that but only one of us ‘fessed up.

 
6) If cooking skills and cost were no object what would you make? Seafood was the number one choice with oysters getting top honors, followed by lobster.
Foie gras gets honorable mention as the next runner up.
Then it broke down into roasts, steaks, and multi-ethnic delicacies like Creole Seitan stew, Mexican, porchetta, mole poblano, xiao long bao.
That all sounds delicious to me!
For a vegetable, asparagus wins. Whoever is making the asparagus souffle, can you share that recipe?

7) Comfort Food: Is there a scientist in the house because I think we’ve discovered something: we are comforted by carbs. When we need a cuddle we turn to pasta, potatoes and rice.
 A distant runner up was soup, lots of tomato soup and a few lentil soups and a few any kind of soup at all.
    I need to know, what is Nailey’s canned chili?? There is more than one of you that confesses to loving Nailey’s chili.
And I’m not going to out the person who has an herb butter dependancy.

8) Mystery Basket Menu: We’re all having some kind of lemon chicken, garlic mashed potatoes and a custard for dessert (Or a pudding as our British friends call the sweet at the end of a meal, and based on the responses we’ve got a  few British friends!)  As one commenter noted, we’ve got a color issue with this menu, tasty but blonde.

9) Ready Made, Either Way or Store Bought? Come on...nobody buys salad dressing/cream?? There are whole aisles dedicated to the stuff, so somebody is buying it.

10) One thing you screw up: We were all over the board here except for timing of dishes.  All I can say is practice helps and so does an extra glass of wine or two. For the guests, not for the cook.


Thank you everyone for helping out with our survey!  I had fun and I learned a few things, although I’m still trying to figure out what goes on with all that melted butter.

We start shooting video next week, so I’m trying to get my Julia Child groove on...wish us luck!

Cooking Meat: And the Science of the Sear

To sear or not to sear – that is the question.

Whether ‘tis juicer or tastier on the tongue

The claims and counterclaims of outrageous bloggers

Or to take forks against a sea of evidence

And, by opposing, end them. To taste, to eat

 

Apologies to Mr. Shakespeare but I’ve been experimenting with searing meats and digging around regarding the ‘science’ of searing meat and it is like entering a debate on whether the earth is still round.

Only one point seems to be universally agreed upon: searing meat at temperatures above 310F/154C will brown the meat. . Browning is also known in food nerd circles as the Maillard reaction, so if you want to show off, you can say, “Oh my dear, you have achieved a lovely Maillard reaction on my steak this evening.”  This will however result in your dear one cutting you off from any further sips of wine.

 

Where the nerds circle like angels on the head of a pin is whether or not searing ‘seals’ in juices or actually results in a drier piece of meat.  Frankly, I don’t think that’s the issue. What I enjoy is the contrast between crust and the meaty middle and I don’t care if its scallops or steak, I want crusty crunch on the outside and soft on the inside. Sort of how I like my man to be, but that might be too much information.

 

If you like to sear here are some guidelines:

       1) Use a heavy pan.  If you use a lightweight, flimsy pan you will scorch not sear. The lightweight pan concentrates heat in small areas and doesn’t let the heat spread evenly. That heavily used pan you see in the photo was my grandmothers pan and it's been in constant use for probably 75 years.

       2) Preheat the pan until it is really hot. I use my handy dandy infrared digital thermometer. Try not to put the meat in the pan until the temp reaches around 450F/230C.

   3)    Use a dry pan; don’t put any fat in the pan. Here is where I’ve been experimenting and I’ve found that no, you don’t get stickage at high temps and you run the risk of adding too much fat and then the meat steams instead of sears. When the meat hits the pan, resist the temptation to move it. Let it do its thing and form a crust. Once you have the crust, you can freely flip the meat.

       4) It’s gonna make smoke. Santa, if your are listening, I’d like a better ventilation system.

       5) Once you’ve seared both sides…turn down the heat!  In my cast iron pan, with say a 1 ½” thick steak, I can now remove the pan from the heat, cover it and it will continue to cook. We like our meat pretty rare, so you’ll have to experiment with this technique to find the best way to cook meat to your liking.

       6)   If you want to pretend that you grilled the meat, take a metal skewer and heat it mad hot in the oven. Using gloves, remove the skewer from the heat and press it into the meat, essentially branding it like they did in old western movies. I can’t imagine anyone actually doing this, but at least you know you can.

 

In case you are now hungry:

 Steak Bistro Style

Parsley: take the leaves from 5 or 6 stalks of fresh parsley

1 good-sized clove of garlic

3T butter (you won’t really need this much, but it tastes great on chicken, pork, scallops, so you may as well make a little extra)

 

Place the 3 ingredients in a little blender and whirrrr away until you have a smooth green butter.

 

Preheat your searing pan.

Generously salt the steak.

Sear, let it rest, and place a chunk of the parsley butter on top of the steak. Done to perfection. Some roasted or boiled potatoes on the side will soak up all the extra juices quite nicely.

 And for anyone who is trying to remember the words to the Hamlet verse that I bastardized at the beginning of the post, rest easy, here it is:

 To be or not to be – that is the question: 

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep⎯

 

Why you need a scale: the salt story

Seems that I’m always getting asked for advice on cookware, what pots, what knives and like most things the answer depends on how much you cook, how you cook, what’s your budget, etc. etc.  It’s all about defining what you need and what you want to do with it.

But, if there is one thing that is crucial to my cooking style, it’s a digital scale. I’m Low Tech Girl: no microwave, I have a rolling pin not a pasta machine, and I knead my bread, but I cannot cook without my scale.  

 

Here’s the visual: a recipe calls for a tablespoon of salt. Currently in my house I have three kinds of salt: Diamond Kosher, Maldon Salt Crystals and some very fine grain Japanese sea salt (I’m not being esoteric, I have a Japanese grocery store across the street and their sea salt is cheap.)  I measured out one level teaspoon of salt and then weighed them:

19 g sea salt

12.5 g salt crystals

9 g kosher salt

 

It's a little more than twice the volume of salt if I used sea salt instead of kosher salt. Wonder why that chicken recipe you made came out so salty?

 

Think about a brownie recipe that calls for 1 cup of nuts: if there was such a variation with salt, imagine the variation with roughly chopped v. whole v. finely chopped nuts.

 

And finally there is the clutter factor: all those measuring cups you’ve acquired can be tossed, those single measuring spoons that get disconnected from the ring and you can’t find the ¼ teaspoon spoon because it’s buried under the clutter of random spoons and lobster forks that have mysteriously accumulated in the junk drawer, can all be tossed and replaced by one single, elegant scale.

 

Find a scale that tares, which means you put the bowl on the scale, hit tare and the scale goes to zero so you aren’t factoring in the weight of the bowl. Which would be a nice thing for the deli man to do so you don’t have to pay $12.99/lb for that plastic container, but I digress.  Also find a scale that has ounces and grams because it’s good to have an easier conversion. All of my cookbooks have scribbles all over them where I’ve done the conversions, which sounds like a royal pain, but once you get used to working with weights, you don’t go back.  I use the CJ-4000, it gets the job done, and please don’t spring for the scale with the bowl, you already own bowls.