Elements of Cooking

Elements of Cooking: Scale, Scaling

                                                                                                                                 Photo by Donna
Scale (noun): A good digital scale is an important kitchen tool because it provides the most accurate way of measuring ingredients, which is especially critical in baking.  A tablespoon of different brands of salt have different weights but an ounce of salt will have the same impact no matter the type or brand.  Flour and other finely powdered ingredients measured by the dry cup can vary in weight as well.  A scale is recommended for any serious kitchen.

Scale (verb): To scale means to weigh—for example, “Scale that dough into 10 ounce portions for small baguettes.”

This scale is one of the most important tools in my kitchen.  It not only ensures constency, it makes putting together ingredients simple. You know how much easier it is to measure 8 ounces of shortening as compared to one cup?  Here, I'm measuring ingredients for bread dough that I've been making a lot of recently.  If I were making cookies, I could put the shortening or butter right in there with the flour.  I was corresponding recently with a cook who weighed a cup of his flour and it was 3 ounces.  A cup of flour can weigh as much as 6 ounces.  If he measured four cups and I measured four cups, I'd have twice as much flour in my bowl.

But I don't know how much a part a scale is of the home kitchen. Many of the people who read this blog are serious home cooks.  I'm working on a book now that relies a lot on the weight of ingredients, and I'm very curious to know what people who care about cooking think about scales.  Do you own one?  Why or why not.  Do you use it?  If so how?  If not why not?  I suspect a lot of it is because almost all the cookbooks out there use volume measurements so you don't need one. Here's the scale I use. But there are lots to choose from and start at about $25.  Key attributes are digital, measures in grams and ounces, and can measure at least 5 pounds or so.

Curing

                                                                                                           Photo by Donna T. Ruhlman
Cure: 1) To cure means to preserve.  Almost always, it’s salt that cures food, often followed by a secondary treatment, such as cooking (bacon, usually hot smoked) or drying (salt cod, prosciutto).  2): The salt mixture* used to cure meats, which can contain sodium nitrite, sugar, and other seasonings. Cures can be dry (salt and seasonings) or wet (also called a brine).  A “dry cure” should not be confused with dry curing, which indicates that a food has been cured with salt and then hung to dry in order to preserve it.
                                                --  From The Elements of Cooking

Curing your own meats (which is no more difficult than marinating a steak) is one of the cook's greatest tools, capable of elevating inexpensive cuts to new levels of flavor and texture.  We don't need curing know-how in order to stay alive as we once did, but we still use these techniques for the extraordinary flavors and textures they create.  When Heath Putnam generously sent me a sample of mangalista hog belly (above), I immediately wanted to cure it to give it great flavor and to take advantage of it’s extraordinary fat.  Notice the gorgeous layering of fat and meat .  This belly was liberally coated in a basic dry cure (2 parts salt, one part sugar, and some pink salt*), put in a plastic bag with some thyme, smashed garlic, crushed bay leaf, brown sugar, nutmeg, cracked black peppercorns, and refrigerated for a week.  I then cooked it in a 200 degree oven to 150 degrees internal temperature. The nitrite in curing salt is responsible for keeping the meat pink, gives it its distinctly piquant, bacony flavor (and also prevents botulism, should I have chosen to smoke it, an excellent option; I could also have let it dry cure for a week or two, hanging it from a pot-hook in my food snob kitchen to intensify and enhance  the flavor, but I was too hungry and eager to taste it).

The fat is exquisite, really picks up the flavors of the cure, and is the true pleasure of this amazing cut of the mangalista.  The knees go a bit wobbly from pleasure.

*Pink salt, or curing salt, is a salt containing a small amount of nitrite; it’s generically called pink salt because it’s dyed pink to prevent accidental consumption, and is sold under various brand names. Potassium nitrate, saltpeter, was used for dry-cured sausages but has been replaced by sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate (the latter is for dry-cured sausages) because of their consistency and reliability.  I buy mine from butcher-packer.com for a buck-fifty, which will last me more than a year.  (See my book Charcuterie for the basic dry-cure and other curing recipes.)

Brine

                                                                                  Photo by Donna T. Ruhlman

Brine: A brine is salt in solution.  Brining is a powerful technique for seasoning meat and fish and can also cure it and introduce complementary flavors.  Fresh vegetables can be brined at room temperature for a natural pickle, one in which the acid is generated by bacteria.  Brine strength, the ratio of salt to water, can vary but a good working ratio is a cup of kosher salt (between 6 and 8 ounces) per gallon which, depending on the type of salt you use will result in a 5% to 6% brine.  For an exact brine, it’s easiest to use metric measurements—50 grams of salt per liter of water results in a 5% brine.  Always use kosher or sea salt, and it’s best to weigh the salt rather than measure it by volume.  A 5% brine is also an excellent liquid in which to cook green vegetables and the ideal strength for natural pickles.  A small amount of sugar is often added to a brine to counteract the harshness of salt.  Aromats can be added to the brine to complement the flavor of the meat or vegetables (tarragon and citrus for chicken for instance, garlic and sage for pork chops, garlic and chillis for pickled vegetables). Aromats should be simmered in the brine while the salt dissolves to infuse the water.  Brines should be completely chilled before the meat or vegetable is added and should be discarded after they’ve been used (never reuse a brine).  The brined item should rest after being removed from the brine to allow the salt concentration to equalize within the meat.  A brined piece of meat, which has absorbed water, will result in a ten to fifteen percent greater yield and often juicier finished meat.

--from The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen

The above image is from the corned beef soon to simmer in a spicy liquid.  I used a five percent brine along with chilli flakes, mustard seed, coriander, ginger, peppercorns, cinnamon, cloves, garlic and importantly, pink salt (which gives the meat its distinctive piquant flavor and rosy color). Home-cured beef is fantastic, easy, and enormously satisfying (there’s a complete recipe in Charcuterie). I now find it difficult to enjoy a store-bought corned beef, not because there’s anything wrong really with buying a brisket  that’s been brined, only that having enjoyed so thoroughly curing my own I’m acutely conscious of the pleasure I’ve deprived myself of by not doing it myself.  And it doesn’t taste as good.
    One of the many extraordinary uses we can put a brine to.  If all you have available is crummy factory pork loin, second in it’s lack of taste only to the factory chicken breast, brining it is a good way to make it more moist and flavorful.  But again, I want to stress that a brine is a multi-faceted tool: it’s a perfect medium for cooking green vegetables, pickling vegetables (now, when it’s cool, is a good time to pickle vegetables—keep cut root vegetables and aromatics submerged in a 5% brine for a week and you’ll have a nice clean sour pickle), curing meat such as beef or pork loin (for Canadian bacon) or shoulder or leg (for ham), and enhancing the flavor and juiciness of meats we roast.

Brown Butter

Beurre noir [bur nwoir], beurre noisette [bur nwoi-ZET] and brown butter:  These are related terms for brown butter and are sometimes used interchangeably.  Beurre noir means black butter and often designates a sauce made with brown butter, lemon juice, capers and parsley (in effect a delicate vinaigrette, often served over lean, white, sautéed fish). Beurre noir should never be cooked until it actually turns black. Beurre noisette, or brown butter, refers to butter cooked till the butter solids brown, and the butter develops a nutty aroma and flavor (thus it’s name, hazelnut).  The trick with making a brown butter sauce is to recognize the right color and aroma, then to stop the cooking by adding the acid which cools the hot butter fat. Brown butter is a versatile preparation, whether as a beurre noir or meuniere sauce, or as a kind of seasoning for vegetables, pasta, potatoes or sweet preparations such as custards and cakes.
                From The Elements of Cooking, my book containing a thousand essential (opinionated) cook’s terms.

Photo by Donna T. Ruhlman
Brown butter is one of the great ingredients quietly hiding in your refrigerator.  With its nutty, caramel flavors, it enriches everything from savory pastas to legumes to soups to sweet cakes and ice cream.  Virtually anything to which you add butter can be made more complex and intriguing by the addition of brown. I’m posting about brown butter here after reading a brown butter post in Alex Talbot’s excellent blog (he makes a brown butter and corn ice cream). Talbot links to this post in a blog by Michael Laiskonis, pastry chef of Le Bernardin, who gives recipes for financiers (cakes flavored with brown butter), a butter cream flavored with only the solids, and a chocolate-brown-butter ganache.  Cory Barrett, pastry chef of Lola here in Cleveland, figured out a way to increase the amount of solids the butter yielded by adding milk powder (the solids are where all the flavors are). Michel Richard in his most recent book uses strained brown butter in his potato puree for decadent delicious mashed potatoes.  Suvir Saran, a chef and owner of the excellent Indian restaurant in Manhattan Devi, told me how his mother used to make a sweet treat of the solids strained from the butter when she prepared ghee (Suvir’s got an excellent new book out, btw, American Masala, Indian cooking in his American kitchen).

There’s no end to the uses of brown butter and it’s available to anyone with a stick of butter and a pan.  Simply cook butter over medium high heat; after the water cooks off, the temperature of the fat can rise high enough to brown the solids; remember that the fat gets hot and stays hot and will keep cooking the solids even after you take it off the heat, so be careful not to take it too far or the solids will burn and become bitter.  Transferring it to a bowl can speed the cooling process.  The main image above shows the golden brown hue of the fat and a very fine sediment of browned butter solids.

Veal Stock and Remouillage

I’ve been shooting my mouth off a lot about the wonders of veal stock, in the new book, in Gourmet  magazine all the way back in 1999 (here’s the braised short ribs that featured the veal stock), and over this past weekend on The Splendid Table.  You can listen at their site, and here’s the recipe I gave them but I’m going to make it even more simple here.

My main points about the veal stock (photo by donna) are these: almost no one has written about the special qualities of veal stock since Richard Olney in the 70s and this is unfortunate. If there were one ingredient that the home cook could have that would transform absolutely his or her cooking, one that would put it close to the level of the professional chef, it’s veal stock.  This stock takes the flavors that are already present and, without inflicting its own flavors in braise or a stew or a sauce or a soup, elevates them.  It’s the selfless stock.  And last, it’s no more difficult to make than chicken stock.

Another thing about stock generally: don't think that stock making must be a huge undertaking.  I got an email the other day from a home cook saying she didn’t have the right pots to make stock.  Please, listen to me: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO MAKE ENORMOUS QUANTITIES AND MONOPOLIZE YOUR KITCHEN FOR AN ENTIRE WEEKEND IN ORDER TO HAVE STOCK.

Put two or three pounds of bones in a 2-quart pot, cover with water, bring it to a simmer, skim anything that looks unpleasant off the surface, and put it in the oven set to 190 degrees for as long as you wish, a few hours at least or for beef and veal 10 hours is good.  Add an onion, two carrots and a bay leaf for the last hour of cooking.  Strain (the finer the strainer, the better the stock—I strain through a cloth).  This will give you about a quart of stock.

For veal stock, see if you can find a veal breast, which has a great mix of bone, cartilage and meat (I know some people have trouble finding bones—if you’re not worried about cost, osso bucco works).  Ask your butcher to cut it into 3 inch pieces for stock (I use a cleaver which does the same work).  Roast them in a 425 degree oven until they are beautifully golden brown and delicious looking.  Then follow the above instructions.  Also add a couple tablespoons of tomato paste and some garlic.  Other aromats that are great to use here and in other stocks are leeks, peppercorns (crack them first), parsley and thyme.

Use this stock to braise anything from short ribs to lamb shank to duck legs, add it to sautéed mushrooms and shallots for a delicious mushroom sauce, add it to the pan you’ve roasted a chicken with some chopped onion and carrot and some Dijon mustard in for an
amazing chicken sauce.  Truly the stuff is a miracle, one of the fundamental elements of cooking that few home cooks seem to know about or make use of.

And I would be remiss for not including this Element here:

Remouillage: A second stock made from bones that have been used once for a primary stock in order to make complete use of the bones.  It’s a weaker stock, of course, and is often added to the primary stock and reduced.

It’s a very effective way of increasing the yield of stock from your valuable veal bones, worth the extra effort.  Why it works, I don't know--perhaps the cooling and reheating of the bones?—but it really does work.

Shallots

Shallot: Shallots are one of the most powerful onions in the cook’s pantry because they’re mild, sweet, and flavorful in a way that other onions aren't.  This sweetness is especially valuable in sauces, in which they can be used either cooked, in hot sauces, or raw, in vinaigrettes and mayonnaises, though raw shallot should be used judiciously.  Their harsher effects can be eliminated by macerating them in vinegar; raw shallots are volatile so they should be cut and incorporated into the food the day you’re serving it (that is, don’t add them to a vinaigrette that will sit for several days in the refrigerator).  They are also wonderful sautéed and used as a garnish, deep fried, roasted whole, and glazed.

Of the many items that are ubiquitous in professional kitchens and not so in home kitchens is the shallot.  Why they aren't ubiquitous at home, I don't know.  They take an ordinary sauce and make it extraordinary.  Saute mushrooms in a pan hot enough to brown them, add salt and pepper and they're fine.  But add a spoonful of minced shallot and they become delicious.  A vinaigrette is transformed by shallot.  Add them to minced salmon and they transform the tartare.  Or to an omelet. To understand their power, try adding finely minced shallot to mayonnaise with a little lemon juice.  You'll have a delicious sauce for crudite, an artichoke or cooked cauliflower.  Make  the mayo yourself and you'll have a restaurant caliber sauce.  One of my favorite garnishes for a stew is whole roasted shallot--wrap them in foil with a few drops of olive oil, salt and pepper, and roast them till they're tender. So easy, yet so powerful. (Still working on unsquishing Donna's good work.)

Aspic

Aspic: Aspic is clear gelled liquid, usually stock, commonly used in haute cuisine.  It can be diced or chopped and used as a savory garnish.  It is a kind of tool that holds ingredients in place within a mold—diced vegetables (vegetable terrine), an egg (oeuff en gelée), pork (headcheese).  In a pâté en croute, it fills in the space between the cooked pâté and the crust.  Food dipped in aspic will take on a lacquered finish for a fancy presentation.  Certain meat stocks, especially those that have included a calves foot or pig skin, will contain enough gelatin to set completely when chilled.  Other stocks such as those made from fish or vegetables require the addition of gelatin.  Aspics can be delicate, in which they hold their shape, but are very tender, on the verge of collapse.  Or, if they must hold ingredients together in a terrine, they can be made firmer, into what’s sometimes referred to as a sliceable aspic.  Any clear liquid—consommé, the clear strained juice of tomatoes, called tomato water, or clarified vegetable stock—can be transformed into aspic.  A general rule for a liquid with no natural gelatin in it is to add, for a delicate aspic, 1 teaspoon of powdered gelatin per cup of liquid and for a sliceable aspic, 1 tablespoon of powdered gelatin.  If you’re unsure about the strength of a meat-stock aspic, pour a couple tablespoons onto a plate and chill it quickly in the refrigerator to evaluate its strength.

There is of course much more to be said about aspics, more nuance regarding when and how to use them well.  The reason I posted it today is that when I came across this shot Donna took of a tomato aspic it halted me (double click on it for correct proportions--this format somehow is squishing it).  Tomato water heated with aromats—mint and jalepeno and garlic and lemon grass—and just enough gelatin to delicately enclose other ingredients and hold its shape when unmolded, would become a provocative focal point for a summer salad with watercress and arugula.  I’d been wanting to make a tomato aspic ever since Eve Felder described one in garde manger class—she’s from South Carolina where, I believe, tomato aspics are gelled tomato juice.  This is clarified tomato water, looks flavorless but is in fact powerfully flavored, and considerably more intriguing than gelled tomato juice.

This picture makes me think of the end of summer when tomatoes are plentiful and the smooth driveway is hot on my feet and puts me am at ease, and the air smells of grass and leaves and not cold mud, sleet stinging as I walk the goddam dog.  It’s winter now, but this picture of aspic makes me feel hopeful.  Isn’t that what people say when they hear the word aspic, that it makes them feel hopeful?  Well, it should.

Blanching, shocking, refreshing

A commenter named luis in another post criticized the element “shock” in the new book for being too brief.  Of course every term has an infinite level of nuance, but the point of The Elements of Cooking is to provide a concise glossary of cooks terms. Nonetheless, for luis and others, here are three linked terms.  Shocking fruits, vegetables, pasta and other foods is one of the most important acts a cook performs.

Blanch: This word has several different meanings depending on who’s using it and why, so it almost always needs some qualification or explanation.  Technically, to blanch means to plunge a fruit into boiling water for a minute or less to make the skin easy to peel (as with a tomato or a peach) or to change, or “set,” a green vegetable’s color from flat to vivid green while keeping it, in effect, raw.  Some kitchens use the word to mean parboil, to cook a vegetable half way, then shocking it so that it can be finished later.  French fries are often blanched in low temperature oil so that they can be finished quickly (and crisply) in hot oil later.  Many chefs use it to mean plunging a vegetable into heavily salted water that’s at a rolling boil, fully cooking that vegetable, then removing it to an ice water bath. To blanch can also mean to cover bones with cold water and bring them to a boil, then strain and rinse them in order to clean them for a white stock.

Shock: To shock means to plunge into ice water in order to halt the cooking.  Green vegetables, such as the broccoli above (thanks donna!), are commonly boiled in salted water and immediately shocked.

Refresh:  1) To rejuvenate a dish or a sauce by adding fresh ingredients.  Stock based sauces can be refreshed for instance by adding more stock and fresh herbs. 2)  Some cookbooks and recipes use “refresh” as a synonym for “shock,” plunging cooked food into an ice bath to stop it from cooking.  Avoid this illogical term; use shock, which is more accurately descriptive.

Chef Pardus, who read and commented on the entire manuscript, responded to luis on the other blog and I’ll put some of his his comments to luis here. I like his note about the carryover cooking (another important term!) of nuts (or anything especially with a high fat content).  It's all about heat control.

"I think that we assumed a level of knowledge/experiance among readers that we should not have - i have to be very careful of this when I am teaching - easy for me to assume that because it seems simple and self evident to ME that a brief explanation will suffice for my students. You cook what ever it is - broccoli rabe, egg, pasta, shrimp - until it is cooked to your specification for a particular need (par-cooked, half cooked, JUST cooked...)and then immediately remove it from the cooking liquid and plunge it into ice water to arrest the cooking. Leave it in the ice water until it is COLD to the touch and then remove and hold cold/cool until you need to use or reheat it.

"It's not the same thing, exactly, but worth noting that roasting seeds and nuts will over cook if allowed to brown perfectly and THEN removed from the heat source and left in the hot pan they were roasted in. Obviously you can't plunge them into ice water, but you should have a cool metal pan on which to spread them out so that they can cool quickly without over browning - in effect, "shocking" them to quickly arrest the cooking and color change before it goes too far."

Recipes

Recipes: Recipes are not assembly manuals.  You can’t use them the way you use instructions to put together your grill or the rec room ping pong table.  Recipes are guides and suggestions for a process that is infinitely nuanced.  Recipes are sheet music.  A Bach Cello suite can be performed at a beginner’s level or given extraordinary interpretation by Yo Yo  Ma—same notes/ingredients, vastly different outcomes.
    How to use a good recipe.  First read it and think about it.  Cook it in your mind.  Envision what it will look like when you serve it.  Try to know the outcome before you begin.  Read a recipe all the way through not only to understand it generally, but to make your work more efficient and to avoid making errors or taking unnecessary steps.  Perhaps a dough needs to chill for an hour in the middle of a preparation, perhaps meat needs to be salted for 24 hours, or a liquid must be simmered then cooled.  The recipe suggests adding the flour, baking powder and salt one at a time, but perhaps you can combine all the dry ingredients ahead of time while you’re waiting for the butter to get to room temperature so you can cream it with the eggs.  Taking a few minutes to read a recipe, acting out each step in your mind as you do, will save you time and prevent errors.
    Measure out or prep all your ingredients before you begin.  Don’t mince your onion just before you need to put it in the pan, have it minced and in a container ready to go, have that cup of milk and half cup of sugar set out before you.  Good mise en place makes the process easier and more pleasurable and the result tastier than preparing a recipe with no mise en place.
    If you’re unsure about an instruction, use your common sense.  You’ve already imagined in your head what the goal is.  Work toward that goal using all your senses.
    How to perfect a good recipe.  Do it over again.  And again.  Pay attention.  Do it again.  That’s what chefs do.  Often great cooking is simply the result of having done it over and over and over while paying attention.  Great cooking is as much about sheer repetition as it is about natural skill or culinary knowledge.

This entry (which Heidi also posted in her review) was a last minute inclusion Elements, a request from my editor as I recall.  The fact is, I like to say that I don’t like recipes and I don’t like cookbooks.  But that’s not strictly true.  I don't like a cook's reliance on recipes.  We can learn many things from a good recipe and the best recipes help us to see and understand cooking in a new way.  But when we use them as construction manuals, I think they may do more harm than good.

The above images are of one of my favorite cookbooks, The Every-Day Cook-Book and Encyclopedia of Practical Recipes, written it seems by a Midwestern woman, Miss E. Neil, and published in the late 19th century.  I love Miss E.'s recipe writing style and the recipe fromat, which is often how Elizabeth David wrote hers.

Chicken pot pie, by the way, remains a great way to use that left over chicken and stock that you made from the carcass of your roasted chicken—you could even thicken it with some of that beurre manié or of course a roux, which would make the most sense.  I think pot pies bit the dust in American cooking when Swanson's started selling frozen ones.  Are pot pies sold like this anymore?  I do know that frozen puff paste is sold and makes a perfect cover for a pot pie, which is an enormously satisfying dish when prepared with good stock.

A la Ficelle

Ficelle, a la [fee-SEL]: This is the French term for cooking food by allowing it to dangle from a string (la ficelle) in front of a fire.  A technique often associated with leg of lamb, cooking a la ficelle is more work than cooking the meat in an oven—it should be basted regularly and carefully tended to ensure all sides are evenly cooked but not overcooked and dried out.  The technique is valuable because the meat picks up extra flavor from the fire and it’s also a pleasure to behold a leg of lamb or a pheasant cooking slowly in front of a fire.

Our friends Pam and Bill hosted an annual dinner for a small group of friends and Bill, an intrepid cook, used this method of roasting meats by the fire--a leg of lamb, a pheasant, and a chicken.  I chose this element today because of the festive nature of the cooking, a method of adding flavor to the meat that also includes everyone gathered in the process of the cooking.

Happy holidays to all--I hope they are bountiful and filled with good food and family and friends.