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.