Category — SECRET CHEF TIPS

In my home kitchen, I use a lot of shortcuts and tricks gleaned from my checkered pants past. From time to time I will pull one out of my toque and share it with you! If you have questions or requests, leave them in the comments and I’ll tackle them in a future post.

You’re all set with a fudge, caramel, penuche, or candy recipe, and as you read the directions more closely you learn you need a candy thermometer. But it’s Thanksgiving/Christmas Day/post-apocalypse so there is no way you’re getting one today! What to do? Don’t fret: you don’t need a candy thermometer to get accurate temperatures, just a little know-how and a bowl of ice water.

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To me, mashed potatoes are like a blank canvas. They can be creamy and pillowy or rich and silky. They can be chunky or smooth. They can have green stuff in them. But most importantly, they can be really really really good or just so blah and boring that they’re not worth the calories.

I always make mashed potatoes a little differently, so I’m not here to share a specific recipe – but rather a group of the most important scientific potato facts and chef tips gleaned from years of experimentation and experience. Armed with this knowledge, you will never need a recipe to make fabulous mashed potatoes under any circumstances.

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In my home kitchen, I use a lot of shortcuts and tricks gleaned from my checkered pants past. From time to time I will pull one out of my toque and share it with you! If you have questions or requests, leave them in the comments and I’ll tackle them in a future post.

A lot of the tea I like comes in loose form only, so I’m always fiddling around with it. I absolutely loathe that kitchen drawer with all the tea balls in it. It’s such a messy and inelegant way to make loose tea. Recently I had a flash of memory and remembered that one of the fancy restaurants I interned at served loose tea in a French press. Brilliant! No more mess, just a perfect cup every time. I’m drinking from one RIGHT NOW.

In my home kitchen, I use a lot of shortcuts and tricks gleaned from my checkered pants past. From time to time I will pull one out of my toque and share it with you! If you have questions or requests, leave them in the comments and I’ll tackle them in a future post.

One morning you want to make buttermilk pancakes, so you buy a quart of buttermilk (the smallest size available) and then use the 1/2 cup your recipe calls for. Flash forward a month or two and you find a funky smelling carton in the back of your fridge that contains exactly 1 quart minus 1/2 cup of skanky old buttermilk. Does this sound familiar to you? No problem. Unless you are a total purist and insist on only the finest buttermilk, you can make your own buttermilk in whatever quantity you need for a recipe. Just mix lemon juice (or vinegar) with any type of milk–nonfat, lowfat, or whole–and wait 5 to 10 minutes for the acid to curdle the milk.

Here is a guide for what proportions to use:

• 1/3 cup milk + 1 teaspoon lemon
• 1/2 cup milk + 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon
• 1 cup milk + 1 Tablespoon lemon

In my home kitchen, I use a lot of shortcuts and tricks gleaned from my checkered pants past. From time to time I will pull one out of my toque and share it with you! If you have questions or requests, leave them in the comments and I’ll tackle them in a future post.

There, I said it. I use Pam, and I LOVE it.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’m impure because I use Pam and that all my baked goods must taste funny and that if I were a REAL chef I would never use such a horrific product. But the ugly truth is that cooking spray is one of the most useful things in a restaurant kitchen. At the range of places I have cooked, from the medium-low end to the very very very high end, there have been industrial-sized aerosol cans of cooking spray all over the place, and they get used all the time.

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In my home kitchen, I use a lot of shortcuts and tricks gleaned from my checkered pants past. From time to time I will pull one out of my toque and share it with you! If you have questions or requests, leave them in the comments and I’ll tackle them in a future post.

Every Italian nonna worth her salt will tell you to save your pasta water! Before serving, add a splash of the pasta water to the sauce simmering on the stove and cook, stirring, to combine and heat through. Then toss it with the pasta. The starch in the water will make the sauce a bit creamier and help it hold on to the pasta. If it looks watery and gross when you first add it to the sauce, don’t worry–just keep cooking it and it will get incorporated into your sauce. You don’t need much, anywhere from a couple of tablespoons to half a cup!

This also works very well if you’re making gravy and potatoes in the same meal. Use part water and part potato water for a creamier gravy that needs less flour.

In my home kitchen, I use a lot of shortcuts and tricks gleaned from my checkered pants past. From time to time I will pull one out of my toque and share it with you! If you have questions or requests, leave them in the comments and I’ll tackle them in a future post.

Have you ever tried making bread at home and found that it didn’t come out with a nice crust? What you need is some STEAM in your oven. Commercial bread ovens have steam injectors to get the crust brown and crisp. You only need steam on the loaf for the first 10-15 minutes of baking. There are a couple of ways to get the steam in your home oven for a better crust:

• Moderately Dangerous But Pretty Darn Effective Way: When you turn on the oven to preheat it, put a metal pan (like a 9×13 pan) in the bottom of the oven. When the oven is preheated, put the loaf pan on a rack and pour boiling water into the hot metal pan. This will make a big amount of steam really quickly, so close the oven door so it stays inside and don’t open for at least 10 minutes. Steam burns are very painful, so be reeeeeally careful to position yourself as far away from the pan as possible when you add the water.
• Lazy Way That Works But Not Quite As Well: Throw a couple of ice cubes in the bottom of the preheated oven as you place your loaf pan on the oven rack.

In my home kitchen, I use a lot of shortcuts and tricks gleaned from my checkered pants past. From time to time I will pull one out of my toque and share it with you! If you have questions or requests, leave them in the comments and I’ll tackle them in a future post.

Have you ever made risotto with an elderly Italian woman? Be warned: she might yell at you for doing it wrong. Here are some things you can do to get top marks with the signoras!

• In the first part of the process, toast the rice well in the olive oil before adding any liquid. The rice should be a nice golden brown before proceeding to the liquid phase.
• You don’t have to heat the broth before adding it in. I swear. Don’t believe the broth-heating hype, you’re just making more work for yourself!
• While Arborio rice is the commonly recommended risotto rice, many chefs and grandmas prefer Carnaroli rice – try it if you can find it.
• If you’re adding things to the risotto, like sauteed vegetables or bacon or shrimp, cook them separately and fold them in at the very end.
• Also: I once read that Thomas Keller folds whipped heavy cream into his risotto at the end, to finish it. I have tried that and it’s not worth the effort – a splash of unwhipped cream or a knob of butter does the trick just as well.

It bears noting that I don’t use a recipe to make risotto, and I don’t think you need to either. It’s one of my favorite things to make when I need to make a good side dish and I don’t want to go to the market, because you can add most anything to it. The whole process takes about 20-30 minutes, and shouldn’t be made ahead because it will ruin the texture.

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In my home kitchen, I use a lot of shortcuts and tricks gleaned from my checkered pants past. From time to time I will pull one out of my toque and share it with you! If you have questions or requests, leave them in the comments and I’ll tackle them in a future post.

Butter! So many types of butter, all so very delicious. Here’s a little cheat sheet with butter terminology to help you sort out what the heck people are talking about.

First things first: this will make more sense if I tell you that butter is made up of 2 things: oil and milk solids. When you melt butter, the milk solids are the white foamy looking part and the oil is the clear yellow part.

• Beurre à la Bourguignonne: A fancy term for garlic butter. You most often see this term used in regards to escargot–since they are traditionally served with this butter.
• Beurre Blanc: French for “white butter,” a sauce made from vinegar, white wine, shallots, and butter, and often served with seafood. Everything but the butter is heated, and then the cold butter is carefully whisked in piece by piece, creating an emulsion. This makes a rich, satiny, tangy sauce.
• Beurre Manié: Butter and flour that’s kneaded or mixed together and used as a thickener for warm sauces. The butter prevents the flour from forming lumps in whatever it is you’re thickening, and makes the sauce shinier.
• Beurre Nantais: The same thing as beurre blanc, but with heavy cream added to it. (Note: YUM.)
• Beurre Noir or Black Butter: Beurre noir is butter that has been melted over a low heat until the milk solids turn black–at which point an acid (usually lemon juice, sometimes vinegar) is added to stop the cooking. Commonly served with fish, especially skate wing. Not to be confused with brown butter.
• Beurre Rouge: The same thing as beurre blanc, except made with red wine vinegar and red wine, which makes it (wait for it) red in color.
• Brown Butter aka Browned Butter aka Beurre Noisette: Similar to black butter, brown butter is melted over a low heat until the milk solids turn brown and start to smell nutty. Commonly paired with sage, pumpkin or squash ravioli, or fish. Delicious on lots of things.
• Butterface: A female who has an attractive body and an unattractive face. “She looks good everywhere… butterface.”
• Clarified Butter: Butter that has been melted and the milk solids (white stuff) removed, so just the oil remains.
• Compound Butter: Firm butter with stuff in it, like herbs or garlic or citrus zest. You make compound butter by softening butter, mixing things into it, shaping it into a log and wrapping it in plastic, then refrigerating it. When you have a round slice of garlic butter on your steak in a restaurant, that’s a compound butter.
• Cultured Butter: Butter that has lactic acid cultures added to it or is made from fermented cream–giving it a tangier taste. Most butter in Europe is cultured.
• Drawn Butter: The same as clarified butter, but for some reason when you serve it with lobster, it’s called drawn instead of clarified.
• European Butter: Generally this means 2 things: that it has a higher butterfat content than U.S.-made butter (~85% compared to ~81%) and that it’s cultured. Sometimes it just means one or the other.
• Ghee: Clarified butter that has been heated to preserve it longer without refrigeration; ghee is a common ingredient in Indian cooking.
• I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter: Not butter. ICBINB is made with buttermilk, vegetable oil, water, and some chemicals and colorings.
• Salted Butter: Butter that has had salt added to it.
• Spreadable Butter: Usually this means the butter has vegetable oil incorporated into it, so that even when it’s cold it will spread easily.
• Sweet Cream Butter: Butter that’s made from pasteurized cream–meaning, not cultured.
• Whipped Butter: Butter that’s been mechanically aerated with nitrogen gas.

Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments!

In my home kitchen, I use a lot of shortcuts and tricks gleaned from my checkered pants past. From time to time I will pull one out of my toque and share it with you! If you have questions or requests, leave them in the comments and I’ll tackle them in a future post.

Does it drive you mad when you have to buy créme fraiche for a recipe, and you find that it costs up to $7.99 for 7 ounce container? At over a dollar an ounce, you might as well be buying gold nuggets, or drugs. (Not really. Stay in school! Drugs are bad.) If you do a little planning ahead, you can make your own créme fraiche at home–at a fraction of the price. Lots of restaurants make it in bulk this way, because even at wholesale prices, créme fraiche can break a restaurant’s budget.

You need to do about 2 minutes of work and about 1-3 days of waiting (depending on how hot it is where you put it.) Here’s the skinny:

• Put heavy cream in a container with buttermilk. Use 1 Tablespoon of buttermilk for each cup of heavy cream.
• Cover tightly with plastic wrap and use a knife to poke holes in the plastic wrap.
• Set the container up high and out of the way in your kitchen, where it’s warmer.
• Check it the next day and stir it a few times with a spatula. If it’s not thick enough, let it go longer.
• When it’s at your preferred consistency, put it in a container with a cover and store it in the refrigerator. It will keep for a couple of weeks!
• Note: If you use ultra-pasteurized cream, vs. pasteurized, it will take longer for the process to occur.