Content about Butter
May 13, 2010
Forget hollandaise: this will blow your mind
I recently stumbled on an essay called The Power of the Hot Vinaigrette in Michael Symon's new cookbook. "Cold vinaigrettes are excellent," he writes, "but add one to the hot pan you've sauteed some shrimp in, and the blended acid and oil will pick up all the flavor of the bits of protein and sugars that have stuck to the pan." He advocates for pan sauces to be vinaigrette-based, rather than stock-based. "I...
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The original celebrity chef helps us out with this French classic.
A variation on meunière sauce with almonds
In one of the opening scenes of My Life in France, Julia Child experiences an early meal in France with her husband, Paul, a lunch at La Couronne, a medieval house turned restaurant built in 1345. After oysters, she goes on to describe an early culinary epiphany, apart of what would become "the most exciting meal of my life."
Paul had decided to order sole meunière....
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August 21, 2009
How to create the perfect cucumber sandwich.
I feel like I finally understand the cucumber sandwich. After weeks of thinking about it, and trying to recreate the most authentic version I could muster, it finally sunk in. The taste isn't rich, indulgent, spicy, acidic, comforting, salty, or fatty. It's cool, calm, and collected. The strongest reaction I had towards one was a contented sigh, a sort of momentary delight.
So why was I breaking a sweat trying to make one? I had...
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April 9, 2009
How to cook your next porterhouse.
I'm not interested in carbonizing the surface of the meat. To me that ruins the flavor.
- Alain Ducasse
It was a bachelor weekend of sorts. My wife mercifully let me pass on attending a wedding of an old family family friend, so I had the whole weekend alone in the apartment to get work done. I had some crazy projects planned including a mad braise of a cow tongue, but the first night alone was all about pure unrestrained male...
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January 21, 2009
A better way to make ravioli.
What kind of flour should I use? I had quite quickly settled on 100% Semolina flour when I first made tagliatelle, because I loved the bite that it gave my fresh pasta. When I made the first batch of ravioli, I just started there, figuring it would work for all fresh pasta recipes. But as I read more and more, I noticed that most of the recipes specifically called for all-purpose flour. Perhaps the flour would...
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April 9, 2008
In the midst of deep frying chicken last week I dreamt of Loretta Lynn. This happens only occasionally, and usually is musical in nature, but this time I had an image of her pan frying chicken in a large iron skillet. Sure enough, I found some rather hilarious commercials of her pawning Crisco on YouTube. How wonderful, I thought, that the amazing country singer never had to worry about dealing with large quantities of...
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October 21, 2007
By Abby Parker
Although it seems odd because I will soon be married to the food-loving Paupered Chef (Nick), I was a very picky eater as a child. I did not just abhor the typical foods, but also disliked peanut butter, all carbonated beverages, and even bread. Other than McDonald’s, only one food item made me excited to eat: my mother’s yearly batch of apple butter. I would even eat it on bread.
We had two apple...
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October 19, 2007
About a year ago, a phenomenon swept through the food blog world: with a little planning and an enameled cast iron Dutch oven, the novice baker could make a nice crusty loaf without kneading the bread. Without shaping the loaf. Without doing much of anything, really. It was a supposedly foolproof bread recipe for the laziest of amateur bakers, and countless food blog posts confirmed the consistent success of this technique.
I'...
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October 7, 2007
It came to us late in the evening some time in early September. A few bottles of wine down and numerous beers under our belt, we decided that we would try to eat all locally for a month. While not exactly a novel concept, it felt noble. We’d help Ohio farmers and eat well in the process. We toasted to the prospect and ceremoniously wrote the rules out on a paper plate.
Those rules and regulations included a...
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September 26, 2007
Lately I've been making this sandwich over and over again. I don't know why. It's nothing that unusual: ham, bread, sometimes cheese. I've made it with the shrink-wrapped lunchmeat from my corner bodega; I've made it with thinly sliced Bayonne ham from the charcuterie.
The secret is in this invention I've taken to calling pickle butter. I don't think I invented it; I think I read about it somewhere. But it's sort...
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January 25, 2006
This is what happens when you start cooking before you’ve put in 30 seconds to check if you actually have what you need.
When I can’t decide what I feel like cooking, I’ll often visit epicurious.com and bum around until an ingredient that sounds great pops up--then I’ll start searching for that ingredient and I always find something that sounds tasty. In this case, my ingredient was goat cheese. I was doing a few searches at www.jamieoliver.com--we basically follow him and his British humor around with tongues wagging--and he had...
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January 19, 2006
This is the easiest recipe this side of Dominoes, it’s pretty gourmet, and if you can boil water, you’re 83 percent there.
One thing I’ve found difficult about cooking is that it’s really hard to start when you’re hungry--you have to plan ahead. Once you get started you get your momentum going, and there’s always ingredients to snack on, but it’s the getting started that proves difficult. The inertia works against you at first. Since I get lazy when I get hungry, I end up heating canned soup.
This evening, with...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
