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Content about Thomas Keller

An Opinionated Way to Roast a Chicken January 25, 2011 What's your favorite way? Having roasted many, many chickens in my cooking life, I've come to the opinion that there is no way to roast a chicken without some kind of opinion. You may get away with tossing an untrussed chicken into the oven with a shower of salt, maybe a lemon in the cavity, and calling it dinner, pretending to be as careless as possible. But that's still an opinion. So is planning days ahead of time brining it and messing around with... Read the Full Article	Wednesday Links: Keller At Home, Taxes on Junk Food, and a Guide to Sausages March 3, 2010 [From Eating L.A.] Welcome to Wednesday Links. This is our weekly collection of four of the most interesting food links we've discovered in the past week. Enjoy! Straining Valentine's Day with Thomas Keller Are Thomas Keller's damned recipes worth it, or just overcomplicated? Sky Full of Bacon's Michael Gebert attaches his erudite crankiness to Chicken and Dumplings and inquires. Should Junk Food Be Taxed? A recent... Read the Full Article	The Mystery of the Chicken Oyster February 24, 2010 How to save the oyster while cutting up chicken. The chicken oyster. It sounds strange. But also intriguing enough to suggest deliciousness. I've heard other people talk about this elusive piece of meat hidden somewhere on the chicken. Only smart cooks know about it, like Thomas Keller, who mentions it in his recipe for "My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken" in the Bouchon cookbook. When the chicken is done roasting, the skin golden and fragrant, he locates the oyster on each... Read the Full Article	Is Salad Dressing the Perfect Sauce? December 2, 2009 Throw away those bottle salad dressings. I've been thinking about salad a lot lately, which is strange, because how inspiring can a salad really be? The salads I grew up with were made of lettuce with a bunch of chopped vegetables--carrots, mushrooms, peppers, whatever--doused with a dressing from the fridge door. Everyone put their favorite dressing on, and that worked pretty well. It was the typical "your-choice-of-dressing" side salad, and it was just a way to... Read the Full Article
The Duck Confit is Served April 16, 2007 I was cleaning out my fridge, throwing away plastic bags full of blackened herbs and limp celery and muttering about how I felt wasteful, of course, but also uncreative. Why does the ability to look into the fridge and dream up recipes with what’s there elude me? I'm a failure and a hack. Why even cook anymore? I should just order takeout and go to sleep. But in the midst of this crisis, a beacon: I found my duck... Read the Full Article	Macaroni Gratin vs. Macaroni and Cheese February 27, 2007 I’ve already done my public fawning over Thomas Keller’s cookbooks. The absurd attention to details, the flowery short essays about “the importance of onion soup” in the philosophy of bistro cooking, the potential of preparing-ahead the “building blocks” of cooking (like soffrito and aioli) that allow you to continue preparing uncomplicated dishes with simple, inspired combinations, while introducing a... Read the Full Article	Duck Confit, Part 2 January 21, 2007 Duck Confit, Part 2 It turned out that, for my 6 legs totaling 3 pounds, the large contained on the right (1.75 pounds) was the perfect amount for the confit. I threw my three D'Artagan containers in the freezer for another time. 6 duck legs (about 3 pounds) salted and spiced, cured in the refrigerator for 24-36 hours (see previous post.) 36 hours is about the maximum, otherwise it will become too salty. 1.75 pounds... Read the Full Article	Clams Marinières (And More Thomas Keller "Building Blocks") January 12, 2007 I'm no stranger to clams. I'm no stranger to the whole bivalve genus. I think that we've cooked mussels more than any other dish for this website, even going so far as titling a post "Because You Can Throw Just About Anything In the Pot with Mussels and It Will Taste Glorious." Clams are cooked much the same way: you make a simple broth with herbs and usually a little butter, toss the critters in the pot, add some kind of wine, slam the... Read the Full Article
How-To: Soffritto January 10, 2007 I've been reading Thomas Keller's two cookbooks lately, one for each of his Napa Valley restaurants--Bouchon and The French Laundry--and I've doing a lot of drooling. First off, they are probably the most gorgeous cookbooks I've ever seen, physically. From the text design to the layout, paper quality, printing colors, it's all overwhelming. Then, of course, there is the matter of Keller's recipes, which are so intimidating and complicated... Read the Full Article