How long do you cook ravioli? I wondered this precisely the moment after I plunged my handmade ravioli into a raging cauldron of boiling water. It didn't occur to me that it might be an issue. I had always thought you pulled them as soon as they floated, or was that just gnocchi? When I consulted my recipe in The Silver Spoon it said I needed to cook them for 10 minutes, which sounded abs...
Once I figured out how to make fresh pasta , I waited all of 12 hours before I set out to create my own Ragù alla Bolognese. It was a goal of mine ever since watching an episode of Heston Blumenthal's TV series In Search of Perfection . The premise of the show is for the acclaimed chef to reexamine some stodgy British classics by going back to the roots of the original dish. His f...
I've had a tumultuous history with fresh pasta. Though I adore dried pasta in all its forms and permutations, my adventures with the fresh can best be described as a disaster. I've wasted hours and honestly lost friendships to the stuff. For this I've relegated fresh pasta to something I may order at restaurants but never, ever make at home.
Perhaps I wasn't giving it a fair shot. When...
We only had one night in Rome to eat. So where would we choose? We had no idea where to begin.
My friend Mitchell Davis came to the rescue when I emailed him to ask for help. One night in Rome? "I’d try Matricianella, I think, if I had one night. All the classics, well prepared, great wine list, not pricey." Indeed, classics were what I wanted: specifically, a giant creamy steamin...
Do fancy ingredients make better meals?
Over the last couple years, with a great deal of enthusiasm, I've learned to cook more skillfully. I spend all sorts of time reading endlessly about technique, ingredients, and recipes, and I cook almost every day. I think my cooking has improved. I've developed good instincts. I know that a roast chicken needs to be very dry before it goes in...
My favorite passages from Bill Buford's Heat are set in the Babbo kitchen, when he describes with fear and awe the wonder that is a busy restaurant kitchen at dinnertime-- tickets flying, steam vaporizing, oil popping. Orders arrive faster than they can be made; you are perpetually behind. The heat, of course, is unbearable-- like a shimmering wall when you enter the kitchen. Sweat...
I’d venture a guess and say that there’s nothing I cook more than pasta. For someone as devoted to simple cooking with simple ingredients as I’ve become, there’s no dish more fitting and open to invention, nor in possession of a learning curve that’s forgiving at first, but can take a lifetime to master. It’s easy enough to make a tomato sauce and boil some pasta—college stud...
Before this point in my life--some 24 years in--I’d never willingly eaten cauliflower. Sure, it'd been sneaked into some of my dishes. But I know for a fact that it has not played an integral role in any dish I’ve ever made. A quick scan of our directory reveals only 1 mention of its name, and that was for a curried cauliflower dish that we didn’t even cook! One of Blake’s form...
It happened again. I'm just minding my own business, slowing making my way through Bill Buford's book Heat , and I get to passage where Alex, a former chef at Babbo, describes how Frankie, his screaming superior, had taught him how to make pasta Carbonara:
You render your guanciale, and make a sauce with and the egg whites, and then, after you've plated it, you add your yolks, uncook...
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 combin...