Tag: cooking

Sunday Slow-Mo Scramble

On By DrewIn cooking, science, travel

Let me tell you about scrambled eggs; they’re one of those easy-to-learn, hard-to-master things.

I’ve been making scrambled eggs for years; like most people, I mostly used a bit of water or milk to dilute them so they’d scramble better, beat ’em with a fork (later with a whisk when I got a little classier), then cooked them on medium. They’d come out OK, they’re edible, whatever. Bachelor cooking, y’know; most people can figure out how to make them.

So last February Claire and I went on a vacation to the Catskills. We stayed at a really nice place, the Alpine Osteria near Belleayre Mountain in upstate New York. We just wanted the hygge trip, you know, roaring fireplace/après-ski kind of deal without the actual skiing part (we’re both kind of risk averse). Being late risers on vacation, we usually are the last ones to have breakfast, so it was just us and Scott Fawaz, the owner (and Culinary Institute of America chef). Claire remarked that the scrambled eggs were the best she’d ever had, within Scott’s hearing, and he kindly took the time to explain his process.

1. Don’t add anything to them, just use elbow grease and a whisk to get them smooth.

2. Cook them on the lowest heat your stove can put out.

3. Just stir them once and leave them alone.

He explained that the same principles apply to this as to most cooking; the longer heat is applied, the more connective tissue dissolves and the more tender what you’re cooking turns out. This is the principle behind crock pots, stews, and barbecue.

We tried it when we got home, and with a little tweaking for our gear (we have to move them around a bit more to heat evenly), turned out great and got the Claire seal of approval. Now we make our scrambled eggs this way every Sunday!

Top Ten Non-Obvious but Must-Have Kitchen Tools

On By DrewIn cooking

Over time I’ve accumulated a bunch of odd kitchen gadgets that I never expected to find a use for, but have rapidly made themselves indispensable.

A kitchen spider.

First, the kitchen spider. This guy is really just a strainer on a long handle. I use this thing a lot to drain & wash berries and orange slices for breakfast. It’s killer for draining cans quickly; just slap it over the open end and dump. Since it’s metal, you can also use it to fish things out of liquids, like bay leaves and garlic cloves out of stews, or dumplings out of oil, pasta out of boiling water, etc.

A spoonula.

A spatula.

Then there’s the humble spoonula. Most people don’t think much about the difference between a “rubber spatula” and a spoonula. It matters more than it might seem at first glance!

Spatulas have a point on one side, and are better for stirring dense foods; the point can also get into the crevices of containers with angular bottoms.

Spoonulas are rounded and cup shaped. They’re better for stirring less dense, liquidy mixes, and are good for getting the last bits of stew out of a pot, for example.

Both should have silicone heads so they can be used in high temperature environments (like every pot and pan ever!). Rubber can melt; silicone can take up to about 500 F!

Let’s not forget the mandoline, which is pretty much a slicer. Back at one of my first high school jobs, used to use these to slice tomatoes quickly for burgers. These days I use a food processor disc for much the same thing. Delis use a motorized version, like a table saw, to slice meat! Not necessarily for small jobs, usually best to just use a chef’s knife for those, but great if you have a lot of stuff to slice.

Speaking of food processors, if you don’t have one, super useful if you can afford it. I ended up with one as a wedding gift. If it needs to be chopped, sliced, or mixed, it’ll usually do that. Some come with video instructions that can be super helpful.

Tongs & turner.

Tongs and a turner (a type of spatula) are essential if you want to move anything around in a pan that’s on the stove. I kind of count these as one tool, as they should really be used together! Just tongs by themselves aren’t always enough to move a piece of heavy food without breaking it, and just a turner by itself has a hard time controlling the movement of the food; it ends up just kind of flopping over, which can splatter drops of hot oil or sauce on your arms; no good at all! Get steel ones that won’t melt.

Oven gloves.

Pot holders are uniformly terrible, but you can pick up professional insulated oven gloves for pretty cheap on Amazon that beat the heck out of them. The good kind have silicone grip strips on them too.

Sharpener and knife steel.

If you’re going to cook seriously, get a good set of high-carbon steel knives that will hold an edge, a sharpener, and a knife steel. This is another one that’s kind of one item. The sharper you can keep your knives the less muscle power you’ll need to cut things, thus the more fine motor control you’ll have to make delicate cuts (and the less the chance that you’ll use too much force, slip, and cut yourself!).

(A word on knife safety)

Knife steels (aka honing steels) are the little blunt sword looking things that many of us have always called knife sharpeners. These won’t really sharpen a blade that’s not already sharp. They’re more like a razor strop; running a knife blade over them creates microscopic serrations in the edge that act like a saw blade and make the knife cut more effectively than a smooth edge.

Cooking, like music, is a game of time and orchestration. I sometimes use a standalone timer for very simple recipes, but more often I use a multi-timer cellphone app to coordinate all the parts of a meal. If everything just happens to be done at the same time, everything will be the right temperature to eat when it gets to the table; a good multi countdown timer app can help a lot with planning that. I use Timer+ (for the iPhone).

A digital stick thermometer.

In the temperature department, get a good reliable digital stick thermometer. White meat chicken needs to be 165 F throughout to be fully cooked, 185 F for dark meat chicken, 145 F for fish; if you can get it to that temperature and no higher, you’re usually good to go. You can cheat a bit with a microwave oven if you’re not quite there when the cooking time is done (say, if you’re cooking frozen fish); you can bump the temperature slowly up to where you want it by nuking it in short increments.

You can get by and cook a fair bit of stuff without these, but they’ll make your life a lot easier in the kitchen!

Hunting The Mean Bean

On By DrewIn coffee, cooking, travel

I’m kind of naturally sleepy and have worked nights fairly frequently in my life, so I drink a lot of coffee. Been doing it most of my adult life. I didn’t used to be especially picky about it, just drank whatever was around. I never much liked the dark roasts that most folks these days are into; too intense for me, so I mostly stuck with regular garden variety coffee. That changed in the past few years when my wife became a coffee drinker.

Claire never used to like coffee, always stuck with tea. She told me that she had tried it a few times, but that it was far too bitter and she didn’t like it. I left it at that until a few years ago, when her job got more intense than it had previously and she had less energy to go around. Then I questioned her on it a bit more.

Turns out she’d mostly had pretty bad coffee, and not usually with any kind of sweetener or milk or anything. She’d experimented a bit with just sugar or just milk, but hadn’t brought it all together; she’d kind of dismissed it. I made a resolution then that I’d introduce her to proper coffee and together we’d find a kind we liked.

Since then, we’ve tried all kinds of joe. Being the kind of person I am, I figured we should do it systematically and do a baseline. That is, pick a kind of coffee that pretty much every roaster has, find a roaster we liked, and then branch out into different kinds. We started with Colombian medium roast for that reason.

After trying bunches of different interpretations of that, we narrowed down to two roasters we liked the best. We found that New England Coffee, based in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, had an excellent medium roast Colombian Supremo that was available occasionally in the supermarkets around where we live in Manhattan, so we had that for a while. We had occasion to visit a friend in Boston, so we rolled in a trip to their coffee shop, next door to their roasting plant.

We tried a number of their different blends and had a conversation with them around closing time about storing and grinding coffee. They had some good advice for us: coffee should be stored at room temperature, away from light and air. They said to keep it out of direct light because it breaks down the oils that give coffee its flavor, and air because coffee is very absorbent and sucks up any other smells around it, affecting the taste. As far as grinding it, we asked them whether they’d found that grinding different kinds of coffee in the same grinder had any effect on the taste; they said not that they’d been able to ever tell.

A few years ago we went on a vacation to Alaska, and encountered Raven’s Brew coffee at the now-defunct Grizzly Bear Coffee Shop in the “Glitter Gulch” tourist area outside of Denali National Park. That was excellent and prompted us to learn more about their coffee. Funnily enough, the only other place where we encountered that brand of coffee (shortly thereafter) was in The Raven Cafe in Port Huron, Michigan, where I’m from. Their Colombian is also excellent. We tried different kinds there on successive visits and found that the kind we liked best was their Skookum blend, which is Indonesian & South American beans. That’s the coffee we have most often at home now; we can get it pretty easily via mail order and it’s easier than trying to find New England. Claire likes Skookum slightly better and I like the New England Colombian Supremo slightly better. We often fill in with Hawaiian Kona between bags of those.

There are a number of different coffees we found in our search that were a little unusual, that we think are good for specific purposes. The smoothest, least acidic coffees we tried were Java Medic, from upstate New York, popular with emergency workers; Illy, which only makes one kind of extremely smooth coffee in a bunch of different grinds for different brewing methods; and Jamaican Blue Mountain, which is extremely expensive and, we think, good but not worth the money.

Both of us usually put a Splenda in our coffee, but we like a little almond milk in there as well to take any acidity down. The three just mentioned and Skookum are the only ones Claire doesn’t put any milk in. Funnily enough, Claire’s father likes Skookum, but considers it too strong and waters it down; he’s used to more common supermarket coffees like Eight O’Clock.

We’re still constantly searching for great coffee now; we’re always hoping to do it one better. We were turned on to the Beanhunter app by our coffee-loving Australian relatives. We’ve recently been experimenting with refillable (environmentally friendly) Keurig cups for our probably overly complicated Bunn MyCafe coffee maker. It’s a moving target, but it’s a lot of fun!