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Wood and Herb Flavoring Options For Grilling By erwin

June 10th, 2009

Different herbs and woods affect grilled meat’s overall aroma, after taste and even presentation. Choose aromatic additions to enhance your grilled meat to take your dish to the next level.

Alder Chips: Marry well with salmon and other fish and light meats.

Apple Chips: Enhance chicken and game birds, pork, salmon, sweet glazes, and fruit sauces.

Cherry Chips: Are similar to apple and complement poultry and seafood.

Hickory Chips: deliver a slightly nutty flavor to pork, chicken, and turkey.

Mesquite Chips: Enhance fish, chicken, turkey, and pork.

Oak Chips: Complement pork and beef.

Pecan Chips: are similar to hickory and pair well with chicken and pork.

Dried Basil Stems: infuse a wide variety of foods with a sweet herbal scent.

Dried Rosemary Sprigs: Give a pleasantly woodsy flavor to beef, lamb, pork, chicken, and meaty fish fillets or steaks.

Mixed Herbs: Create fragrant smoke that suits a wide variety of foods; they are sometimes sold in tea bag type packages.

Grapevine Cuttings: A by product of wine making, add fruity flavor to such grilled foods as beef, lamb, chicken, and fish.

Making Good Grill Marks By erwin

June 10th, 2009

Marking your grilled foods with professional looking cross-hatching is easier to do than you might think, and the distinctive marks create an attractive presentation. Each pieces 45 or 90 degrees, depending on whether you prefer diagonal or square grill marks, and continue to the halfway point.

1. Prepare the grill for direct heat grilling, the  higher the heat the better

2. Clean the grill rack well, oil it generously, and place the food directly over the coals or heat elements, arranging the pieces so that they line up in the same direction.

3. After one fourth of the total cooking time has elapsed, use a spatula or tongs to rotate

4. At the halfway point, turn over the food pieces, keeping them lined up, and proceed to grill the food.

5. Repeating steps 2 and 3, finish cooking the food.

6. To preserve the cross hatching, it is best not to move the food again. If you must turn it, however, try to keep it in the same relative position and angle.

Crowned Best Restaurant in the World in 2006, 2007, 2008…El Bulli By lacredo84

April 16th, 2009

The St. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants has voted El Bulli of Spain as the most prominent restaurant in the world in 2006, 2007, and 2008 with the Fat Duck of United Kingdom placing second in the consecutive years.

A three Michelin starred restaurant inspired by the ingenious chef Ferran Adria, is open to 8,000 reserved guests per season with over 1 million in requests. The average cost of a meal is about $325 U.S. dollars. Utilizing science and chemical processes to transform the ingredients used in many food concepts, the molecular gastronomized plates is sure to catch the attention of the restaurant’s curious diners.

Even Joel Robuchon, once critiqued as the best chef in the world before his retirement in Paris, considers Adria to be the best chef in the world presently. His simple ideology of food, service, and ambience being the focus of a restaurant has brought tremendous success to his name and to those that he impacted in the culinary world.

The 2009 list of World’s Best Restaurant will be released in London on April 20. We shall see if El Bulli wins a 4th consecutive title!

How to Use a Pressure Cooker By Olive Oil

October 6th, 2008

While they are not as fast as a microwave oven, pressure cookers drastically reduce the amount of cooking time required for many foods. Pressure Cookers also cook meat and chicken to a tender perfection without losing any of their flavor (and with a shorter cooking time, foods also retain more of their vitamins and minerals). Recipes that could take 8 hours or more to cook in a slow cooker take only about an hour to cook in a pressure cooker.

In general, a pressure cooker takes about one-third the time of the conventional cooking method, but more precise time charts for pressure cooking various foods can be found online with a simple search – and there are many good pressure cooker recipe sites, too, where the pressure cooker novice can go for ideas and tips.

As useful and easy to use as they are, however, pressure cookers can be dangerous if not used with caution and maintained with care. Remember to follow these tips when choosing and using your pressure cooker:

• Do not buy a used pressure cooker or attempt to resuscitate your grandmother’s old one. Sensitive parts like the rubber gasket may need replacing, the steam vent tube may be blocked, or the pressure cooker may not seal well enough to use. It’s best to start fresh with a new cooker.

• If you must use an old pressure cooker, make sure that the rubber gasket is clean and free of tears or other defects. Clean out the vent tube with a pipe cleaner and make sure there is no blockage. Pressure cookers older than 5 years old lack the safety features of the modern pressure cookers, so familiarize yourself with how to use it safely. For instance, learn how to let your pressure cooker cool down before opening – let it sit on the stove until the pressure indicator on top no longer hisses when you tilt it, or put the cooker in the sink and run cool water over it to help the pressure go down. Even with a new pressure cooker that has safety features, never attempt to force the top open.

• Never let children or pets play around the pressure cooker (of course, this also applies to any pots and pans on the stove – the back burners are the safest places for cooking when kids are around, and handles should always be turned toward the back of the stove so that they are not easy to reach or accidentally bump).

• Make sure you have enough water in the pot to be able to convert to steam – otherwise the cooker will be unable to build up pressure, and the food will simply burn. Conversely, make sure not to put too much water in – there should be a “fill line” marked on the inside of the pot that you can use as your guide.

• Be aware that certain foods, primarily dried beans, tend to foam excessively when they are cooking and may block the steam vent.

How to Use a Wok Properly By erwin

October 6th, 2008

Cooking with a wok is a great healthy and quick method of cooking

Before you use your wok it is essential to wipe the pan inside and out with oiled kitchen paper and heat to a high heat in the oven or on the hob. Remove the wok from the heat allow it to cool and repeat the process several times to give a good coating – this will make it easier to clean and give it a non-stick coating.

Using the wok

When cooking with a wok the pan needs to be of a very high temperature before the food is placed in the pan. Once the pan is hot enough and the food is placed inside the wok you kneed to keep turning the ingredients to ensure that they are kept hot. Using a wok is a good, healthy and quick way to cook vegetables in stir-fried. Cooking for too long will make the ingredients either burn or be saturated with their own juices and become limp and soggy. Vegetables cooked in a wok should be crispy, not wet.

Stir-frying

This cooking method originated in China, and remains the more recognised form of Chinese cooking. In China it is called Ch’au which means that a number of ingredients are sliced and cooked in 1-2 tablespoons of fat.

Stir-frying is usually done in stages, this allows foods that have different cooking times to be removed and then returned at a later stage. The dish is then brought together at the end and sauces/apices are added and then the dish is served as a whole.

There are two different types of stir-frying: Liu is wet frying with slow stirring and more turning of the individual foods. A stock is then added at the end of the cooking time for a coating sauce.

Pao requires foods to be fried at the highest possible heat. This is a quick method lasting for usually only a minute.

Eggs Essential Facts By erwin

August 31st, 2008

Cooking time for boiled eggs

Soft Boiled Eggs: 3-4 minutes

Medium Boiled Eggs: 5-7 minutes

Hard Boiled Eggs: 12-15 minutes

Guidelines for cooking eggs

1. Avoid using high heat
2. Avoid color
3. Do not OVERCOOK

Tempering By bearic

July 25th, 2008

The act of tempering is done by gradually increasing the temperature of one recipe component by the addition of another.

To achieve this gradual increase of temperature, you drizzle the hot component into the cooler component while constantly mixing the cooler ingredient. If your container is sufficiently large, you may continue adding the hot component to this container, else you should bring the temperatures as close as you can, then whisk/mix the cooler components into the hotter.

Tempering is often done where eggs are used as a thickening agent (i.e. in custards and sauces), since a sharp increase of temperature will cause the eggs to cook prematurely resulting in a lumpy texture.

The same principle might be used when the addition of one recipe component might rapidly change the other, such as adding a large quantity of something acidic to something containing milk products.

Stir Fry By bearic

July 25th, 2008

Stir-frying involves frying food quickly over very high heat in an oiled pan. While stir-frying, you generally stir continually. A special slope-sided pan called a wok is designed for stir-frying.

Stir-frying Tips

• Make sure all ingredients are prepared before you begin stir-frying.
• Heat the wok on medium-high or high heat at least one minute before adding oil. Do not pre-heat the wok if it has non-stick coating, as the heat can damage the coating.
• Drizzle the oil down the sides of the wok to maximize oil coverage as well as to heat the oil more quickly.
• Cook meat on high heat in order to keep it juicy. Remove the meat before stir-frying the vegetables. Add the meat back into the mix once the vegetables are almost cooked.

Steaming By bearic

July 25th, 2008

Steaming is the cooking of food by the application of steam. In this cooking process, the food is put into a steamer, which is a cooking utensil that consists of a vessel with a perforated bottom placed over one containing water. As the water boils, steam rises and cooks the food in the upper, or perforated, vessel. Steamers are sometimes arranged with a number of perforated vessels, one on top of the other. Such a steamer permits of the cooking of several foods at the same time without the need of additional fuel, because a different food may be placed in each vessel.

Steaming is preferable to boiling in some cases, because there is no loss of mineral salts nor food substances. The flavour is not so likely to be lost as when food is boiled. Some delicate fish is best cooked by steaming as it does not break up as it might in boiling water. Vegetables prepared in this way prove very palatable, and very often variety is added to the diet by steaming bread, cake, and pudding mixtures and then, provided a crisp outside is desired, placing them in a hot oven to dry out the moist surface.

Smoking By bearic

July 25th, 2008

Smoking is a slow form of cooking that can pack in more flavor than probably any other form. It involves soaking the ingredient, whether it be fish, meat or vegetables, in the smoke of an aromatic wood.

An optional method of smoking food is through the cooking of the food in a covered grill. In a sense, all grilled or barbequed food have some aspect of smoking involved, usually through drippings on hot fire causing smoke, or by the fire smoke itself.

To cook, just pick the leaves and wood chips from an aromatic tree (Bay leavess are good) and put it on the metal mesh. Put the meat in the smoker like you would if you were barbequing it. Turn on the light and wait 6 hours. After this you can refrigerate it and cook it on a grill later.

Smoking food is time-consuming, and can be expensive and a bit tricky, but the results can be superb.