Reply With QuoteI just pulled a loaf casatiello out of the oven. The Bread Baker's Apprentice is a fantastic book.
The one recipe of his that I do use quite a bit is his method of cooking brown rice (in the oven.) It's the only way (aside from a rice cooker) that it doesn't come out gross and gummy for me.
Alton is first and foremost a filmmaker (he was a cameraman before he was a chef,) and you can really tell from his show.
I just pulled a loaf casatiello out of the oven. The Bread Baker's Apprentice is a fantastic book.
I've followed Alton Brown's instructions for making dashi and it has worked out well. I love a good miso soup, and I can now make it myself.
I doubt anybody else has the balls to use that much butter in one recipe. But yes, even with a neophyte cook they turned out awesome.Originally Posted by BaconTastesGood
What? That recipe is barely 20% butter by weight. That's totally reasonable for biscuit scones.
I can't understand why I don't make slow-cooked scrambled eggs every weekend.
They're incredibly delicious and actually kinda soothing and relaxing to cook.
What are slow cooked scrambled eggs? Sounds interesting. (I guess I could google it, but I come to this thread for guidance!)
Basically, they're like any other scrambled egg, except you cook them over low heat, stirring steadily so they stay smooth and don't get lumpy. I make 'em like this:
Take three eggs, warmed up to room temperature, crack them into a bowl, scramble them gently, and add salt and pepper.
Bring a small non-stick or cast iron pan to medium-low heat and add the eggs without any oil or butter. Stir them gently so they don't stick or solidify too fast -- you want them to cook as gently as possible and stay liquid as long as you can get them to so the texture is nice and soft. Keep stirring; if you stop, they'll set too fast and you'll just have normal scrambled eggs.
When they start to set but are still pretty soft and runny, take them off the heat and add a good-sized pat of butter and 1-2 tablespoons of milk or cream, stirring until it's fully combined. The eggs should keep cooking a bit from the residual heat of the pan, but if they don't you can put them back on the heat a little. They're supposed to be pretty soft, though.
When they're done, they should almost custard-soft, and you might want to eat them with a spoon.
Mmm.
Nlanza,
Thanks for the recipe! I will admit that that sounds gross, but I'm going to give it a try and see how it ends up.
Respectfully,
Neng Janggo
As a guy who is billed for being a food scientist I recall an episode where he intermixed lactose and lactic acid and was talking as if they were the same thing. One is a sugar and ones an acid. That is a big deal.
My first serious plunge into cooking was lead by CI and America's Test Kitchen. It is an excellent gateway into cooking. If your interests take you further, great. If not, that is still a good place to be.
While on the subject of gateway cooking drugs, here are my two: Julia Child shows on DVD (she's really charming, she makes cooking look fun, and she made me feel a lot more relaxed about screwing up), and cooking chinese food from cookbooks. The thing about at least some (NOT ALL) chinese recipes is that they are fairly easy to do decent things with once you have the right ingredients, but when you pull them off you feel pretty cool. Part of what it took to get me into cooking was confidence building, and both of these were really helpful for that.
Also, I just made brussel sprouts, basically following this recipe. The only things I did differently were: I threw the leaves that fell off the sprouts in with the sprouts (which turned out well), I added the juice of 1/2 lemon after they were cooked (which turned out great), and a bit more parmesan cheese (I kept the cheese and grater next to me while I ate and added more as needed). This is a really terrific thing to eat and super easy to cook.
Yeah, brussels sprouts done this way are great.
They're even more fantastic if instead of using olive oil you fry a little bacon in the pan and then sear the sprouts in the bacon grease.
Duuuuude.... that sounds great.
I'm just starting to try a sort of ethical "vegetarianism" (no factory farmed meat, no sea products that clearly feel pain, dairy but only because I'm weak willed), but next time I stumble upon humane bacon, I'm going to give this a try.
A nice bonus here is that fancy free-range pork and bacon tends to taste even better. God I love the stuff we get from farmers around here.
Miniature soft pretzels on Sunday for a party! They didn't brown properly, which I attribute to poaching them in a glaze of baking powder and water rather than baking soda and water to save another shopping trip. But they were scarfed down with due alacrity, so I consider my contribution a success.
Also, never let your sous chef shape the pretzels. Hearts may be cute, but they're not going to cook the same as traditional pretzels. I'm looking at you, AaronSofaer. :)
Get some lye. You'll get kickass color and taste.
That sounds like the eggs I've been making from a Gordon Ramsey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsDj0JJxMXo. I might have posted it before. I was posting it everywhere when I tried it out and tasted the results. Really good with toasted bread.
You may want to consider dropping pork altogether then, as there are some who say that, because of the intelligence level of pigs (on the same level as dolphins,) that there are few humane ways to kill them, as they are aware of their fate much more than other animals.
That's like an oxygen molecule being aware. It doesn't change the fact that it exists solely to further my respiration. Regardless of their awareness, the purpose of a pig is to be bacon. If they think their place in the world is inhumane, they're welcome to evolve thumbs and contest the notion.
But if you subscribe to the superstition that coddling your meat makes it taste better, barbecue sauce makes everything taste better regardless of its pre-mortem self-esteem.
We made clam chowder yesterday. No photo, because a) I didn't think of it, and b) chowder doesn't exactly look pretty. (Interman will now post a photo of the most beautiful chowder ever made, of course.)
When my girlfriend and I first started dating, we spent some time trying to come up with the world's best clam chowder. I don't know if we've got the best, but I do think we're pretty damned close these days. This one was particularly good, thanks to some amazingly meaty clams from the local asian supermarket.
Recipe?
I hope that's not true, but I'm willing to take the suggestion seriously. Do you have a link to something I could read on that (I'm a pretty smart guy, so I don't mind if it's something academic)?
You know what, I've never cooked, or even tried clam chowder. I guess it's just not a thing here in Norway, but it looks really tasty.
DON'T get canned chowder. The clams are all chewy. Blecch.
I don't understand why you Norskies wouldn't have clam chowder. You've got plenty of other recipes based primarily on seafood, butter, heavy cream, and potatoes.
That's like saying the Norskies don't understand why you New Englanders don't have Lutefisk or Surströmming.
Pretty sure you can get lutefisk from the Port of Boston. At least, we've had it for Christmas on numerous occasions, mail-ordered from somewhere down around there.
Last night I made some French Onion soup. I love FOS.
Also made Italian Turkey meatloaf. It came out well.
Thirdly I made an apple crisp. Nice.
Same method as Broccoli Strascinati which is awesome as well. I'll have to give this a try with brussels sprouts.
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