Cooking Hints & Tips Archive 36
Cooking Tip: Bouquet garni are little bundles of herbs and spices tied together with twine or wrapped in cheesecloth. These packets are added to soups, stocks, sauces, braises, or any other dish with a lot of liquid and a long simmer. A bouquet garni keeps all the herbs together, making them easy to remove.
Cooking Tip: Parsley, thyme, and bay leaf are the standard trio to use for bouquet garni. Use four or five parsley stems, a sprig or two of thyme, and a bay leaf.
Cooking Tip: Other aromatics used in a bouquet garni can give your dish a more complex flavor. A few whole cloves add a touch of warmth and sweetness; a strip of citrus zest enhances meat-based stews and braises; a sprig of rosemary, sage, or savory sets a Mediterranean tone; and a garlic clove is a welcome addition to almost any selection of herbs.
Cooking Tip: You can tie a bouquet garni with twine, but if you're using small spices like peppercorns or cloves, or if you're worried about thyme leaves getting into a clear soup, you should bind everything in a more secure wrapping. Cheesecloth is ideal, but leek leaves or wide celery ribs also work.
Cooking Tip: Some cooks leave a few inches of twine on a bouquet garni and tie the end to the pot handle so it's easier to retrieve.
Cooking Tip: If fresh veggies are wilted or blemished, pick off brown spots and sprinkle with cold water. Wrap in a paper towel and refrigerate for about an hour.
Cooking Tip: If you've forgotten which eggs you've hard cooked and which are raw, give them a spin. Hard boiled eggs will spin quickly. Raw eggs will wobble and spin slowly.
Cooking Tip: You can brown the flour for gravy by placing it in a custard cup or other oven safe dish and putting it next to the meat in the oven as it cooks. When the meat is done the flour will be browned.
Cooking Tip: When making gravy from pan drippings, pour it into a tall, narrow jar. The grease will rise to the top for easy skimming and fat free gravy making.
Cooking Tip: Add some cold water to the bottom of the broiling pan before cooking beef or pork. It will cut down on smoke and grease from the meat and make clean up easier.
Cooking Tip: When boiling, a mixture should have bubbles rising constantly to the top and breaking on the surface. When simmering, a mixture should have smaller bubbles forming more slowly and collapsing below the surface.
Cooking Tip: Use two flatware knives or a pastry blender to cut in shortening, butter, margarine, or lard into dry ingredients. The recipe will state how small the particles should be in the end.
Cooking Tip: To poach food, place them in seasoned liquid. Bring to a boil over high heat. Cover tightly. Reduce heat to medium-low. Simmer so small bubbles form and break below the surface of the liquid.
Cooking Tip: To saute food, heat a small amount of fat in a skillet until a drop of water sizzles in it. Add food and cook over medium-high heat, turning part way through, until cooked.
Cooking Tip: Get a head start on main-dish salads by storing cans of fruits, vegetables, and meats in your refrigerator. That way they're already chilled when you're ready to use them.
Cooking Tip: Olive oil will turn rancid over time if not properly stored. Keep it away from heat, air and light. Don't be tempted to store it in the cupboard over the range or above the refrigerator.
Cooking Tip: Do not store olive oil in the refrigerator as it solidifies at 36° Fahrenheit. If you find your olive oil contains a layer of white solids, the bottle has been chilled. Leave it to reach room temperature.
Cooking Tip: Use only fresh basil from a plant that has not yet gone to seed. The leaves are at their sweetest before flowering. Pick just before preparation, bathe tenderly in cold water, and dry by gently blotting between layers of paper towel or dishtowels.
Cooking Tip: As the best basil is seasonal, you may wish to freeze batches of pesto for a welcome return to summer in the colder months. Before preparing the pesto, have a sterilized glass jar with a lid and a roll of plastic wrap handy. The jar should hold only slightly more than the amount of pesto you are making.
Cooking Tip: To freeze pesto, leave a little space in the jar, pack in the pesto and cover the top with a 1/4 inch layer of olive oil. Press a piece of plastic wrap evenly over the surface of the oil allowing the wrap to hang over the sides of the jar. Screw on the lid and freeze immediately.
Cooking Tip: Be sure to measure your ingredients carefully. Use metal or plastic nested cups for dry ingredients like flour and sugar, and graduated glass or plastic cups with spouts for liquids.
Cooking Tip: To measure flour, lightly spoon it from the canister into the measuring cup and level it with a straight edge of a spatula or knife. Do not tap or shake the cup to level it.
Cooking Tip: When measuring brown sugar, pack it firmly into the dry measuring cup so that it holds its shape when it is removed.
Cooking Tip: For the best flavor and texture, be sure to use the exact type of butter, margarine or vegetable shortening called for in each recipe. Substituting one type for another could change the taste or the texture of your finished product.
Cooking Tip: After you have finished a stick of margarine or butter, save the wrapper in a ziploc bag and throw in the freezer. The next time one of your recipes call for greasing a pan pull out one of these wrappers and use it for that purpose.
Cooking Tip: As long as they are kept at room temperature, tomatoes picked at the mature green stage will finish ripening in supermarkets and after you purchase them. Within a few days, they will soften slightly, turn red and develop their full flavor and aroma.
Cooking Tip: Place tomatoes on a counter or in a shallow bowl at room temperature until they are ready to eat. Do not refrigerate them.
Cooking Tip: When tomatoes are chilled below 55°F, the ripening comes to a halt and the flavor never develops.
Cooking Tip: Keep tomatoes in a brown paper bag or closed container to trap the ethylene gas that helps them ripen. Adding an ethylene-emitting apple or pear to the container can also hasten ripening.
Cooking Tip: Once they are fully ripened, tomatoes can be held at room temperature or refrigerated for several days. When you're ready to use them, bring the tomatoes back to room temperature for fullest flavor.
Cooking Tip: To substitute honey for sugar in recipes, start by substituting up to half of the sugar called for. With a little experimentation, honey can replace all the sugar in some recipes.
Cooking Tip: When baking with honey, remember the following: Reduce any liquid called for by 1/4 cup for each cup of honey used. Add l/2 teaspoon baking soda for each cup of honey used. Reduce oven temperature by 25°F to prevent over-browning.
Cooking Tip: Because of its high fructose content, honey has a higher sweetening power than sugar. This means you can use less honey than sugar to achieve the desired sweetness.
Cooking Tip: When measuring honey, coat the measuring cup with non-stick cooking spray or vegetable oil before adding the honey. The honey will slide right out.
Cooking Tip: To retain honey's wonderfully luxuriant texture, always store it at room temperature; never in the refrigerator.
Cooking Tip: To ensure that the egg yolks and sugar of an ice cream base are completely mixed, do it by hand.
Cooking Tip: Let ice cream base flavors develop overnight in the refrigerator. Adjust the flavor before churning.
Cooking Tip: Consider adding flavorings with alcohol toward the end of the ice cream churning process as alcohol freezes at a lower temperature than the other ingredients and may slow the process.
Cooking Tip: Serve ice cream in chilled bowls, preferably glass. Not only is the frosted bowl refreshing to look at, but the ice cream will retain its shape longer.
Cooking Tip: To store opened ice cream, first place a piece of plastic wrap on the surface and smooth it down lightly with your fingers. Then close the lid securely and return to the depths of your freezer.
Cooking Tip: Bring cheese to room temperature before melting. Melt cheese over a low heat to help prevent toughening and separation of oils and liquid.
Cooking Tip: Most ripened or aged cheese is low in moisture content and can be frozen without drastic flavor and texture changes. Thaw slowly in the refrigerator for 24 hours or more. If frozen for several months, the cheese may dry out somewhat and become crumbly when thawed.
Cooking Tip: Cookie cutters should be sharp, with no rough edges. If the cutter sticks to the dough, dip it in flour each time you use it. Always start cutting at the edge of the rolled-out dough and work toward the center, cutting the cookies as close to each other as possible.
Cooking Tip: Bring eggs to room temperature before cooking. This helps prevent cracking due to the sudden shock of temperature change and ensures a properly cooked egg. If you do use eggs right out of the refrigerator, add a minute or two to the cooking time.
Cooking Tip: Temper ice cream before you scoop. Leave it at room temperature for 8-10 minutes before serving. Return ice cream to the freezer immediately after it has been served to minimize the formation of ice crystals.
Cooking Tip: Even if you're freezing food for only a couple of days, be careful of packaging. Air that's in the package will affect the color, flavor and texture. The container should be air tight, or the food will get freezer burn and lose nutritional value, and palatability.
Cooking Tip: It's critical to have a both your refrigerator and freezer cold enough. The best indicator of a good freezer temperature is brick-hard ice cream. If ice cream stored in your freezer is soft, turn the control to a colder setting. As for the refrigerator, check the drinking temperature of milk. If it's very cold, you've probably hit 40 degrees, which is what you're aiming for. If the milk isn't cold enough, or if it sours too quickly, move the control to a colder setting.
Cooking Tip: If you're freezing chicken in a polyethylene bag lower the bag, with the chicken in it into a pan of water to force out the air. Be sure the bag opening is above water. Press entire surface area of bag to squeeze out air bubbles. Twist the end of bag and fold over. Secure with fastener and label.
Cooking Tip: To make homemade TV dinners place leftovers in serving portions on sectioned plastic trays. Cover, chill, tightly with plastic wrap and seal. Then wrap entire tray in foil. Label, date and freeze. To reheat, remove foil, puncture plastic wrap to make steam vents, and heat dinner in microwave.
Cooking Tip: Whole birds to be roasted should be thawed before cooking. Broilers, and birds to be cooked by other methods can start being cooked when thawed enough for pieces to separate.
