Stuff Every Cook Should Know Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Quirk Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2016930953

  ISBN: 978-1-59474-936-0

  Illustrations by Kate Francis

  Production management by John J. McGurk

  Quirk Books

  215 Church Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19106

  quirkbooks.​com

  The publisher and authors hereby disclaim any liability from any kitchen fiasco that may result from the use, proper or improper, of the information contained in this book. In other words: Exercise caution when operating a food processor. Don’t run with knives. And never forget to keep your pantry stocked for three meals a day.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-59474-937-7

  v3.1

  To my niece, Henrietta.

  I can’t wait to teach you all this stuff cooks should know, and so much more.

  Cover

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  YOUR TOOLS

  Organizing Tips

  How to Work with a Small Kitchen

  Your Family Recipes

  How to Choose a Recipe

  The Difference between Stainless Steel and Aluminum

  What Size Pot to Use

  How to Care for Cast Iron

  The Case for a Food Processor

  How to Sharpen a Knife

  Essential Knives

  Basic Knife Cuts

  How to Chop an Onion

  How to Care for a Cutting Board

  Vinegar Can Clean Anything

  YOUR INGREDIENTS

  All about Your Spice Rack

  How to Season to Taste

  Cooking Oils 101

  How Long Stuff Keeps

  How to Reduce Waste

  10 Go-To Flavor Combinations

  How to Start an Indoor Herb Garden

  How to Conquer Your Fear of Baking

  How to Measure Ingredients

  Common Doneness Tests

  Meat Temperature Guide

  A Few Cuts of Meat

  How to Save Scraps for Stock

  How to Stop Onions from Making You Cry

  Common Conversions

  Common Substitutions

  THREE MEALS A DAY

  Mastering Meal Planning

  Solutions for Common Disasters

  A Plan for Breakfast

  How to Pack a Lunch

  How to Balance Your Diet

  How to Make Meals Ahead

  How to Cook Frugally

  What to Cook When You’re Sick

  The Benefits of Family Meals

  How to Cook for Children

  ENTERTAINING

  How to Plan a Dinner Party

  How to Take a Compliment

  What to Cook with a Kid

  What to Cook for a Date

  Common Food Allergies

  All about Your Home Bar

  Good Kitchen Gifts

  How to Handle Red Wine Stains

  Stuff We Can’t Tell You

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Learning to cook is not something that people do during the normal course of life anymore. Many grow into adults and have their own children without having acquired the skills needed to scramble an egg or boil spaghetti. Thankfully, a shift has occurred in recent years; everyone is more interested in food. In some cases the obsession translates to eating out more, but often a budding culinary enthusiast looks within. Wanting to cook is one of the best impulses that can wash over a person, but the path from desire to dinner is rarely a straight line. There is stuff every cook should know, and you’ll find much of it in the pages that follow.

  This book is a crash course in fundamental home cooking. These pages contain basic need-to-know information, like a chart for meat doneness temperatures, and outlines meant to help shape your own ideas, like a guide to throwing a dinner party. You won’t learn everything you should know about home cooking here, but you’ll learn a lot of essentials as well as how to direct continued self-study. Consider what you’re about to read a starter toolbox that you will add to over time. Hopefully, reading this book is the start of a beautiful relationship between you and your kitchen.

  YOUR TOOLS

  Organizing Tips

  Judging by the sheer number of charts, magazine articles, and online slide shows dedicated to the topic of organization, you’d think that keeping your kitchen in order is akin launching a spacecraft. The truth is that basic common sense plus an awareness of your own preferences and habits are your best tools for creating an organized kitchen. That said, keep these guidelines in mind as you stock and store all the things you need for the heart of your home.

  • Things that play together stay together. Most household organization comes down to one simple idea: things that tend to get used together should always be stored together. For example, you should keep all baking cookware and equipment in the same cabinet or drawer. (Likewise, flours, sugar, baking soda, etc., should share the same shelf in the pantry.) That way, when baking day arrives you don’t waste time hunting for the pie plates or cookie cutters. Apply this thinking kitchen-wide and you’ll have what you want at your fingertips most of the time.

  • Use buckets and bins. Forget fancy when it comes to kitchen storage. The simplest buckets, bins, baskets, and crocks make ideal silos for frequently used utensils such as spoons and spatulas. You can also neatly corral napkins, dishtowels, and silverware this way. Tuck the bins inside drawers or cabinets for easy storage and to …

  • Keep counters clear. An open and inviting workspace will motivate you to cook. So after every kitchen session and especially before bedtime, remove clutter from countertops and put items back where they belong. Wipe down all surfaces and make sure nothing is in the sink.

  • Get a recipe binder. In this digital age, it’s still easier to work from recipes on paper, even if you found them online. Splashing olive oil on a printed-out recipe is no big deal (especially compared to your laptop), and you don’t have to worry about fingering a pricey screen with greasy hands every time it fades to black. To prevent paper clutter, keep favorite recipes neatly stored in a binder for easy reference.

  • Mise en place. This is a term professional chefs use; it means “put in place.” It’s the process of preparing, measuring, and organizing all your ingredients before you get to work, and it’s a good way to make your cooking more foolproof. Having all the ingredients laid out beforehand increases the likelihood that every ingredient will actually make it into the dish.

  How to Work with a Small Kitchen

  If you find yourself despairing over your kitchen’s limited square footage, remember that many restaurant kitchens serve dozens of diners every night out of even tinier spaces than yours. In reality, you don’t need much to turn out great food at home: a few basic pieces of equipment (a cutting board, a knife, a skillet, a pot), a small slice of countertop workspace, and a love of cooking.

  • Zone out. Establishing specific work zones can make a small kitchen feel more organized and spacious. Mentally block out areas for storage, chopping and other food prep, cooking at the stove, and cleaning up after. Work inside the space dedicated to the task at hand.

  • Clean as you go. Dirty dishes pile up fast in a small kitchen, so keeping things clean as you go ensures much-needed breathing room. Wash up, wipe your workspace, and put things away while you work. This is especially important for knives, which will stay sharper longer if they’re not left sitting
for hours with acidic foods stuck to them. Cleaning is part of successful cooking.

  • Ban unitaskers. Kitchen gadgets are a lot of fun, but the truth is you don’t need most of them. One big category of cooking tools that should never be permitted in your kitchen if space is at a premium: the unitasker. This is a piece of equipment that tackles one highly specialized job. Think of a strawberry huller, or a corn kernel remover. Both of those tasks are easier tackled with a paring knife. Before you acquire any new tool, ask yourself what you’ll use it for. If you can think of just one thing, put it back on the shelf.

  Your Family Recipes

  Family recipes are sacred, but many people don’t realize this until it’s too late—until they experience a bone-deep yearning for Grandma’s apple dumplings and she’s no longer around to make them. No one likes to think of a time when the elder cooks in the family won’t be with us anymore, but one of the best ways to honor them and preserve their memory is to learn how to make their signature dishes.

  Invite yourself over for cooking sessions with your loved one over the course of a month. Arrive equipped with:

  • Measuring tools and timers. Many highly experienced home cooks haven’t measured their ingredients or monitored a cooking time in decades.

  • A notebook. Ask a lot of questions (What does the crust look like when it’s done? Pale golden brown? Should I hear it sizzle?) and take detailed notes on the answers.

  • Your patience. You’ll need to ask sweetly to slow down and intervene in order to weigh and measure that flour or sugar, even if Grandma doesn’t have to.

  Learning beloved, time-worn recipes can be a painstaking process, but one day you’ll be enormously glad you did it. And Grandma will be glad you asked. Well-documented family recipes can be a clan’s most treasured heirlooms.

  How to Choose a Recipe

  Recipes are like the syllabus for learning to cook. If you start with great source material, your kitchen prowess will grow each time you hit the stove. But if you work with a faulty plan—poorly written or untested recipes—you are likely to start calling yourself a bad cook and using that as an excuse to keep ordering pizza.

  Once upon a time, most of the recipes in circulation were either handed down from one generation to the next or found in trustworthy sources like magazines, newspapers, and cookbooks—sources that had a strong incentive to make sure their recipes worked. Today, thanks to the Internet, recipes are everywhere. And most of them are terrible. Many either turn out tasting bad or just plain don’t work.

  When you understand how to cook, you can easily tell a great recipe from a flop just by reading it. But as you’re still developing reliable recipe radar, use these tips for choosing a recipe.

  1. Find out if it’s tested. Some food magazines brag about their testing process. This is a good sign. For example, Cook’s Illustrated has defined itself as a testing operation, and its recipes are virtually foolproof. When you shop for cookbooks, read the acknowledgments. If you see that the authors have thanked their recipe testers, proceed to the checkout with confidence. No testers mentioned? Put it back on the shelf.

  2. Check the comments. You will continue to go to the Internet for recipes. That’s okay. Read the comments for guidance. Are there hundreds, with many people saying specific things about their experience, maybe offering suggestions for improvements? Are the comments positive? Print that baby out and head to your kitchen with confidence.

  3. Read the recipe closely. People who know how to write recipes always do certain things. Check to see if the ingredients are listed in the same order they appear in the instructions. And if an ingredient appears in one section but not the other, it’s a red flag. If the writer doesn’t follow these basic rules, the recipe may not be one you can trust.

  4. Be honest with yourself. Do you have or will you buy the ingredients the recipe calls for? Will you perform each step without improvising or taking shortcuts? If you don’t intend to follow the recipe as written, put it aside. The best recipe is the one you will follow. After you’ve made a recipe successfully once, you’ll have more freedom to experiment.

  The Difference between Stainless Steel and Aluminum

  Walk into any kitchenwares shop or browse online for a simple skillet, and you are immediately flooded with choices. The most basic variable—and one of the most confusing—is the material that pots and pans are made from. You’re likely to find seemingly similar pieces made from stainless steel, aluminum, and a combination of both. Each material has its benefits and disadvantages.

  Stainless steel is a nonreactive metal, which means you can cook acidic foods in it, but it doesn’t conduct heat as well as other metals. Aluminum, on the other hand, is a fantastic conductor of heat, which eliminates hot spots and makes even cooking easier, but it is reactive (not a good choice for tomato sauce!).

  If versatility is your top priority, look for stainless steel cookware with an aluminum disk bottom, which combines the nonreactivity of stainless steel with the conductivity of aluminum. Higher-end cookware sometimes features a copper disk, which is even more conductive than aluminum. This type of pan is almost always dishwasher-safe another huge advantage. Anodized aluminum cookware undergoes a process that strengthens the metal and makes it nonreactive, like stainless, but typically is not dishwasher-safe.

  Of course, these metals are not your only choices in cookware. Other materials you’ll run across include copper, cast iron, and carbon steel. Those types all have specialized uses, but a skillet made from stainless steel or aluminum is most likely to be your everyday cooking workhorse.

  What Size Pot to Use

  Recipes often are vague about what size pot you need to make a dish. If you are lucky, the instructions will specify if a vessel should be “small,” “medium,” or “large,” but those terms are relative. As long as all the ingredients fit in your pot and you have some room to simmer and stir, everything will be just fine.

  When choosing between a larger and smaller pot, bigger is safer—you don’t want to deal with the mess of a pot of potatoes or pasta boiling over. That said, if the ingredients don’t fill your pot at least halfway, the dish will probably cook faster than the recipe indicates. A larger-than-intended cooking vessel will increase the surface area, meaning that ingredients will be more exposed to the heat of the stovetop and evaporation will occur at a faster rate.

  When you are shopping for pots, remember that for most home kitchens, four pots can tackle most jobs:

  • A 2-quart to 3-quart saucepan with a lid for tasks like cooking rice, reheating leftovers, and steaming vegetables. This is truly an essential you’ll find yourself reaching for every day. The ideal size for you may be a bit bigger or smaller than this range.

  • A 5-quart to 6-quart Dutch oven for making braises, soups, and stews. Go for an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven if you can; the heavier material holds heat well, eliminating hot spots.

  • A 12-quart stockpot for when you need to pull out the big guns. Think spaghetti night for the extended family or chili for Super Bowl Sunday.

  • A “butter warmer” for when you want to melt butter for popcorn or any other reason. You’ll also find yourself using it to reheat one portion of leftovers or to warm up all manner of sauces or gravy. These are not a standard size, usually less than 1 quart.

  How to Care for Cast Iron

  If you ask experienced home cooks to name a cookware MVP, they are likely to talk about their cast iron skillet. This kitchen icon conducts and retains heat like no other and, if properly cared for, a single piece can last a century or more.

  Some people are a bit intimidated by cast iron because of its reputation for being complicated to care for. And thought it’s true cast iron does require a bit more TLC than stainless steel or aluminum cookware, it’s hardly rocket science.

  1. Start with the seasoning. Seasoning is the process of creating a tough film over the metal by lightly coating it with vegetable oil and then baking the empty pan upside down in a m
oderate oven (350°F) for about an hour.

  2. Keep it seasoned. Though most cast iron pans come from the store already seasoned, it’s still a good idea to repeat this process at least once a year. You can fortify your seasoning by occasionally using the skillet to cook something extra greasy, like a big batch of bacon or fried chicken.

  3. Keep it clean. You frequently hear that you should never use dish soap to wash cast iron, but that isn’t true. Simply rinsing with water is advisable, but when water alone doesn’t get the job done, it’s okay to gently wash with soap and water. Then rinse the pan promptly and dry it thoroughly to prevent rust. For best results, set the clean pan on a low burner until completely dry, and then rub lightly with the barest film of canola oil before putting it away.

  The Case for a Food Processor

  Some people are resistant to investing in a food processor. These countertop appliances are expensive, costing between $100 and $250 on average. They are also heavy, bulky, and a bit annoying to clean. But these drawbacks fade as you grow accustomed to having this powerful machine in your kitchen. It can do everything a blender can do, and more. You might even pick up a second-hand model at a consignment store that has been barely used by its first owner.

  With one, you can easily whip up plenty of foods that are expensive if store-bought: hummus, pesto, and nut butters top the list. These items are cheaper, healthier, and generally a lot better tasting when you make them yourself. Here are some other ways having a food processor will make your time in the kitchen easier:

  • Pizza and pasta dough come together quickly and easily. The blades do all the kneading.

  • Chopping tons of vegetables for produce-heavy recipes is much less of a chore when you don’t have to do it by hand. Pulse the machine for the most evenly cut results.