Good Taste

Residual heat is an often-overlooked factor in cooking.

A large ham, roast, or fowl can rise as much as 8 or 9 degrees after it leaves the oven.

Roasted beef tenderloin will rise 4 to 6 degrees after cooking.

Fish fillets that are an inch thick can rise 4 to 5 degrees after they are removed from the heat.  Remember that fish, and most seafood, is loosely textured.  Seafood also has a very high moisture content.  Heat transfers easily under these conditions.

Steaks, cutlets, burgers, and medallions that are cooked on the grill, in a skillet, or under the broiler will cook to completion faster once they are turned because residual heat was established by cooking the first side.

Residual heat is also used for warming or holding cooked foods.  Placing food on a plate set over a pan of hot water is an example.  We often hold food in a warm oven, or an oven that has been turned off after a cooking session.

Dried fruit is great for snacking, baking and sauce making. It is often desirable to rehydrate dried fruit before using it in recipes.

The common way to reconstitute dried fruit is to soak it in warm water. Use enough very hot water to cover the fruit by at least half an inch. Fifteen to 20 minutes of soaking will moisten the fruit.

You can add a touch of flavor by soaking the fruit in broth, wine, liqueurs, tea, fruit juice, balsamic vinegar, or rum. Adding a drop or two of almond or vanilla extract to fruit soaking in hot water adds an interesting flavor dimension.

When using hydrated dried fruit in baking recipes, blot them thoroughly dry with paper towels, especially those recipes using dry yeast.

Dried fruit is often available in supermarket produce departments, or in the bulk food areas. They make healthy and tasty snacks. You may want to experiment by partially or fully hydrating the dried fruits for snacking. Most often they are attractive to the bite, and the palate, in the dried state.

Store dried fruit in airtight containers, away from light, for up to six months.

  Microwave steamers are handy utensils. They consist of a holding container, a perforated insert and a tight-fitting lid.  They can be purchased at kitchen shops and many general merchandise retailers.

Between 1/4 and 1/2 inch of water or broth is placed in the holding container.  It’s helpful to preheat the steaming liquid for 3 or 4 minutes before adding the ingredients to be steamed into the perforated basket and securing the lid. Avoid overcrowding your steamer so that ingredients cook evenly and quickly.

Use your microwave steamer to cook vegetables close to the time you will be serving them.  Use the high setting when steaming vegetables.  After only a little practice, you will present perfectly cooked vegetables at the peak of color in only minutes.

These handy steamers can also be used to soften tortillas, baked goods, and rolls or buns.  Just place these items in the steamer for brief times and they will soften nicely.  You don’t need violent rolling steam for this process. 

You can also reheat leftover meat, poultry and seafood items in a short time over moderate steam.  These items come back moist and well textured when reheated with steam.

For a real treat, steam a ham steak over a mixture of pineapple juice and Marsala wine for about 10 minutes.  The flavor and texture is marvelous.

   Buy good cookware. Good cookware gives a lifetime of good performance, and then becomes an heirloom.  Poor cookware is problematic and has short life spans.

            The simplest test of good versus bad cookware is in the feel when we pick it up in our hands.  Good cookware feels heavy and substantial.  Poor cookware feels light.

            Heat transfers erratically through thin and poorly constructed pots and pans.  This leads to uneven cooking, hot spots, and bad language. A heated heavy pan bottom transfers heat evenly and steadily, and assists us in our cooking efforts.

            It’s tempting to buy sets of cookware, but not always practical. Think through your cooking habits, making a list of your specific needs. Some sets of cookware may match your needs, but many will contain a pot that you may never need. It’s often best to match your specific needs.

           Matching cookware gives us a nice visual and mental image, but who sees it?  And how often?  Shop for your specific needs when investing in good cookware.

We thicken sauces, soups, and stew like dishes by using two methods:  We can either add a thickening agent or we can thicken the recipe through reduction.

Typical thickening agents are rouxs (fat and starch mixtures, usually butter and flour), cornstarch, commercial powdered thickeners, or arrowroot powder.

Arrowroot powder has the advantage of being tasteless and has about double the thickening capability of flour or cornstarch.  Although arrowroot is a white powder, it turns clear when heated and incorporated.

If you do not have a recipe with specific ingredient amounts, it is prudent to add thickening agents incrementally.  Stir them thoroughly into the dish and give them about five minutes to work.  Use the principle that it is easy to add but impossible to extract.

Uncalculated added moisture from ingredients can alter the flavor of recipes in a negative manner.

 It’s a good rule to read recipes through to the end before gathering ingredients and beginning to cook. If the recipes call for discarding excess moisture in ingredients be sure to do this diligently.

An example is frozen spinach. It’s remarkable how much moisture it can hold. It’s also messy to handle when squeezing by hand. Try pressing excess moisture from thawed or cooked spinach by pressing it in a potato ricer. It works like a charm and you won’t have a bunch of spinach particles to clean out of the sink or the colander.

When using previously frozen crabmeat, squeeze excess moisture from the meat with your hands or with the aforementioned potato ricer. The meat will have more natural flavor when it is de-moisturized. The same is true of small, precooked and shelled salad shrimp. Squeeze it before adding it to recipes. Be careful not to squeeze the crab or the shrimp so hard that it turns to mush.

Fresh mushrooms are another ingredient that is loaded with moisture.  They need to be cooked until they release their moisture in many cases. Sauté them in a skillet until they release their moisture. Continue cooking them just until the moisture evaporates from the pan.

    Cooking oil spray has been a good innovation in cooking, but there are pros and cons.

            Cooking oil sprays are best used in the oven, rather than on the range top.  Spray cookware used for baking, but not cookware used for range top cooking. 

Aerosol cooking sprays contain a propellant to help expel the oil from the can.  It is harmless to humans, and it is clear.  The propellant wants to cling to cookware along with the oil.  The oil becomes volatile when exposed to heat, but the propellant becomes tacky. 

When baking, the propellant is absorbed with the baked goods.  That’s fine because it’s harmless and tasteless.  But in a skillet or saucepan, where the foods are less absorbent, it will cling to the pan rather than the food.  Because it is invisible, and sticky, it is hard to remove from the pan as it is washed. 

The next time we use the skillet or saucepan the propellant residue becomes tacky again and it causes food to stick to the pan.

Boiling is a good cooking method for many foods, but many foods benefit from being simmered.  Red meat, pork, and poultry will toughen when boiled.  A much better texture will result when the meat or poultry is simmered with just a few bubbles coming to the surface occasionally.  It takes longer, but the results are well worth the wait.

Examples would be meat or poultry that is being cooked before being made into meat salads.  When cooked meat or poultry is to be finished on the grill, it will be less tender if it is precooked at high heat.  Simmer, rather than boil, your soups when they include the aforementioned high protein meats.

The collagen in high protein meats begins to contract at 160 degrees.  A low simmer will occur at around 190 degrees.  Although the simmer temperature exceeds the 160 degree mark, the connecting tissues will not tighten as vigorously as at a boiling temperature of over 200 degrees. Remember that a simmer has occasional rising bubbles, rather than constantly rising bubbles.

Deviled eggs are great snack fare for all kinds of events.  Here are some helpful tips.

            Purchase eggs at least 5 days in advance before simmering them so that they will be easy to peel.  Notice I said simmer, as apposed to hard-boiling.  Boiling can easily lead to over cooking the eggs, causing the iron and the sulfur in the eggs to react and form an ugly gray ring around the yolk.  Cooking the eggs in iron rich water can also cause the dreaded gray ring.

            Cover the eggs in a saucepan by at least an inch of tap water.  Avoid crowding the eggs in the pan, as it can cause them to crack.  Add a tablespoon of vinegar to the water.  Bring the pan to a simmer, uncovered.  Set the pan off the heat, cover it, and allow the eggs to rest for 17 minutes.  Cool the eggs in a cold-water bath, peel, and cut them in half to remove the yolks into a separate bowl.

            Blend the yolks with mayonnaise, a little yellow mustard, a small amount of cider vinegar, and salt and pepper.  Add ingredients incrementally and taste as you go for flavor adjustments.  When the yolk filling reaches a desired flavor, fill the egg halves, cover, and refrigerate.

Cupcakes are enjoying a well-deserved resurgence in popularity.  I hope you are enjoying the trend and have purchased some cupcake baking trays.

Here are some additional uses for these multi-cup baking pans.

Use your cupcake trays to make dinner rolls from bread loaf dough.

Place your meatloaf or ham loaf recipe mixture in the tray cups to make individual portions of these favorites.  This size portion freezes and thaws nicely.

Cookie dough portioned in muffin cups becomes pre-portioned brownies.

Cinnamon roll, coffee cake, quick bread, and other pastry recipes size well in muffin cups.

Use muffin compartments to twirl spaghetti and other strand pasta into nests that make attractive serving portions.

Mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes can be molded into attractive mounds in muffin cups.  Spray the cups with cooking oil spray before adding the potato mixtures.  Bake them, uncovered, for about 15 minutes.  Then use a flat pan to aid you in inverting and removing the mounds.

Recipes like crab cakes and salmon cakes can be formed and portioned in muffin cups.  Portioning in this manner can give you exact portion yields from a recipe.

Thin strips of zucchini, or acorn squash rings can be placed in muffin cups, around the outer edge, to make flower-like baskets to hold savory baked fillings.

Use an inexpensive muffin pan to segregate miscellaneous nuts, bolts, screws, and nails in your workshop.

The same can be done in the office with miscellaneous pins, clips, and rubber bands.