Culinary Tips

Wiping down

Jan 242012

Oftentimes I try to write very detailed posts with a lot of well eresearched nfirmation. I think this is holding me back from passing along a lot of basic, yet important kitchen tips. That said, here’s a nice brief one:

When you’re wiping down your station, sacrifice one of your precious dry towels to some liquid, be it sanitizer or soapy water, wring it out, then wipe down. A wet towel is much more absorbent than a try towel. Don’t believe me? Just try wiping up a puddle of water with a bone dry towel. Then try it with a moist one. Water is a polar molecule, and it has a strong attraction to other water molecules, so it’s the water itself that is pulling it into the fibers of the towel.

An important lesson - Not all recipes are created equal

Cooking Books and Magazines No Responses »

Jan 222012

Being in pastry, I have no problem using a recipe. I even slightly dislike when sneering cooks say to each other “oh my god dude, I can’t believe you need a recipe for that”. Standard recipes are not only the only way to control food cost, but they are also the only way to maintain standard flavours from one day to the next and one cook to the next. Yes you should know how to make a tomato soup without a recipe, but in a professional kitchen, having a standard recipe is essential. 12 different cooks will make 12 completely different tomato soups.

That said, not all recipes are created equal, or are all even any good. There is pretty much nothing I hate more than someone asking for me to make something stupid that I don’t have a good recipe for, then handing me a printout from all recipes, or about.com. Even printouts from respectable sources are often not suitable for production kitchens, with ingredients in cups, or bags, or handfuls. There is no substitute for trustworthy recipes that you know will work with your oven, available ingredients and equipment.

What is “acceptable” to a home baker in terms of a final product will not necessarily be good enough to be used in your establishment where anything less than “great” is simply not good enough. Book recipes are a lot more trustworthy in general because of the accountability involved. A recipe that gets a complaint from bonappetit.com, can be taken down within a few hours, but a bad recipe in their published book will damage their brand with everyone who tries it out over the lifetime of the book. But again, there are good books (The New Best Recipe, Bon Appetite Desserts, Indulge, Canadian Living Baking book, and Michel Roux Pastry are but a few) and bad books, but I’ll take a book recipe over a printout any day.

Kitchen Math Part 2

Everything Else No Responses »

Jan 202012

My last rant about math in the kitchen got me thinking about the other main use for math in my kitchen life – recipe scaling.

Recipe scaling comes in handy when you have a recipe that yields a different amount than the amount that you need, but you want to make it anyway, and you want it to come out the same.

For example, a muffin recipe that yields 36 muffins, but you need 90. Sure you could do a double batch, but then you’ll be short, or a 3X, but then you’ll have too many. The best and easiest thing to do is scale the recipe to fit your needs.

The first step it to figure out how many times a recipe you need to make. If your recipe is too small, this will always be a number larger than 1. If your recipe is too big, your number will be a decimal smaller than 1.

90portions required / 36 portion yield=2.5x recipe. You need to multiply each ingredient with a factor of 2.5.

1kg of flour becomes 2.5kg.

400g of sugar becomes 1kg.

Etc.

I have had so many stages come through my shop without a calculator, without even an idea of how to scale a recipe that I’m scared now, and that is the thing that I make darn sure they leave with above all else.

Indulge by Claire Clark

Uncategorized No Responses »

Jan 182012

Indulge: 100 Perfect Desserts.

Claire Clark has had one hell of a career. The kind of career that I have wet dreams about. She has worked at some of London’s best restaurants (the Ritz Hotel…), been a pastry teacher at Le Cordon Bleu, and at the time of writing her amazing book Indulge, was the pastry chef at the French Laundry.

The book is a testament to simplicity and flavour above all else. I have never had anything less than a stellar result from any of the recipes I’ve tried and I’ve tried a lot of them. Her shortbread, which Thomas Keller raves about in the introduction have become a standard everywhere I’ve worked. Her techniques are easy to understand and there is even a write up about the history of the recipe before each one. 90% of the recipes in the book have pictures and the recipes range from basics and staples such as cookies, to more elaborate plated desserts while never slipping out of the reach of a moderately talented home baker.

I love it more than any pastry book I have and it is the first thing I turn to when I need a recipe. It is also the only cookbook that I have ever been pleasantly surprised by reading the non-recipe pages of; her insight into both life in the kitchen, what people need to know and expect, and her experiences as a woman in a man`s world over the years are both insightful and a testament to her humility. I don`t know many chefs comfortable enough with themselves and their accomplishments to tell stories about their failures as she is.

Be sure to try:

Marshmallows – p233

Baked Vanilla Cheesecake – p 140

Crème Caramel- p123

And most importantly Shortbread – p12

Food Costing

Cooking Professionally 1 Response »

Jan 112012

I know. I know. I hear it from you guys all the time. “But I got into cooking because I suck at math”. Yes, yes, that’s nice for you. You still have to have a basic understanding of math to do things properly. There is no way around that, and the more “molecular” the food you want to make, the more numbers you will have to play around with in your head.

Food is science, and science is math. Yes you can make a good soup with absolutely no further math knowledge than how to count to 10, but what is your food cost per portion? How much would you have to sell a bowl of it for to make any money? What if your tomatoes were half off from your supplier? How much would it cost then?

Restaurant businesses fail more often than any others, and I’m sure there are a lot of factors around why, but one problem that often comes up is managers and owners who don’t know where all the money is going. Knowing what amount of money is tied up in product and stock is vital to knowing how your business is doing. Food costing is easy, too. I dropped high school math at the first possible opportunity, and the basic classes that I took were not my strongest subjects, but knowing this simple math makes me a better chef.

The basic food costing formula: the cost of all ingredients in a dish divided by the number of servings it makes.

Example –

Dry pasta costs $1/kg.
Salt is $1/kg.
Water is free.

If I cook 1kg of dry pasta in 50g salt and 6l water then:

$1+$0.05+0= $1.05. 1kg of cooked pasta (25 portions)=$1.05

$1.05/25 portions = $0.042 per portion of cooked pasta.

In the restaurant business, food cost should account for about 30% of the price on the menu (the rest goes to labour, and overhead.) Without a basic idea of food costing, a lot of easy to avoid problems can suddenly find themselves in between you and profit. There are other things to consider as well, like the yield of a given ingredient [how much is edible] also commonly called the edible portion. I’ll post a follow up, including examples shortly.

Try using both quick oats and rolled oats in cookies

Baking and Pastry No Responses »

Jul 252011

If I could only one type of cookie for the rest of my life it would be chocolate chip oatmeal. With that in mind, I often find oatmeal cookies are lacking in oatyness. I’ve found one way around this is to use 2 kinds of oats in your dough; quick oats and whole rolled oats.

‘Steel Cut’ oats, or ‘groats’ are too dense and unprocessed to use in baking cookies, so resist the urge even if you’re trying for a healthy rustic angle.

The rolled oats will stay whole even after they are baked, giving you that nice oaty look and bite that is so satisfying. The quick oats will become part of the dough a bit better, giving you a nice taste, and also help with the oaty texture.

The Six Things Wrong With the Vancouver Food Scene

Where to Eat No Responses »

Jul 212011

Lately I’ve found myself lamenting the state of the Vancouver food scene. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m particularly unhappy at my current job, sleep deprived because of it and just generally cranky, or if something is really actually wrong at the heart of food in Vancouver. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it and I think I’ve narrowed it down to six main sub-problems which all lead to this mediocre, over-priced, un-influential mess of food culture here.

The Pay VS cost of living

Now I will be the first to admit that some of the items on my hate list cannot be changed by me nor anyone else and this one defiantly falls into that category. The simple fact is that the cost of living in Vancouver is outrageous. According to the first hit on Google for a comparison to Toronto, Vancouver is about 8-10% more expensive than Canada’s largest city. Renting a restaurant space in the city is astronomical and leaves very little room for smaller places offering cheaper food or more niche items to survive. This in turn means there is less money to go around after paying rent on a restaurant for things like, oh, say staff costs.

That meal you and 150 other people just each paid $200 for … the 8 people that cooked it got paid an average of $9 an hour to make it. Even at hotel restaurants where pay per hour is better, the average line cook still works 4 hours a day for free. Your chefs will say that it’s your fault you have to come in 3 hours early to get your prep done because you are too slow, but that’s crap and they know it. They also know that there’s not a lot of choice for a line cook, because that working for free nonsense is the same everywhere.

Asian influence

Why does everything need an “Asian influence”? I was browsing Sherman’s Food Adventures and came across a post about the newly opened Hawksworth restaurant. For those who don’t know too much about David Hawksworth, he was the chef at West restaurant for a number of years, is in the BC restaurant hall of fame (yes, there is such a thing) and was known for seasonally driven local food. So the restaurant bearing his name would typify the very thing he has preached all those years while spending other people’s money you say? But, no. As Sherman correctly points out (he loves it though), there is enormous “Asian influence” across the board on the Hawksworth menu from the XO sauce on the scallop appetizer, to the five spice broth and enoki mushrooms on the duck main. I’m not saying these aren’t nice dishes, I haven’t eaten there, I don’t know, my point is just that what happened to local food?

Living in a very “ethnic” (as it is often referred to) part of town I understand that there is a large and influential Asian community in Vancouver and that as I will get to later, a lot of food writers and bloggers are Asian, but why does every restaurant need to have Asian influence? Can a restaurant be good and popular and successful without it? Even West which used to be quintessentially Canadian, on the first menu I found on their site has “Yuzu marinated Octopus Tentacles”. Being on the inside of the food scene a little, I know that this doesn’t happen to be on their menu because they found a supplier who is growing great little fresh yuzu fruit on their farm in Abbotsford. The juice comes in little bottles shipped all the way from Japan and is about as close to fresh juice as Real Lemon is to a lemon. You wouldn’t serve Real Lemon in your fine dining restaurant why are you serving Real Yuzu?

Food Bloggers

I admit, I am sort of a food blogger. I try to blog more about cooking, than about eating, but still there are a couple of posts up there, I know. I’m calling out Sherman, and Chow Times, and Ho Yummy and whoever else is out there pretending to know about food. You work in a bank! Because you’ve eaten everywhere, doesn’t mean you understand anything, and it doesn’t mean you know about food, it just means you’re probably not hungry anymore. If someone has the time and wherewithal and most importantly money to eat at a different restaurant every day, you can be damn sure they aren’t working in one. These blogs are not commissioned and put up content that ego-driven chefs (read: Chefs) will read, and think that these people know what they are talking about and make changes accordingly. But they are not the voice of the people. Or maybe they are and the people just suck. Letting your cultural biases dictate what you order is fine, if every other blog isn’t doing the exact same thing.

I feel somewhat bad for calling out I’m Only Here For the Food. But the guy eats places, not once, but twice , and can’t even be bothered to order the namesake dish of the restaurant. Why visit places that cared about falafel so much they named their restaurant after it and not order the falafel!

Lately even Kim-Kiu Ho, the writer of I’m Only Here for the Food has become so despondent with the state of the Vancouver Food Blog community that he has taken himself out of it (hence me feeling bad for calling in out, but I read that ages ago and it’s bugged me ever since).

House-made!

According to the message boards at Something Awful, this is the case everywhere, but I’m including it on the list for 2 reasons – eating out in Vancouver (at a nice, sit-down, tablecloth kind of place) is absurdly expensive, and because it dilutes the effect of all the work that the hundreds of cooks do every day to house-make something.

House made should mean that it is made, from scratch in house. House baked is an entirely other thing, meaning that it comes in unbaked but still purchased and is baked “fresh” on premises. Everywhere I’ve worked and everywhere everyone I’ve talked to has worked lies on their menu. Mostly about “House-made”, but sometimes about “real brandy” or other times about “Wild Mushrooms”. I love mushrooms, and I know that real wild mushrooms are expensive and time consuming to deal with once they are bought. Most importantly however, they are tasty. So when I see them on a menu, I give the benefit of the doubt and trust that they are wild mushrooms. When they are not (as is sadly often the case), I get very angry. I feel betrayed and ripped off. I will not eat at your restaurant again. You think I’m dumb and don’t know what a wild mushroom looks like. I don’t need that thank you. Other things are harder to tell though, like “House made preserves”. I want to believe in and reward anyone who is passionate about preserves enough to make them in house for a busy restaurant, so I will order then. When they end up being substandard bought in slop then again the whole thing of the betrayal and the sadness comes again. Stop lying. Make it and be proud of how much better it is than crap that comes in a bucket, or don’t and put the price down. It has bothered me when I have had to serve things that were being called “house made” that I didn’t make so much that I would tell the servers to tell the guests that they were not “house made” and that I didn’t want to be associated with such garbage.

Liquor Tax

Liquor is very expensive. Coming from a place where for better or worse liquor is cheap (and goes on sale and becomes even cheaper), and is available from the supermarket to BC was a shock and every time I have to go to the government run liquor store (but not on a Sunday, they don’t open on a Sunday) I feel like a criminal or a heroin addict going to get their methadone. I don’t like it. I’m a responsible drinker and treating people like children makes them act like children. The high price of liquor makes it hard for restaurants to make it here as most other places a large percentage of gross revenue comes from liquor sales, but here, who has the money? I would love to order a $100 bottle of wine, if I knew that it didn’t cost $10 for the government to buy to resell at the liquor store to be bought by the restaurant to be re-sold to me. And then pay tax on it. If booze was cheaper, food would be better.

Vij’s/Tojos

Vij’s and Tojos! Why?! They are such icons in the Vancouver food scene! And often quoted in proper books (The Flavor Bible comes to mind). What have they done!? -I hear you all scream.

As much as they are a part of the Vancouver food scene, they are also not a part of the Vancouver food scene. Have you ever run into a cook that used to work at either place that wasn’t Indian or Japanese respectively? Me neither. Vij make a point of only hiring Punjabi women to work in his kitchen. He is proud of this and is quoted in a number of places stating this. What’s wrong with that? Vij’s is an island, totally cut off from the rest of the world. You can’t go stage there, you can’t work there. It’s not how it’s done. It’s the same for Tojos. I want to see more Indian influence on menus, but I can’t learn about Indian food from the so-called best Indian restaurant in Vancouver, because I’m not Indian! How crazy and isolationist is that?

So what does this all mean? I don’t know. Right now I’m in the anger stage of the five Kibler-Ross model stages. Next comes Bargaining. I’ll have to post again when that comes.

Home made Potato Oat Bread

Baking and Pastry, Breads No Responses »

Jul 202011

Now while I loved my old bread machine, it took a tumble and fell off the counter and then didn’t work so well. So, we got a new one – a Breadman BK1060BC. Maybe it proofs a little warmer than the old one, or maybe it’s the new yeast I bought, but we haven’t had much luck with mixing and baking our old bread machine recipes in the Breadman. It is perfect for making dough, however, and we have a convection oven to bake in anyways.

I almost prefer to mix my bread in the machine and bake it in the oven. That way you get to make it whatever shape you like and with our convection oven, it comes out beautifully. Most bread machines seem to come with at least one dough setting (our old one also had a pizza dough setting, and our new one has an “artisan dough” setting which takes over 5 hours!).

Here’s a recipe to try out in your machine, it’s my new favorite, Potato Oat Bread.

Potato Oat Bread

Yield: One 2lb Loaf

Ingredients

2 Eggs
1 1/3 Cup Lukewarm Water
2 Tablespoons Sugar
2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
1 1/2 Teaspoon Salt
4 Tablespoons Milk Powder
1 Tablespoon Gluten Powder (Optional)
1 Tablespoon Lecithin (Optional)
3/4 Cup Potato Flakes
3/4 Cup Quick Oats
2 1/2 Cups All Purpose Flour
2 Teaspoons Bread Machine Yeast

Cooking Directions

Follow the guide for your bread maker, or standard bread baking practices. In general, for a bread machine you\\\'ll be putting the liquids on the bottom, and the dry ingredients on the top. The lecithin powder can be added to either set of ingredients.

Potato Oat Bread

The gluten powder and the lecithin are optional, but recommended. I posted before, about the benefits of lecithin, but the gluten powder is a new ingredient for me. Gluten is the protein responsible for trapping the gas the yeast produces, allowing bread to leaven. Adding an ingredient to bread that does not have gluten (anything but wheat flour), can mean that the bread gets a bit dense or becomes crumbly and lacking structure. Adding the extra gluten powder can give the bread a helping hand when it comes to rising.

As an extra ingredient, gluten was never mentioned at school, and I’ve never come across any information about it in any book I’ve ever read, but I’d seen it at a couple of stores and thought I’d try it. Galloways carry it, and I had seen it at Save-On-Foods in the bulk bins listed as Super Gluten 100. I use it now in any bread dough that is not strictly a white wheat flour dough (it is also good for whole wheat breads, as proportionally whole wheat flour has less gluten than regular AP/bread flour). I also add it to any dough that needs extra structure such as pizza dough.

Tips for making the perfect ganache

Baking and Pastry No Responses »

Jul 072011

A ganache is simply chocolate and a liquid homogenized to form a paste or liquid. Ganaches can be hard enough to cut and hold their shape (dipped chocolates), or soft enough to enrobe a cake (sacher cake glaze) depending on the ratio of liquid to chocolate. The liquid (or liquids) used can virtually anything from water, to fruit puree, to most commonly milk or cream. Ganches are a cornerstone of the pastry world and making a perfect one is often a test given to commis pastry cooks in a similar way to cooking a perfect omelette is given to commis cooks.

The principles are quite simple. Half melt your chocolate, scald your liquid(s), pour one third over at a time and emulsify with the stick blender (or for those with too much time on their hands, a whisk). Just like using the stick blender at any time, it is important to use a deep container. Also, since you are working with chocolate make sure you don’t incorporate any air. If you aren’t sure as to how stiff you want a ganache, make a stiffer one with less liquid than you think you will need, and slowly add you liquid till you get the correct consistency. Keep in mind that your ganache will be stiffer once cold and can be warmed to thin as needed. Finally, once homogenized, let your ganache set up in the fridge overnight to achieve crystallization.

How to use an immersion blender

Equipment No Responses »

Jul 072011

Big Robot Coupe immersion blender

Most home kitchens now seem to have an immersion blender (or stick blender as they are sometimes known), but not everyone seems to know how to use them.

Most importantly, you need a nice deep container to blend in. At work, bain marie inserts are used, but really anything that is narrow and deep will do just fine. As long as the blade of your blender is completely submerged, you should be okay.

The next important thing is to not incorporate too much air if you don’t want to, for instance if you are working with chocolate. Keeping the blade fully submerged will allow you to blend smoothly, but blend in any air. If you see a lot of bubbles forming or hear a bubbly noise, take your blender out (the blade guard will hold an air pocket), and re-insert it, on an angle. Even if it looks like your mixture is not coming together on top, underneath it will and moving the blender around while still submerged should allow you to homogenize without incorporating any air.

Bain marie insert

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