Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Techniques
Macerated Fruit
Jan 19th
Some summer fruits are still around at this time of year, but they don’t always have the most flavour for eating out of hand. That’s not to say they won’t be good, but what to do if you get stuck with bland or sour fruit? Macerate it.
Macerating fruit could be seen as something akin to artificially ripening it. You’re drawing moisture out of the fruit, and sweetening it.
To mascerate, clean and take any inedible parts out of the fruit. Then sprinkle it with a little granulated or icing sugar. Cover the fruit with saran wrap, and it leave for about half an hour. The sugar will draw some of the moisture out of the fruit, and the resulting liquid can be drained off. You may wish to save it for another use. The longer you let the fruit and sugar sit together, the softer your fruit will become.
Related Blogs
Simple technique for great nut or seed brittle
Jan 3rd
Nut or seed brittle can be a wonderful accompaniment to many dishes. I love a piece of pumpkin pie with pumpkin seed brittle as a garnish as it adds a great crunch. Pumpkin seed brittle sprinkled with sea salt is also nice with coleslaw.
Pecan brittle broken up into little pieces is great in a green salad with goat cheese and dried cranberries.
Brittles are quite simple, but they can be go so very wrong. Too sweet, grainy, too hard… there’s so much room for badness.
A simple technique for brittle is:
- Make a simple syrup (1 part sugar, 1 part water, brought to a boil).
- Wait for the syrup to cool a little, and simply toss your seeds or nuts in the syrup. There shouldn’t be too much extra syrup – just enough to coat the nuts and hold them together.
- Spread the mix on a cookie sheet lined with a piece of parchment or a silpat, then bake at 325ºF for aprox. 15 minutes, or until the nuts around the edges start to brown. The brittle will set up once cool. If it’s too soft, put it back in the oven for a few minutes.
If stored in an airtight container, they should keep for a week or so, but I’ve never had any around that long.
Rotate during baking for even browning
Jun 23rd
It’s a good idea when baking pretty much anything to rotate the item about halfway through baking to even cooking and browning. One trick is to rotate about 60% of the way through the baking time instead of 50%. Browning usually takes place toward the end of the baking (if you’re baking at the correct temperature), so rotating later will ensure a more even browning.
Making marble cakes
Jun 23rd
To marble two different cake colors together without getting too much mixing, pass a knife or skewer through the unbaked cake in a spiral motion starting at one end and ending at the other. If you spiral through just once, the batters should be nicely marbled without being indistinguishable.
Folding whipped egg whites when making a cake
Jun 21st
When folding, a lighter product is folded into a heavier one, creating a homogeneous light mixture. This technique is especially important when making sponge cakes as the entire texture and leavening power of the cake is dependant on how well the whipped egg whites are folded into the other ingredients. There are a couple of tricks to folding:
1: Don’t under whip the whites or cream, as some of the air will be lost during folding no matter how quickly or gently you do it.
2: Mix approx 1/3 of the lighter mixture into the heavier one. This will enable the remaining mixture to be incorporated with more ease.
3: Next Fold in the remaining thirds one at a time, waiting till the first of the two is almost homogeneous.
4: Fold with either a whisk or a rubber spatula. Don’t over mix, because this will lose volume. Starting at the bottom of the bowl, work in a spiral motion, slowly and gently, bit by bit moving the heavier mixture onto and into the lighter one. Since you already mixed some of the light mix into the heavier one, it’s now light enough to sit on the light one without flattening it.
5: Bake immediately.
No more crumbs in frosting with a crumb coat
Jun 12th
If you’ve ever frosted a cake, you may have encountered one of the most common problems with homemade cakes; that is frosting full of cake crumbs. There is an easy way around it, and that’s to do what’s called a crumb coat.
Once the cake has been assembled (sliced and filled if necessary), take a small amount of your frosting and spread a thin layer all over the cake making sure that no cake is left exposed. Chill this until it’s all set up, and then do your final layer.
As long as you don’t scrape any of the crumb coat into your top coat, all the crumbs will stay there and not be seen.
Warm eggs are easier to whip and seperate
Jun 5th
When making a recipe that calls for whipped eggs (whites, yolks or whole), one thing to remember is that warm eggs whip to a greater volume than cold eggs.
You can leave the eggs at room temperature for a few hours, or you can place the eggs in a bowl and cover then with lukewarm water (about body temperature works well) for 30-60 minutes, but keep in mind, if eggs are heated above 60 degrees C they will cook. Warm eggs are also easier to separate as the whites are more fluid when warm.
(Remember though, that when leaving eggs above 4 celcius, you may be allowing any salmonella bacteria in the egg to flourish. The incidence of salmonella contamination in eggs in the US and Canada is somewhere between 1 in 20,000 and 1 in 100,000 however, so the risk is minimal -Chris )
Beware of water when working with melted chocolate
Jun 4th
One thing most people don’t know is that in chocolate there is a small amount of starch, which when even a drop of water is added to it will become thick and paste-like. It is for this reason that when working with chocolate in a liquid form to make sure that absolutely no water comes into contact with it.
This is especially problematic when melting chocolate in a bowl over hot water. The steam from the water hits the cooler base of the bowl, condenses and becomes water drops, which can work their way into the chocolate bowl at a later stage. It’s best to wipe the base of the bowl onto a towel right after you remove it from the melter.
The starch in chocolate can be used to your advantage sometimes. When writing with chocolate, you can add a drop of water (literally 1 drop, to up to 1cup of melted chocolate), this will make the chocolate run out of the piping bag more slowly and form a more stable strand, enabling more control of your chocolate writing.
Technique of the day: Tempering
Jun 3rd
Tempering in kitchen terms means bringing an item to a usable temperature. In pastry tempering can have a couple of more specific definitions. One referring to the method of heating and cooling chocolate to specific temperatures to select certain characteristics, and the other to a method of adding a hot liquid to some form of egg without cooking the egg.
Tempering Custards:
The method of tempering using a hot liquid and eggs is a lot simpler, requires no special equipment and for most people is a lot more useful, so that’s where I’ll start.
Tempering is used when making a creme brulee, or other custard such as creme anglaise, or creme caramel, but also for certain recipes of butter tarts and pecan pies. The technique of tempering is basically slowly adding the hot liquid, whether it be cream, or caramel, or whatever, while constantly whisking to distribute the heat, thus raising the temperature of the eggs above that which they could go normally without cooking. This is easy to do with a helper, but slightly more troublesome alone. With one hand to pour, and one hand to whisk that doesn’t leave a hand to hold the bowl while you whisk. One trick to to take a wet towel, twirl it around by one corner (as if you were going to flick it at someone) and place that in a ring around the base of the bowl. This will leave you with one hand to pour and one hand to whisk. A good rule of thumb is to add 10% on the first pour, make sure that that is well mixed, add another 20%, again whisking, then you can add the remaining in 1-2 additions. The whole mix should now be warmer than the eggs should be able to get without cooking, but should be smooth.
An alternative method if you’re not comfortable with the all-in-one method above is to take a few spoonfuls of the hot liquid to your eggs while mixing, then slowly add the now warmed eggs into the hot liquid as above.
Now on to the chocolate technique.
Tempering Chocolate:
The basic principles are that inside the cocoa butter in chocolate six types of crystals can be formed. Of the six, only two provide desirable characteristics. Have you ever melted chocolate for coating or dipping and had streaks form on the surface shortly after, or the chocolate doesn’t set up at all? To prevent this, pretty much the only thing you can do is to temper the chocolate before you use it.
Each individual chocolate formula differs from company to company and from product to product and thus requires slightly different tempering temperatures. The basic technique remains the same for all varieties, however.
First you raise the temperature, melting the chocolate, then the chocolate is cooled, possibly with the addition of finely chopped or chipped pre-tempered chocolate, and the whole mix is then re-warmed. There is extensive information online about the types of crystals and their characteristics, but it’s all a bit technical to go into here.
For the 3 main types of chocolate there are some rough temperatures (in C) to use as a guideline:
Dark: 45-50, 27-28, 31-32
Milk: 45-50, 26-27, 30-31
White: 45-50, 26-27, 30
All chocolate is pre-tempered when you buy it, and you can use this to your advantage if you chose to temper it.
For better cheese bread use cubes
Jun 2nd
Cheesy quick breads and yeast breads can be awesome. What’s better than a spicy cheese corn bread, or a tasty crusty cheese loaf? But, they can also be lacking in cheese flavour.
Many recipes I’ve seen call for grated cheese. Grated cheese is a great addition to lots of things(pizzas, chilli, pastas etc), however it is not a good addition to breads and muffins. You can use twice or even 3 times as much as the recipe calls for and still not give you a good, cheesy taste, increasing the cost and calories of an otherwise nice item.
The trick to deliciously cheesy baked goods is to cut the cheese into roughly 1-2 cm cubes, and add these as called for in the recipe. They will stay relatively whole during baking, and will leave melted cheese nuggets in your final product.
