Culinary Tips

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.

Have you heard about America’s Test Kitchen?  Well now you have, so check it out.   Their website is an incredible tool for home cooks and pros alike.

What separates them from other shows and websites is their testing process.  They try variation after variation of method, ingredients, and cooking process until it works.  Along with the website and show, they also have quite a few books.  I LOVE their ‘New Best Recipe’!  LOVE IT.  It’s got everything.  You need a banana bread recipe?  Theirs rocks.  They talk about the process that they went through to get to the one they settled on.  They talk about common faults and how to avoid them.

Only going to send your kid away to college with one cooking book?  Make it this one.  It’s regular food that people crave and like to eat … no bacon foam here.  They also often have variations on the recipes (aka free extra recipes!). One of my favourite segments of their show is the review corner, where they test everything from coffee makers to jam.

The website has every show and every recipe from the current season for free, and all the others for a subscription.  It’s pretty awesome.  Check it out.  For real.  Also it’s hosted buy a guy that wears bow ties!  What’s not to love?

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food by Jeff Potter

I want to love this book, but it’s so.. geeky.  There loads of good information here, but peppered throughout the book are CompSci references, and interviews with social media stars and blog owners that I found to be a distraction from an otherwise good book.  I really don’t care how the creator of BoingBoing makes her roast potatoes [or whatever].

However, the recipes are easy to read, measurements are often given in imperial as well as metric, and from a technical standpoint most of the recipes themselves seem solid.

There is so much information packed into this book that I think it is a good read for anyone interested in the ‘whys’ of cooking.  If you’ve tried to read through Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking and fell asleep, Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food is a good alternative, and in some respects may be an even better book for the home and professional cook because it includes a ton of well thought out recipes.

30 Second Review: The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen by Michael Ruhlman

If you’re a fan of Anthony Bourdain, you will probably like Michael Ruhlman too.  This book is a follow up to The Soul of a Chef/Making of a Chef, and in it Ruhlman revisits the people and places of his past.  The other books aren’t prerequisites though.

I would say this book and Bourdain’s latest, Medium Raw, make good companions with similar topics and stories: chef branding and ever expanding empires, and the rise of celebrity chefs.

The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen is probably the closest many of us will get to being able to sit down with some of the CIAs chefs, Grant Achatz, and Thomas Keller and for that reason alone I think it’s worth a read.

I’ve written about podcasts before, when I shared Crimes Against Food, but now I’d like to mention two niche specific audio programs that I think may appeal to a wider audience.  I am visually impaired, and if I’m reading on paper for more than a few minutes suffer from intense eye strain.  That said, I find Voiceprint to be a great resource.  For those non-Canadians out there, Voiceprint is a ‘radio station’ staffed by volunteers that read various newspapers and magazines.  It is available as a streaming audio broadcast, and as a S.A.P. broadcast on a few Canadian cable/satellite stations.

The two food related programs I check out regularly are:

Bon Appetit, which features general cooking articles, write ups about restaurants and chefs.  Click here to visit the archives of past episodes.

Dining Out – From the website ‘Hear the latest trends in dining out. Discover the hot places. Listen to news and insider tips on where to eat well – and where to be seen.‘  Visit the Dining Out archives to download previous episodes.

Iron Chef UK takes the familiar Iron Chef formula, replaces the head on head aspect with a team, makes the competition a week long, and adds a £1000 prize for the winning chef.  What Iron Chef UK doesn’t do is make any of this entertaining.

4 challengers compete against a chairman-chosen Iron Chef, either Martin Blunos, Judy Joo, Sanjay Dwivedi and Tom Aikens.  On the ‘Friday Final’, the weeks top contestants face off against the week’s top Chefs.   Each team member cooks up one component of the meal, whereas the Iron Chef and his crew cook up four.

The host Olly Smith is irritating, and his puns are terrible.  They were delivered with such sincerity that it pained me.  His lines are all delivered with the tone of comedian David Mitchell doing his ‘Football’ skit.   David Mitchell is far more entertaining than Iron Chef UK, so here’s the skit:

The Japanese Iron Chef had a great thing going with the story at the beginning of each episode.  Sure, it may have been a load of scripted crap, but it was an entertaining narrative for those of us that tuned into Iron Chef weekly.  This UK spin off does away with it completely, and worst of all does away with the challenger choosing which Iron Chef they want to compete against.

The host irritatingly darts around and interviews each competitor and banters with the other commentator on camera, taking the focus away from the food.

And on this first episode, the secret ingredient is … beef?  Really?

It’s still not as bad as Chef VS City, and I’d rather watch Mario Batali sweat into his food whilst wearing silly shoes and shorts.

Iron Chef UK can be seen on the UK’s Channel 4.