Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Hot Line
Spaghetti squash and vegetable ragout, confit garlic and roast tomatoes
Jan 18th
It’s cold, it’s rainy, and I’m tired. I also have virtually no groceries in the house. Now I need to be a little creative.
Here’s what’s in the fridge:
Spaghetti Squash
Zucchini
Carrots
Garlic
Artichokes
Tomato sauce
Garlic Mushrooms
Caramelized onions
Grape Tomatoes
These grape tomatoes are grim looking. They’re wrinkled and dry, so what better way to use up than roasting. Preheat your oven to 325F, put the tomatoes on a baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast for 30-45 minutes or until somewhat dry.
Grape tomatoes drizzled in olive oil and seasoned. Ready for roasting.
Cut the ends off the squash – carefully. Cut it lengthwise, and scoop out the seeds and pulp. Place it on a microwave safe plate cut side down, and microwave on high for 7 minutes. Remove when done, let cool, and with a fork, scoop out the strands of squash.
Place a few garlic cloves and olive oil into a small pan or pot. Cover, or nearly cover the garlic with oil. Heat over medium low heat for about 15 minutes. Do not let burn. Remove when garlic cloves are soft and golden brown.
Shread carrots and zucchini, or cut into spaghetti like strips with a mandoline.
Cooked spaghetti squash, julienne zucchini and carrot
Heat your tomato sauce in a pan, add carrots and simmer briefly. Add zucchini after about 2 minutes. Simmer 30 seconds, and add precooked mushrooms, roasted garlic.
Heat up a little butter in a pan, toss in the squash, season. Sautee to reheat. Add your ragout. Garnish with basil, confit garlic, roast tomatoes, and garlic oil.
Spaghetti squash and vegetable ragout, confit garlic and roast tomatoes
Related Blogs
Butternut squash and zucchini curry with fresh spices
Jan 11th
This dish may not be traditional, but I tried to build it using some traditional Indian cooking techniques. Now, when I say ‘Indian cooking’, I realize that it is a huge country, with countless regional culinary variations. This dish is probably closest to west Indian, Gujurat or Rajastani food – hot, vegetarian, flavorful, and mildly sweet.
There is no curry powder used here, only fresh ground or whole spices. This gives the cook the ability to adjust the dish as needed. Its hard to screw up a curry dish, since you can always correct it as you go. The only golden rule is to never burn your spices. Keep watching your heat.
| Ingredients: |
| 2 tbsp vegetable oil |
| 3 red chilies |
| 4 green cardamom |
| 3 inches cinnamon stick |
| 1 1/2 tbsp cumin seed |
| 2 tsp fennel seed |
| 1 white onion, diced |
| 2 tsp ground ginger |
| 4 cloves minced garlic |
| 1 tbsp ground coriander |
| 1 tsp turmeric |
| 1 cup of diced tomatoes or halved grape tomatoes |
| 1 cup zucchini |
| 1 cup cream or omit for a lower fat version |
| 1 cup butternut squash diced |
| sprinkle of dried fenugreek leaves |
| 1 tbsp yogurt |
| brown sugar to taste |
| Fresh coriander for garnish |
Before proceeding, heat up a pot of salted water. Peel and dice the butternut squash and blanch it until soft, probably 4 minutes if diced into 1 inch cubes, less time for smaller cuts.
- Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a pan over medium heat until it begins to shimmer.
- Break off the stem of your red chilies and crack them in half. This way they wont explode and splatter you with oil. Sautee them until the skin begins to crackle.
- Add cardamom pods and cinnamon stick. Let toast in the pan for about 60 seconds.
- Add the cumin seed and toast it until you can smell the toasty lemony scent.
- Add fennel seed and toast.
- Add onion and cook until translucent.
- Add garlic and ginger, saute briefly.
- Add coriander, turmeric
- Toss in the tomatoes and briefly cook out
- Add zucchini and cook briefly, then add cream and cook over medium heat until thickened.
- Add your blanched and drained butternut squash.
- Sweeten with brown sugar, and finish with yogurt if you wish.
- Garnish with fresh coriander leaves.
Now, I know that seems like a long recipe, but once you do it once, it really becomes the same old flow over and over. The summary – toast and saute your spices, add your aromatics [onions, ginger, garlic], build sauce with tomatoes/cream/whatever, add veg, finish and plate. The plating would have been nicer, but I had to clean up a major spill in the kitchen while cooking.
Building the sauce, tomatoes added
Almost done, cook the zucchini
Add the butternut squash to reheat it
Finished and plated
Related Blogs
My New Favourite Thing: Super Quick Fresh Pizzas
Dec 6th
Fresh home-made pizza is one of the best things ever. But who can be bothered to make a dough, let it proof, punch it, let it proof again only to still have to make everything you want on the thing?!
The solution I’ve found, (sad that it took me so long to implement even though we’ve been doing this at work since long before I started a year ago) is to make all the components separately and freeze them in individual portions.
For the base, simply make the dough as you would regularly, make enough for however many pizzas you want, and after rolling, freeze.
A sub-tip here is to freeze them all on a baking sheet with a piece of wax paper in between and once frozen, wrap individually in saran wrap to prevent freezer burn.
For the sauce and the toppings, make as per the recipes you like, and freeze in small zip lock baggies. I’ve found this works brilliantly for garlic mushrooms, caramelized onions and sauce so far, and from work I know this also works with sausages (cut to size first).
When you want a pizza, simply pull one bag each of whatever you want on it from the freezer, let them defrost in the fridge (or in the microwave) and there you are home-made from scratch pizza any time you like.
Seasoning Meat
Nov 9th
When seasoning meat before cooking, there are really two ways you can go about it.
Firstly, season it right before cooking or searing. This way the surface of the meat will be seasoned, and you’ll get flavour in every bite.
The other way to go about it is to season your meat, then let it rest for an hour or two. Moisture will be drawn out of the meat by the salt, but will be reabsorbed with some of the salt over the time period. This is the way I prefer to do it whenever possible.
If you do something in between, like seasoning a steak, and leaving it sit for 20 minutes, you’ll notice a layer of moisture on the surface. This has been pulled out of the meat. If you cook the meat after a short rest, you’ll lose that moisture.
Thai Inspired Lamb Satays
Nov 7th
The post I did a while back on Moroccan inspired lamb shoulder was so popular, I decided to dig up this old recipe. Here we have Thai style satays, but instead of beef, chicken, or pork, we are using lamb. Sure, it’s nontraditional, but the flavours definitely go well together. Think back to the Moroccan recipe: chilies, ginger, coriander, garlic, citrus. Here we have similar ingredients, with the addition of some fish sauce for umami, and lemongrass for those citrus notes.
Thai Inspired Lamb Satays
4 portions; 8 skewers.
500g lamb loin
1 Tbsp cilantro
1 Tbsp mint
1 1/2 cm ginger minced
2 cloves garlic minced
1 lemon grass stalk minced
1 red chili minced
1 Tbsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
2 tbsp honey
1 tbsp fish sauce
4 tbsp veg oil
8 soaked bamboo skewers
Rather than mincing all of your ingredients separately, blend mint, coriander, ginger, garlic, chili, cumin, honey, fish sauce, in a food processor. Stream in your oil. Slice the lemongrass across the fibers and add to the mixture. Blend until smooth.
Cube meat the lamb, skewer it and marinate for a few hours, up to 24 hours.
Grill your skewers 3 minutes per side over a medium heat, or until the lamb is cooked medium-rare.
Types of flour and their substitutions
Jul 14th
Lately, Culinary Tips has been getting a lot of searches for types of flour, substitutions of flour types, and uses of flour, so I’ve expanded the entry here on flour. Hopefully this helps answer some questions. If not, as always, drop us a comment below or email a question.
Firstly, to understand flour, it helps to understand its source, wheat. There are several varieties of wheat, which I won’t delve into here. They vary in colour, protein content, and texture. The seed of which, has three distinct parts: the hull or bran, the endosperm, and the embryo or germ. In whole wheat flour, the husk of the wheat grain is left on and ground, hence the term whole wheat. In white flour is it removed, and only the endosperm and embryo are ground.
Inside flour are two important proteins that make baking possible – glutenin and gliadin. When these are kneaded together in the presence of water, they interlink and form a network called gluten. Gluten gives baked goods a chewy/firm texture, and captures the gases released from yeast during fermentation, and the carbon dioxide released from chemical leaveners in baking.
For many baking projects the right type of flour can make all the difference, but how do you know what the right type is? First lets discuss the types of flour, and what they are used for. The four basic types of wheat flour on the market are:
- All Purpose
- Cake and Pastry
- Bread
- and Self-Raising
Apart from self-raising, which has a chemical leavener (baking powder) already added, the others differ from each other in respect to how much protein is left in during the milling process.
Though there are many different proteins found in flour, the ones that are of concern to bakers are gliadin and glutenin. These proteins form gluten. Gluten is what makes dough elastic. When making bread you want maximum gluten formation, so the CO2 from the yeast will have a place to stay, but when you’re making say, scones or pie dough, the less gluten the better so the product will not be chewy.
Strong / Hard / Bread Flour
Bread flour has the highest protein content of them all, and though it varies from brand to brand and place to place, the protein content is 12-14%. It is often made using a type of wheat called Durum. Due to the high protein content, when worked with water, the most gluten is formed resulting in a chewier product. Strong flour is typically used for making pasta, bread, and other yeast leavened baked goods. Strong flour is also the type that should be used when dusting a workbench because of the large particle size. Unless you are using yeast in your product, or making pasta, consider another type of flour.
All Purpose Flour
Next in strength comes all purpose, which has an 8-10% protein content, putting it basically in the middle of the road when it comes to gluten forming potential. It is a blend of hard and soft flours. If you are going to be making a variety of products, but only want to buy one type of flour, this is the one for you.
Cake Flour / Pasty Flour
At the grocery store, you will often see a single product called Cake and Pastry Flour, with generally the lowest protein content of around 7-10%. Cake and pastry flour has the lowest protein content of all common types of flour, and should be used in making products with a light texture as gluten development is to be avoided. For example, using a high protein flour will make your cake tough, causing it to not rise when baked.
If you only have bread flour and you want some scones tonight, by all means use it, but be extra aware that the potential for chewy scones is higher with bread flour than cake flour. If you are making bread, and you only have cake flour, you may be in for a little more trouble. Soft bread depends on proper gluten development to trap the gases from the yeast, creating leavening, and therefore a nice soft crumb. With cake flour, there is only about half the protein in bread flour, so the potential for gluten development is lesser. To get fully developed dough, you may have to knead for so long that the heat from the friction in the bowl kills the yeast, leaving you with a big sticky pile of mess.
Quite a few British recipes call for self-raising flour because in the UK, self raising flour is roughly the same price as regular flour. For each cup of unleavened flour, add 1 1/2 tsp baking powder. If you only have self-raising flour, and your recipe calls for regular, omit the baking powder and/or salt (if your flour already has it mixed in).
Moroccan inspired roast boneless lamb shoulder marinated in chermoula
Jul 14th
I’m not the biggest fan of lamb in general, but I think my favourite cut of any meat has to be lamb shoulder. It is a rather tough cut of meat with a lot of connective tissue, but can be boned out and rolled into a roast if you carve around or remove some of the tendons beforehand. Also, if you get quality young Australian or New Zealand lamb, you won’t have to worry about that gamey scent that lamb usually has.
This recipe is inspired by something that I did at work a few days ago, Moroccan spiced roasted boneless lamb shoulder.
From the top: sambal oelek, chopped coriander stalks, ginger, garlic, onion
The spices come in the form of chermoula [also spelled shermoola, and charmoula]. Chermoula is a spice paste used in north African cooking [Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), and while recipes vary considerably, some common ingredients are: garlic, ginger, onion, coriander leaves and stems, chilies, lemon juice and zest, and oil.
From the top: paprika, cumin, Chinese 5 spice, coriander seed, turmeric
Spices used may include fennel seed, coriander seed, cumin, paprika, cinnamon, turmeric.
Chermoula recipe:
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1/2 small onion, red, white, yellow, whatever you like.
- 1 tbsp sambal oelek [or ground red chilies, sambal was a shortcut]
- 1 tbsp paprika
- 2 tsp cumin
- 1 tbsp ginger or 1 inch or so fresh ginger chopped
- 2 tsp coriander seed, crushed whole or ground
- 4 tbsp coriander (cilantro) leaves and stems.
- 1 tsp turmeric (optional).
- 3 tbsp lemon juice
- Zest of 1 lemon
- 1 tsp fennel seed
- 1/2 to 1 tsp cinnamon depending on taste
- Oil
- Salt to taste
Finished chermoula, ground into a paste with a morter and pestle. Feel free to use a food processor.
Yeah, I know that is a lot of spices and ingredients, and if you don’t have them all on hand this can be an expensive thing to make. Feel free to omit anything listed, and I recommend you eyeball the quantities as well because everyone’s spices have different potencies. Mix your chermoula and let it sit for a few minutes, then taste it. Adjust the flavour if you need to, after all, eating is a very individual thing.
I couldn’t be bothered to find my fennel seed today, so I threw in 1 tsp of Chinese 5 spice powder. Five spice contains ginger, cinnamon, star anise, fennel seed, and Sichuan peppercorns [yours may have different ingredients, however]. Cinnamon, ginger and fennel seed are all ingredients in todays recipe, and the cloves go nicely as well, so if you have 5 spice, feel free to experiment and use it. I should also mention that I only had a bundle of coriander stalks left over, without any leaves. The stems pack even more flavour than the leaves do, so you may want to hold onto them next time you grow or buy some cilantro.
Boneless lamb shoulder, flattened and ready to be coated
If you bought vacuum packed lamb, open the cryovac bag and rinse the lamb under the tap, then let it sit to let the smell dissipate. When things sit in cryovac bags they tend to start to stink, even when the meat is perfectly fresh. The smell will go away in a couple minutes, and the meat will return to its natural vibrant red colour.
Boneless lamb shoulder with the inside coated in chermoula
Preheat the oven to 325F/160C. Coat your lamb shoulder inside with some of the chermoula.
Rolled, tied, and coated lamb shoulder
Then roll it up and tie with butchers knots. Coat the outside with the remaining chermoula and let it sit as the oven heats up. You can also coat and roll the lamb the night before to let the flavours infuse.
Roast the lamb at 325F for about an hour, or more, or less. Now is the time to break out that meat thermometer, because the cooking time depends on the thickness of the meat, and every roast is going to have a different cooking time. Cook the roast until the internal temperature reaches 140F, or 60C. This will be rare. Then remove it from the oven, and tent with foil and let it rest for 10-15 minutes. The carryover cooking should give you a medium-rare roast. If you prefer your lamb medium to well, remove it at 150F or 65C and let rest. If you like your lamb charcoal and dry, cook it well done to 170F or 70C. If you cook it well done, it’ll likely be dry and inedible.
Roasted lamb shoulder after resting
Let the lamb rest for 10-15 minutes, remove the ties, then slice. You may need to cut cleverly if you’ve left some thick tendons in there.
Roasted Moroccan inspired lamb shoulder cooked medium and sliced
This lamb goes nicely with minted yogurt, a rice pilaf, and some zucchini and carrots.
Keep tofu from breaking up in a stir fry
Jun 24th
Ever tried making a Chinese takeout style stir fry at home and ended up with a bunch of overcooked vegetables covered in tiny bits of broken tofu? Well, I can’t help you with the veg today, but there’s an easy way to keep that tofu from breaking up.
If you have access to a deep fat fryer, toss the tofu in a bit of cornstarch (either dry, or mixed with your marinade) and deep fry briefly until the outside is firm to the touch.
Alternately, for a more authentic way, wrap the block of tofu in a clean kitchen towel or piece of cheesecloth, put it in something with edges or a rim to catch the liquid, and set a can, book, or something else heavy ontop [not, TOO heavy, you'll break it]. The moisture will be pressed out, and the tofu will firm up, and also be able to absorb more flavours from the dish.
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 )
All about cooking pasta
May 21st
Pasta is something that seems to mystify even some experienced cooks. When I refer to pasta here, I’m talking about Italian style pastas.
Cooking pasta:
For reference, half a cup of dried pasta generally yields about 1 cup of cooked pasta.
The ratio of water to pasta is important. If cooking pasta in too little water, the released starch will cause the pasta to be overly sticky. A good general rule is one litre of water for every 100g of pasta, and remember, that water should be at a rolling boil before adding the pasta.
When it comes to seasoning pasta, don’t be scared to add quite a bit of salt. A tablespoon [15g] salt for every 200g is reasonable. Obviously, in a professional kitchen you won’t be measuring or weighing your salt when tossing it in the steam kettle – so taste test – the water should taste like sea water, don’t worry, very little is absorbed by the pasta.
If you’re cooking pasta in a huge pot or steam kettle, remember that if you want something to boil faster, throw a lid or sheet pan on top of it. I see way too many people waiting around for 80 litres of water to boil in a steam kettle, and this is a little tip neglected in culinary school.
Also, to prevent boil-over when doing a large batch, toss in a SMALL amount of oil. It will break up the surface tension and prevent bubble formation. If your kettle is boiling over though, grab that spray wand and blast the bubbles. it will knock them down immediately – then turn down your kettle.
If you don’t have an approximate cooking time for your dried pasta, start checking the doneness around the 8 minute mark.
Another important point to make about cooking large amounts of pasta is that as long as that pasta remains hot, it is still cooking. So while it may be perfectly al dente when you test it, consider it will take you at least 5 minutes to remove all that pasta from the steam kettle and put it into inserts or onto sheet trays with oil. By that time it is overcooked.
Serving pasta:
If you’re holding the pasta to be reheated later, remove it from the water a little more al dente than normal, drain well, and toss in a little oil. Spread evenly and thinly onto sheet pans, and put on a rolling rack in the cooler. Wrap it well once cooled.
Normally, pasta should not be tossed in oil, but rather tossed in a little of the sauce it is being served with. Tossing pasta in oil forms a barrier that will cause the sauce to slide off rather than cling. Likewise, don’t rinse pasta before serving. The surface starch helps the sauce cling.
