The Kitchn Archive: Jan 2013

Turnips, kohlrabi, celery root, rutabaga. Root vegetables all, and often left for last in the CSA box by otherwise enterprising cooks who are flummoxed by their ugly looks and famine-food reputations. Among these intimidating vegetables, rutabaga looms large — both because of its size, and because it is simply my favorite one of all to eat. I want to cajole you into giving rutabaga a chance. Here’s why it deserves a place of honor right beside your potatoes and sweet potatoes.

I’m not hating on salt shakers here: I mean, how else am I supposed to surreptitiously salt my eggs when I’m at my parents’ house? I’m just saying that if you want to cook like a pro in the kitchen, leave the salt shaker on the table.Your real aim when salting a dish while cooking is not to make the dish salty, but rather to reduce bitterness and bring out the other flavors in the food.

The wine word VDN stands for “Vin Doux Naturel,” and it’s a specific style of wine produced in certain parts of France. VDN wines are sweet fortified wines made using a process called ‘mutage’, or the addition of grape spirit during fermentation.This stops the fermentation well before the yeasts have converted all the sugars in the must to alcohol. Mutage is another word for fortification.

apple harvest tourFirst, let’s just take a moment to appreciate what a fine looking apple this is. It’s perfectly spherical and plump with dark pink skin and yellow freckles. Inside, the flesh is creamy white and very dense. I love that the skin is snappy without any of the chewiness that you get in some varieties.That floral flavors seems even more pronounced now than it did three months ago, and I’ll swear up and down that a hint of almond sneaks in there.

I recently took a marmalade class here in Seattle and was surprised with some of the questions that came up from fellow attendees. While I had questions about the size of the citrus chunks or how exactly I could tell when the marmalade was done cooking, other students really wanted to know what to do with their marmalade. Beyond toast, how should they use it?I thought the question funny only because I use marmalade in so many different ways in the kitchen, morning and evening.

Salt to taste. Such a simple and innocent instruction. We’ve all read those words a million times over the years without thinking anything of it. Ever wonder what it really means?As an ingredient in dishes, salt plays two very important roles. First, it reduces bitter flavors. Second, because it reduces bitterness, adding salt allows the aromas and tastes of the other ingredients in your dish to shine through.

The past few weeks have been pretty rough for me and my cat. We both seem to have an insatiable appetite, wanting another snack or bite to eat just minutes after the last. What’s going on? Is it the cold winter? Is it the gray skies? Or is it an expanded stomach that has got too accustomed to gingerbread and fudge? I had to find out.“Meow.” That’s my cat again, begging for another treat when usually her normal eating routine will do.

At a recent dinner party, a friend asked me whether it was really necessary to sear meat before cooking it, especially if it was just getting slow-cooked in a braise or a stew anyway. My friend logically pointed out that if it wasn’t an important step, then why go to the extra trouble or dirty more dishes?Contrary to widely held belief, searing meat doesn’t actually seal moisture inside the cut of meat or result in a juicier finished dish.

If you’ve ever been interested in making your own sausage, but put off by the equipment needed to do it, Bon Appetit has a smart method that uses just one low-tech tool: a Chinese soup spoon. In the video above, Chef Kris Yenbamroong demonstrates how to stuff sausages with a spoon, using the narrow end to gather the casing and the wide end as a sort of funnel to more easily stuff in the sausage mixture.