Pro Technique

Thanksgiving is a holiday that is all about the food. It’s a time to go full steam ahead and pull out all the stops to fill the table with a sea of the most impressively delicious and indulgent dishes. And when delicious and indulgent are the name of the game, Ree Drummond, aka the Pioneer Woman, is the lady to turn to. These are the hallmarks of her most popular recipes that folks flock to on a daily basis.

Ina Garten has given us so many cooking and entertaining tips throughout the years that we could fill an entire book with them (well, if she hadn’t beat us to it!). But I would argue that an entire chapter deserves to be dedicated to Queen Ina’s favorite holiday: Thanksgiving. On what for many of us is the busiest day of the year in our kitchens, Ina always manages to pull off the festive feast with ease.

Cooking Thanksgiving dinner can sometimes feel like a giant science experiment. There are so many elements and factors at play, all with the hope of a spectacular end result. That’s why it’s smart to turn to a guy like Alton Brown, who takes a scientific approach to every part of the meal. He deconstructs classic Thanksgiving dishes in order to make them a bit more foolproof for all of us. Here are some of his best Thanksgiving tips for everything from turkey to leftovers.

A friend excitedly texted me last week: “I scored a well-loved cast iron skillet at a garage sale! What should I cook first?” These are my favorite messages to answer because I love cast iron cooking and I have strong opinions about where to start if cast iron cooking is new to you.

Your chef’s knife is perhaps the most important and beloved tool in your kitchen, so naturally you want to be thoroughly schooled on every aspect of it. To help you out, we rounded up all the top intel on how to buy, care for, store, sharpen, clean, and use a chef’s knife. Remember, this is the tool that will potentially be with you for your entire lifetime, so it’s best to get really well-acquainted, really quick.

This past summer I had the opportunity to step behind the doors of a restaurant kitchen. This is a place I don’t venture often, but when I do get the chance to sneak inside, I am eager to grasp onto any little chef’s trick or tip I may come across in this uncharted territory. And on this particular occasion, I hit gold. The chef was preparing baby potatoes for our dinner that evening.

Winter squash are the heroes of cold-weather cooking. Rich in vitamins and fiber, they bring a touch of sweetness to heavy dishes and enliven our plates with their bright, often deeply hued flesh. Long-lasting and beautiful, they can even double as a sculptural centerpiece until you’re ready to bring them to the chopping board.

If you’ve ever had the one batch of cookies emerge from the oven perfectly, only to have the second batch turn out flat and disappointing, don’t blame the recipe — it might actually be your baking sheet. Specifically, the problem might be your hot baking sheet. Dropping cookies onto a hot baking sheet — one that just came out of the oven and hasn’t had a chance to cool down — means that the butter begins melting even before the cookies go into the oven.

If you have owned your white dishes for any length of time, by now you’ve probably started noticing a gradual accumulation of stubborn gray scuff marks marring that pristine, glossy white surface. These scuff marks don’t seem to respond to either repeat cycles through the dishwasher or determined hand scrubbing.

If you like to cook (and we’re guessing you do, based on the fact that you’re currently reading The Kitchn), you’ve probably had at least a fleeting fantasy about saying goodbye to your day job and trying your hand at being a private or personal chef. One former restaurant chef who opted for the private chef life shares what the job entails in this Serious Eats essay. Here are a few of the things we learned. You get to play around with menus and cuisines.

This week’s meal plan has recipes from two of chef Jacques Pépin’s latest cookbooks, both of which were companion books to his popular public television shows. I’ve watched Jacques on television since I was a little girl and wanted to find out what this legendary chef, who’s cooked for presidents and with Julia Child, makes for dinner at home! I chatted with Jacques about his long career (he’s turning 80 in December!

Do you fill your fridge with salad greens and have big plans to make healthy, diverse salads for the work week ahead? Many of us do, but if your house is anything like mine, a few of those lunches didn’t happen, and at the end of seven days you still have limp lettuce looking longingly at you when you open the door. Take a page from the grocery store playbook and extend the life of your greens in a few short minutes! I’ve worked in food retail for the majority of my adult life.

Love cupcakes, but always run into some common problems? Well, I’ve developed over 200 cupcake recipes and baked countless cupcakes. In the process, I’ve experienced every possible cupcake fail. Don’t let any of these happen to you! This problem is easily fixable by piling frosting over the stubby cupcake. Who doesn’t love extra frosting? (See my popular all-frosting cupcakes as evidence.) But, why have a height-challenged cupcake in the first place?

On Cupcake Project, I’ve converted every imaginable kind of cake to cupcakes. I’ve made angel food cupcakes, pound cake cupcakes, upside-down cake cupcakes, cheesecake cupcakes, and more! It’s not hard to take your favorite cake recipe and translate it into cupcakes. Here’s the process that I’ve developed over the years. Here are eight steps to get from favorite cake to perfect cupcake recipe.

With the right tools and mindset, getting a good dinner on the table doesn’t have to be stressful. Pull out your trusty sheet pan, and a beautiful — and mostly hands-off — meal is just a few simple steps away! I love using my sheet pans to orchestrate wholesome and flavorful meals without fuss. Here are my favorite tips for cooking the best sheet pan dinners. A sheet pan for home cooking measures 18×13 inches, with a 1-inch lip around the sides.

Whether you’re a true collector or just love picking up old cookbooks at garage sales or thrift stores every now and then, there are some easy things you can do to preserve your finds for many years to come. Some people actually like to use their vintage cookbooks in the kitchen, while others prefer to store them safely to maintain their value.

While restaurant cooking is very different from cooking at home, there are plenty of smarts that a home cook can pick up from chefs and their shops. As part of a week devoted to learning from restaurants, I asked Andrea Lynn to share some of the little tips and good ideas she picked up in her interviews with chefs, restaurant owners, and food truck proprietors in the neighborhood of Queens.

This tip is short and sweet but will change how you prep some foods for life. Repeatedly, when I was working with any type of stickiness on my hands, the chef made a note to wet my hands before touching it as to prevent sticking. For recipes like matzo balls, falafel, meatballs, and potato pancakes, using wet hands to roll into shapes worked to prevent any from clumping into large globs on my fingers.

At the Filipino restaurant Tito Rad’s Grill & Restaurant, I was taught how to make Kare Kare, a stew with oxtail braised in a peanut butter sauce. Sounds fairly delicious, right? Well, they also taught me a way to make it even better — at the last minute. During the last 10 minutes of the cooking process, a variety of vegetables like greens beans and halved baby bok choy are added to the mix and then steamed until tender, just about 10 minutes.

Like any cocktail enthusiast worth her margarita’s salt, I know the difference bitters make in drinks. In fact, my home bar is stocked with 14 different varieties, including a citrus trio I made myself. Despite my ardor for the botanical-laced infusions, I’ve often wondered if I’m measuring them correctly into my cocktails, because, what the heck is a dash, anyway? To figure this out, I set up a very scientific experiment in my kitchen.

This was my first experience working with the natural spider web of caul fat, which is the membrane around the intestines (usually of pigs). And, much to my surprise, I fell a little in love with it. The Cyprus restaurant Kopiaste Taverna had introduced me to their specialty of sheftalia, a homemade Cypriot sausage made from ground pork, parsley, and onions rolled in caul fat. “It’s very unique and very popular in Cyprus. We sell hundreds of these.

“A martini, shaken, not stirred,” instructs Sean Connery’s 007 in Goldfinger. An iconic line uttered by an even more iconic character. This oft-repeated quote has confused cocktail enthusiasts ever since. Do you understand when to shake, and when to stir a cocktail? Let’s shake it out.

With a lemoniness that walks the line of almost being too tart without actually being so, creating authentic Greek lemon potatoes became an obsession of mine when I first moved to the Greek haven of Astoria, Queens. I marinated, roasted, and boiled the potatoes in a hefty amount of lemon juice, never happy with the subpar results. So when I started working on my cookbook, Queens: A Culinary Passport, I knew I had to delve into the secret of the lemon potatoes.

When trying to get tips from Himalayan Yak manager, Gyaltsen Gurung, on a potato recipe called Sho-Go Khatsa (Aloo Dum), he kind of shrugged and said, “It’s just cooked potatoes.” But it taught me so much more than that. The recipe Sho-Go Khatsa for has moved up my queue to become a favorite side dish. Here’s how it goes. First, the potatoes are boiled until half-cooked.

Cooking, baking, and owning a business of your own are dream jobs to many, and for good reason. There’s a certain romance in stirring a big pot of fragrant, melting chocolate, or in early morning light cast upon a tray of bubbling apple pies on their way to a farmers market.

I always thought the key to the perfect potato pancake was hand-grating the potatoes and onion, as opposed to using a food processor. But Ben’s Best Kosher Deli says the real trick is using paper towels to soak up the excess liquid of the grated potato and onion. Put a double layer of paper towels together, and press down on the grated mixture, repeating a few times until a majority of the liquid has been removed.

I’ll admit it, I was a bit of a coffee snob. So it never occurred to me that instant coffee might actually, actually be the secret of some of the best coffee drinks on the planet. While working on my cookbook (and culinary guide to Queens), I learned that instant coffee was the secret to making Greek frappés. Hailed as the national coffee of Greece, the frappé is a frothy concoction of coffee granulates and water, made foamy thanks to a frappé machine.

While working on my latest cookbook, Queens: A Culinary Passport, I chatted with cooks and chefs from diverse ethnic backgrounds (Himalayan, Cuban, Cypriot, Szechuan and more). As I learned how to replicate their dishes in my own kitchen, I amassed a slew of tips from them that I began using in my everyday cooking life.

Unlike the random sprig of mint that might show up on a restaurant dessert plate, mint in cocktails actually serves a purpose: It adds delicious herbal yet fresh flavors that provide a nice contrast from the sweet and more bitter flavors in a drink. But just throwing a sprig into your drink doesn’t do anything — you’ve got to smack it first!

Peeling and cleaning shrimp isn’t my favorite task in the world, but sometimes it’s an inevitable part of cooking that I sigh over and just get on with. I don’t see the whole process as a waste of my time though, since I don’t just throw out the shells when I’m done. Here’s what I do with them that you should try too! Shrimp shells, tails, and even the heads are packed with delicious, briny flavor.

A box grater makes quick work of shredding cheese or vegetables, but did you know you can break it out for your next baking project too? A stick of frozen butter can be quickly grated into fluffy shreds, and here are two reasons why you should use this technique next time you bake with butter. I always have a few boxes of butter around since I buy it at the club store and butter freezes well.

Bet you didn’t know that you can make dreamy sorbet without once looking at a recipe. All you need is fresh fruit, sugar, water — and an egg. That’s right, an egg. Don’t worry, that egg isn’t actually going into the sorbet. We need it for another purpose: we need to see if it floats.

Jackson Galaxy is a bona fide cat whisperer. He’s the host of Animal Planet’s My Cat From Hell and coauthor of the book Catification — he knows what makes our feline friends tick. I spoke with Jackson about a topic that has plagued me for quite some time (and if you’re a fellow cat owner, it’s no doubt plagued you, too): how to keep curious cats off our kitchen counters. Jackson explained that cats see our countertops as socially significant places.

When forming hamburger patties, I was always told that you had to make a shallow indentation or dimple in the middle of each patty — this would keep the center from bulging up as it cooked so that the patty would stay flat and even. I never questioned that technique until I came across even more methods on how to do this, so I just had to test them out myself! The basic theory is that as meat cooks, the proteins contract so that the whole patty shrinks and puffs up in the middle.

On its own, each ingredient in a salad is fairly unremarkable. Lettuce, cut-up vegetables, nuts, dried fruit, maybe some cheese or protein. What brings it all together, though, is the salad dressing, so the dressing deserves some extra care and attention. Here’s a tip on how to make sure your dressing is perfectly balanced and seasoned properly for your salad.

All week long, I’ve been talking about summer tomatoes and the various ways to preserve them so that you can eat them all year round. And truly, I think that there’s no better gift to yourself and your family than a pantry shelf full of home canned tomatoes. However, new canners often find that once they’ve put all that work in putting up those tomatoes, they have a hard time getting themselves to open up those jars and eat the fruits of their labor.

When Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of public radio show The Splendid Table, gives advice, I listen. This goes double if the owner of that mellifluous voice is standing right next to you, doling out knowledge with so much enthusiasm you’d be daft not to start taking notes. This past week, I attended a farm-to-table event hosted by Muir Glen Organics with Lynne and a handful of other food writers and tomato lovers from around the country.

When it comes to preserving tomatoes, most people think that you have to go big. And while it’s true that during late summer it’s easy to get your hands on Romas and San Marzanos by the boxful, there’s also nothing wrong with thinking small. Here are a few tips for scaling down those big-batch recipes to turn just a few pints of tomatoes into delicious sauce.

Over the last few years, we’ve been taught to believe that the very best tomato is an heirloom tomato. And while many of those gorgeous, homely heirlooms are definitely best for salads, sandwiches, and no-cook pasta sauces, they are actually not the best choice when it comes to canning. The reason has everything to do with water. Part of what makes those heirlooms so delicious is their juice. However, when you select a tomato for canning, you want more meat than juice.

Jesa Henneberry, who has a super-organized kitchen we toured and admired, is all about eating well — not just gustatorily, but also for fitness and health. Since she spends a lot of time planning out and preparing menus for her clients who have the same goals, it seemed like a good idea to ask Jesa for some tricks of the trade. What are the best ways to plan meal aheads and keep a tight rein on portions? Have a plan and a format to follow and cook foods in bulk to be portioned out later.

After you’ve cut all the kernels off corn on the cob, you probably think that the cobs have done their duty and have nothing more to give. Think again! Here are two easy ways that corn cobs can add extra flavor to your food. You’re probably wondering what milk has anything to do with corn cobs. Milking the cobs refers to the process of removing the milky liquid (corn milk) that’s still clinging to the cobs.

For some reason, eating something off a stick just makes it more fun. Maybe it’s because you’re probably eating outside, or maybe it’s because you don’t need utensils or even a plate. Regardless, skewers should be a staple in your grilling routine, so here are a couple of tips for successful summer skewering! Ever pick up a skewer and have the food spin and flop around it? Thread two skewers parallel to each other to make sure the food stays put.

Ryan Farr is the owner of 4505 Meats, a well-loved butcher shop in San Francisco’s Mission district. In the past two weeks he’s both opened a new restaurant, 4505 Burgers and BBQ, and released a new cookbook, Sausage Making: The Definitive Guide with Recipes. Clearly, he is a busy guy but he’s the one to tap when it comes to solid advice on the essentials of sausage making! Read on for Ryan’s thoughts on the art and science of making sausage at home.

Yes, I’m sure you already know how to pour a beer: find glass, pour beer, drink up. Or heck, skip the glass and just drink it straight from the bottle. It’s your beer, and I’m not here to quibble. But. If you want that perfect cap of fluffy pub-style foam crowning your glass, there’s only one way to go. In today’s video, I show you how to pour beer like a boss. There are actually two beer-pouring routes you could take here.

Wine isn’t cheap. In fact, of all the beverages you could choose, it’s often the most expensive. So why not spend five minutes to learn a bit about that liquid in your glass? Here are five 1-minute projects that will teach you quite a lot about how wine tastes and responds to food. Do them one at a time, or all at once, with friends!

Who cooks and eats here: Michelle Marek, chef at Foodlab, and Anthony Kinik, film professor and food writer. Where: Montreal, Quebec Visit their blog: An Endless Banquet This week we peeked inside Montreal chef Michelle Marek’s kitchens — both of them! The one at home, and the one at Foodlab, the restaurant where she works. Today I want to go back to the home kitchen for a moment.

Whether you grew up eating them or not, homemade hamantaschen are a special treat. The triangle-shaped cookies, which are traditionally served during the Jewish holiday of Purim, come stuffed with jam, ground poppy seeds, and many other delicious spreads. And when made well, with a supple dough and warm, sweet filling, they can be ethereal. The problem is, making hamantaschen at home can be tricky.

June Taylor is the owner (and heart and soul) behind June Taylor Preserves, a small-batch preserves operation she runs out of The Still-Room, her shop and workroom in Berkeley, CA. June started her business 25 years ago with selling just three kinds of marmalade at her local farmers’ market.

Over the past few days we’ve looked into the lovely culinary corner of Chelsea Fuss and learned about her favorite cooking tools. Today Chelsea shares her pro tips on how to keep flowers looking their best in the kitchen and at your table. Just look at those romantic blossoms! Here’s how you can create a beautiful bouquet like this, without breaking the bank. “I always look for flowers that are soft, wild-looking and bend easily,” Chelsea says.

I’ve long perfected my method for the perfect grilled cheese, but when I first started cooking, it always seemed to elude me. Either my sandwich was toasted on the outside with unmelted cheese inside, or the cheese was gooey but the outside burnt. That was until I figured out the old line cook trick: put a lid on it! If you’ve ever watched a line cook make a grilled cheese on a flat top, you’ve seen this method.

Folks in my Oakland, CA, neighborhood know about chef Tanya Holland because of her popular restaurants Brown Sugar Kitchen and B Side BBQ but her fame has spread much wider than our shared city. Maybe you recognize her from her appearances on The Talk and The Chew, or perhaps you’re a diehard Food & Wine fan like Ms. Holland herself, in which case you probably saw her Thanksgiving spread last November.

Besides perfectly tender and flavorful beans, another big bonus of cooking dried beans from scratch is bean broth, the tasty and nutritious liquid left behind in the pot. If you’re tired of using it in soups, Rancho Gordo owner and all-around bean guru Steve Sando has one surprising suggestion for extra bean broth: poach eggs in it! Leftover bean-cooking liquid is particularly flavorful if you cooked your beans with aromatics like bay leaf and garlic or smoked meats.

Seasoning a steak or a chicken breast for dinner has always felt like a strangely cumbersome process to me. There’s rubbing the meat with oil, but then using a clean hand to sprinkle salt. But then you need two clean hands to work the pepper grinder and open the spices (because who remembers to prep those beforehand?), and then when I’m repeating the whole process for the second side, it seems like half the seasonings fall off anyway. Maybe I’m weird. Maybe I’m not.

Small kitchen habits can make a big difference in your cooking, so we love learning about the everyday cooking habits of cookbook authors, chefs and other food professionals. What are the small habits they practice every time they step into the kitchen? The Commonsense Kitchen If a habit is indeed “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up,” then I have many kitchen habits: Wash greens carefully.

Small kitchen habits can make a big difference in your cooking, so we love learning about the everyday cooking habits of cookbook authors, chefs and other food professionals. What are the small habits they practice every time they step into the kitchen? This week we are talking to our favorite food experts to find out the simple cooking practices they rely on, and today legendary French chef and cookbook author Jacques Pepin shares his five basic habits for better, happier cooking every day.

The release of Chad Roberson’s Tartine Book No. 3 this week has created quite a lot of buzz in the food world. Building on his previous two cookbooks, but especially Tartine Bread, No. 3 takes us on journey into the fascinating world of ancient and whole grains. Not a gluten-free journey, mind you, but a passionate, innovative exploration into the ways these long-forgotten gains can add flavor, texture and character to breads and pastries.

We’re big fans of Davis Tanis here at The Kitchn. We love his new book One Good Dish, previous books (A Platter of Figs and Heart of the Artichoke), and his NYT column City Kitchen. We also love his take on Thanksgivukkah! So it’s no wonder we tapped him for our 5 Essentials series and it’s no surprise that he came though with characteristic warmth and generosity.

Rendering lard was one of those things I had on my list: big, complicated cooking projects I wanted to try. Months ago, one of my favorite farmers’ market vendors offered me a bag of pork fat. Who wouldn’t take a free bag of pork fat? He suggested that I try rendering it and I couldn’t wait to give it a try. So why did I leave it in the freezer for so long? I figured I would need a whole day.

There’s something a little magical about a really good gravy. From drippings, a little flour and some stock comes a bubbling pot of liquid gold, ready to be poured over turkey, mashed potatoes and everything in between. But have you ever wondered what’s going on inside the pan when you make gravy? We turned to chef and Harvard food science instructor Wylie Dufresne for a scientific explanation, as well as his advice for making better gravy on Thanksgiving and beyond.

Of course you know that the iconic image of Thanksgiving dinner is the turkey, roasted brown and crisp-skinned, sitting proudly on a platter. But what you might not know is the science behind what goes on in the oven, the process that transforms a pale, flabby bird into something fragrant and irresistible.