Skills

Clouds of meringue, creamy soufflés, pillowy sponge cake–these elegant dishes can be the pride of any table…and they can be particularly aggravating when they don’t go as planned.

While in New Orleans, if you haven’t had a beignet (pronounced ben-YAY), you aren’t having the full experience of the city.A few days ago I was there for the International Association of Culinary Professionals conference. I had a few minutes free, so I popped over to famed Café De Monde on Decatur Street, shared a plate of three with my companion, and washed it all down with a tall coffee and chicory café au lait.

A reader emailed us to ask about using up frozen edamame. Her dilemma? What to do with them besides making a puréed dip. We have several ideas, and most of them start with the microwave… Frozen, shelled edamame are becoming easier to find at the average grocery store, which is good — they are so healthy and versatile. We do often purée them into a hummus made with edamame instead of chickpeas, but they work well in any dish where you might normally use beans or peas.

I received some silicone muffin cups last year as a gift (the fluted stand-alone kind that look like a muffin tin liner). I’ve tried to make several batches of cupcakes in them and every time, not one of the cupcakes has slid out easily; they all break or stick to the sides. I’ve Googled this and rarely find any reviews or blogs where people have this problem. They all swear by silicone’s non-stickiness, so I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. Any thoughts?

It’s just barely spring, but already our thoughts are turning to ice cream. This reader too – does anyone have any advice for Jessica?Whenever I make ice custard or cream (with or without eggs) the dessert turns out icy instead of creamy, no matter the recipe. I have an ice cream maker that uses a bowl one puts in the freezer and try to use full fat dairy products. Any tips?

Our first reaction to seeing this bag of ready-to-eat, hard-boiled eggs in the grocery store was along the lines of, “That’s ridiculous.” In fact, that’s exactly what our husband said when we put them in our basket.Why did we buy them when we are perfectly capable of hard-boiling our own? Because to give you a full report, we needed to slice and taste a few. Could this new convenience product have a place in our kitchen?The short answer is no.

Don’t you just hate when this happens? You’re hard-boiling eggs to make deviled eggs, and when you peel them, you discover the yolks have clung to one side of the egg, leaving holes. Or, you peel the egg, and bits of the white come off. How do you keep this from happening? We’ll tell you! First of all, before you even cook the eggs, if you store the eggs tip-point down, this will center the yolk. Now, when you cook them, cook them slowly!

Sometimes a sauce will break no matter how attentive you are to its whims and needs. (See our post here with the most common reasons why emulsified sauces break.) It’s frustrating and discouraging, especially if guests are at the table and waiting for your finishing touch.But never fear! You can still pull off a fantastic sauce without missing a beat.If your sauce is just starting to break, little droplets of fat will start to form around the edges of the bowl.

It’s your average weekend morning. You’re making some hollandaise, whisking away and looking forward to a delicious velvety sauce to serve with your brunch. And then it happens. You look down and somehow, without knowing when, your sauce has broken.A broken sauce is a such a sad sight. Instead of a thick cream, suddenly you have grainy bits of fat floating in a bowl of watery liquid. Not very appetizing! So what happened?

Ever wondered why a cake recipe doesn’t come out the same every time? It could be how you’re measuring.Pastry chefs and recipe developers typically weigh ingredients to get an accurate measurement. But since most American cookbooks aren’t written by weight, and not all home cooks own scales, it’s not fair to just tell you to weigh everything. So how do you get it right?

There’s no doubt about it–emulsions are tricky. They’re confusing to understand and they’re confusing to make. Sometimes even the most seasoned chef can have trouble getting their sauces to emulsify! But if you can start to get a feel for the science behind the scenes, you’ll feel more in control and confident next time you decide to whip up a hollandaise sauce for Sunday brunch.Ready? Here we go!

At Fairway in Brooklyn this morning I came upon something new to me: smoked garlic from France. It has an unusual smell — not like other smoked foods, more just like fire. It only came in whole braids (!) but I was intrigued so I went for it. Any thoughts as to what to do with it? Thanks… — abby(To All Good Questions) Abby, smoked garlic can be used in most of the ways that you use roasted garlic.

Mirepoix (mirh-pwah) noun. In French cooking, a mix of carrots, onions, and celery, usually finely diced, and used as the seasoning base for a meat dish or sauce.A mirepoix is often the only seasoning we use for a good pot of beans, like the one we posted yesterday. But when we looked for a post mentioning mirepoix to link back to – nada! Oops. Mirepoix is one of the foundations of the classical Western kitchen, and we rely on it heavily in our soups and stews.

All the coffe coverage has Cortney thinking about perfect cafe au lait…Any tips on how to make the perfect cafe au lait? Whether it was in Paris, Bilbao or Madrid, the ones I had in Europe were so far superior to any I have been able to find in the US. I’d like to know how to make my own! – Cortney(To All Good Questions)Cortney, this a hard one for us because we are not completely sure what makes a perfect cafe au lait.

One of our favorite easy ways to make a simple dessert just a little extra special is chocolate curls. They are very, very easy, and curls and shavings add a pretty touch. Pictures and show-how below…• Grab a bar of good chocolate and a vegetable peeler. This chocolate here is El Rey, 70% cacao. This is a high amount of cacao; it won’t curl quite as well as a softer bar.• Warm the chocolate a little in your hands.

Baking Week wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of baking disasters. We’ve had fallen cakes, burnt cakes, greasy cookies, burnt cookies, flat bread and burnt bread. (Sense a trend?) But every time we learn something and usually there’s a good story to tell too.What was your worst baking disaster? Are you up for sharing it with the crowd? Anything really spectacular?Ours started with over-ambition (baking disasters usually do).

Dear The Kitchn,I make a habit of going to the farmer’s market, even in the cold months. I want to support the farmers and buy their onions, squash, and garlic. But, as you can see in this picture, many of the onions I’m buying at the farmer’s market are brown in the middle and have a slightly spoiled smell. Is there something I can look for when shopping for onions so that I avoid these spoiled specimens? Thanks for your help,RPRP,Thanks for your question.

Pepino melons are not really melons; they are the fruit of a South American evergreen and actually related to the tomato and the eggplant. Sometimes they are called tree melons, or melon pears. They have been cropping up in the grocery store lately and we were intrigued by the beautiful stripes and teardrop shape. The melon is about the size of a hand, almond-shaped and firm. It will usually have beautiful purple streaks on a yellow skin.

The first time we saw a Cape gooseberry, it was on someone’s blog, and it looked like a perfect yellow egg yolk encased in paper leaves. We really thought someone took a photo of an egg yolk. It wasn’t, of course – it was a Cape gooseberry. Cape gooseberries are native to South America, and they’re closely related to the tomatilla – which makes sense, since they look like tiny tomatillas, swaddled in tissue leaves.

Souse [sows] n. Variety of and term for head cheese in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect.Souse is a variety of head cheese, usually specific to the Pennsylvania Dutch. They make their head cheese from the pickled meat of often otherwise unused animal parts (usually pork). These often include the feet, head, tongue, and heart.The word itself probably comes from the Germanic souce, or pickling juice, which is related to sulza, or brine.Do you eat head cheese?

Pouring ingredients into a running standing mixer is a big challenge. It is too awkward to push ingredients from a standard mixing bowl into a running Kitchen Aid. We’ve struggled with this since we first bought our mixers and we’re not the only ones . . . We watch carefully when TV chefs pour ingredients into their whirring, running standing mixers. Celebrity chefs struggle with this little detail too.

We went to lunch last week and had some crispy fries with our sandwich – but they weren’t made out of potato. They were labeled “yucca” fries on the menu, and a sharp-eyed friend pointed out that this had to be wrong. The potato-like starch that you find in Latino cuisines and in some trendy bistros nowadays is cassava or Manihot esculenta, a native of South America and consumed in large quantities throughout Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean.

Potatoes and onions are great companions in potato salad and frittata, but potatoes and onions should be stored separately. That’s the advice reader RB shared on the Open Thread over the weekend. An eHow expert agrees: “Avoid storing potatoes with onions because, when close together, they produce gases that spoil both. ” Bigspud.com says, “First and most important, don’t put [potatoes] anywhere near onions. Onions will make potatoes deteriorate in a hurry.

Cartouche [kär too sh] n. Circle of greaseproof parchment used to cover a dish while poaching or simmering. Poaching is a quick way to cook certain cuts of meat – especially fish and poultry. It usually involves cooking the food in a small amount of sauce or liquid, often covered by a cartouche. The cartouche serves two purposes: it keeps the small amount of liquid in a poached dish from evaporating too quickly, and it prevents that unpleasant skin from forming on the top of a sauce.

Braise [BRAYSE] v. To fry food then cook it slowly in liquid in a closed vessel. We’ve got braising on our minds around here, for reasons to be revealed shortly, so we went back to our Harold McGee to read up on all things braising. The word braise originated in the 18th century, coming from the French word for “live coals,” which were piled under and on top of a closed cooking pot.

Jamie Oliver’s new cookbook and television show bring us Jamie’s Italy. Jamie crosses Italy to find homecooks and sends their recipes on to us. Jamie’s trip reminds us that flexibility and simplicity are at the heart of cooking at home. If you want to serve stuffed lemons today, but don’t have anchovy filets, how about some olive paste instead? Basil leaves bring freshness and color, but parsley or arugula might do in a pinch.

On my huge bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce it says very clearly: “Refrigerate after opening.” And yet I don’t. My Asian friend, an amateur chef, never does. I go to Chinese restaurants and there is soy sauce sitting out on every table. So what’s the deal? Are you supposed to refrigerate or not? I did a little research and discovered that soy sauce is fine at room temperature. It’s just that it will keep its flavor and freshness longer when refrigerated.

Chances are you’ve seen them at the farmers’ market lately. Like pomegranates, pumpkins, apples and pears, fall is the season for this somewhat perplexing fruit known as a persimmon. Usually some shade of orange and resembling a tomato with a sort of brown flower bud in leiu of a stem, persimmons are likely conjur a jumble of questions to swirl though the heads of those unfamilar with them. Are they a fruit? Are they a vegetable?

Friandise [free-yawn-DEEZ]n. A small sweet or plate of sweets served at the very end of a meal. Friandise seems to be used interchangeably with mignardise, another French word for the tiny pastries and confections offered after the dessert course or during tea. Sometimes the word is used to refer to the whole assortment, and sometimes to the individual sweets.

Duxelles [dook-SEHL, deu-SEHL]n. A thick mixture of minced mushrooms and shallots slowly cooked with butter and herbs, used for flavoring soups and sauces and for fillings. This admittedly unphotogenic mushroom mixture is a deceptively simple way to add rich, intense flavor to many dishes, and it’s easy to make ahead and have on hand for quick appetizers. Wrap a teaspoonful in puff pastry and bake, or stuff into chicken breasts.

If you don’t have twelve hours to marinate meat, using a little bit of kiwi can make tender whatever you’re choosing to cook in minutes. I’m not sure how it started, but my mom and every other Korean mom I know rub kiwi pulp on thin strips of flanken-style short ribs before dunking the ribs in a sweet soy sauce and garlic mixture, and grilling them to charred perfection.