Today is my nephew’s birthday, so I am making cupcakes using his favorite cold cereals as ingredients. I am baking a dozen Trix cupcakes and a dozen Cocoa Puffs cupcakes.
I spent the last few days looking for a good recipe and have decide to merge several recipes I found online, so wish me luck.
I am off to the store and will update later today.
I started preparing the ingredients for a cake and I noticed the recipe called for unsalted butter. I knew butter came salted and unsalted, but I didn’t know if using salted butter would affect the outcome of the cake.
After a few hours of research, I discovered most chefs seem to think it is an issue of control. The amount of salt in different brands of salted butter can range from 1/4 teaspoon of salt per stick to 1/2 teaspoon of salt per stick. The more you control the variables in your food preparation, the more consistent your results will be.
That is good enough for me to continue using unsalted butter.
Lessons learned:
– There are three types of butter: cultured, sweet cream and raw.
– Cultured butter is made from a fermented cream.
– Sweet cream butter is made from pasteurized fresh cream.
– Raw cream butter is made from fresh or cultured unpasteurized cream.
– All categories of butter are sold in both salted and unsalted forms.
– Cultured butter is sometimes labeled “European-style” butter in the United States.
– Normal butter softens to a spreadable consistency around 60 °F.
– Clarified butter is butter with almost all of its water and milk solids removed, leaving almost-pure butterfat.
– Ghee is clarified butter which is brought to higher temperatures of around 250 °F once the water has cooked off, allowing the milk solids to brown.
– Once butter is softened, spices, herbs or other flavoring agents can be mixed into it, producing what is called a compound butter or composite butter.
– Here are the smoking points for common cooking fats.
Soybean oil – 495 °F
Sunflower oil – 437 °F
Corn oil – 446 °F
Peanut oil – 437 °F
Canola oil – 401 °F
Suet – 400°F
Olive oil – 374 °F
Lard – 374 °F
Vegetable shortening – 329 °F
Butter – 302 °F
I always thought herbs and spices were the same and the two words could be used interchangeably.
It was brought to my attention after my previous post that herbs and spices are different.
Both are obtained from plants and are used to add flavor and aroma to foods.
Herbs are obtained from the leaves of herbaceous plants and spices are obtained from roots, flowers, fruits, seeds or bark.
The herb wheel I wrote about earlier does not differentiate between herbs and spices and refers to both as an herb.
Just in case you are wondering, salt is not a spice or an herb. It is a mineral.
A big challenge I need to face this year is my lack of knowledge about spices.
I honestly don’t know the difference between parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. I have started tasting the spices I am using when I am cooking, but I have a long way to go.
To compensate for my ignorance, my wife was kind enough to buy me an herb wheel.
It is a pretty simple device. You pick a dish that you want to prepare such as shrimp. The wheel lists several spices that work well with the selection you are about to prepare. In this example, cayenne, garlic, parsely, oregano and cilantro are suggested.
The wheel does not give advice on the amount of spice to use or the best way to apply the spices. This would be helpful for me, but the list is a great start.
My only complaint with the wheel is it is constructed out of flimsy cardboard, so don’t expect to have it forever. The wheel does have a coating on it to make it easier to wipe off any spills.
For $10, it is a good learning device or gift for experienced and inexperienced chefs wanting to spice up their cooking skills.
After I have used the wheel for a few weeks, I will let you know if I change my opinion.
Here is a review of the herb wheel on Youtube.
Yum!
Mushrooms, minced shallots and vegetable stock combined with farfalle pasta equal a simple tasty dinner with lots of leftovers.
Lessons learned:
– It takes two cloves of shallots to get two tablespoons of minced shallots.
– Shallots are sort of a cross between onions and garlic.
– I love cooking with mushrooms.
– I get nervous when I try to surprise my wife with dinner.
– Vegetable stock is time consuming, but easy to make.
– Never watch “Honey Boo Boo” on a full stomach.
I will post a link later to Mark Bittman’s recipe, but all I had to do was cut up some vegetables, brown them in a pan, add water and cook at a soft boil for at least 30 minutes.
This is an easy recipe, but my long-term goal is to understand what is happening during the cooking process and possibly come up with my own recipes.
The stock is almost ready, so I will soon start working on the pasta with mushrooms. I just realized I had the heat too high, so a lot of the broth evaporated.
I will let everyone know if that becomes a problem.
After completing my essential knife skills class at The New School of Cooking, my dream of mastering culinary knife techniques in a single afternoon was sliced, diced, chopped and turned into julienne fries.
I naively went into the class thinking I could learn a secret culinary knife trick that would jump start my ability to use a chef’s knife. The class was more of an introduction to essential knife skills.
It was a good class for a beginner like myself, but many in the class were clearly looking for a higher level of training.
The first hour of the three-hour class was a lecture on the types of knives and a discussion on cutting techniques. The second part of the class I sliced, diced, chopped, chiffonaded and julienned vegetables with a chef’s knife. I even was able to supreme an orange.
At the end, I shared a meal made from the fruits and vegetable used in the class with my fellow chefs in training. We had a surprisingly good meal consisting of kale salad, potato gratin and brussels sprouts with a salsa verde.
Lessons learned:
– Always use the claw when using a knife in the kitchen.
– There is no shortcut to mastering the knife. Practice, Practice, Practice is the only way to get better.
– The chef’s knife and the paring knife are the only essential knives needed in the kitchen. The other knives can be helpful, but not required.
– Cutting up fresh herbs is extremely easy and makes your food taste much better.
– For best control of a chef’s knife, use the pinch grip.
– If prepared properly, a kale salad can taste really good.
– Always hold a chef’s knife before you buy it. You need to find a knife that feels good in your hand.
The Ultimate Chocolate Cake
I found an amazing recipe for the “Ultimate Chocolate Cake” from Martha Stewart and decided to put a Valentine’s Day twist to it for my wife by making a triple-decker, heart-shaped chocolate cake.
Keep in mind, the only cake I have ever made in the past came straight from a box. I also had to figure out how to stack and frost three layers of cake.
I used a heart shaped pan I purchased from Surfas in Culver City and baking the cake was pretty straight forward.
I knew the key to frosting the cake was to wait until it had completely cooled down. Patience is not one of my best virtues, but I let the cake cool for more than an hour before I started working with it.
This may be lame on my part, but I have seen how Chef’s level cakes on TLC’s the “Next Great Baker,” I took out a serrated knife and leveled all three cakes. There is a first time for everything. After the cakes were level, I stacked them one at a time and separated them with a layer of the “Ultimate Chocolate Frosting.”
Now, I am eagerly waiting for my wife to come home so we can taste the cake.
As I continue my journey of self discovery through cooking, I uncovered something interesting about myself.
I need to learn how to chill out.
As a goal-oriented person, I like to challenge myself. My decision to make two relatively complicated dishes on the same day — and for the first time — with only about four hours of cooking time, turned a fun afternoon into my own stressful episode of “Chopped.”
Earlier in the week, I decided to make a kale salad, baked ziti and tiramisu from scratch for my family. As a novice chef, I didn’t even know what ziti pasta looked like.
The baked ziti and kale salad went off without a hitch, but I struggled with the tiramisu. With time running out, I accidently broke an egg yoke in the egg whites I had been separating. I was starting to stress out because I had promised my family tiramisu and I was running out of time. In the midst of all the chaos in the kitchen, I lost perspective.
Tiramisu
I stepped back and regrouped. After a few minutes, I opted to make the tiramisu the following day.
The next day, while eating a generous portion of tiramisu with my lovely wife, I made a vow to stay focused and appreciate the opportunity to cook.
Each meal may not turn out perfect, and there will be a few disastrous dishes along the way, but the challenge to be a chef keeps the journey interesting.
After submitting my proposed menu for tonight’s dinner, my family wanted to make two small changes.
The first request was to use a different baked ziti recipe. The new recipe from the Food Channel sounds like it will taste better and is easier to make. I let the opportunity to learn how to grill vegetables get in the way of a better baked ziti recipe.
The second change is a slight alteration of Giada De Laurentiis’ tiramisu recipe. My wife’s tried-and-true recipe switches out two teaspoons of rum in Giada’s recipe for 1/4 cup amaretto liquor.
Let the cooking begin.