Recipes and Techniques for Home Chefs is an ideal gift for any novice cook or to assist your friends and family members who wish to learn to cook. Mastering fundamental techniques will enable them to experience fresh flavors while building confidence in the kitchen.
Learn the fundamentals of cooking with this book that covers everything from how to chiffonade vegetables to understanding why one ingredient may overshadow another. This comprehensive manual covers the essential skills for mastering culinary excellence.
Sauteing
Sauteing is an exciting technique that can elevate any home-cooked dish. This method combines high heat with small amounts of fat for rapid cooking of ingredients that caramelize quickly – providing delicious results! Mastering this skill takes practice but the payoff can be delicious.
When selecting vegetables, fish, or meat for sauteing, choose uniform items so they cook evenly at higher temperatures. Sauteing also forces out moisture through its higher temperature setting – drying out and browning while leaving soft insides behind.
To achieve a perfect saute, it is crucial to work quickly using the French culinary technique of mise en place (getting all your ingredients and tools together prior to starting). Vegetable oil has a high enough smoke point to prevent burning while clarified butter or rapeseed oil may also work well as alternatives. When sauteing food it should be stirred frequently either by spatulaing or by shaking the pan.
Broths and Stocks
Stocks and broths serve as the cornerstone for many types of soups, stews and gravies, making them an essential tool in both home kitchens as well as professional chefs’ cuisine.
A tasty broth serves as the foundation for all sorts of delicious dishes, from classic chicken soup and risotto to Italian tortellini in broth and French pot-au-feu and bouillabaisse.
Basic beef stock requires large beef bones being slowly simmered with aromatic vegetables such as onions, leeks and carrots; parsley and thyme among others; whole spices such as bay leaves and peppercorns; in addition to any whole spices such as bay leaves or peppercorns that might also be added. Restaurant-produced stocks are generally skimmed off of any surface-rising scum during simmering process – something Handal says could take an average of four days per batch to prepare properly.
Store-bought broths are an indispensable staple in many pantries, yet often contain high levels of sodium and artificial flavors. A better choice would be making your own homemade broth; making a homemade stock is easy and provides the tastiest foundation for all of your culinary creations.
Cooking Techniques
Aspiring home chefs may become overwhelmed by the abundance of recipes and cooking methods available. It’s understandable; mastering culinary techniques takes time and practice.
Beginner chefs need to understand the essential techniques behind successful cooking, whether that be creating the ideal omelet, perfect pasta texture, or crafting delicious sauces and gravies. In order to take their recipes from good to great it’s imperative that they gain these fundamental techniques early.
Unlock the secrets of sauteing – quickly cooking small, uniformly-cut ingredients over high heat with minimal oil – by quickly and uniformly heating small ingredients at high speed on an open stove top. Roasting can bring out natural sweetness in vegetables and meats while blanching is suitable for delicate items. Emulsifying is used to form smooth mixtures like vinaigrettes and mayonnaise that require no further processing before use.
Sous vide is an advanced cooking technique using a vacuum-sealed bag and precise temperature to produce restaurant-grade results. Plating and presentation techniques can take your dish from delicious to extraordinary; learn them along with modern culinary tools like the CHEF iQ Smart Cooker and Smart Thermometer and take your home cooking experience to new heights.
Recipes
Recipes are collections of ingredients and instructions for crafting a dish, often passed down from generations past or created by professional chefs. Recipes can serve to control quality, quantity and food costs in restaurants or simply be used by home chefs as a means of improving their skills.
A typical recipe typically starts off with an introduction to the dish and includes an ingredient list and its quantities measured either by volume or weight. A detailed cooking procedure often follows in the form of numbered steps which are ordered chronologically; further details such as cooking temperatures and times are often given as well.
Recipes may also include notes about how to serve the dish, nutritional information such as calories, fat, carbohydrates, sodium levels and yield. Yield is sometimes provided and recipes may also be organized into collections like “Healthy Meals” or “Weeknight Dinners.” For web publishers using structured data such as hRecipe and Schema is key in order for search engines and other platforms to understand their significance.
