Best Cooking Tips I

There are cooking tips, and then there are cooking tips. The best ones can literally transform your cooking. Others may not change your cooking, but maybe they take an otherwise odious task and make it easier. Herewith are just a few of my favorites, in no particular order:

1. Brown your meat in batches. For years I would read recipes that said to “brown” or sear the meat, so I would heat some oil and then dump all of my meat into the pan. Of course, the crowded meat would touch and release steam or something, and it would all turn a nasty grey color with absolutely no browning. This mystified me until I read that to really brown your meat, you need to make sure its not touching. This works like a champ. I don’t know why, it just does. It takes a bit longer, but the meat will develop a nice brown crust, and you will develop a nice fond on the bottom of your pan, just dying to be deglazed to add to the flavor. So, carefully place your meat in the pan about ½ to 1 inch apart, take your time, and brown in batches…it will make all the difference, I promise.

2. Smash the garlic clove before you try to peel it. For years I hated trying to peel garlic…inevitably I would get cloves that absolutely defied my attempts to peel them, with my fingernails digging small divots into the garlic as I attempted to remove the skin. Then I read about taking the flat of your knife and smashing the garlic, which loosens the skin and makes it easier to peel. I gave it a try and eureka! It was so much easier. Now I no longer dread having to peel even droves of garlic cloves.

3. Use coarse corn meal to dust your pizza peel. This is what makes the difference between sliding your dough effortlessly onto your hot stone, or watching helplessly as the dough sticks and your toppings slide on the hot stone, erupting in dense smoke. The first time I tried to make pizza, that is exactly what happened. I had no idea that you had to put something on your peel to make the dough slide. Today I use coarse ground corn meal like polenta, and it works awesome. Plus it gives your pizza crust a nice, crunchy, nutty flavor.

4. Fond is your friend (with two corollaries; go easy with the heat, and deglaze that pan!). When you cook something nice and easy, say a bunch of diced or sliced onions and minced garlic in a bit of olive oil, you get a nice, deep brown coating on the bottom of your pan. This coating, called a fond, contains wonderful flavors. Now, if you jack the heat up, it will scorch and turn black and taste, well, burnt, but if you keep sautéing on a nice medium heat, it will develop very nicely. Of course, unless you deglaze your pan, there it will stay, so at some point you need to add some moisture to your pan, and then scrape with the flat edge of a wooden utensil. This will dislodge all the nice bits from your pan and add them to whatever you are cooking. Needless to say, the more ingredients you carefully sauté, the more complex flavors you will build.

Those are just the first four I can think of off the top of my noggin…at a later date I’ll post more. But I’ll bet there are a lot of folks with some great tips out there. So, what are your favorite cooking tips? Send them in, either via e-mail or comment, and I’ll cut and paste them into another column.