Cake fails cause your baking adventures to end in tears? Does your cake stick to the pan or come out dry as the Sahara Desert? Never fear, here are some fail-safe techniques for making a beautiful cake that everyone will be talking about. (In a GOOD way!)
Salt will wake up the flavor of your food. How much salt is enough salt? You’ll know it when you taste it. If you taste a dish and it feels “meh,” pause to intentionally taste for the salt. Are you detecting it at all? Then add another large pinch. Taste it again. Keep doing that until you taste the dish and feel a *ziiiiiing!!!* That’s when you know you’ve got enough salt. In restaurants, chefs know how to salt food properly. That’s what makes the food taste so good, and what keeps people coming back.
Today we’re going to talk about the single-most important flavor factor for a lot of different dishes: mirepoix. (Pronounced meer-PWAH.) Yes, this is a very fancy-pants sounding word*, ? but what really matters is that it can SERIOUSLY up your game while cooking. A mirepoix is a simple mixture of chopped onions, celery, and carrots that you cook gently on the stove until the vegetables develop complex flavors, usually until they are browned. You then use these cooked vegetables as the base for the rest of your dish (such as stocks, soups, and sauces).
Have you ever sat down determined to cook a recipe, only to come across one or two mystery cooking terms or words that stops you cold in your tracks? Like, “sweat the onions,” “brine the meat,” or “fold the batter?” And from there, you’re totally lost. Unknown cooking terms can cause all sorts of havoc in the kitchen. But don’t worry. It happens to the best of us! Today we’re going to talk about some of the most commonly misunderstood cooking terms you’ll see in recipes. These are words, phrases, and techniques that might trip you up if you run across them while cooking. While there are an endless number of culinary terms to learn, there are only a few you really need to know to become a better cook. I’ve compiled them all here for you in one place.
Here’s a super simple concept that’s going to make your cooking SO much easier: it’s the idea of “kitchen zones.” First off, I want to say that it doesn’t matter if you have a tiny kitchen — or what we call in my house a “one-butt kitchen,” because there’s only room for one pair of buns. Kitchen zones make cooking SO much easier because it’s the first step of kitchen organization, and organization leads to easier execution. Each kitchen generally has four kitchen zones. In smaller kitchens these zones often overlap, and that’s totally fine. Here’s a quick video that will explain the zones and show you how to organize them.
Let’s take a step back and thank whichever higher power you hold dear for the internet. The mess of wires and anonymous commenters that gives us shopping from home. Because I love you, I’m going to give you my top-5 list of awesome culinary-based Christmas gifts for 2017. Every single one of these things can be purchased while in the form of a blanket burrito on your couch while binging Netflix. No pants, shoes, or makeup required. Halle-freaking-lujah.
Fearless Fresh Cooking Cheat Sheets are like having a cooking teacher right there in the kitchen with you. These colorful cooking guides are full of easy-to-read recipe tables that allow you to mix and match ingredients, so you can create flavorful dishes with complete ease. For the next two weeks I’m offering all Cooking Cheat Sheets sets in a bundle at a discounted rate of 15% off + free shipping. If you order now, you will get the your cheat sheets will ship the first week of November.
This avocado sauce recipe is a great example of how to increase flavor with almost no effort. Not only does it hit almost every mandatory flavor note, it also whips up in less than a minute. As a sauce it’s incredibly flavorful and very flexible, so you can serve it however you like it best — thin, like a sauce, or thick and chunky, like the best guacamole you’ve ever eaten. If you’re serving it in tacos, over enchiladas, or on top of chicken/fish/veggies, blend it to a smooth consistency so that it seeps into every nook and cranny of your dish. If you’re eating it like a dip or serving it on top of bread, leave it chunkier so that it’s easier to eat.
This farro salad is healthy, yes, but also hearty and incredibly flavorful. Whole grain farro fills you up while an impressively assertive cast of flavors makes this one of those two- or three-helping dishes: sweet corn, cherry tomatoes, green onions, lemon zest, lemon juice, olive oil, and some welcomely bitter green arugula to round the whole thing out. This farro salad hits so many flavor notes, and perfectly, that I’ve been eating it for dinner with nothing else without feeling deprived in any way.
Each summer I have access to plenty of figs to make fig jam from and each year it’s a little bit different. One year I flavored my fig jam with orange juice and zest, another year with cinnamon sticks, and yet another with a generous pour of balsamic vinegar. This year’s fig jam was spiked with aquavit; a Scandinavian spirit flavored with caraway and star anise. The savory whisper complimented the inherent flowery flavors of the figs, resulting in what may be my favorite fig jam yet.
– This little orange blossom water recipe really perks up your standard glass of OJ. – Flavor Secrets is a little series I’m running about a handful of single, simple ingredients that can take the flavor of your cooking to the next level with almost ZERO effort. Let’s start with something innocuous: Orange juice. And, orange…
Learning how to keep freeze blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and other summer berries can be frustrating without a few important tips. An endless variety of summer berries are filling the markets right now (and filling our mouths as we stuff ourselves silly with them). This is the best part of summer, in my opinion — but berries tend to spoil quickly, especially when it’s warm out.
The best sous vide ribs are right here, by Seattleite Julie Dreyfoos. Finished on the grill, these are 1000% the best ribs you’ve ever eaten. Pinky swear. These ribs are fall-off-the-bone delicious. Super easy to make, with almost zero work.
I’m super excited to share my big news: soon you’re going to see my very first paid products. I feel a mix of emotions typing that. First I’ve got the crazy-ecstatic butterflies in my stomach because this is a LONG time coming. But I also feel a little fear — fear that you’ll resent me for charging for my work. I know this site is called Fearless Fresh, but come on — I’m human. No one is totally fearless out of the gate. So I’m calling out my own anxieties and putting them on notice. I’m doing exactly what I encourage you to do in the kitchen: I’m doing it anyways.
Let’s talk about the concept of the Minimal Viable Cook (MVC). You might be familiar with the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP from business circles) and the concept makes a lot of sense when applied to any number of topics. In this context, minimum viable cook refers to what you need to create something…
There are a million different ways to make salad dressing. You’ve seen row after row of dressings at the grocery store: Ranch, Italian, Russian, caesar, bleu cheese, thousand island… there are literally thousands to choose from. (And FYI, the term “French dressing” is just a fancy name for vinaigrette.) I’ll eventually show you how to make all of these crazy salad dressings, but first we’re going to start with the easiest: How to make a vinaigrette.
Vinaigrette is literally 4 or 5 ingredients, added to a jar and shaken. That’s it. Now do you see why I’m starting here? ?Also, vinaigrettes have a disproportionately high flavor to effort ratio, meaning they add a whole lot of awesome and require almost no work. In my book that gets an A+++++ WOUDL BUY AGAIN.
Molasses butter is a super simple, but CRAZY delicious addition to your flavor library. You can whip it up in literally 3 minutes and slather it on anything that you want to give a hint of gingersnap flavor. Goes great with scones, buttermilk biscuits, or even just spread onto toast. LOVE IT. I’ve also included directions on how to make gingersnap butter, which tastes just like gingersnaps without all of the sugar. Seriously, my entire biscuit life changed once I developed this recipe. If you want to knock your biscuits out of the park, spend the $2 and 3 minutes necessary to create this awesome addition to your cooking repertoire.
Just a few weeks ago we talked about how to get more whole grains into your diet without taking up a ton of time. This week we’re going to talk about everyone’s favorite musical fruit: BEANS! Beans are not only a great source of fiber, they’re are a healthy way to add more protein to your diet without adding a ton of fat or carbs. When it comes to beans, you have two options: canned or dried. While there’s nothing wrong with canned beans – they are certainly healthier than a lot of the things you get out of a can – there are few things tastier than fresh beans made over a few hours on the stove.
Last week I gushed about the magic of your local restaurant supply store and how it’s Mecca for bulletproof cookware at cheap prices. I got a lot of emails in response, asking me for more details, so I thought I’d share a little more about all the goodness you can find at your local restaurant supply store. I even went down to my local restaurant supplier and took a ton of photos, so you can see exactly why I’m so excited about shopping there. Here is a handy list of some of the common things you need for your kitchen that you’ll find for cheaper at your local restaurant supply store. If you need help finding one near you, click here for a Google search that will show any in your area.
There’s a pro secret to shopping for cookware that both awesome AND cheap. Stuff that’s built to last, without costing a fortune. It’s shockingly simple! I’ve gotten some incredible deals by shopping around at my local restaurant supply stores, such as my favorite spatula, which has lasted me five years and cost me $4. There’s also my awesome mixing bowls, which literally cost $12 for three. A few weeks ago I found a nice marble slab for ruling out pastry ($30) and a clearance sale on chef-quality Mercer knives. ($40 for a $80 knife!)
Despite how easy they are to use, herbs are something I get a ton of questions about. Like, A LOT. When I polled my readers last year about what they want help with in the kitchen, 15% said learning how to use fresh herbs was at the top of their list. Since this is such a hot topic, I decided to put together a guide to the basics of using fresh herbs. Now, this isn’t a list of flavor pairings — though I am working on that. The below guide is my top 10 cardinal rules when it comes to using fresh herbs.
Why write a whole post on how to make pasta? Isn’t this a simple thing to do? Not necessarily. I get at lets one email a week from people asking my why their dry, boxed pasta is either crunchy or gummy. It appears that this simple food is not so simple for some folks. Since I wrote a whole damn book on cooking with pasta (and cheese) I thought it might be useful to spell out how to make pasta so that it’s perfect every time, so even if you’re cooking with the cheap stuff you’ll have the best possible eating experience. I still argue that the best pasta is that which you make yourself, and I’ve covered that in another post. For now, here are a few tips to get the most out of dried pasta.
Pronounced KAE-zeh-SHPET-zleh, this dish is a great example of simple German comfort food at its finest. While American renditions of this German dish may add any number of odd spices, such as nutmeg or mustard powder, a basic Kasespatzle consists only of soft, dumpling-like noodles mixed with melty, stretchy cheese and topped with a touch of caramelized onion. When made from scratch, Kasespatzle beckons to a simpler time when food didn’t have to be complicated to be delicious. It just had to be fresh.
When I was growing up we didn’t have grand and glorious decorations all over our house. We may have had a string of lights on the garage and a Christmas tree, but we didn’t have a lot of money to buy a lot of decorations for Christmas table settings. Even then our house was beautiful thanks to my mother’s creativity and ingenuity.
She would send us out into the yard to gather acorns, colorful leaves, red pyracantha berry sprigs, small branches from bushes and trees, etc. Everything could be turned into the most beautiful, natural decorations. We would go to the tree lot and ask for any discarded branches they had cut off trees which added the beautiful aroma of pine to the house. My brothers would climb into our huge oak trees and cut down mistletoe which became gifts for our family friends when tied with red yarn.
I’ve got a great recipe for swirly Cinnamon Honey Bun Cookies below, straight out of Irvin Lin’s kitchen. Below you’ll find the recipe alone with my thoughts on his new baking book, Marbled, Swirled, and Layered: 150 recipes and variations for artful bars, cookies, pies, cakes, and more. There are a billion baking books out there….
From Jennifer: Apple picking is one of my favorite autumn activities. Even though apples are often available all year at the store, seasonal apples have so much flavor and are wonderful in baked goods. Tart apples are especially good to use because they offer both sweetness and acidity. While I prefer to eat sweet apples, I use tart apples in almost all of my recipes. This caramel apple pound cake is sweet, eggy, and dense, but also quite soft. It has apples in every slice. And it’s covered in a rich, creamy caramel sauce that keeps the cake moist and fl
From Jennifer: Brussels sprouts are one of those vegetables that everyone seems to either love or hate. I stand firm in my love of them as long as they are cooked properly. Brussels sprouts are not meant to be boiled in water. They should be caramelized with high heat, either in a sauté pan or roasted in the oven. I often prepare them simply with olive oil, garlic, and balsamic vinegar. But when I want a real treat, I like my Brussels sprouts with bacon and maple syrup for a tasty sweet and salty side dish.
The thing I like most about The Gourmet Kitchen is that while the recipes are indeed “gourmet,” most of them are also practical and approachable. Jennifer says that many of her dishes are “geared towards special occasion cooking, such as casual dinner parties, a leisurely weekend meal, or a romantic dinner for two.” And sure, some of the recipes in this cookbook are aspirational, but I’ve found that the vast majority could be made by absolutely anyone. Even those without a lot of cooking skills.
This apple spice cake recipe is my favorite part of the holidays. Each layer is drizzled with apple cider caramel syrup before the layers are covered with a buttercream frosting made with honey and sour cream. The perfect crunchy topping is a toasted honey walnut and oat crumble. This towering, 4-layer cake is impressive to behold. Folks will think you graduated from pastry school when they weren’t looking.
– Yay for Thanksgiving table decor and tablescaping ideas! – Since it’s just past the middle of November, Thanksgiving table decor and tablescaping ideas are a hot topic. I think it’s a welcome change in discussion from the insane election chatter that’s still filling our feeds — folks just want something else to think about, something fun and…
What is tablescaping? Even with dinner parties being so popular, table setting seems to be a lost art these days. I’m not talking about the which-fork-goes-where kind of table setting, but rather a whole process of thinking, being creative, and designing a mood to be shared on a flat surface.
Learning how to chop an onion isn’t something I can really explain via text, so I went ahead and created a handy dandy little video for you titled, “How to Chop and Slice an Onion.” This is the very first video I’ve ever produced for Fearless Fresh, so be sure to click the thumbs up icon on YouTube and help make my new channel look a little more lived in!
Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees, a cookbook by Kian Lam Kho, is the perfect introduction for anyone who wants to learn how to cook traditional Chinese recipes at home. Plus, it’s a beautiful book that you’ll love reading just because. I guarantee you that if you have this book sitting on your coffee table, any guests you have will instantly start flipping through it and demanding you cook for them. ;)
A good red cooked pork recipe is a family treasure and this one is no exception. Kian learned to make this dish from him Aunt Hong and her recipe is the foundation for his, which has evolved over the years after much experimentation with parboiling and caramelizing, aromatic ingredients and spices.
When it comes to choosing the best cooking oils, there are dozens of options on the market these days. You can choose from canola, olive oil, coconut oil, or (if you’re feeling adventurous and have a few extra dollars) go for something more exotic like avocado oil. The choices can seem endless, and we’ve been told that vegetable oils are lower in saturated fats which is good, right? Maybe. There’s more to choosing the best cooking oil than price and type of fat.
Smelly cheese can be a tough sell to some folks. A good, upstanding wheel of washed-rind can smell strongly enough to cause scent-sensitive people to run for the nearest open window. Their reasoning makes sense: what sane, self-preservation savvy person would eat something that stinks so damn bad? There’s a good reason, actually. Because smelly cheese is freaking delicious.
It’s another installment of the Professional Fail Files! In this ongoing series, I grill culinary pros to get the dirty details of their cooking failures. You can check out the first edition of the Professional Fail Files with cookbook author Dianne Jacob. What’s the point of this series? In my work as a food writer and cooking teacher, I hear from…
While there are many ways to classify cheeses, it’s important to properly categorize different varieties by how they are produced. Cheeses generally fall into one of four production categories: mass-produced, specialty, artisan, and farmstead. How is a novice cheese lover supposed to tell the difference between a mass-produced cheese and a farmstead cheese? (Besides the prettier packaging?) To make matters worse, plenty of people mix up the terms, causing even more confusion.
Today we’re talking dinner party table setting ideas. If you struggle to get creative with your dinner party ideas, then read on because this post was written with you in mind. We’ll explore 15 stress-free ways to level up your next dinner party so you can relax and impress your friends with your hostess skills.
Chocolate pasta is available at gourmet grocery stores throughout the country, or you can make it pretty easily yourself. You’re more than welcome to use any aged, well-mannered goat cheese available to you, or even the standard log of small-production chèvre from your local grocery store if that’s what you’ve got. The key here is balance: the pasta is bitter; the cherries are sweet; the hazelnuts are, well, nutty; so the cheese should be capriciously tart to round out the playlist. A chorus of red wine vinegar, ground mustard, and maple syrup adds even more dimension by way of an intriguing vinaigrette.
The reality is that good bread is an exercise in economy, a simple craft that doesn’t require years of practice. Four humble ingredients—flour, water, salt, and yeast—come together to create something incredibly special. But despite the simple nature of its components, bread needs an attentive hand. You can’t just throw these things together and create a memorable loaf; they require patience, a lost art that our recent kitchen culture doesn’t abide. But in the end, bread is not a difficult thing to make by any means.
This is just a quick heads up to let you know that a few things will be changing over the next week or two. First, my team and I have been working night and day to merge the two websites together, so all the recipes from TheCulinaryLife.com will soon have a new home at FearlessFresh.com. It’s a change that’s been a long time coming, and it will be so nice to have everything in one place. The second thing I’m excited about is that the new recipe archive over at FearlessFresh will be much more organized and searchable by recipe type, cuisine type, key ingredients, and even skill level. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting to make this happen, and it’s almost done!
This almond marzipan cake is a delightfully rich treat with a tender crumb, one that keeps well for up to four days in an airtight container. It’s perfect with coffee, great for high tea, and even holds it own as a dinner party dessert with a quick sprinkling of slices almonds. Because sliced almonds make everything look like you just stepped out of a bakery. And, it’s super easy to put together. This cake involves very few dishes almost no elbow grease. The cake batter is made in the food processor, so yay on easy cleanup.
I have to say, I may never make split pea soup without chicken again. The shredded chicken adds something beautiful to this soup, a lightly sweet flavor that doesn’t compete with the smoke usually provided by the ham hocks. (Though the bacon adds just a hint of smokiness, which is nice.) The texture is spot-on, and honestly, I think this soup recipe is one of the most comforting things I’ve eaten all year. You can easily make the stock for this soup the day before, and just stick both the broth and the meat in the fridge until you’re ready to use it. Even the soup freezes well.
This cinnamon swirl bread recipe has earned a permanent place in the pantheon of comfort food, right up there with my baked morning oatmeal with berries, coconut, and walnuts. Why? Because cinnamon is comfort. The result of this cinnamon bread is less dessert-y and more breakfast-worthy, which is exactly how I prefer my baked goodies these days. If you want a sweeter experience, a swath of maple butter is a perfect something-something to take each slice to the next level. Or if you’re feeling really fancy, homemade clotted cream or DIY crème fraîche knocks it out of the park. This bread begs to be sliced thick, toasted crisp, and blanketed in plenty of salted butter (or the afore-mentioned clotted cream or crème fraîche). Given the sugar I’ve taken out of the bread, feel free to go overboard with the dairy!
There’s a special place in my heart for orange cake recipes, especially those that have a touch of tang and perk up my tastebuds. Besides the gorgeous orange flavor that comes from a good amount of orange zest, this super-moist cake is also made with sour cream, which lends it touch more tang and a super luxurious texture that literally melts in your mouth. Taking a bite of this cake is like laying down on a super plush $500 pillow.
Veggies are the one thing we need to eat more of than any other food, and as luck would have it, they’re often relatively cheap. The problem is, not a lot of folks know how to cook vegetables so that they actually, you know, taste like something you’d want to eat all the time. The reality is that they’re easy to screw up, and if you came from a household where your mom turned dinnertime veggies into mysteriously bland, gray lumps, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you find that your attempts at learning to cook vegetables end in disaster (or simply boredom), these five tips will cure your lackluster veggie experience. You might be surprised as how easy they are.
A few years ago, a friend decided to make me rainbow cupcakes for my birthday. At the time I was battling some health issues and had removed gluten from my diet to see if that made a difference in my overall sad-sack-sick-girl status (because honestly, that’s how I felt at the time). She threw together some gluten-free cupcakes, popped them in the oven, arrived at my house, and presented me with… some of the sorriest cupcakes I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen some baking flops, but I’d never seen anything quite like this. The cupcakes had collapsed into bright, colorful little craters, not unlike those you see on the moon, and when bitten, they had the texture of fresh asphalt. I had never seen her to stressed out, and I’m way familiar with cooking stress.
We all need help sometimes, no matter how good a cook we are. Things go wonky: Cake pans overflow, vegetables melt into a gray gelatinous puddle, chicken suddenly decides to go rubbery in the frying pan. Even those of us who wrangle food for eight hours a day run into our fair share of problems. That’s why I’m building Fearless Fresh, and why I started the new Ninja community on Facebook. It’s a place for cooking beginners and adventurers alike, where you can find friendly-fierce guidance and inspiration for sharpening your skills… so you can feel like a total badass in the kitchen. (Because, you can be. I promise.)
