#knife-skills

#knife-skills

Contrast is at the center of many popular culinary trends. There's also a strong emphasis on contrasting textures within a single baked good. For example, soft milk breads and laminated doughs that have been hard-baked create exciting combinations.

The word 'allium' is the name of a group of vegetables including garlic, onions, chives, leeks and others that are botanically related. Because of the myriad ways they influence flavor, in states ranging from raw to cooked (even burnt), they're culinarily related too.

I like to fold the bag over my hand as I fill it with frosting and I press everything down towards the tip as I am filling. This gives more control over the bag and allows her to apply pressure and remove the air.

Cutting a pizza fairly involves more than just making a straight slice; it requires consideration of how toppings are distributed across the pizza. If one side has significantly more toppings, the division is inherently unfair.

When churning out cover after cover at the saute station you can't exactly be picky about what's on the shelf above the stove. But that doesn't mean professional chefs don't have opinions about the pans they use every day during service.

Instead of cheapest, ask for the 'best value for [your] cooking method.' That small shift in wording can make a big difference in the 'final cut,' so to speak.

Most knife recommendations come with a quiet asterisk. A brand deal, a commission link, a product sent to a chef's PO box before the review goes live. What gets left out of that conversation is what the same chef keeps in the drawer at home - the blade they reach for on a Sunday morning when nobody is filming.

Cheesy comparisons aside, the reason chefs are responsible for their own knives boils down to subjective preferences and comfort. "I want the knife to be an extension of my arm and my hand," says Fredrik Berselius, executive chef at Aska. Since there are far too many variables that go into a knife's design-handle shape, blade shape, weight, balance, material, and so on- determining which knife is the best knife is fundamentally impossible.

For example, if a recipe calls for 1 cup of chopped onions, do you know exactly how many onions you'll need to buy or ultimately, chop? Often, you won't know until you get deep into your recipe's ingredient list, whether you'll need a specific volume or number of onions (sometimes with a size specification, but oftentimes - annoyingly - without). This leads to further confusion as small onions weigh around 6 ounces, medium about 8 ounces, and large roughly 16 ounces.

Whether donning an apron at home or in a Michelin-starred restaurant, pretty much everyone agrees on the merits of cooking with cast-iron pans. They've been around for generations, passed down like an heirloom and fired up for all kinds of meals, from everyday comfort food to special company-is-coming fare. But there's one thing that needs to be acknowledged: it's not ideal for everything - specifically, cooking eggs.

Some chefs pride themselves on blurring the lines between food and art. For Executive Chef Andrew Oh, Momoya SoHo has become revered for putting beauty on plates, such is the case for the restaurant's beautiful wine glass parfaits. However, Oh is known for sushi creations that are equally impressive. We asked the chef for tips on sushi-making (known as one of the most difficult culinary techniques to master) so that our next batch of caterpillar rolls look more professional than problematic.

So when engineers at The New York Times steered a generative artificial intelligence model to scale our recipes, I worked with them to address common questions that math alone can't answer and create nuanced rules for a range of situations. (How do you halve three whole eggs?) Our recipe editors, all of whom have decades of professional experience, then reviewed rounds of scaled recipes, and the engineers incorporated that feedback into their model to help ensure the best possible outcomes.

Not only does a mortar and pestle amp up your spices, releasing oils and concentrating flavor by crushing them against the stone bowl, but the iconic chef also notes its versatility. "These ancient kitchen tools are perfect for everything from pestos to dressings," he says. Other aspects he likes are the total control they allow for - as opposed to what you get with electric food processors or grinders, the textures that you can achieve and control by hand, and even just their appealing look.

If you've ever mixed something vigorously in a large bowl during a cooking project, you have probably experienced the universal frustration of a tilting, wobbly bowl. Maybe you're whipping cream by hand, whisking a vinaigrette, or even just beating eggs for a casual, but perfect, omelette, and notice the bowl starts migrating across the counter. There are some low-tech workarounds, like a damp towel or a silicone mat slipped underneath the bowl. Neither works terribly well, especially with super-slippery granite countertops.