A purée is a thick, soft dish that's made by pressing cooked foods through a sieve, or mixing them in a blender or food processor.
Vegetable purées are either used as a base for soup -- thinned with water or stock -- or eaten as a side dish. Tomato purée, used for sauces and soups, is made by removing seeds from lightly cooked tomatoes and straining the pulp. Fruit purées are used to make sauces, mousses, soufflés and other preparations. Purées can also be made from anchovies, chicken livers, shrimp or salmon, and used as a filling for canapés.
Recipe: Butternut Squash And Banana Puree With Whiskey And Pecans (Cookthink)
Recipe: Parsnip And Orange Puree (Cookthink)
Reference: Tomato paste vs. tomato puree vs. tomato sauce (Cookthink)
Some recipes call for just egg whites or just egg yolks. How do you separate them? You could use an egg separator, but it's really not too tricky to just use the shells.
Set yourself up with two bowls -- one for the whites, and one for the yolks.
Carefully crack the egg on the edge of your bowl. Holding it over the bowl you intend to use for the whites, turn it vertically while you separate the halves, so that the yolk sits in one side of the shell. Some of the whites will spill over and into the bowl.
Gently pour the yolk back and forth between the halves, keeping the shells tilted so that the rest of the white can drip over and into the bowl. Once most of it is gone, dump the yolk into the other bowl, discard the shells and repeat. It takes a little getting used to, but a few eggs into your angel food cake, and you'll be a master.
When you want a dish to have quintessential garlic flavor that permeates each bite, mince it. You can mince with a knife, or a garlic press.
Either way, you need to free the individual cloves. To do that, press down on the head with the heel of your palm. Apply firm, even pressure so the cloves don't fly all over the place.
To peel an individual clove, cut of the hard stem end where the clove attached to the bulb. Either stop the cut just short of the skin on the other side and peel the skin around to remove it, or make the cut all the way through and squeeze out the clove. The older the clove, the easier the skin releases.
You can also peel it by setting the side of your knife blade on the clove and pressing down until you feel the skin release, though not hard enough to pulverize it, or the skin will get mixed in with the garlic.
To mince with a knife, smash the peeled clove with the side of the knife. Then just run your knife back and forth across the smashed clove, chopping as you go until it's as fine as you like.
If you don't want individual little pieces of garlic and have a press, just put the whole peeled clove (or cloves, if you can fit them) in the press and squeeze. Use your knife to trim away any clinging garlic.
What's the difference between white and brown eggs?
What's the difference between white and brown eggs?
Don't judge an egg by its shell. Whether an eggshell is white or brown is determined by the breed of the hen who laid the eggs. It has absolutely nothing to do with taste or nutritional value.
The only time you may want to consider the color of the eggs you're buying is around Easter and Passover time, since white eggs work better for dyeing and decorating purposes.
What can't you do with an egg? You can't grill it, but you can boil it, broil it, fry it, roast it, scramble it, simmer it, steam it or drop it from 10 meters in a balsam wood cage.
incredible The really amazing thing about the egg is the versatility of textures it can create. It can be as light as a meringue, and as dense as a pound cake. It all depends on how you rearrange an egg's proteins--break them apart and whip them full of air, or use them to bind together heavier ingredients like cream and sugar.
colorblind Some chickens produce white eggs, others brown. Some are even blue. Among the common grocery store offerings, there isn't too much difference, whatever the color.
put together An egg is made up of a couple of different components: a semi-permeable outer shell, a viscous "albumen" or white, and the center yolk, which is also made up of microscopic layers. Many recipes call for either the yolk or the white alone. Don't worry, separating them is is easy enough to do.
sinker As eggs age, they gradually lose moisture through the pores inthe shells. So an old egg will be much less dense than a new one. You can test an egg's relative freshness by putting it in a bowl of cold water; the fresher it is, the faster it sinks. And if it floats, toss it out.
no boil Don't let the name fool you. Actual boiling water is too violent for cooking eggs; the constant bubbling shifts them around, possibly cracking the shell and letting the white leak out. Eggs should be cooked in barely simmering water, 3-5 minutes for soft boiled or coddled eggs, 10-15 minutes for hard boiled.
what you need
A nonstick pan is almost essential for eggs. It lets you fry or scramble or make an omelet without using a lot of butter. Unless you want to, of course.
For the true egg devotee, try any of the recipes in The Good Egg: More than 200 Fresh Approaches from Breakfast to Dessert. Make sure to pick up a few dozen eggs first.
If you're a stickler for perfectly round fried eggs (it can't overlap your English muffin, after all), try an egg form.
what you do
The lightest of desserts, this Apple Snow will look graceful on any table.
Try your eggs Passover- style with Matzo Brie. Think of it as Jewish French toast.
When scrambled eggs grow up, they become quiche. And what little scramble wouldn't want to be an elegant Quiche Lorraine?
These Spicy Baked Eggs with Tofu are great for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or that late-night craving.
featured recipe
This springy Pasta with Leeks, Asparagus, Mushrooms, And Fried Eggs is the featured recipe of this week's Root Source Challenge. We loved the creaminess of the cheese combined with the yolk of the egg. Congratulations to Amy and Jonny of We Are Never Full.
You can leave basil leaves whole and add them to salads and hot dishes toward the end of cooking, tear them into pieces for more capricious basil flavor, or thinly slice them. To avoid bruising the basil, slide a sharp knife down and across the basil with a deliberate, smooth stroke. A clean cut will darken the leaves less than a pounding cut.
To slice basil, first stack the leaves together.
You can either roll them up like a cigar and slice through them to make a chiffonade, or just slice away at them as they are.
Why does Cookthink use red pepper flakes in so many recipes?
Why does Cookthink use red pepper flakes in so many recipes?
We use red pepper flakes so often that we've come to think of them as the third standard seasoning, after salt and pepper.
Why do we use red pepper flakes in so many recipes?
We use it as a flavor highlighter. In addition to the fives tastes -- sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami -- our tongues detect capsaicin, the main ingredient found in any hot chile. The heat of capsaicin in red pepper flakes "points up" the taste of ingredients they season. So, no matter what tastes and flavors you have going on in a dish, a pinch of red pepper flakes will help clarify and those tastes and flavors without necessarily adding heat (though you can add plenty of heat by adding red pepper flakes).
Experiment with red pepper flakes by starting out with a pinch in a dish like this Fusilli with Broccoli Raab and Parmesan. Increase (or decrease) the amount you use to get a sense of how much you like to add.
Recipe: New York Strip With Spicy Gremolata Dressing (Cookthink)
Reference: Measuring freshly ground black pepper (Cookthink)
Here's a fast, organized way to slice a bell pepper. First, cut off the top end. You can use the flesh around the stem, so save it to prep at the end.Next cut off the bottom. Save it to slice or dice at the end, too.Split the pepper from top to bottom with a single cut.Pull out and dscard the core and seeds.Now you're left with relatively flat sections. You can slice them to any thickness, in any direction. For stir-frys, slice the pieces into long thin strips.To make larger irregular slices for longer-coooking dishes like braises and stews, rotate the sections back and forth as you slice.
Tomato paste vs. tomato purée vs. tomato sauce
Tomato paste vs. tomato purée vs. tomato sauce
Do you sometimes get these confused?
Tomato paste is made from tomatoes that have been cooked for a few hours, strained and reduced into a rich, sweet paste. Tomato paste is most commonly used in pizza sauce. A dollop of tomato paste adds a dark, savory flavor to soups and stews.
Tomato purée consists of tomatoes that have been cooked briefly and strained to produce a thick, tangy liquid. Tomato purée is used in soups, stews and sauces to add the tomato flavoring without the texture. We use it as the flavor base in certain recipes, this Indian chicken stew, for example.
Tomato sauce refers to any sauce made out of tomatoes. That includes the ubiquitous Italian tomato sauce with all its variations, as well as Indian and Thai curries that have a tomato base. Tomato sauce can be canned, jarred or fresh. Time-willing, we prefer to make our own. Try this lasagna with homemade Italian tomato sauce.
