What is extra-virgin olive oil?
What is extra-virgin olive oil?
Extra-virgin olive oil is the precious unrefined first result of cold-pressing olives to make a fruity liquid that contains less than one percent acid.
Extra-virgin olive oil is the most expensive olive oil variety, and it is best appreciated in salads or as a garnish to give preparations a final flourish. If you are using olive oil to cook, it's fine to use regular olive oil.
Greece is the #1 consumer of olive oil in the world and also the leading producer of extra virgin olive oils, which account for 82 percent of their olive oil production. The U.S. is not a member of the International Olive Oil Council (IOOC), which regulates olive oil standards worldwide, and the IOOC does not recognize the U.S. standards for extra-virgin oil.
There is much controversy in the olive oil world, with accusations of corruption and adulteration smearing consumer confidence and shedding doubt on the purity of so-called virgin olive oil.
Florence fennel, the bulbous variety found in most American stores has a subtle anise (mild licorice) flavor and delicate celery texture. The bulbs are often sold with the feathery fronds lopped off. Get the ones with some fronds attached if you can -- they’re the perfect raw finish to a fennel dish, sprinkled on as a bright green top layer to echo the anise flavor.
You can thinly slice fennel crosswise for sautés, pastas, and salads, or cut it into wedges lengthwise to roast, braise, or gratinee.
First, rinse the bulb and fronds well and pat them dry. Cut off the the stalks close to the bulb.
If you want to remove some of the slightly stringy outer layer, peel bulb with a vegetable peeler.
To slice for salads or quick cooking, just cut across the bulb as thick or thin as you like.
For longer cooking methods like braising and roasting, cut the bulb lengthwise into wedges of any size. Slice through the core, leaving some of it attached to each wedge to help keep the wedges together. The core will become tender with cooking.
If you want to cook wedges briefly, like on a grill, it's best to remove the core. Cut the bulb into wedges lengthwise, then sliced down along the core at an angle. Then just slice the quarters crosswise to any thickness.
Now that you know how to prep fennel, try cooking it - there are lots of fennel recipes at Cookthink.com.
Here's a fast, methodical way to dice a bell pepper. First, cut off the top end. (Once you're done dicing the full pepper, you can slice off the edges of the top to use.)Next cut off the bottom. Save it to slice or dice, too.Split the pepper from top to bottom with a single cut.Pull out the pepper's core, and discard it.Now just unfold the pepper like a book. Some peppers will break apart here, which is fine.Cut the pepper into sections along the white bitter ribs, which you'll want to remove. This way they're easier to get at with a knife.Hold the knife parallel to the cutting board and cut between the ribs and the red flesh below.Now you're left with relatively flat sectioned pieces of bell pepper. Slice them into thick or thin strips, depending on the size dice you want.To complete the dice, rotate the strips 90 degrees and slice them crosswise.
A caper is the pickled bud of a bush native to Asia and found throughout the Mediterranean. Capers are dried in the sun and pickled in a vinegar brine. Tangy green capers come packed in brine or coarse salt.
Capers are found in various sizes, but Southern France's nonpareil are the smallest -- and the best. Italian varieties are larger, and large Spanish caperberries are the edible mature fruit that are pickled with their stems.
The Romans used capers in fish sauces, which still works today. You can also add them to meatballs, scatter them on a pizza or smoked salmon, or mix them into all kinds of condiments and sauces.
Salt-packed capers should be rinsed of excess salt before using.
what you should know
Meaty, black and slightly sweet, the Kalamata is our favorite table olive.
Good flesh-to-pit ratio. Firm but slightly chewy. Strong and briny but without that mineral aftertaste left by so many olives. A perfect, plump nibble. Also great in tapenade.
Kalamata olives come from around Kalamata, Greece, a city at the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Kalamata is an earthquake-prone area that specializes in the production of olives, raisins and grandiose New Age music.
washed and soaked Almost all harvested Kalamata olives are kept whole for eating. (Only scarred and unshapely ones are used to make oil.) Kalamatas are washed, sometimes pitted, and then left in a red wine vinegar brine.
it's the pits We like to buy Kalamatas unpitted. The texture holds up better and is less prone to mushiness. Plus, pitting olives is good exercise.
what you need
In his Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit, Mort Rosenblum tracks the history and legend of the olive. This is one of the best culinary histories you'll read.
Though it's not really useful for anything else (except maybe displaying your collection of marbles), we're still suckers for this wooden olive canoe.
While OXO's cherry pitter can handle olives just as well, the easiest way to pit an olive is with your fist and a dough scraper.
what you do
In this simple dish of sliced mozzarella with green and black olive tapenade, the salty, umami olive spread plays off the clean, mild flavor of the mozzarella.
Speaking of tapenade, hogwash's pan-seared chicken with two-olive tapenade and sundried-tomato cream leaves you with enough left over for sandwiches.
For this simple spin-off of the classic baked Provençal tomatoes, we added Kalamatas, garlic and bread crumbs for extra flavor. (Cheese wouldn't hurt, either.)
A tuna, green bean and olive salad is not quite the classic Niçoise, but it's a solid jumping-off point for all kinds of variations.
This calamari, radicchio, white bean and Kalamata olive salad is a recreation of a salad Brys washed down with a cold beer on Naxos.
Featured recipe: This delicious flatbread El Greco comes from DC-area food blog Food Rockz and is the featured recipe for this week's Root Source Challenge.
A cherry tomato is a diminutive subspecies of the regular old tomato that can be as small as a cherry.
Cherry tomatoes are red or golden yellow (with less acid and a milder flavor). They first appeared in Europe in the early 1600s, and there are dozens of varieties with names like Cheerio, Whippersnapper, Husky Red, Gardener's Delight, Peace Vine and the much-lauded Sweet and Supersweet 100. The Santorini cherry tomato ("tomataki") is noted for excellence, and the volcanic Greek island hosts international conferences on the cherry tomato.
Cherry tomatoes are frequently used as a garnish because they are so cute. They are also popular used in hors d'oeuvres or salads, as they are easy to pop in your mouth and at their best are bursting with concentrated sweet tomato flavor that is often superior to their larger counterparts. Best of all, they don't need to be sliced -- which makes them popular in salad bars.
In addition to eating them like candy, you can roast cherry tomatoes in the oven, sauté them or do fancy things like cut off their tops, scoop out their insides, and stuff them with whipped goat cheese or crab mousse.
Pricey cherry tomatoes can be red and perfectly round; yellow and pear-shaped; or oblong "grape" tomatoes that are like miniature plum tomatoes. The smallest of the mini tomatoes are currant tomatoes, which weigh just 1/8 of an ounce.
Root Source: Cherry Tomato (Cookthink)
What does it mean to julienne?
What does it mean to julienne?
To julienne something is to cut it into long, thin strips, like matchsticks. While there is some discrepancy over the exact width of a julienne cut, it is the smallest of its category, generally agreed to measure around 1/16th to 1/8th of an inch.
The alumette cut is a bit bigger than the julienne, and the batonnet is the largest of the matchstick cuts, about 1/4 of an inch. There's no need to get out the ruler at Cookthink, though. We usually just go with "cut into matchsticks" instead of "julienned". It's just easier that way and, frankly, you'll be fine as long as you think "matchsticks" and cut whatever it is you're cutting as thin as you can.
Some vegetables you commonly cut into matchsticks: peppers, carrots, celery and onions for salads and soups. Beef, pork or duck work well this way in stir-fries.
