What's the difference between white rice and brown rice?
What's the difference between white rice and brown rice?
Brown rice and white rice are the same grain. White rice is brown rice that has been stripped of its fibrous layers of bran and then polished smooth and white. Those outer layers contain most of the fiber and nutrients of the grain. (They also give brown rice a nuttier, chewier flavor and texture.)
So, which is better?
It depends on what you're in the mood for. We enjoy the complexity and wholesomeness of brown rice. But we also appreciate a simple, soothing bowl of white rice, which cooks faster and has a light, fluffy texture that balances acidic and spicy dishes, like a stir-fry or vindaloo. And while brown rice is great for the heart, white rice is easier on the stomach, making it a suitable base for comforting Greek Lemon-Egg Soup.
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.
Cutting up a whole chicken for the first time may seem baffling, but there's no need to worry. If you watch this video by Handmade TV, you'll be all set. Just make sure to sharpen your knife!
Cooking lobster is quite easy, but eating it (especially for the first time) can be another matter. This video by Handmade TV provides directions for a successful lobster-eating experience.
So-called Italian sausage is a style of plump, uncured pork sausage that comes in hot and sweet varieties -- essentially, with or without hot red peppers.
Sold in links and flavor-enhanced with garlic and fennel and/or anise seeds, it can be cooked like any old sausage and is especially popular in sausage-based pasta sauces or eaten in a sandwich with fried onions and bell peppers.
Go to Italy and ask for "Italian sausage," and you will receive either a blank stare or a multitude of options; what we think of as Italian sausage is a generic label specific to the U.S.
Recipe: Pappardelle With Sausage And Yellow Squash (Cookthink)
Recipe: White Bean Soup With Spicy Sausage (Cook & Eat)
Reference: What is chorizo? (Cookthink)
Saffron, the world’s most expensive spice by weight, comes from the stigmas of the purple saffron crocus (a member of the iris family). Each flower contains three stigmas, which are harvested by hand and then dried. One pound of dried saffron requires a minimum of 50,000 flowers to be picked, which helps explain the elevated cost. Native to Asia minor, Iran and Spain now lead the world in saffron production.
Saffron can be purchased ground into a powder or whole as threads. Buying the threads ensures the spice’s purity, since powdered saffron may be watered down with additional spices like turmeric or safflower. The threads tend to have a stronger taste than the ground, and must be steeped in milk or water, or roasted, before being added to a dish to release their flavor.
Saffron has a bitter taste, an earthy, hay-like smell, and a golden-red hue, which gives food a deep yellow color. When cooking with saffron, it must be used sparingly; too much can produce a harsh, medicinal flavor.
what you should know
Richly flavored and intensely aromatic, these golden-orange threads are the dried stigmas of the saffron crocus.
Harvesting saffron takes some doing: each thread is picked by hand. An acre of flowers yields only about 10 pounds of saffron, making it worth more than its weight in gold (and, ounce for ounce, the most expensive spice in the world).
not mellow yellow A little saffron goes a long way. Just a few strands -- which can smell hay-like or brightly medicinal -- add a distinct color and flavor to a dish.
to dye for Saffron has a history as a dye, both for clothing and for food. If you want to give a dish that telltale color, soak the threads in warm water for 10-20 minutes and then cook with the infused liquid.
toasty warm If you're going to use saffron threads without soaking them first, lightly toast them to enhance the flavor.
blooming Saffron crocuses are blooming right about now. If you are very industrious, you can grow your own -- Andrea from Andrea's Recipes is just about ready to harvest hers.
what you need
Saffron threads are absolutely crucial if you're making paella. You can make do with a wide saucepan or Dutch oven, but it's much simpler to go from stovetop to table in a pretty paella pan.
Joyce Goldstein explores the wide-ranging traditions of Jewish cooking in the Mediterranean in her book Saffron Shores.
If you decide to grow your own saffron, White Flower Farms offers a variety of bulbs. And if your thumb is not as green as you'd like, a copy of Gayla Trail's You Grow Girl (and regular visits to her wonderful blog) will set you on the path for prosperous gardening.
what you do
Persian chicken and rice glistens with golden beets and saffron.
Saffron is the star of a Provençal-inspired seafood stew.
Broil them, grill them, serve them on ice cream -- no matter how you serve them, saffron-infused pineapples are bright and delicious.
An elegant presentation of tapenade and saffron aioli makes pan-smoked tomato bisque a beautiful main course.
Cook and Eat created an elegant soup for any season, pairing saffron with citrus and a cranberry-balsamic meringue.
Try a Sardinian take on paella from Efisio Farris' Sweet Myrtle & Bitter Honey.
Featured: A fall-perfect featured recipe for this week's Root Source Challenge -- gorgeous saffron-pumpkin macarons. Congratulations to Helen of Tartelette!
Find more saffron recipes at Cookthink.com. And if you haven't yet signed up for a free account at Cookthink, do it now!
Why do I need to fluff rice with a fork?
Why do I need to fluff rice with a fork?
To "fluff" rice (or couscous, quinoa or bulgur) means to use the prongs of a fork to carefully separate the cooked grains. This will remove any lumps and separate the delicate grains without crushing them to give the rice a light, fluffy texture. (A wooden spoon is too much of a bruiser for this operation and will often result in mushy rice.)
Note: When making a granita, a semi-frozen dessert made from water, sugar and fruit or other flavorings, a fork is also used to scrape the ice crystals as they form, resulting in a fluffy icy texture, not an ice cube.
Recipe: Stuffed Zucchini With Ground Beef, Brown Rice, Red Pepper And Basil (Kalyn's Kitchen)
Recipe: Vegetable Fried Rice (Tastes Like Home)
Recipe: Muscatel & Green Grape Granita (Chow)
Chopping is probably the most common way to prep an onion. Chopped onions show up in anything that needs the basic, earthy pungent flavor that onions give. Chop them larger for longer-cooking dishes like stews and rustic soups, and smaller (call it a dice if you like) for anything from salsas to sauces to ragouts.
To start, cut the onion in half through the root. The root itself will help keep the onion together for chopping
Rotate the onion 90 degrees and cut off the papery end (not the root end). This will make the skin easy to peel away and discard.
Peel back the onion's papery skin. It's often easiest to peel away the first layer of the onion along with the skin.
Make a series of diagonal cuts (roughly 45 degrees) into the side of the onion. Keep more space between the slices for a large chop. Make the cuts closer together for a small chop or a dice.
Now make a series of horizontal cuts to finish shaping the chop or dice.
Finally, rotate the onion again and slice crosswise against the checkerboard pattern you made in the onion. The chopped pieces will fall away from the onion.
To wash or not to wash? Though the conventional wisdom says not to wash mushrooms, we side with Jacques Pepin, Harold McGee and Alton Brown, all of whom say that washing leads to neither mushy mushrooms nor lost flavor. Most of the time though, you'll be okay just brushing over dark spots with a damp paper towel. However you decide to clean your mushrooms, wait and clean them just before you need them.
What makes a tomato an heirloom tomato?
What makes a tomato an heirloom tomato?
An heirloom is a thing handed down from generation to generation. Is an heirloom tomato then a tomato plant that's been handed down from generation to generation?
Sort of. An heirloom tomato is an open-pollinated tomato whose seed grows "true to type" -- meaning, if you plant Cherokee Purple seed, you're going to get Cherokee Purple plants. From generation to generation, that seed will stay true (and so, you could argue, the plant gets "passed down"). Some heirloom tomatoes have, in fact, stayed within one family and so are heirlooms in the truest sense of the word. Other heirloom tomatoes circulate widely.
The term "heirloom" was applied to tomatoes (and plants in general) to distinguish traditional varieties (and techniques) from the F1 hybrids of modern seed industry. Seed from an F1 hybrid plant reverts to something in its parentage and so does not stay true from generation to generation. Through years of selection, some hybrids have been "stabilized" or "dehybridized" so that their seeds are true to type.
As Phelan from points out, , so the distinction between "hybrid" and "heirloom" is more about age (old vs. new) and hybridizing technique (classically bred vs. GMO).
Speaking of age, an heirloom is an old thing. How old does a tomato have to be before it's an heirloom? It's debatable. Some say that to be an heirloom, a tomato must have originated before 1940, when the hybrid seed business began to take off. Others insist that you can't put a date on a label that has more to do with technique than time. To get in on the debate about what is and isn't an heirloom, check out Gardenweb's Growing Tomatoes forum.
Recipe: Tomato recipes at Cookthink
Resource: The National Gardening Association has an solid introduction on open pollination versus hybridization. If you're looking for hard-to-find heirloom varieties, try the Seed Savers Exchange.
Story: Gary Ibsen named one of his open-pollinated tomatoes after Julia Child. Read the story here.
What is the difference between a shrimp and a prawn?
What is the difference between a shrimp and a prawn?
In some culinary circles, the word "prawn" is used to describe a large shrimp. In other circles, "shrimp" is used exclusively to describe both shrimp and prawns. And to further complicate matters, in other circles, "prawn" is used exclusively to describe both shrimp and prawns.
So is there a difference between the two?
Yes, there is a difference. Technically, shrimp and prawns are separate species, with mildly different gill structures and tastes.
The saltwater crustacean known as a shrimp is found in warm water (like the Gulf of Mexico) or cold water (like the Atlantic). Much of the shrimp we eat is pond-raised. In general, the colder the water, the smaller the shrimp.
Marketed according to size, shrimp are named based on the rough number of them that make up a pound. "Miniature" shrimp are so small that it take roughly 100 to make a pound, while just 10 "colossal" shrimp make a pound.
A prawn is a different kind of crustacean that resembles a miniature lobster and has sweet, succulent meat. The French langoustine, Spanish langostino and Caribbean lobsterette are all prawns, as is the Italian scampi (which shouldn't be confused with the dish known in the United States as "shrimp scampi"). Freshwater prawns like the Hawaiian blue prawn look like a shrimp-and-lobster love child, with thinner bodies and longer legs than shrimp.
Since in most recipes one can be substituted for the other, at Cookthink, we prefer to say "shrimp" when referring to shrimp and prawns. Using our synoynm feature, you can search for shrimp or prawns and we'll know what you're talking about.
Recipe: For recipes using shrimp and praws, take a look at the "related recipes" box on the left
Some rice -- short-grain white rice in particular -- almost always needs to be rinsed of the powdery starch that builds up around it during transport. Brown rice, since it still has its hull, doesn't create as much buildup in the bag or box.
All rice probably gets a little dirty between the farm and the store shelf. A good rule of thumb is to rinse new brands and varieties the first few times you use them. If the water's crystal clear, they may not need rinsing the next time.
To rinse rice, add it directly to the saucepan or a bowl, fill it with cold water, and swish the rice around with your fingers. Check the clarity of the water, pour it out (keeping the rice in the pan with your hand), and repeat until the water is clear.
What does it mean to devein a shrimp?
What does it mean to devein a shrimp?
"Deveining" has nothing to do with veins. To devein a shrimp is to remove the black threadlike intestinal tract that runs along its back.
Deveining is a good idea when working with larger shrimp, because the digestive tract can contain grit. But whether or not to devein smaller shrimp is a matter of preference. Some people think the flavor of a dish is enhanced by leaving it in (or that it's just too much trouble to remove the harmless tract). The perfectionists among us remove it for aesthetic purposes.
We're not perfectionists here, so we rarely devein shrimp. If you're set on doing it, there are a few shrimp deveining devices on the market -- such as OXO's shrimp cleaner -- but you can just as easily make do with a knife. Peel the shrimp first, then run the tip of a sharp knife along the shrimp's back to lift out the delicate black vein, removing any pieces that break off with your fingers.
Recipe: Broiled Thai Shrimp (Cookthink)
Recipe: Spicy Linguini With Shrimp And Mint (Cookthink)
