Green onions are a milder, versatile alternative to onions. The white parts are great for cooking, but mild enough to work into raw salsas and salads. The green parts work in either, too, but have an almost herbal quality when raw.To prep them, first pull off and discard any soft outer layers. It's best to rinse them after you do this. Cut off the root and and any damaged top green parts and discard them.Now just thinly slice straight across the onion. Thin slices are good to at at the end of cooking, sprinkled over a finished dish, or raw in salads and salsas.Make thicker slices for longer cooking dishes, and when you plan to sauté them first with oil or butter and spices. As with onions, a little salt at the beginning of cooking helps them soften more quickly.For stir-frys and shorter-cooking dishes where the green onion plays a starring role, slice the onions at an angle. The sharp slices look great on the plate (if you're impressed with that sort of thing).
Storing fresh herbs is a battle against the inevitable, but here are a few tips for keeping them alive in time for you to eat them up:
1 Set a bushy herb like parsley, cilantro, chervil, or mint in a shallow glass of water and keep it on the counter or in the refrigerator for several days, just like a bouquet.
2 Or, rinse it, wrap it loosely in a paper or dish towel while still damp, and place it (with or without a plastic bag covering) in the crisper or at the bottom of the fridge.
3 Sturdy herbs such as rosemary or thyme can be stored in paper or loose plastic (either keep it loose or puncture some air holes to let out moisture). Or you can simply hang them upside down in the kitchen, where they will dry slowly.
4 Do not manhandle delicate herbs like chives, tarragon or basil. Rinse lightly, wrap loosely in paper and place in a plastic bag in the crisper.
5 Fresh herbs should last about a week if stored properly. If you're at the end of your garden's season and you have a tons of herbs left unused, you can most herbs to have later in the year. Kalyn's Kitchen breaks down the best way to freeze basil, rosemary and thyme.
Reference: Marjoram vs. oregano (Cookthink)
Reference: How to make pesto (Cookthink)
Kosher salt is a bright-tasting white, coarse-grained salt made without additives (such as iodine).
It is called kosher salt in North America (elsewhere it's referred to as coarse-grain salt) because it is used to aid in the preparing of kosher meat that is salted after butchering in order to draw out the animal's blood. Kosher salt works particularly well because its large grains don't immediately dissolve on the surface of meat, drawing in liquid instead.
But you don't have to keep kosher to appreciate kosher salt, a favorite of cooks everywhere for its large flaky texture and clean taste that works in a variety of dishes.
If you're new to kosher salt, be aware that it doesn't always dissolve completely in baked goods and that its grains vary in size according to the manufacturer, so be sure to check the box for measurement conversions. The large flakes of kosher salt make it a nice finishing salt to sprinkle on dishes before serving.
What's the difference between a green onion and a scallion?
What's the difference between a green onion and a scallion?
The words green onion and scallion are generally interchangeable; they both most often refer to immature members of the sweet onion family.
In general, green onions or scallions are vegetables with a white base and long straight green leaves that can be eaten raw or cooked (both parts). In Europe, the term spring onion refers to green onions that have a fatter but mild white bulb and long green leaves.
recipe: Boiled Eggs With Green Onions, Bell Pepper And Ginger (cookthink)
recipe: Green Onion Beer Bread (Coconut & Lime)
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.
You can add whole sprig of rosemary to a dish -- tossed in with roasted vegetables, submerged in soups, stews, tied to or tossed alonside roasted meats - when you want the flavor but not the texture of the leaves. Just discard the sprigs before serving the dish.More often though, it makes sense to finely chop rosemary. First, you have to remove the leaves from the woody stems. Hold a sprig upright with one hand, then pull the leaves downard against the direction of growth. Pull away the remaining top leaves separately.Put the leaves in a pile, rock your knife across them, and occasionally bring them back into a pile. Chop until they're as fine as you like. Coarsely chop them for longer cooking dishes. For quick cooking dishes, or to add at the end of longer-cooking dishes, finely chop them.
what you should know
Unsalted butter is always equally unsalted, but salted butter is never quite salted the same.
The NaCl uncertainty is the main reason we prefer to use unsalted butter when we cook. Often that salt can subdue the sweet flavor of butter. (Unsalted butter is often labeled as "sweet butter.")
salt conversion In most recipes, the little extra salt will go unnoticed. Still, as a general rule if a recipe calls for unsalted butter but all you've got is salted butter, cut 1/4 teaspoon of salt per stick of butter (1/2 cup) you use.
stick it up Salt acts as a preservative for butter. Tightly wrapped in foil and stored in the fridge, salted butter can last for five months, while unsalted butter lasts about three before going stale. (Spot stale butter by slicing into the stick; the outside will be darker than the inside.) Then again, many people don't store butter in the fridge to begin with.
cooking with butter Sometimes, when you want a nuttier flavor, you'll want to let the butter's foam subside. But butter has a low smoke point, so be careful using it as your cooking fat. It'll burn easily. Clarified butter, or ghee, has a higher smoke point (and also makes a tasty dipping sauce for crab, lobster and anything else).
roux-dimentary Butter forms the foundation for countless classic sauces and thickeners, including béchamel, beurre manié and roux.
what you need
Have you ever wanted to make fresh butter at home? This traditional butter churn is based on the famous Dazey churn from the early 20th century.
You can also make a small batch of butter by putting cream in a jar and shaking it for a long, long time until you've shaken it solid.
The water-cooled crock owners we know swear by the constant supply of creamy, spreadable butter they keep on their tables.
Other butter lovers who shun the refrigerator prefer the classic rectangular butter dish.
what you do
Sage and butter are absolutely delicious together. How delicious? Try this rich and pillowy tortellini with sage brown butter and parmesan to find out.
Steamy Kitchen likes to top her slow butter- braised asparagus with parmesan and sea salt. With that savory finale, you definitely don't need salted butter.
Drizzling roasted sweet potatoes with cilantro-lime butter gives them a burst of tart richness.
Salted butter might interfere with the complex sugar-spice interaction in these orange-scented popovers with cinnamon-orange honey.
These better-for-you whole-grain flapjacks from hogwash are made with quinoa, millet and flaxseed. After using butter to grease the pan, you can afford to use a little extra on the cakes themselves.
Coconut & Lime's worked out one of the fastest and tastiest cinnamon bun recipes out there.
Tarragon is a delicate, green herb with long, thin pointy leaves and a singular flavor with hints of anise.
One of the signature herbs in French cooking, tarragon is a main player in the classic quartet known as fines herbes. Tarragon marries particularly well with chicken, eggs, fish and cream. It also infuses tarragon vinegar and is the most crucial ingredient in Béarnaise sauce.
French tarragon is the most aromatic and flavorful tarragon for cooking. Russian tarragon doesn't smell or taste as good (no offense, Russians). You can buy tarragon fresh in summer, but in a pinch dried tarragon will work for many recipes. Just be careful not to get carried away and use too much, since tarragon has a strong personality and a tendency to overwhelm the other ingredients when given a chance.
Fun facts about tarragon: It was once thought to cure snakebite and the famous character of Estragon the clochard in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is named after the French word for tarragon.
Recipe: Iceberg Wedges With Garlic Croutons And Green Goddess Dressing (Cookthink)
Recipe: Tortellini With Tarragon, Chives And Parsley (Cookthink)
what you should know
Like a seasoned diplomat, tarragon is somehow forceful and subtle at the same time. It's an elegantly tuned herb -- delicate, reasonable.
walks softly Tarragon's thin, long leaves have a slightly sweet, resinous flavor, like basil-infused licorice. Add fresh tarragon towards the end of cooking to retain that flavor in the dish.
carries big stick As with thyme and marjoram, too much tarragon can overpower a dish. If a recipe calls for fresh tarragon and all you have is dried, use less than the recipe calls for.
fine aliment Tarragon goes especially well with eggs, chicken, fish and cream. A fundamental herb of French cuisine, tarragon is paired with chives, chervil and parsley to create the classic French herb mix called fines herbes.
fit for a king The difference between Hollandaise sauce and Béarnaise sauce? For Hollandaise, you use lemon juice. For Béarnaise, you use vinegar and add tarragon.
fit for a tramp The famous character of Estragon the clochard in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is named after the French word for tarragon.
what you need
This contraption might be the flashiest way to chop tarragon, though we think this knife would work just as well.
Has it been too long since your last reading of Beckett's Waiting for Godot? Nothing to do but read it again.
Got a witch in your life who needs to brush up on tarragon's many mystical applications? (It's been said to cure snake bites.) Get her Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs.
For more traditional culinary uses of tarragon, Herbs and Spices: The Cook's Reference has got you covered.
what you do
Tarragon's delicate but distinctive flavor adds depth to many sauces and dressings, notably bearrnaise sauce, tarragon vinaigrette and Green Goddess dressing.
Earthy, green broccoli loves the anise-y flavor of tarragon in this creamy risotto.
While we love our morning pancakes, sometimes we like to mix it up with savory potato latkes and fried eggs.
We often find it unbearable to cook indoors during the month of August, when summer's end is in sight. Get outside and grill this tarragon chicken with carrots.
Cook & Eat's summery salmon noodle soup is a quick and comforting lunch.
Featured recipe: This week's Root Source Challenge recipe comes from eating club vancouver. These tarragon carrot deviled eggs are brighter and more complex than the usual deviled egg.
Visit Cookthink.com for more tarragon recipes
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.
What are the pros and cons of farmed fish?
What are the pros and cons of farmed fish?
The fishing industry has tried to control some of the variables by farming the most popular varieties of fish, like salmon, trout and catfish. Aquacultured fish grow faster than their counterparts in the wild, and they are often more tender and richer tasting. They are harvested without suffering the stress and damage of being hooked or netted, and they are processed closer to the time and nearer to where they are caught.
Currently aquaculture provides about one-third of the world seafood supply (including shellfish), and this amount is bound to increase to meet the growing global demand for fish that can not be met by wild fishing alone. Although some popular farmed fish -- like trout, tuna and salmon -- are also caught in the wild, others, such as tilapia and catfish, are almost all farm-raised.
Fish farming can be done responsibly, but not all fish farms are the same. Raising salmon and tuna in ocean pens has contaminated nearby water with waste products, food and antibiotics. There have been cases of genetically modified aquacultured fish escaping into the environment where they compete with the surrounding wild population, and there are studies showing that fish meal, which is the primary component of aquaculture feed for carnivorous species, like salmon and tuna, has elevated levels of environmental toxins, particularly dioxins, like PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl), which accumulate in the flesh of farmed fish. Omnivorous fish, like tilapia and catfish, are fed vegetarian pellets, and don’t have dioxin problems.
Raising fish in inland ponds, lakes and tanks is less environmentally invasive than farming in the ocean (although there is some concern about untreated wastewater discharged from poorly run fish farms contaminating ground water), so the most benign aquaculture products tend to be freshwater fish and the few saltwater varieties farmed on land (sturgeon and turbot).
Farmed Fish
Freshwater:
Carp
Catfish
Eel
Rainbow Trout
Tilapia
Saltwater:
Char
Mahi mahi
Salmon
Sea Bass
Sturgeon
Steelhead Trout
Tuna
Turbot
Yellowtail (amberjack, himachi)
To crimp something -- say, pastry, pizza or pie dough -- is to decoratively fold the edges of it, slightly overlapping the folds to create a rounded border.
Crimping is easy to do and makes the edges of sweet and savory pies, empanadas, dumplings and calzones look more finished. Crimping also seals two pieces of dough tightly to keep the filling ingredients from leaking out during baking.
Aluminum foil or parchment paper is also crimped when used to make a papillote. The sealed package seals in the steam that cooks the meat or fish.
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.
Parsley used to be a gross-looking garnish on the side of your plate. Now, we think of it as one of the best go-to herbs to work into your cooking. It adds a bright but relatively neutral herbal flavor to almost any dish.To prep it, first rinse and shake dry the leaves. Hold the bouquet at an angle with the leaves against the cutting board. Run your knife down the side of the bouquet to slice away the leaves. It's fine to remove some of the tender stems along with the leaves.Now just run your knife back and forth across the pile of leaves, chopping them as coarsely or as finely as you need to. The closer to the end of the cooking you plan to add the parsley, the finer you'll want to chop it. But since parsley's so tender it's usually okay to keep the the chop coarse.
