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.
Tongs are the most useful tool in the kitchen.
Having a good pair of tongs is like having a heatproof robotic arm in the kitchen. Consider a partial list of things you can do with a pair of tongs: stir something in a sizzling pan; flip something in a sizzling pan; move something around in a sizzling pan; spear something in a sizzling pan; push something in a sizzling pan to check for doneness; hold something above a sizzling pan to taste it; take something out of a sizzling pan. And that's just around a sizzling pan. Standing around a grill or reaching inside an oven, tongs are critical.
You can spend a small fortune on specialty tongs, but you don't have to. OXO's Good Grips stainless steel tongs are inexpensive and probably as special as you’ll ever need.
So here's our public service announcement - buy tongs now.
When you want the flavor of ginger to permeate a a sauté , stir-fry, sauce or braise, mince it. For the most ginger flavor, mince it finely and add it toward the end of cooking. Cooking ginger longer mellows its flavor.
We usually start with what we call a "thumb" -- a piece of ginger roughly the size and shape of your thumb. To make the thumb easier to peel, start by cutting off any small protruding parts. You can peel and mince these separately.
We like to peel ginger with a spoon. Because a spoon is dull, it easily takes off the soft skin and leaves most of the aromatic flesh behind.
Slice the peeled thumb lengthwise into planks, thick or thin depending on how fine you want your mince to be. After you slice away one or two planks, roll the thumb over on the flat side for more stability.
Stack the planks and slice them lengthwise into matchsticks.
Now just gather the matchsticks together, rotate them 90 degrees, and slice them crosswise to complete the mince. For a finer mince, just run your knife across the pile a few times, chopping as you go.
The tastes of sweet, salty, bitter and sour are familiar, but there is a fifth taste we can perceive with our tongue. Called umami, its taste has been described as rounded, rich and savory.
Of the five tastes, umami (a Japanese-coined name) is our favorite to think about when cooking. It’s usually matched with salt to add depth and complexity to foods that may lack depth and complexity on their own. Traditional examples (the map comes from the Umami Information Center) of umami-rich foods include soy sauce, miso paste and bonito flakes in Asian cuisine; and cured ham, cheese, tomatoes, ketchup and mushrooms in Western cuisine.
Let’s leave the origin of taste to evolutionary biologists and just agree that our tongues have evolved to make us want the things we need to live. The compounds that exude umami form the essential building blocks of proteins, which we need along with sugar and salt to survive. Somewhere along the line, we developed an aversion to bitter and sour tastes, probably to help us avoid dangerous substances. But we’ve learned to overcome those aversions and often enjoy those tastes, too.
Recognizing the power of umami helps us understand our cravings. It also helps explain why we crumble cheese on a roasted beet and arugula salad or why we add a dollop of tomato paste to the base of a stew or why we splash soy sauce in a stir-fry. They all make a meal more satisfying.
Recipe: Arugula Salad With Roasted Beets And Ricotta Salata
Recipe: Beef Osso Buco
Recipe: Stir-Fried Chicken, Bok Choy And Chiles With Basil
Image courtesy of the Umami Information Center
What should you do if you eat a pepper that sets your tongue on fire?
Do not drink beer. Water won’t help either. (In a Caribbean folktale, children drown in a river trying to cool their tongues after eating habanero stew. See Dave Dewitt and Nancy Gerlach's The Pepper Pantry for the full story.) Capsaicin, the chemical that makes a hot pepper hot, doesn’t dissolve in water, so even ice water won’t help remove the heat.
Your best bet? Get milk. Because capsaicin is fat-soluble, a compound in milk can actually pull the capsaicin off your tongue and relieve some of the burn. Another option: eat bread or rice to absorb the heat. Cucumber can also have a cooling effect.
If you are feeling brave (or masochistic), you could try eating another pepper. According Robert Berkley, the author of Peppers: A Cookbook, you can build up a resistance to capsaicin by eating more chile peppers. With Berkley’s approach, you get the added high of a capsaicin-triggered endorphin release. Before you know it, you might be addicted to the hot little things.
Reference: How to seed a chile pepper (Cookthink)
Reference:: Why are some jalapenos hotter than others? (Cookthink)
