Sage is one of the stronger herbs. Its flavor ranges from mild, warm and spicy to musky, heady and astringent. We commonly cook with it in the cooler months since it pairs well with rich dishes.
Sage’s best match might be with brown butter as a pasta sauce. But it also contrasts the fattiness of pork and sausage, makes roasted chicken more succulent, and complements heartier vegetables like sweet potatoes, squash and zucchini.
Large pieces of uncooked sage leaf and stem aren’t the most pleasant things to chew. You can finely chop them for quick-cooking or last minute appearances. Long cooking and higher heat (like with sage butter) softens the leaves.
To make clean even slices, roughly stack the leaves, roll them up like a cigar and hold them in place on the cutting board.
Then just slice the cigar crosswise into thin strips.
To coarsely chop the leaves for longer cooking dishes, run the knife back and forth across them a couple of times.
For quick-cooking dishes, keep going with the knife until the leaves are finely chopped.
Like other tender leafy herbs (basil, parsley, cilantro), it's best to chop mint with a sharp knife and a clean cut. Too much pounding can discolor the delicate leaves. This matters most when sliced leaves are added in an uncooked dish, or just before serving. Some dishes call for the leaves to be left whole, or torn into smaller pieces, in which case you can avoid the knife altogether.To slice or mince the leaves, first stack them together in a pile.Next, roll them up into a cigar-like shape and hold them together with your fingers.Keeping the cigar in shape, slice it into strips as thick or thin as you like. Run the knife down onto the leaves, and across them at the same time. Moving in both directions at the same time makes for a cleaner cut. At this point, you can either leave the leaves in thin strips, or run the knife through the strips again to make a mince.
Leeks are underappreciated and underused. Their flavor is mellow, complex and more subtle than other members of the onion family, and they go tender and silky when cooked.
They’re known for their role in potato and cream-based soups (like vichyssoise) and in winter stews. They’re delicious raw and sliced thin in salads, stir-fried with beef (or anything, for that matter), simmered in water and served hot or cold with a vinaigrette, braised whole in wine or stock, or brought in anywhere you’d use an onion.
No matter what form you want your leek to take, you’ll need to isolate and clean the usable white and light green parts.
Start by cutting off and discarding the root from the leek’s bottom end. If you’re planning to cook the leeks whole or as halves, try to leave enough of the fibrous white part above the roots to hold the halves together. If you’re planning to slice the leeks, you don’t need to be so exact here.
Next, chop off the tough top part of the leek between the light green and dark green parts (let's call it medium green). Either discard the dark green part, or rinse it well and use it to flavor a stock, broth, or poaching liquid.
Next, cut the leek in half lengthwise. If you’d like insurance that the leek will stay together for washing, leave the root end intact.
Now it’s time to get rid of the sand and soil that wedges between the leek’s layers. Be thorough here — a gritty bite is a deal-breaker. Rinse the leek under cold running water, making sure to spread the layers apart with your fingers to remove any hidden sand or soil.
Alernatley, If this is too much, you can take the short cut and slice them sand and all, and afterwards rinse them well in a colander submerged in a bowl of cold water and pat them dry.
Now all you have to do is finish cutting the leek in half lengthwise (if you haven’t already), and choose your slice - crosswise for little half moons, or lenghtwise for matchstick sized pieces. Remember the longer the cooking time, the thicker the slice should be to hold up well.
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.
The youngest green beans don't need much prep. They tend to be small and tender enough to eat as is. You can trim the ends from older, tougher ones, and then cut them into bite-size pieces.First, just slice off the ends. If your green beans have strings running along their sides, you can break off the tips and pull down along each side to remove them.Then just cut the green beans into bite-size pieces. If you want to make them look nice, cut them at an angle.
Even though by definition tofu is a pressed block of soybean curd, it still has lots of liquid (water or whey) in it. To make tofu less watery and hold it's shape better, press out and discard the liquid before you cook it. A kitchen towel and a weight are all you need.Double up a kitchen towel and put the tofu on top of it. Fold the rest of the towel over the tofu. The towel will absorb the liquid as it's pressed from the top and bottom.A heavy cast-iron lid works great as a press. If you don't have one, improvise with a cutting board or plate and any heavy object. Either way, most of the liquid will be pressed out after 15 to 30 minutes, depending on how heavy the weight is.
For soups, stews and stir-frys, it's easiest to cut tofu into cubes, small or large. Cubes have flat sides that make good contact with the pan, and brown well. Browning the cubes on all four sides in a non-stick skillet is a good way to improve tofu's bland reputation. Since most tofu comes in rectangular blocks, cubing it is easy to do.Start by cutting the block in half.Depending on what size cubes you want, cut each half in half (2 cuts -- one on each side of the first cut) or into thirds (4 cuts -- 2 on each side of the first cut).Rotate the block 90 degrees and repeat.To make the final cut, you can either hold the knife parallel to the cutting board and slide it through the center, or turn the tofu up on end and slice perpendicular to the cutting board like you see here. It's not hard to keep the pieces together if you use both hands.
The cured italian meat pancetta comes either rolled (rotolata) or flat (stesa). Rolled pancetta is often sold thinly sliced. Flat pancetta comes as a slab. You can use it in any dish that would benefit from an underlying, mild pork flavor.
Here's an easy way to prep thin slices of rolled pancetta. First, stack 3-4 slices and roll them up like a cigar. If you want short strips (like lardons), cut the pancetta cigar in half lengthwise. Skip this step if you want the strips to be long.
Then slice the cigar crosswise. Toss the pieces around with your hand to separate them.
To dice slab pancetta, cut a few slices crosswise as thick or thin as you like. Stack the slices, then slice off and discard any unwanted tough skin.
Cut the slices into strips lengthwise.
Rotate the strips 90 degrees around and slice them crosswise to finish the dice.
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.
How to prep an acorn squash for roasting
How to prep an acorn squash for roasting
Acorn squash have thick, ribbed skins that make them seem tough to peel. Here's how to cut one into half-rings for roasting in the oven.
Start by slicing the squash in half lengthwise.
Remove the seeds from each half with a spoon, taking care to scrape away all the stringy fibers.
Use a vegetable peeler to remove the squash's skin along the ribs. Don't worry about being too neat here. The skin is edible and leaving some on looks nice.
Put the squash flat on your cutting board and trim off each end.
Next cut it into 1-inch slices.
Toss the squash with any spices you like -- cinnamon, cardamom, cumin -- a little salt, sugar and a oil or melted butter.
Spread the slices evenly on a sheet pan.
Roast until they're tender and brown in spots.
Kohlrabi is an intimidating-looking vegetable on the outside; its exterior skin is knobby, ruddy and rough. But remove that and you'll find the flesh inside tender, nutty and versatile. Here's how:First, use a small, sharp knife to cut away the stems right where they meet the round root. Use the same knife or a vegetable peeler to remove the rest of the exterior skin.Now all you need to do is remove the core. Like you would when coring cabbage or fennel, cut the kohlrabi lengthwise into quarters.Turn each quarter on its end, then slice away and discard the core (or save it to make vegetable broth).Now the kohlrabi is your oyster. Cut it into paper-thin slices to have raw in a salad, cube it and simmer it in braises and stews, or julienne it for stir-frys.
