Corduroy Orange

Hey–
How do I know when my pan is hot enough to saute stuff in?

–Gary

Gary–

There are a couple of ways to check. Generally, you want it to be hot enough that water balls up and rolls around the pan, but not so hot that it’s smoking.

If you don’t feel like splashing water into the bottom of the pan, you can look at the fat that you add to the pan to cook things in. You want the fat to slide around the bottom of the pan easily and coat the whole thing, plus you should see some ripples in it when you tilt the pan and it flows.

If all else fails, add one piece of whatever you’re cooking to the pan. It should sizzle at a moderate volume. If it’s not sizzling, wait a little longer. If it sizzles too loudly, add everything to the pan, but remove it from the heat until it quiets down a little.

Whatever you do, don’t splash water into a pan that already has fat in it: that will lead to hot fat splattering in your face!

Have a question about food or cooking? Email me, and I’ll try to respond in a future post.

Corduroy—
Is it possible to get salmonella poisoning from poached eggs?

Yes, similarly to how it’s possible to get salmonella from sunny-side-up eggs. The runny yolk is sign that the proteins in the egg have not all coagulated, and therefore a sign that bacteria present in the egg may have survived. If the white is still runny, the egg has reached a lower temperature, and the possibility of food bore illness is therefore greater.

Most food pathologist type people will therefore urge you to eat your eggs “fully cooked”—with not even a hint of liquidity to the yolk. Unless my egg is boiled or going on a sandwich, though, I can’t play that game: the rubbery texture of an overdone egg is downright undesirable.

This is why the freshness of your eggs is of paramount importance. The fresher the egg, the more probable that its bacterial levels are not harmful. Most eggs purchased from a grocery store are probably about four weeks old by the time you get them. If you’ve held onto them for another couple of weeks, it’s probably time to hard boil them and get some fresher eggs for your less-cooked purposes.

Or, search out farms in your area and see if you can get eggs straight from the farm. Chances are they’ll cost somewhere in the range of $2-$3 per dozen, but the somewhat higher price tag is justified in terms of freshness, better treatment of the animals (visit the farm if you can and see how the chickens live, otherwise, ask questions), and flavor. Indeed, the difference between farm and factory eggs is quickly seen, even before it is tasted.

I am trying to decide whether or not to purchase a food processor. I don’t have any knife skills as of yet, but I am trying to learn. Do you honestly believe that anything I would do in a food processor I could do with knives given that I learn the proper knife skills????

Actually, no. I hope my post on my preference for knives over food processors in most situations isn’t too misleading. Really, I just meant to express a strong preference for using knives to take care of the everyday jobs they’re designed for.

Knives work great for mincing and chopping. You can get onions, garlic, mushrooms, etc. to the sizes you want with a greater degree of accuracy with knives than a processor. When it comes to making bread crumbs or hummus without a food processor, though, you’re S.O.L. Pesto is easier with a processor, but can be done satisfactorily with a very large mortar and pestle, but a mortar and pestle of that size don’t often make an appearance in a kitchen that isn’t already well-stocked with tools (like a food processor).

As a interim step, what I might recommend is the deluxe version of the immersion blender from Kitchen-Aid. In addition to a hand blender, it comes with a whisk attachment and a mini-food processor attachment that does quite well for small quantities of things. It cleans up easily, stores in a drawer, and has multiple uses.

If, after using that for a while, you feel like a larger food processor is something that’s lacking in your life, you might then make the educated decision to get one. Truth be told, though, a food processor will spend more time taking up space on your counter than doing actual work. When it comes time to use it, though, it does come in handy.

For an at home potato bar how would you suggest keeping the potatoes warm? It seems like I am alway plagued by room temp mashed potatoes when ever I try to do something like this.

The easiest way to keep your spuds warm at home is to boil a pan of water and then set your potatoes atop of it.  It won’t preserve their heat forever, but it should work long enough for service, especially if you keep the potatoes covered when you’re not actively scooping them.

jesse - I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about the miracle health benefits of raw (unpasturized) milk. apparently it can cure eczema, asthma, and even hep c. I can’t get it in NJ (until I cultivate some black market raw milk farmers) so might be planning a raw milk pit stop on my next trip to albany and/or pgh.

(http://www.realmilk.com/where.html)

Kari–

All of my propoganda on raw milk comes from the same source as yours does, the folks at the Weston A. Price Foundation, who sponsor the Real Milk campaign. I gathered up some of their literature and attended a lecture they organized about the benefits of raw milk at the Pittsburgh “Farm to Table” conference on Saturday.

The organization is dedicated to propogating the beliefs of Weston A. Price, who, in the 1930s, “traveled to isolated parts of the globe to study the health of populations untouched by western civilization” and decided, based on his observations, that these civilizations enjoyed better health (namely dental) than most westerners and that their diet was the reason behind this situation.

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On another note, I was wondering if you have a menu planned for Easter (I am assuming you celebrate it since you posted about the King Cake a little bit ago, if you don’t just disregard this). I would love to see it, as I feel I am missing something in mine. It is the first holiday my husband and I have had a chance to host so I really don’t want to ruin it.

Easter is one of my favorite dinners of the year. Every year since I can remember, I’ve had absolutely wonderful North Carolina ham (with some side dishes, of course). For the past several years, my parents have been generous enough to order a ham for me when they get one for themselves, a gesture I always appreciate, becuase if they ever stopped ordering it, I’d be forced to spend my own money to get one as I can’t imagine Easter dinner without one.

North Carolina ham is salt cured, with no water injected. It’s quite a bit drier and saltier than supermarket hams, but it’s also quite a bit higher quality. My Uncle Luther used to raise hogs in Meadow, NC. We were always lucky when he sent us one of his hams. I don’t think he ever heard the phrase “free range,” and if he did, I doubt he’d have used it; but that’s how he raised his hogs because that’s what made sense. A pig tastes better when it gets exercise, so he gave them a limited run of the land, allowing them to swim in his irrigation ponds and run through the woods. I was always a bit scared of them when we went fishing in the ponds with our bamboo poles, but now I think it’s a wonderful way to treat your livestock. Another great technique he used was to let the hogs root through the sweet potato fields after they had been harvested and eat the tubers that hadn’t been pulled.

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Do you have to peel the clove before using the garlic press?

No. And, actually, if you leave the peel on and then remove each clove’s remnants immediately before pressing the next, it makes the darned thing a lot easier to clean when you’re all done.

I rarely use the press myself (only when I definitely want a smashed clove, like for a Caesar dressing [which, on a side note, is very tasty and microbially safer if you use hard-boiled egg yolks instead of raw yolks, and then you can crumble the egg whites over your salad {yum!}]), preferring finely minced garlic for most purposes. Admittedly, it takes more time, but it’s a good chance to practice knife skills as you aim for a fine brunoise.

Do even the dark chocolate kisses taste waxy to you? Because I find that just the milk chocolate ones do. Even though the dark chocolate kisses are not high quality dark chocolate, they still at least have the flavor I seek from dark chocolate.

Even though I’m not a milk chocolate fan, I AM a big fan of both the caramel and peanut butter Hershey’s kisses that are now on the market. The last bag of PB kisses that entered our house did not even last 1 day.

–Aurora

Wifey–

So glad you asked.  I don’t really like cheap dark chocolate.  In fact, I would choose milk chocolate over dark in this context 2 times out of three.  On the other hand, offer me my choice between quality dark chocolate and quality milk, I’ll choose the dark every time. I value quality dark chocolate to the extent that the imitation frustrates me because it’s such a paltry shadow of the real thing.

The peanut butter Kisses are actually pretty good.  I’ll gobble them down by the handful if there’s a dish in front of me.  The caramel ones tickle my throat after I’ve had more than a couple.  It’s an odd sensation I find displeasurable.

Hey Corduroy–
What exactly is a caper? My sister claims that it’s a juniper berry, but that doesn’t sound right to me.
—AC

Hey A–

You’re right: a caper is its own plant, completely different from juniper. I know what juniper plants look like because one of my apartments in New Orleans had juniper growing in front of it. The sidewalk smelled like gin in the summer. It was sickening, but then again, I’m not a fan of gin.

Which really means that I’m not a fan of juniper: it’s what provides gin’s flavor. Capers are obviously completely different. What exactly they are, I wasn’t sure until tonight when I looked it up because you asked.

It turns out that capers are cloely related to the cabbage family, which includes such edibles as mustard and wasabi, thus their slightly bitter flavor. The capers you buy have been pickled, which is why they taste somewhat sour as well.  Also, they have magnificent flowers that only bloom for a short time. But really, anything I tell you is going to be regurgitation. Instead, I recommend that you check out Gernot Katzer’s Spice Page about capers, which features concise, thorough information and some great photos of the amazing caper flower.

My daughter was criticizied by her mother in law for not using her knife at the meal.

Her mother in law was of the opinion that one must use the knife to aid in picking up all food and not trying to navigate just with a fork. I have always been of the school that you only use a knife when needed to cut meat .

What is the correct opinion? Thanks.

I’m not Emily Post, but whether you use a knife to guide your food onto your fork seems like an awfully nit-picky thing to sieze upon for a critique of manners. Because, so long as you’re using a fork (and not your fingers), who really cares? The only time a knife as a guide is necessary is when the food in question doesn’t want to sit on the fork on its own, in which case a knife is the polite mechanism with which to guide the unruly morsel.

In fact, even if your daughter were using her fingers for an occasional nudge, what could her mother-in-law possibly accomplish by calling her out on it? Among adults, unless someone is behaving as a total boor, it seems to me that a courteous person would turn a blind eye; or at most mention the matter quietly when others weren’t around.