Cooking Tips for beginners

Post Reply New Topic

^ Brought up wholly vegetarian: these days I’m generally veggie, but have sausages from a local organic rare breed farm about once every six weeks or so. I also eat meat & poultry out of politeness if I’m a guest... but I don’t really like it! Fish is just too weird for me to be polite about however.

Yes: I’ve always had compliments for my cooking from habitual meat-eaters. And the occasional recipe request!
Only complaint I get is that I like garlic too much
As if there was such a thing as too much garlic

Grew up without a television in the house I’m afraid: by the time I saw Blackadder it was already too old to work for me
(Well, I did enjoy the first series a bit)

Anyway: cooking tips is meant to be the thread purpose!
So...

• Mushrooms are better sautéed in butter than oil, less likely to go slimy

• Bread makers are great for dough preparation, but tip the proven dough into a tin and bake in a real oven to avoid unpleasantly dry bread.

• the thing about cold Butter for pastry only applies to puff and filo, if you’re making normal shortcrust or wholemeal pastry use room temperature butter: your fingers will thank you and you won’t end up with hard overworked pastry.
Supplementary: use half wholemeal bread flour and half self-raising for wholemeal pastry, it’s lighter to eat and a less combative flavour with the filling.
Second Supplementary: 1 tablespoon of icing sugar per 4 oz of flour in pastry for a very sharp fruit pie or tart helps balance the finished dish out without having to ruin the fruit by over sweetening the filling.

• learn to make basic Béchamel sauce: it’s fiddly to pull off, but opens up a world of both sweet and savoury possibilities.
I use plain wheat flour rather than cornflour because it’s easier to control the thickening of the sauce.

• never use salted butter for a sweet dish... I’ve done it, and whilst it wasn’t awful, it wasn’t fully convincing either.

Re: Food Selection
My first principle is to not eat someone else's food or cause animals to suffer. I grew up on a beef farm, so I knew what was in the cheap packages when I moved away. I made a spur-of-the-moment New Year's resolution to try a vegetarian diet, and found it suited me well. That was a half century ago, when the world population was half what it is now. Now, I'm vegan, but humankind has caused the Anthropocene - the current wave of extinctions will be written in the fossil record as the end of a whole era.

In my breadmakers, I use Whole Wheat and Rye, and the loaves come out so moist that I usually toast every slice.

I seldom do complex cooking - I go for variations on very few recipes almost all the time, and vary my reading matter as I eat.

I thought I'd miss things like butter, but once my body learned that Olive Oil digested just as well, there was no problem.