Kristin Janz

Tag: America’s Test Kitchen

  • Fixing the recipe as you go

    If you do a lot of cooking, you start to notice that some cookbooks are better than others. Not just because the food you make from the recipes tastes better. Some cookbooks are also better than others at giving instructions that you can (and should) follow as written for the results. Other cookbooks … not so good.

    My target once again is one of Rachael Ray’s recipes, from her Just in Time! cookbook. (It occurs to me that I have been, probably incorrectly, referring to this title in earlier posts without the cutesy exclamation point. My bad!) Rachael Ray’s recipes are actually better than average, with respect to being able to follow the recipe written in the book. Not nearly as good as America’s Test Kitchen … but then, who is? They’re hardcore. They test every possible permutation of the recipe, and then have all the variations submitted to tasters in a blind tasting. Not everyone can be America’s Test Kitchen.

    The Rachael Ray meal in question is referred to as “Dinner at the Ivy.” This vague and unhelpful name refers to some restaurant in LA that she likes to eat at, and the “Dinner” in the cookbook is her interpretation of their Tomato Salad Stuffed Artichokes and Mushroom Tagliatelle.

    First off, the cookbook said it would take 60 minutes to prepare, and it took me 2 hours. But that’s fine; by now, I double the time estimate given in any Rachael Ray cookbook. The mushroom pasta was a bit too much food for 4 servings, but not as far off as many of her recipes, so that’s fine. The issues were with the preparation.

    I didn’t really like the artichoke cooking instructions she gave: put them in boiling water and put a clean dish towel on top to keep them submerged. Rachael Ray likes to dirty a lot of dish towels in her recipes (she also recommends using them to wring the water out of thawed frozen spinach, which you can do perfectly well with bare hands); but as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m not looking to have to wash any more dish towels than I absolutely have to. Also, if you submerge artichokes in water to cook them, they’re going to get pretty water-logged. I followed the ATK method, steaming the artichokes by setting them on thick onion slices so they’re just above the surface of the boiling water. Only I didn’t have any big onions (or a steamer rack, the other recommended option), so I used my dessert custard cups instead (empty, of course). This works pretty well, only you have to make sure to have the open part facing up instead of down, or they’ll jump around once the water starts boiling, and the artichokes will fall off into the water (I learned this the last time I made artichokes and didn’t have big onions lying around).

    The tomato salad used to fill the artichokes involved cherry tomatoes. The recipe didn’t say anything about cutting the cherry tomatoes in half, but I thought that was ridiculous. Of course you have to cut the cherry tomatoes in half, if you’re putting them in a salad. Otherwise the flavors won’t meld properly. Also, you won’t be fitting many tomatoes into the hollowed-out artichoke if you don’t cut them in half first. Spheres aren’t going to pack together as tightly as half-spheres.

    The mushroom tagliatelle recipe went more or less according to recipe. Except that when you cook the mushrooms, it says to use “medium to medium-high” heat. Well, even if you don’t have the entire skillet filled with mushrooms (and I did), they’re not going to brown on medium heat. At least not in 7-8 minutes. They’ll slowly release liquid, and you’ll have palid, unbrowned mushrooms swimming in mushroom broth for quite some time. Which is fine if that’s what you want, but it probably isn’t. With few exceptions, anything that can be browned before making a sauce or a soup should be (onions and garlic are usually exceptions, depending on the recipe). Browning food causes a chemical reaction to occur between the fat or oil in the pan, and the sugars in the food, and the product of that reaction provide depth and richness of flavor.

    In any case, if you have a full pan of mushrooms and want to brown them, you pretty much have to turn the heat up all the way, or almost all the way (depends on your stove, of course). It still takes longer than the 7-8 minutes Rachael Ray thinks it takes at medium heat (unless she has some super hot stove); more like 15 minutes. And of course you have to keep an eye on them. Burning food causes a different chemical reaction to occur: the organic molecules in the food being oxidized to elemental carbon. This, of course, contributes a flavor not usually thought of as deep and rich.

    Only three changes to the recipe isn’t so bad, I guess. And it’s not as if the meal wouldn’t have tasted good, had I followed the recipe to the letter. But I don’t think it would have been as good, and it would have been far more frustrating to prepare; even more frustrating than being very hungry after an hour and a half in the kitchen, and still not ready to eat.

    I did make a fourth change, but I’m not 100% sure I should have. The recipe said to transfer the cooked pasta to the sauce with tongs. It was unclear whether you were supposed to drain it first. I assumed not. That seemed unwise, because it was fresh pasta, and that overcooks really easily if you leave it in the water just a hair too long. Also, it seemed that lifting it right out of the water and into the sauce would carry a lot of water along with the pasta (both into the sauce and onto the stove between the pot of pasta and the pan of sauce. And, I’m sorry, but what humongous skillet is Rachael Ray talking about here, that can accomodate sauce and 18 oz. of cooked pasta! I drained the pasta, then put it back in the empty pot and added the sauce to that. But, you know, it’s really hard to mix the mushrooms in that way, which makes me wonder if I really should have added the pasta to the sauce, not the other way around. Hmm. Maybe if I left the pasta in the colander, then transferred the sauce to the big pasta cooking pot, then added the pasta to the sauce…. Next time.

    The recipe called for 1 cup of dry white wine, and I followed my friend Bob’s advice: never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink. In fact, if you use a particular wine in a recipe, a glass of that wine will often taste particularly nice with the finished meal. I used a Toscana from Antinori (an Italian wine). And it was very nice! (It’s not a super-expensive wine, either; I found it for $13 at a local liquor store.) So was the food itself.

  • Shame on you, America’s Test Kitchen!

    After all my dissing of Rachael Ray and her so-called 30 Minute Meals, and my holding up of America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks as a sort of star pupil in the school of Giving Realistic Time Estimates For Recipes … the other day, I made Beef Teriyaki from the America’s Test Kitchen The Quick Recipe cookbook. It was supposed to take 30 minutes, and it took an entire hour!

    The ongoing problem with all these recipes, which I think I might have mentioned before, is that they seem to start the clock at the point where the ingredients have already been chopped and diced and minced. Unfortunately, I don’t have a staff of kitchen servants (or even one kitchen servant) to do my chopping for me. (A friend of mine from India said that her mother does, in fact, have the maid chop up the vegetables for dinner, and then the mother does the actual cooking.)

    Not being a Rachael Ray recipe, the America’s Test Kitchen Beef Teriyaki provided only 3 servings, instead of the suggested 4 to 6. But that was partly because my boyfriend Donald had a second helping. (Though Donald often has second helpings of Rachael Ray recipes, and I still end up with 6 to 8 servings when they’re supposed to serve 4.)

    I liked the beef teriyaki too, although I think I might have reduced the sauce a little too long. The recipe instructions said to cook the meat in the sauce at the end “until the sauce reduces to a syrupy glaze and the meat is well coated.” But I had some uncertainty about what, exactly, that meant. The sauce did taste good, but I think it might have been a little too syrupy and candy-like.

    Last night, Donald cooked dinner for me, also from The Quick Recipe. He made Stir-Fried Pork, Celery, and Peanuts in Sichuan Chile Sauce (with rice from a rice cooker; my rice cooker; Donald doesn’t own any cooking utensils as specialized as a rice cooker). In the cookbook, the recipe calls for chicken, but pork was what he had, and besides he’s sort of allergic to chicken.

    It was quite delicious, flavorful and spicy, and the sauce was just the right degree of thickness (it was better than the teriyaki). Donald doesn’t really cook, and this may be one of the few recipes he’s ever cooked completely from scratch (he can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). He even mixed the stir-fry sauce from raw ingredients like soy sauce, sherry, and Sichuan peppercorns (which he first toasted and then ground in a coffee grinder). Which I think is a good illustration of the fact that anyone, no matter how inexperienced they are, can cook perfectly well as long as they have a good cookbook, and are good at following instructions.

    It’s also an illustration of the fact that these cookbooks that promise quick meals, whether Rachael Ray’s or America’s Test Kitchen, fail especially in that promise to inexperienced cooks. (Which is especially aggravating with the Rachael Ray cookbooks, because they’re specifically marketed as being suitable for people who don’t already do a lot of cooking.) The America’s Test Kitchen recipe was supposed to take 35 minutes; Donald said it was more like 2 hours. “Mincing takes a lot longer than you’d think,” he said. Perhaps he’d do better with Lisa’s tomato-feta-pesto pasta dish. (Though I can’t really see him trying it, since he believes that all dinners should include meat, and doesn’t really like pesto.)

  • Springtime Feast!

    Last night I hosted a dinner party. It was me, my boyfriend Donald, my roommates Cory and Aubrey, and my good friend Bob (a former housemate of mine). I did all the cooking, and Bob, who has an extensive wine cellar, brought wine specially selected to accompany the meal.

    I was a bit pressed for time this weekend, since I had to pick up a rental car on Saturday afternoon (which is another story). Also I was kind of tired, and didn’t want to have to get up at 5 am to start cooking. So there were only two courses: the main course and the dessert.

    All recipes were courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks. The main course was from the Quick Recipe cookbook: pan-seared veal chops with gremolata and lemon spinach. Gremolata is an Italian seasoning, a mixture of parsley, lemon rind and garlic. I mixed the gremolata with extra-virgin olive oil and spooned the mixture over the chops after they were cooked. The chops were pretty big, so I decided I didn’t really need a potato or rice side dish.

    I don’t eat veal very often, partly because it’s expensive and partly because these days you have to check with your dinner party guests to make sure they’ll eat it. So it’s a taste I’m not that familiar with. Donald, Aubrey and Cory had actually never tried it before (at least I think that’s what they said). Aubrey thought it tasted quite a lot like beef (not surprisingly, since it’s from the same animal), but that she kept looking at it thinking based on the taste that it would be red, and kept being mildly surprised to find that it was so pork-like in appearance. I guess I think it’s a little beefy, but a little like pork, too (except with the “piggy” flavor, if that makes sense). It’s definitely milder than, say, lamb.

    For dessert, we had the fresh strawberry tart from the New Best Recipe cookbook. It was the first time I’d made this particular strawberry tart, and maybe only the second time I’ve made one of these (with the tart pastry, the pastry cream, then the fresh raw fruit on top, glazed with melted jelly – red currant, in this case). It looked pretty just after I had assembled it, but serving it out was fairly disastrous. The recipe said to prepare the baked tart shell and pastry cream ahead of time, cool the tart shell to room temperature and chill the pastry cream, and then assemble the tart no more than 30 minutes before serving. However, when I tried to cut it, the tart pastry was so crisp that it shattered under the knife, and was kind of impossible to slice neatly. Also, the pastry cream gooped out around the edges of the cuts. So it was very messy! Bob, who is a more experienced cook than I am, said it’s usually better to put the pastry cream in the shell, then chill that for 30 minutes before topping it with the fruit. He said that the pastry cream will soften up the crust just enough in that time to make it cuttable, but not enough to lose all the delectable crispness.

    Despite the appearance of the uneven slices of goopy tart, it was very delicious, and the 5 of us all had seconds, and finished the entire thing in one sitting.

    To accompany the veal chops, Bob brought two Burgundies from the same producer, Domaine Francois Lumpp. One white and one red (for the curious, white Burgundy is almost always 100% chardonnay, and red Burgundy is 100% pinot noir). Both were Premier Cru from Givry; the white was the 2002 Crausot (I think Crausot is the vineyard, but maybe I’m wrong; sometimes I forget my wine knowledge) and the red was the 2001 Petit Marole. I liked both wines, though I thought the white was a little too old, and tasted kind of oxidized. But some of the other people liked the white better than the red. Some people actually liked the red better by itself, but the white better with the food. I still liked the red better with the veal, though I agreed that, with the fattier bits of the veal, the white was better. Also, the white was better with the spinach.

    To accompany the tart, we had a 1976 Johannisberger Holle Riesling Beerenauslese from the Rheingau in Germany. This was a very sweet white dessert wine (made from Riesling grapes). It was definitely my favorite wine of the evening, with a wonderful balance of sweetness and acidity, and a great flavor profile. It was a fairly decent match for the tart. It worked really well with the strawberries and with the crust, but wasn’t quite sweet enough for the pastry cream.

    My next “fancy” dinner will probably be my boyfriend’s birthday dinner that I’m cooking on the 3rd of July (not his actual birthday, but it’s a Saturday, and that’s the important thing). But I had better not say what I’m making, because it’s supposed to be a surprise!

    p.s. – Whole Foods did have the veal rib chops I wanted (reduced cruelty “barn-roaming” veal), but they were a little thicker than the recipe called for. I just cooked them a little longer. It worked fine. (I did use a meat thermometer to make sure I got the internal temperature right, rather than relying too heavily on the suggested cooking time.)

  • Mark your calendars!

    Last night, I prepared a Rachael Ray recipe that was supposed to take 60 minutes … and it did! 62 minutes, to be exact. But well within an acceptable margin of error.

    The recipe was “Spicy Lentil Stoup”, from Just in Time. It was good, too! A nice, thick soup with plenty of lentils and kale, plus tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, onion, garlic, various spices, and a bit of pancetta, a couple anchovy fillets, and chicken broth to give it flavor.

    I think that the 60-minute meals are more likely to be accurate estimates of the time required. They tend to be recipes that require simmering for 25 minutes or so, and where Rachael grossly underestimates the time it will take an average person to sprint through one of her recipes is in prep. I just can’t chop that fast! Not to mention finding the ingredients, mopping up all the liquid that the tomatoes I chopped have released onto the cutting board before I mince the thyme. Etc.

    The Spicy Lentil Stoup serves way more than 4, though (and is not really very spicy)! Hopefully Donald will help me to eat lots of it tomorrow night, so that I don’t have to put any of it in the freezer. I’m going to Newport next week for a chemistry conference, so I’m afraid I might not have a chance to finish it (especially since I’m having a dinner party on Saturday night, so I won’t be able to eat it then).

    I’ve mentioned America’s Test Kitchen a few times, and how their cooking time estimates are usually more reliable than Rachael Ray’s. On Monday, I prepared Grilled Tuna and Bok Choy with Soy-Ginger Glaze from The Quick Recipe. Estimated time, 45 minutes. Actual time, 52 minutes. But that includes the time it took me to run back into the house and splash water in my eyes when the glaze dripped down onto the coals and turned into some potent tear gas that could have been used as crowd control.

    That recipe was also tasty. Though the grilling part gets busy, when you have 4 tuna steaks and 8 pieces of bok choy on the grill all at once. And I couldn’t figure out how to keep the bok choy leaves from turning into charred shreds like the newspaper I used to light the coals. The cookbook said to squirt water on them occasionally “to prevent them from drying out”, but it didn’t really seem to help all that much. Besides, I had to keep glazing the tuna, and flipping it periodically (and chasing the tuna pieces around the grill with the spatula). And splashing water on my eyes.

    Whole Foods apparently hasn’t gotten the memo that America’s Test Kitchen recommends grilling tuna steaks at least 1 1/2 inches thick if you want rare tuna, because I couldn’t find anything thicker than about 1 inch.