My husband had an interesting and excellent idea recently.  Knowing that people enjoy lists and recommendations, he suggested that I make a list of “must have” cookbooks for the blog, explaining why each book is on the list.

Genius!  And I’m planning on taking it one step further.  Each month this year I’m going to review one of the books in my collection that I think is a “must have,” and at the end of 2012, I’ll have a list of 12 cookbooks that are really stellar.  At least, that’s the hope.

The rules – yes, I’m going to make some rules.  Because I love them but also because I think that benchmarks are helpful in assessing things that other people have evaluated.  So here are the rules:

1. I own the book
2. I cook from it at least somewhat regularly (you’d be astounded by how many cookbooks I own and never cook from – or maybe you wouldn’t!)
3. I’ve made at least three things from them which have come off successfully without modification (I am still always amazed at how many recipes need to be altered)
4. The book is in print or is reasonably easy to find if it’s not (I’m not going to recommend you try to find some obscure title that costs $142 when a perfectly good $20 model will do)

Enough rules!

The first volume I’m going to talk about is The Way To Cook by Julia Child.  I talk about this book a lot and I think about it a lot.  You remember the first boy/girlfriend you had?  Not the one you were just super crushy on, but the first one you had that you loved.  The one that made you think “oh!  I totally get it, this ‘love’ thing!”  If there is a cookbook version of that, this one is it for me.

The Way To Cook is the first book I really cooked with.  Before I owned it, I dabbled in cooking, mostly reading Food and Wine, going gaga over the photos and then trying to recreate what was pictured.  I was having fun*, but I was more just kind of making things than I was cooking.  And I definitely wasn’t thinking about technique or about understanding how or why things worked.

Julia changed all that for me, which is the reason I’ll always love her, no matter how enticing and wonderful future authors and cookbooks may be.  This was the first book I owned that explained how to make things, with photos, clear writing and something called “Master Recipes.”  I discovered if I learned these recipes, I would get a handle on a technique that would in turn allow me to tackle other recipes that were similar and feel like I knew what I was doing. Julia’s teaching began to give me the confidence that is so key to learning anything.  This book was the beginning of the foundation I needed to stop parroting what I saw in pretty food magazines and start to actually cook.

I would recommend any of Julia’s books, without having read them.  The ones I have are that good.  As is her excellent PBS series, The French Chef.  The Way To Cook will always be my first-favorite, but I would be willing to gamble that virtually any of her titles would be excellent for any cook at any level.

For more of my waxing on about Julia, here is another post.

Until next month – Bon Appétit!

Cheers.

Twelve Months of Books Quick Recap:

The book: The Way to Cook by Julia Child
How long I’ve owned it: 20 years (approximate)
Three things I’ve made from it  that always turn out, without fail: Pie crust (Pâte Brisée Fine)-page 381*, Mayonnaise-page 363, Anchovy and Onion Tart (Pissaladière)-pg 393 (plus a million other things)

*Which is a must-have element in learning, I think.  The goofing around stage is very important!  Have fun!!
**This has been my go-to pie crust since I’ve owned this book. It’s only now, twenty some-odd years later that I’ve even considered giving other recipes a try. It’s that good.

Enough with my excuses for laming out on you.  Today let’s deal with the question that plagues all chefs (or at least everyone in this household), “when is it done?”

This applies to all things that you can cook or bake, from chicken to cake, but for this post I’m just going to deal with steak, for two reasons: 1. it’s a pretty straightforward example of how to figure out when something is done (without butchering it a second time) and 2. it’s a real shame to overcook a steak.

There are two ways to figure out when a steak is done without cutting into it:

Method One – Temperature

So the nice thing about this method is that it applies to many different things; you can take the internal temperature of a steak, a beef roast, a roasted chicken, a fish…I’m sure you could do this with a cake too (although I’ve never seen a recipe for cake list an internal temperature before).  Almost anything can be tested for doneness with a thermometer.  You will need one of these:

This is the instant read thermometer that I have and I like it a lot.  You can also get a meat thermometer specifically for checking meat, but they don’t go up to a very high temp, so you’ll need a different thermometer if you want to gauge how hot anything over 200F is (like frying oil or candy).  The digital aspect of this one is nice because you can get a really precise reading.

There are all kinds of sites that list temperatures for “done” on different things.  And there are raging debates on how hot something should be when it is “done.”  In the US, we tend toward overdone on many things because we are very* concerned with food safety.  General rule of thumb: the hotter something is cooked to, the tougher (or mushier) it’s going to be.  So if you can risk it, less is generally more (and if you get a decent piece of steak, food-borne illness really shouldn’t be a problem).  Here is the range of temperatures I use when I cook steak:

Super rare – 120 – this one is for beef-o-philes and my stepmother only.  It’s almost alive at this point.
Rare – 125 – serious beef lovers will like this, mostly red and pink.
Medium-rare – 130 – this is what I like, pink in the center but not red.  It’s still a nice tender steak, but it gives me the feeling of the food being cooked!
Medium – 140 – now your steak isn’t really pink anymore, or maybe just slightly.  It’s starting to get very cooked.
Medium-well – 150 – zero pink and pretty much zero softness.  Sometimes people insist on this, but it makes lovers of rare steak very sad.
Well-done – 160 – a “well done” steak is actually it’s opposite.  I generally don’t like to tell people what to do with food, but this is just overcooked.  I would be very disappointed indeed to spend $$$ on a lovely piece of beef and have to cook it this way.  You really might as well have liver.

Very important tip!
Steak (and all meat) keeps cooking when you take it off heat!  So undershoot a little.  You’ll probably need to experiment a bit.  If you want medium-rare, cook it to rare, let is stand for a few minutes and then take the temperature.  If it’s not quite where you want it, cook it a bit more (but not much, it’s really close!)

Once you get the hang of cooking steak using temperature as a gauge for doneness, you might want to venture into the super-impressive touch technique that most chefs use.  Yes, this does involve sticking your fingers in your food, but it’s how the pros do it, and I think it’s a great way of really learning what a cooked steak is.**  Plus you don’t need a thermometer!

Method Two – Touch

As the steaks cook, they start to change physically.  In color, of course, but also in the way they feel.  Much like a cake batter, they go from very squishy (or liquid in the case of cake) to firm outside, soft inside, to springy and solid, to brick-like.  And you can use this feel as a way to figure out if you steaks are done.  Here’s a guide for doing it this way:

Very rare – squishy.  Poke the steak when it’s raw.  If you’ve seared it a bit on both sides and poke it again, it’ll feel almost the same.  That’s how not cooked “very rare” is!
Rare – will feel like your earlobe.  Still pretty squishy, but firmer than very rare.
Medium – feels like the tip of the your nose.  Definitely not squishy.
Well done – essentially feels like your forehead.

This is how the steak will feel at the point when you should stop cooking in order to get the amount of doneness that you want.  A rare steak should be 125 when it’s done, so it should feel like an earlobe when it’s at around 115 or 120.  Make sense?

One great thing to do in order to teach yourself how to do it by feel is to use the thermometer and poke.  This will give you a great sense of how the meat feels at precisely the right temperature.  After a while, you’ll get the sense of when it feels done.

I also found this great guide that uses the fleshy part of the hand to gauge what different levels of doneness should feel like.  I haven’t used this cooking before, but going through it right now, it seems pretty spot-on and I think it would work.

Hope that’s helpful!

Cheers.

* In my opinion, overly concerned.  I have eaten a lot, and so far, I have yet to get food poisoning.  I realize that is a very unpleasant experience, but it is a risk I am willing to take in order to eat the foods I love prepared the way I like them.
**I am still learning to test for doneness this way, but I really believe it’s worth the effort.  You don’t have to rely on a thermometer and paying attention to your food (rather than relying on time or temperature) is absolutely the best way to learn about cooking.

This week’s tip is not so much a tip, as a recommendation.  We don’t have many gadgets in the kitchen, and I really don’t use the computer to organize anything like recipes, etc. (although the computer does get used a lot to google things like “how many grams in one cup of whole wheat flour”).  That said, I do like this little app.  It’s a…an add-on, I guess you’d say, to the fantastic book Ratio by Michael Rulhman.

This app is great because it really allows you some wonderful flexibility as a cook.  For instance; say you’re visiting your mom, and you decide you want to make a pie, but she doesn’t have any good cookbooks.  You’re sure you can wing the filling, but making a great crust takes some precision.  You can use the ratio app to find the ratios you need of fat to flour, in cups, grams – whatever you like.  It also has the best ratio for salad dressing I’ve ever made.

If you’re like me, this thing is sort of a godsend – I can commit things to memory as long as I use the information on a regular basis, but I get rusty fast and even things I thought I would never forget get very fuzzy at best.  So for foolproof “recipes” at your beck and call, this is a great little tool.  And it’s less than $5 on iTunes.

Hope that’s helpful!

Cheers.

*Before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, I am 100% nerd and use the term proudly, with respect and affection

Blame the origins of this particular installment; our friends S and J came by last night and at least one ninja may have had a bit too much cheer in her happiness to see them.  Too much to write a tip last night, at any rate.

We’ll try to make up for it with brevity and simplicity this week – today’s tip is all about doing something sophisticated for cheap (don’t you love that?).  Whenever we go visit my Dad, he always serves us red wine out of one of these:

Not exactly this decanter, but one pretty similar and quite fancy.  I’m not a wine expert in the least (unless being really good at opening the box and putting it on top of the fridge counts as expert), but using a decanter does seem to improve even the most affordable of wines.  So while I would normally be a little suspect of something so fancy-pants, even I get the benefits of decanting.  Maybe not with a high-priced crystal decanter, but I get it.

We were at S & J’s place a while back and, after handing us each a glass of wine, one of them said “you may wonder why the wine is in a flower vase.”  In truth, I wasn’t really wondering, I was just happy someone was giving me a glass of wine.  But I’m glad they explained, because it’s a neat trick.  Apparently they had read somewhere that wine can be decanted from an FTD flower delivery vase and improve just as much as though it were decanted from a fancy-schmancy crystal decanter.  You can see the similarity in shape.

So – want to try your hand at decanting your two buck Chuck?  Pull out one of those vases that your mother’s day/birthday/graduation/honey I’m sorry flowers came in that you’ve been storing in the back of the cupboard and give it a try.  Yes, it feels a little silly to pour your wine out of a flower vase – until you realize that you’ve just saved $50 on a decanter.

Hope that’s helpful!

Cheers.

It’s not a Disney movie but it feels just as magical!  After two years of photographing everything for the blog with a point and shoot, Bake Like A Ninja finally has a decent DSLR camera.

Since it’s spring, a baby sprout coming up seemed fitting for the very first picture from the new camera on the blog.  It’s a jalapeño sprout, which we hope will add depth to our food  and keep it interesting and spicy.  I’m hoping the camera will do the same thing for the blog.

Cheers.