Cooking & Baking Tips: Healthy Fats, Grain Prep & Substitutes

Mastering the kitchen involves understanding healthy fat profiles, variety-specific grain preparation, and safe food handling techniques.

blurred close-up of an array of corn kernels

How to Cook Orange Lentils

Orange lentils are a little smaller than their green and brown relatives, but they're the lentil of choice for thickening vegetarian soups and sauces. Orange lentils give you a small window of time between crunchy and mushy, so you have to time their cooking if you want to eat them as a stand-alone dish.

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How to Cook Couscous in a Rice Cooker

Don't let their name make you think they're one-trick ponies. Rice cookers make just about anything that absorbs hot water during cooking, but do especially well with grains and certain pastas, like couscous. Made from durum wheat, couscous comes in four main varieties: instant, Moroccan, Israeli and Lebanese.

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Rustic grilled beefsteak with french fries

How to Smoke Sirloin Steak

Sirloins don't require as much smoking time as other cuts, so you have more control over the final temperature.

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Raw fresh marbled meat on rustic wooden background, banner

How to Cook a Rib-Eye Like Restaurants Do

Full-service restaurants prepare rib-eyes by searing them in an oven-safe pan on the stove and finishing them in an oven. This method gives the cook the most control over the final temperature of the steak.

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Bacon slice being cooked in frying pan

How to Cook Bacon So It's Soft and Chewy

You have to treat bacon as just another cut of meat if you want to cook it to soft, chewy tenderness. Think of a thick ribeye steak, for example. If you cook it over high heat, you'll crisp the meat and partially melt the fat, leaving it slightly warm and rubbery.

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Organic Homemade Crab Cakes

How to Cook Prepared Crab Cakes

Prepared crab cakes have to keep their shape during cooking to heat through evenly. If you brown the outside of the crab cakes properly, you know the interior has heated through because the inside steams during searing.

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How to Cook Longkou Vermicelli

The mouthfeel of longkou noodles stands out when you first try them. Slippery and almost weightless on the tongue, longkou, also called cellophane noodles, feel more like a garnish than a substantial part of a soup or stir-fry. What they lack in heartiness, though, they compensate for in flavor absorption.

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Cloves

How Do I Make Clove Oil?

Pungent, piquant and peppery, cloves tie aromatics together in multifaceted dishes. You rarely find cloves as the main flavoring ingredient in a dish; they work best in supporting roles, such as infusions for finishing oils.

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Chef garnishing a dish

How to Reheat Steak in the Oven

Although reheating steak to 165 degrees Fahrenheit prevents foodborne illnesses, how you bring it to 165 F affects the quality. You want the steak to reach 165 F while retaining as much moisture as possible and without changing the texture of the meat, which makes the oven your best choice.

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Polenta with cheese on plate

How to Cook Grits in a Rice Cooker

Whether you're from Italy and call your grits polenta or you're from the South and call your polenta grits, you're talking about stone-ground cornmeal that cooks by absorbing water, like rice does in a rice cooker.

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