Mastering the kitchen involves understanding healthy fat profiles, variety-specific grain preparation, and safe food handling techniques.
When you set about making an old-fashioned bean dish, you'll likely reach for white beans. White beans have been used for centuries as a nourishing staple, even today when fresh foods are always available it's comforting to have a bag or can of white beans on hand.
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Part of the fun of going to a new restaurant, or trying a new kind of food, is learning about new and exotic ingredients. This is especially true for Westerners eating Asian food, with its diverse culinary cultures and its whole new world of unfamiliar colors, flavors and textures.
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Cakes are something of a challenge for new bakers trying their wings. When they work, they're wonderful, but there are far too many ways for them to not work.
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Corn syrup is an ingredient with many uses in the baker's kitchen. It is one of a class of sugars called "invert" sugars, which remain liquid rather than crystallizing. It also helps prevent other sugars from crystallizing, which is one reason it's often added to candy and frosting.
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Roasting pans and baking dishes are two closely related types of kitchenware. Often, they can be used interchangeably, with each performing the other's function. The difference between the two methods is more a matter of custom and tradition as opposed to anything physical.
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Garlic is one of the world's most popular ingredients, adding a pungent flavor to cuisines from around the globe. It consists of several small cloves, surrounded by papery skin and gathered into a bulb. Cooks appreciate its ability to grow in most climates, and its long-term storage ability.
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Firm resolutions notwithstanding, you probably haven't cleaned out your kitchen cupboards as recently as you'd like. The back corners doubtless conceal a number of things you don't remember buying, or perhaps can't even identify.
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Although lamb is pricey in most parts of the country, a few overlooked cuts still offer good value. One is lamb flaps, known more formally as breast of lamb. It's the portion of the animal's chest that contains the gristly ends of the ribs, trimmed away when the butcher cuts racks and rib chops.
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Almost anyone can manage to grill a decent steak or hamburger, but cooking chicken on the barbecue is more problematic. All too often it's overcooked and stringy, or charred on the outside but still raw at the bone.
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An unfamiliar ingredient to most home bakers, lecithin is widely used in commercial baking. It's an emulsifier, an ingredient that helps other ingredients to mix more easily and remain mixed. Bakeries add lecithin to bread and other baked goods to improve doughs and batters, or to keep them from staling.
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Although popcorn is the world champion, some other grains and pseudograins -- such as quinoa -- can be popped or puffed to lighten their texture. You won't get the huge puffy kernels you see in commercial cereal, which are created in a vacuum, but puffing gives an interestingly different texture.
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Shoulder cuts of pork are used for a number of preparations, from fork-tender pulled pork to ham-like smoked shoulders. One unusual form of pork shoulder is the so-called "cottage roll," common in Canada and Britain but seldom seen in American meat cases.
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Venison is a lean and well-flavored meat, much lower in saturated fats than mainstream alternatives such as beef and lamb. That makes it a fine choice for grilling or slow-cooking, but venison alone is too lean to make a decent sausage.
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Meats have traditionally been roasted at relatively high temperatures, ranging from a moderate 350 degrees Fahrenheit, to well over 400 F for especially small or tender cuts such as pork tenderloins. Tougher and fattier cuts, such as the shoulder, benefit from long and slower cooking at relatively low temperatures.
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Just about the only thing better than a ripe, fresh, juicy apple is that same apple and a few of its friends baked into a pie. Of course, much of that fresh juice will cook out of the apples as your pie bakes and will need to be thickened to prevent the pie from boiling over or developing a soggy crust.
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The intense heat of a charcoal or gas grill gives foods a deeply savory flavor, but it isn't always the most practical way to cook. A ridged stovetop grill pan isn't an ideal replacement, but it's still a useful tool for preparing chicken and other meats when your outdoor grill isn't an option.
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Banana squash is the offensive lineman of the vegetable garden, a behemoth that frequently tops 100 pounds and can easily grow to more than 3 feet long. Although its size makes it impractical for most home gardeners, it works in the favor of cooks.
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If you're already a health-conscious diner, eating better is usually about small incremental changes rather than a radical alteration of your diet. For example, replacing the butter in your cookies with vegetable oil can become part of your larger strategy to cut saturated fats.
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Working with fresh crabs can be awkward. They're highly perishable once they're killed, and require a degree of cleaning and preparation. If they're still alive they'll defend themselves vigorously, at some hazard to your fingers.
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Lobster tails are often sold raw and frozen in the shell, but it's less common with whole lobsters. They're ordinarily pre-cooked and then blast-frozen at the processing plant, to preserve the fresh and delicate flavor of the lobsters and make them more durable for shipping and storage.
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