Category Archives: Main Courses

How To Fry Chicken

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: February 9, 2012

The chicken wings I made for a Super Bowl party. Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

Fried chicken, done right, is one of the best things to eat on earth. It's all about the proportions—crunchiness: juiciness: chewiness: savoriness. And this ratio hits golden proportions with the wing, lots of crunchy peppery surface area and sweet succulent meat. The study of fried chicken began for me in 2007 during discussions, observations and eating with chef Dave Cruz at Ad Hoc in Yountville, CA, as we worked on the book Ad Hoc at Home. While Ad Hoc's method of flour-buttermilk-flour is not unique, their trial and error experimentation with various methods (including sous vide), proved to them and to me, that this method is indeed superlative. That was 2007, and I've since fried a lot of chicken. My recipe is in Click to Continue Reading

Also posted in american regional cuisine, Donna Turner Ruhlman Photography, Recipes, Seasonings and Spices, Technique | Tagged food photography, fried chicken, recipe, twenty | 33 Comments

Eastern North Carolina BBQ

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: February 2, 2012

Pulled pork sandwich, from Ruhlman's Twenty. Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

With these last few posts on cooking for groups, it occurred to me that I should post one of my go-to, fabulously easy, always-gets-raves main course that serves a lot of people. East Carolina barbecue, called pulled pork here up north. When I arrived at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, from Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1980s I knew the word barbecue to be a verb. You did it on a grill. As a noun, it meant a gathering to eat food cooked on a grill—it was something you had, something you invited neighbors to. But on the drive back from a place called Jugtown (to get there we’d gone through a town called Whynot, with a church named after the town; loved that), we stopped at what looked ...

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Also posted in american regional cuisine, Books, Recipes, Sandwiches, sauce | Tagged carolina sauce, pulled pork, sandwiches, twenty | 55 Comments

How To Cook For Sixteen (and not stress)

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: January 31, 2012

Lobster tails were cooked at 140˚F/60˚C for one hour; claws were boiled on stove top; bodies saved for stock that would become a lobster bisque two days later

The mission was this. Make nine great dinners for a big group, but create menues simple enough so that I could get a morning's worth of work in (ie justify 10 days in Key West) and not freak out at 4 pm. One of the first issues is what to cook food in, the vessels. So a valuable tool was the above Lexan tub which I borrowed from my friendly neighborhood restaurant, Fire (thanks Doug!); the immersion circulator was a huge help (I need to do a post on what lessons from this device that apply to home kitchens without one). I also had two huge pots for ...

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Also posted in Appetizers, Food Adventure, grilling, outdoor cooking | Tagged key west, large group cooking, menu, menu planning, mise en place | 17 Comments

An Amazing Response to Staple Meals

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: January 16, 2012

A weeknight braise of chicken in red wine, coq au vin, photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

Wow, what an amazing glimpse into what people are eating. A lot of stir fries, a lot of curries, pastas, pot roasts, and eggs, American and international. There are so many ideas in the previous post I feel like I should do something with them, make them more accessible. Of course, people who read this blog are people who care about food and who love to cook already. My goal has always been to encourage people who don’t cook, to know that cooking is not as difficult as people too often think it is. All these great suggestions are more proof of this. Thank you all for reading and posting and sharing your meals. I’m currently in Key west cooking for a ...

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Also posted in american regional cuisine, Chicken | 20 Comments

How To Make Beef Brisket Pastrami At Home

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: September 9, 2011

Slicing Hot Pastrami/photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

I've written about pastrami short ribs, and love them because they've got the perfect meat-to-fat ratio. But ever since the arrival of a Big Green Egg (planning a review soon), I've wanted to do a proper pastrami, which is essentially a corned beef brisket, coated with pepper and coriander and smoked (the result above was perfect—look at that awesome fat). While I've published the corned beef recipe from my book Charcuterie, I haven't really talked about smoking strategies at home. I recommend two different methods: stove top and in a kettle grill. Stove-top smoking is easy with an inexpensive ($43) Cameron smoker. I bought one a few years ago and it works great for bacon and would work great for this brisket. Briskets require long low ...

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Also posted in Beef, Brines, Butchery, Charcutepalooza, Charcuterie, grilling, outdoor cooking, Recipes, Technique | Tagged grilling, pastrami, summer | Comments closed

How To Prepare a Simple Crab Boil

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: August 11, 2011

Crabs, kielbasa, corn, potatoes/Photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman

By far the best meal of the summer was our crab boil during our week in Ocracoke. And like many “best” meals, it was unplanned, a surprise, a gift we were smart enough to take advantage of. Donna has pals from her native Port Washington, NY, who have houses here, one of whom owns a popular restaurant on this lovely barrier island off the coast of North Carolina (a ferry-ride away from Cape Hatteras). So she found us a swank house on the water where we and friends and Donna's sister and nieces could frolic. In the grass beside the house was an old crab pot. In the house was my sun-averse pal Lester. In the fridge, was a beef heart. As the sun set, Lester lowered the ...

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Also posted in Recipes, Seafood, Seasonings and Spices, Technique | Tagged crab boil, North Carolina, seafood, summer | Comments closed

Friday Grilling: BBQ Short Ribs

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: July 22, 2011

Full meal on the grill/all photos by donna turner ruhlman

A few weeks ago, I made a full meal on the grill, grilled green beans, grilled vidalia onion, and some awesome grilled short ribs. The following are three recipes, techniques really, for making barbecued beef short ribs, cooking them start to finish on the grill, pre-cooking them and finishing them on the grill, and cooking them sous vide and finishing them on the grill. (If you don't have a wood or charcoal grill, I really don't recommend doing short ribs this way.) Use whatever your favorite barbecue sauce is, store bought or homemade. (I need to do a homemade barbecue sauce post! Anyone wants to make suggestions, feel free in comments.) I recommend the first method because it results in a deeply smokey flavor, ...

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Also posted in Beef, Butchery, grilling, outdoor cooking, Recipes, Technique, Video | Tagged bbq, grill, short ribs, sous vide, video | Comments closed

The Breslin Pig Foot

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: April 6, 2011

When Donna found herself in NYC at the Ace Hotel last fall, she spent a couple nights in the Breslin kitchen watching executive chef April Bloomfield, Breslin chef de cuisine Peter Cho, and crew rock (that's Peter and April top right). The trotter caught her eye. It's the perfect example of why this post could be called Why April Is Not the Cruelest Month But Rather the Best Porker, or simply Why We Love April. The British chef takes a great Italian classic, a zampone, as she notes, breads it, fries it in olive oil and butter, and serves it as their "Pig's Foot for 2." It's the boned out trotter, stuffed ...

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Also posted in Charcutepalooza, Charcuterie, Donna Turner Ruhlman Photography, Pork!, Recipes, Restaurants, sausage, Technique | Tagged April Bloomfield, au pied de cochon, cotechino, Peter Cho, pig's foot stuffed with cotechino, stuffed pig's foot, stuffed pig's foot recipe, stuffed pig's trotter, The Breslin, zampone | Comments closed

Braised Lamb with Ras El Hanout

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: August 31, 2010

Braised Lamb Shank with Ras El Hanout, photos by donna

I’m finishing up answering copy-edit queries on the new book, my beliefs on the core techniques of cooking due out next fall from Chronicle, and also going over some last minute testing with the good folks at cookskorner.com. One of the recipes being tested is a Moroccan-style braised lamb shank using lemon confit and the blend of spices known as ras el hanout. The testers asked, for those who weren’t able to find it in their town, should I include a recipe for it. The book is already running long and I’m not an expert on the subject, so I thought why not include a link to it rather than my own version? Yes, but how do I know the online version I find will be any ...

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Also posted in Books, Braise, Lamb | Tagged braised lamb, ras el hanout | Comments closed

California Travel
Fresh Spring Rolls with Viet Dipping Sauce Recipe

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: July 26, 2010

Durian fruit being cut at a Vietnamese market in southern L.A. The green behemoths in front and back are jackfruit. (All photos by Donna.)

Flew out to southern California last week to be with one of Donna's oldest and dearest, almost entirely beaching it, but found time for one great restaurant meal and one day exploring little Saigon south of LA with the extraordinary White On Rice Couple, Todd Porter and Diane Cu. Diane, born in Vietnam two years before the family fled in 1975, and Todd, a native of Oregon, are photographers, videographers, writers, cooks and gardeners. I met them in Ixtapa last January and was immediately impressed with their energy and work, but I didn't quite appreciate how fine these two souls were until they invited me and Donna and the ...

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Also posted in Recipes, Travel | Tagged Nuoc Cham, vietnamese spring rolls, white on rice couple | Comments closed

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