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

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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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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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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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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 , , | Comments closed

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