Tag Archives: technique

Holiday Classic: Braised & Roasted Turkey

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: November 19, 2012

Turkey: The Roast/Braise Method. All photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman.

I love how every year the major food media come up with some new way to do the same old thing. This year The New York Times tells you to steam your turkey! Not that there's anything wrong with the story or the technique (by the Jacques Pépin, after all). My view is why mess with what works? For important occasions, the rule is: go with what works. And of all my years roasting a turkey, I've found that the braise/roast method works best, as I wrote last year. The reason is that this method solves the two great Turkey Conundrums: 1) how to have both juicy breast meat and tender dark meat, and 2) how to serve it all hot to a lot of ...

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Homemade Peanut Butter

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: October 3, 2012

Homemade peanut butter. Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman.

That 30 cases of salmonella have been reported in 18 states is, of course, troubling (HuffPo story here). I buy bottled stuff—mustard, mayo, ketchup, hoisin, etc.—and feed it to my kids. But the salmonella—have they isolated its source?—makes it an an opportune time to encourage people to make their own peanut butter.
Why? It tastes better, it's easy to make if you have a food processor, and it won't have nasty bugs that can make your kids sick. And, it's cheaper by far than buying commercial. At my local Asian grocery, a five-pound bag of peanuts costs me $9.99. A pound of peanuts ($2) will yield a little more than a pound of peanut butter, less than half what you'll pay for decent peanut butter (Smucker's All-Natural costs $4.83 at ...

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Cultured Butter

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: April 9, 2012

 

Cultured Butter, photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

Back at my desk after three weeks on the road (daughter college trip/week in West Palm to visit Mom with Donna and the kids/NYC biz). NYC biz fun!!! Stayed with dear friend Annie LaG, with whom I'm working on a TV project (don't hold your breath), following fab lunch at the always excellent Bar Boulud (thanks chefs Damian and Daniel! Your pâtés rock!); my book Twenty won an IACP award (yay!); had dinner with the mercurial Amanda Hesser after getting lost in Williamsburg thanks to dead iPhone 3G (ate at Isa, where two tables down was the excellent Eric Asimov, who was so kind to me at the NYTimes when he was a rising copy editor and I was a lowly copy boy in ...

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Ruhlman’s Twenty: Food Tools

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: December 7, 2011

I did two promotional videos for my new book, one a general description of the book (love that that one has a shot of Donna photographing, and one about an idea I thought people might call me out on. Even my recipe tester/organizer/overseer, Marlene Newell, had issues with this. Can food be a technique? I say it can. A technique is an action that has multiple applications. So while yes, an egg is an egg, it’s also an emulsifier, a leavener, a binder, and enricher. Therefore using an egg can be considered a core cooking technique. Knowing how to use salt, is one of the chef’s greatest assets. Learning how to think about these foods as tools makes you a better cook. Disagree? I’ve heard ...

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Posted in baking, Books, Elements of Cooking, Food Writing, From Scratch, ruhlman products, Technique, Tips | Also tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Turkey Gravy Recipe For Thanksgiving

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: November 18, 2011

Gravy is nothing more than flour-thickened stock/photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

People freak out about gravy. I don't know why. Gravy is easy as pie. Actually, a hell of a lot easier than pie. All it is, is a delicious, rich stock thickened with flour. In cooking school, they call it velouté, French for velvety. You take a great stock and give it a velvety texture. Flour-thickened sauces got a bad name when bad "French" restaurants served heavy terrible sauces. Properly prepared, flour-thickened sauces are light, flavorful, and refreshing. I prefer them to heavy reductions which, prepared thoughtlessly, are gluey with protein and make the tongue stick to the palate. The key is dispersing the flour uniformly through the sauce. We do this by combining the fat (butter, rendered chicken or turkey fat) so that the granules of ...

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Posted in aromatics, From Scratch, Holiday, Recipes, Technique | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

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