How To Chop Romain Lettuce

I've spent more time than I care to remember laboriously peeling off leaves of Romaine one by one. Then splitting them down the spine so there weren't any big, nasty pieces in the salad.

This week I suddenly realized I'd been wasting a lot of time doing it by hand. I must have had the iceberg lettuce post on my mind.

So this time, after peeling the few outer leaves that were a little bruised, I just chopped off the tips.



The ends of the leaves are always floppy and sad anyway. Then cut lenghtwise through the spines all the way around.



Yes, this means I only cut the spines on the outermost layer. It didn't seem to matter. Last was to chop down the length in sections a bit under an inch right down to the core.



And that's it.

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As I mentioned yesterday, there's a delicious dinner salad recipe coming up that's great for a light summer dinner. Sign up to get that recipe and all the rest by email using the form to the right.

How To Peel An Apple

When did you learn the word "apple"? No, I can't remember when I learned it either. But obviously I did.

I also can't remember when I learned to peel an apple. I remember seeing my mother doing it when I was little, usually making Waldorf salad. (Man, she liked Waldorf salad.) So I never thought about not knowing how to do it.

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Directions

This would take about three pages to describe something that takes about 30 seconds to show you. So I'll show you.



Think you can do it faster? I'd love to see it. Drop a link in the comments.

Then you have to core it. (Do it in this order. If you slice it first and then peel it, it will take way longer.) You might have one of these apple corer and slicer tools somewhere in your kitchen. Mine is packed up somewhere down in the basement. I hate it. It only works of the apple is completely symmetrical, it takes a lot of pressure to cut, and cleaning it is a chore.

Cut it in quarters, then cut out the seeds.



Okay, I'll show you that one, too.





And that's it.

How To Core And Chop Lettuce

Some people swear by ceramic or plastic knives for cutting lettuce. The idea is that metal knives cause the leaves to turn brown at the edges faster. Actually, it's not the metal that does it. What happens is any cutting will cut cells, which then turn brown. If you want your lettuce to last longer don't cut it. Rip the leaves by hand.

I usually don't see the problem, though. When I buy lettuce, I have salad at every meal until it's gone.

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Directions

First up, the core. You can cut this out if you really want to. But it's way easier this way:



Set the bottom -- the side you just pulled the core out of -- down and cut it in half.



Then in quarters.



You could stop now and serve what the trendy restaurants are calling a "wedge salad".



If you haven't seen it they literally take those wedges you see above and pour some dressing over it. Yeah, that's a salad. Okay.

But for normal people who aren't trying to impress anyone, it's better to do just a little more work and get the lettuce into bite-sized pieces. So put one half -- two quarters -- down flat, start at one end, and chop about an inch wide all the way across.



And that's it.

How To Bake A Perfect Baked Potato - BONUS Cucumber And Onion Salad

There are plenty of formulas people use to try to figure out how long to bake a potato. Pretty much everyone agrees that traditional baking makes for the lightest, fluffiest results, but no one knows how long to go.

This simple trick makes it easy to get the perfect spud every time.

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Directions

Start with russets, and one wooden shish-kabob skewer for each one.



Pierce each potato lengthwise with a skewer. Don't hold it this way.



You'll need to push really hard to go through a raw potato. If you go all the way through you can keep going right into your hand. Hold it this way instead.



You probably won't be able to get the skewer all the way through. That's fine, as long as you get at least through the center. Leave a couple of inches sticking out, but break the rest off.



Tear off a piece of foil for each potato, large enough to wrap it completely.



Wet each potato just enough for salt to stick, and coat all the way around with kosher salt.



Wrap the potatoes, and put in the oven at 400° for about 45 minutes.



Now for the trick: Pull gently on the skewer. When it comes out without resistance, it's done.



Seems a little too simple, doesn't it? But yes, it's just that easy. If it doesn't come right out, go another 10 minutes in the oven.

Now that it's perfectly baked, you need to top it. This is a great time to have fresh chives growing outside.



Did you know chives will come back in the spring? I didn't. Totally unexpected, and just in time for the cookout. Cut a little with your kitchen shears or regular scissors.



Slice a potato in half. Cut a cross-hatch pattern in the top and put a pat of butter on each side. Top with some diced chive and serve.



And that's it.

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Bonus - Cucumber and Onion Salad

The cucumber and onion salad you find on a typical salad bar has a mayonnaise-based dressing, which usually means corn syrup as the #1 ingredient. I could fix this problem just by using home-made mayonnaise. But this recipe is even simpler.

This is about the easiest, lightest, freshest-tasting salad you can make. I could easily go through a whole batch of this by myself every week all summer.

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Ingredients

1 large cucumber
1 large sweet onion
(onion and cucumber should be about the same weight)
white vinegar

Directions

Slice the onion into shreds.



Peel the cucumber.



Combine the cucumber and onion in a large bowl.



Realize that the bowl you picked is barely big enough to hold everything, and nowhere near big enough to mix it. (Oops.)



Transfer to a larger bowl.



Combine the cuke and onion by mixing from the bottom.



Transfer to a large container with a tight seal.



Fill with white vinegar ...



... until it's a little less than halfway full.



Fill with water until the veggies are covered, put the lid on and shake well. Leave in the refrigerator overnight, or on the counter for three hours or more before serving.

And that's it.

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Don't forget to subscribe using the link on the right. You won't want to miss tomorrow's chili sauce recipe ... it turns a simple hot dog or polish sausage into a thing of beauty. (Yes, I like food just a little too much.)

How To Peel A Cucumber

If you already have a vegetable peeler and you know how to use it, you can go ahead and click "Back" on your browser now. You won't see anything exciting here. (Seriously. Sometimes a cucumber is just a cucumber.)

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Directions

Still with us? Okay.

This ...



... is a vegetable peeler. This version works left- or right-handed. The blade is the inside of the hole in that long metal piece.

Press it lightly against middle of the cucumber and slide it toward the end you're not holding.



You could go toward your hand, but it would hurt. So don't do that.

Rotate the cucumber a little and do another strip. Keep going all the way around.



You'll probably have a bit at the end that isn't peeled. I wouldn't worry about that piece. It's probably not worth the trouble.



Flip the cuke around and start over on the other end.



Keep going until the whole thing is peeled.



Okay, fine, peel the end if you really want to.



There, see? You can peel the end.



Or you can cut it off.



Want to fly without a net? Try doing this with a knife instead of a peeler. Just don't brag to your grandfather, he'll tell you about the time he got busted smoking behind the barracks and got K.P. duty for two weeks and peeled every potato in Idaho with a knife. And you really don't want to hear that story (again) do you?

So, if you really want to do this, stand the cuke on its end on the cutting board. Starting at the middle, hold the knife nearly flat against the cuke and slice the thinnest piece you can.



Yes, you can do this, but don't expect it to be fast.



If you have a really skinny cuke, slice it as is. Otherwise, cut it in half lengthwise first. Stand it on end and cut down through the middle.



Place the two pieces side-by-side and slice them as thick as you want.



Check out the previous post about how to slice an onion for a tip on guiding the blade with the knuckles of your hand. I'm doing the same thing in the photo above.



And that's it.

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Come back tomorrow, or subscribe via the link in the side panel, for the exciting conclusion of Cucumber and Onion Salad.

How To Slice An Onion Into Shreds

If you're making onion rings, you really have to have rings. It's kind of in the name. For almost anything else it's better to have all the pieces be just about the same size and shape, and the way onions are built that's just not going to happen with rings. (Unless you mince them and mechanically extrude them to make perfect little uniform rings like certain fast "food" places do.)

I covered how to dice an onion a while back. That's great for recipes where you'll be cooking the onion, or for macaroni salad. But for other salads it's probably better to "shred" the onion. No, it's not really shredded, that's just chef talk for "long thin strips". Not only is this the best way to prep onion for salads, it's even easier than dicing.

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Directions

Slice off the root and stem ends.



Lots of cookbooks talk about how to trim really close to the root and stem to minimize waste. If you're working at a restaurant and going through 50-pound sacks of onions every night, go ahead and worry about that last quarter ounce of onion. If I'm only slicing one or two -- or even four or five -- I can live with a little bit of waste. If I were really that worried about waste I'd have a compost heap.

Now set the onion on one of the new cuts and slice it in half.



It should be pretty easy now to peel the papery outer layer off.



If you're having trouble, use a paring knife to get under the edge and peel it that way.

Once it's peeled, take one half and cut it in half again from end to end.



Starting from the center, where you just made the last cut, start slicing until you get about halfway to the edge ...



... and it's too skinny to be stable.



Then lay the end piece down ...



... and keep going, starting from the small side. Notice that I'm guiding the knife with knuckles on my left hand ...



... with the fingertips tucked back.



No one wants fingernails in their food. Keep going until you get to the edge.




Repeat this for the other pieces, or put the rest away for the next meal. That's the other good thing about this way of cutting: it's very easy to cut a half or even a quarter of an onion.

Separate any pieces that are stuck together.



And that's it.

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Don't miss the thrilling followup, How To Peel A Cucumber, and the edge-of-your-seat excitement of Cucumber and Onion Salad, coming up later this week. Sign up for my email or RSS reed in the column to the right.

How To Dice Hard Boiled Eggs

Have you ever seen hard boiled eggs diced into those perfect little cubes and wondered how they did that? It's really easy to do as long as you have a wire egg slicer. I'm generally not a fan of single-purpose gadgets in the kitchen, but this one makes the cut.

Start by cutting perpendicular to the long axis, the way you would if you were just going to do slices.



Holding everything together, turn the egg a quarter turn and slice again.



One more quarter turn -- it's going to be really hard to hold it all together now.



And that's it.

How To Dice a Bell Pepper

There's lots of slow ways to seed and chop a pepper, and a couple simple ways. I like this one. Start by cutting off the top as shown above. You want to cut as close as possible to the base of the stem.



If you got it just right, you'll be able to pop the stem out with your thumb, and then pull out the membrane with the seeds.



Cut it in half and trim out more of the membrane.



Some peppers have four lobes, some have six. Separate all the lobes so you can get the last of the membrane.



Slice the pieces lengthwise.



And that's it.

How To Core a Cabbage

Cutting the core out of a cabbage is pretty easy. But you can also make it hard on yourself by trying to do it the same way you'd cut the stem out of a tomato. Cabbages are too big and too firm to do that. Here's the easy way.

Cut the stem off the cabbage head.



Cut in half through the stem ...



.. then in half again through the stem.



Now you've got a wedge with the core at one end.



Slice the core out.



And that's it.

How To Make Pasta

(If you think you've seen this before, you're right. It's been updated with a couple more photos.)

Making fresh pasta is like renovating the kitchen before selling your house: it always pays off. And like renovating the kitchen, it takes a little work to get to the payoff. The upside is that once you've learned the technique it's so easy to do you'll keep finding excuses to make it again.

The simplest version is a basic egg pasta. This is what you'll get in Italian restaurants ... and the kitchens of Italian grandmothers. It's just one large egg and one-half cup of flour. Mix it and roll it out and you're done. That's all there is to it.

Okay, that part was an exaggeration. There's a bit more to it than that.

Start with a spotlessly-clean non-porous surface: stainless steel, marble, Formica, etc. (I've seen this done on wooden tables, but the cleanup is a nightmare.) Make a small volcano with the flour.



Add the egg and one teaspoon of kosher salt to the well in the center. (I'm doing two eggs and a whole cup of flour in the pictures.)



Beat the egg(s) with a fork, and start pulling flour into the eggs a little bit at a time. Once there is enough flour mixed in that you can't beat the egg any more, pull the rest of the flour in and start "cutting" it in with the edge of the fork.



Make sure there is a good layer of flour over the top and start kneading it with your hands.



Knead the pasta until it is all the same consistency. It should be smooth and elastic, and not sticky. If it is sticking to either your hands or the work surface, add a little more flour. This is the step that takes practice. No matter how many times you watch someone else do it you're going to have to learn for yourself what it should feel like.



At this point, you can turn your pasta into any shape you want. I'll assume you're going to do some kind of flat noodle: lasagna, linguine, ravioli, etc. Some pretentious food snobs might say you have to roll it by hand. They're idiots. Restaurants that make their own pasta all use motorized pasta rollers. And every Italian grandmother I know has a hand-cranked model somewhere in the house.

Some models are just a little different in how the pasta runs through them. Check the directions when you get one. The basic idea is that there are two adjustable metal rollers that you pass the pasta through.



You run the pasta through on the widest setting, then each pass through you go one step thinner. If the ribbon coming out gets too long to handle, just cut it in half with a pizza roller or sharp knife.



And that is all there is to it.

You can really go crazy getting other attachments for cutting special shapes. My favorite is the linguine. I leave the pasta a bit thicker than you normally would for linguine, then put the noodles in my chicken or turkey soup. The flavor is amazing. The texture of the thicker noodles is fabulous. And because they're not dehydrated, the noodles are cooked about three or four minutes after you add them to the soup.

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I recently read about someone else's first experience making pasta. It reminded me how many times I had to do this before I really knew what I was doing. Here's some tips:

1. Start with just one egg, not two like I did above. It may not look like much, but that's all you're going to need to feed two people and possibly have leftovers.



2. The flour-to-egg ratio is not an exact science. You want to keep adding flour until the pasta is no longer sticky. Getting this right is just going to take practice. (But hey, it's one freaking egg, you can afford to practice.)



3. After running the pasta through on the widest setting, fold it in half and run it back through again. You want to do this at least three or four times, until it's coming out in a smooth sheet. Toontz is right that overworking it can make it tough, but underworking it will make it clumpy and uneven. Again, you'll just need to practice.



4. Get all the sheets rolled out, get the water boiling, and put the pasta into the water as soon as you cut the noodles. Don't hang it to dry first. Unless you're storing it, there's no reason to dry it first. You'll want to work sort of fast, so it's all cooked at about the same time.



5. With fresh pasta it's a little better to under-cook than to over-cook. Unless you like mushy pasta, then go ahead and cook it as long as you like.

How To Mince Garlic

In case you didn't already know, the smaller you chop garlic the stronger the taste will be. When you cut or smash the cell walls, you're releasing the oils that carry the flavor. If you want to go a little milder than you get with smashed or pressed garlic, or if you just hate cleaning the garlic press, you'll need to learn how to mince.

As a bonus, this is also a good technique for using cloves that are actually a little past their prime. It's better, of course, to get something perfectly fresh, but if you've already started on dinner when you discover your garlic has started to sprout, this can be a real time saver.

Note in the two cloves below that they're starting to put out green shoots.



These shoots can be very bitter if you include them. They also don't smash the same way the rest of the clove does, and they'll get stuck in a press. Luckily, if you remember that garlic is a plant bulb, you'll see how to fix it. Start by cutting off the base of the clove.



You have to do this even if they haven't sprouted. Next cut the cloves in half lengthwise.



This is what you couldn't see before slicing, and it's what would jam up a garlic press. Pry out the center part with the back of your thumbnail or the tip of a paring knife.



Now that you've got the green out, put the flat side down and hold two or three pieces together on the cutting board.1



Don't worry at first about trying to go fast like you see the chefs do on TV. Just do nice thin slices along the long side.



Once they're sliced, turn them sideways and go across the other direction.



Presto, minced garlic.

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1. A note on cutting boards. Plastic and glass cutting boards look nice and clean up easy, but they're really hard on the edge of your knife. Use wood if you have a choice. You don't want to mince garlic with a dull knife.

Making mirepoix

Mirepoix is a simple combination of onion, celery and carrot sautéed together. It is so common in French cooking that recipes will sometimes call for a certain amount of mirepoix, instead of listing the three vegetables separately.

When you do see recipes for the mirepoix, it is typically either two parts celery to one part each of onion and carrot, or equal parts each. I have found that you don't have to be really precise with this. As long as there's enough of each that you get all three flavors, and you dice everything about the same size, you'll be good.

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Ingredients

1 medium onion -- the size of your fist
6-10 carrots -- as big as your thumb at the base
2-3 celery stalks

Directions

It's best to do this as mise en place. That's just French for "set in place" -- meaning get everything prepped and set out all at once before you start actually cooking. Set out three bowls before you start chopping.

First dice the onion.

Then do the celery. The bottom inch or so will be bright white, and quite possibly not looking very good.



That's okay, since we're going to cut the whole bottom off anyway.



Unlike onion, which grows underground but is completely clean after peeling the outside, celery grows aboveground and manages to accumulate lots of dirt in the bottom of the bunch.



Separate all the stalks and clean well with cold water. If it's exceptionally dirty, put a capfull of distilled white vinegar in a sink full of cold water and rinse it there. Pat the clean stalks with a paper towel to dry them.



You can see above that the color can vary quite a bit from the outside to the inside. Keep the small leafy stems from the inside to go in your Bloody Mary and dice up the larger pieces.

Cut each one lengthwise before dicing one or two stalks together.



For the carrots, don't get those little pre-milled, suppository shaped things they market to kids. Get real, carrot-shaped carrots. Cut off the leafy top, and also the stringy root at the smaller end.



Chop longer pieces from the smaller end, and thinner pieces from the big end.



Clean up as you go, putting all the trimmed pieces in the trash, and the diced pieces into the bowls you set aside at the beginning.



Sauté everything together in a little melted fat -- bacon, lard or butter.

How to dice an onion

Lots of recipes have the line "1 medium onion, diced" in the ingredients. Not too many of them show you how to do that. Here's a simple way that's easy to learn and pretty quick.

First, cut the pointy end off.



Then put the cut end on the cutting board and cut it in half straight down the middle.



Now that you have it split, it's much easier to peel the papery outer layers off.



Now comes the real dicing. Cut down and in, starting at one side and moving across to the other. The closer you make these cuts, obviously the smaller the dice will be.



Notice in the picture that I'm starting with the tip of the knife about a half-inch away from the root. You don't want to actually separate all the pieces from the base yet, and it's surprisingly easy to misjudge how the length of you knife will compare to the round onion.

Continue making cuts all the way across the onion.



Once you've made cuts all the way across, cut straight down cross-wise up to about a half-inch from the root.



If you hate waste -- or your mother drilled into you that you should never throw away food -- once you get close the the root, turn what's left on it's end and finish dicing.



The important part here is not to get the solid piece of the root into what you're cooking. It's better to throw out one or two little pieces that could be used than to cook a solid chunk of root.

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If you want long, even pieces instead of small ones, here's how to slice an onion in shreds.

How to render and store bacon fat

Not too long ago the average housewife would have been amazed at how wasteful we are, throwing out all that great bacon fat. After all it's a rendered fat, just like lard or tallow, suitable for cooking and use in recipes.

I followed the lead of someone who's done more research and started keeping mine. It's really easy to keep, and much better than vegetable oil for frying.

All you need is a bowl and a paper towel next time you make bacon.



Pour the fat into the bowl while it's still hot.



Lift the paper towel up by the corners and let the melted fat drain through. The hotter it is when you do this step, the faster it will drain.



The paper towel will catch all the solid bits, which is all we're really trying for.



The finished product will be anywhere from light yellow to nearly brown, depending on how crispy you made the bacon and how hot you had the pan.



I leave this to cool for a while before transferring to a plastic container, which I then keep in the fridge.



I could go with glass or stoneware for storage, but I'd worry about shattering it by pouring hot fat into a cold vessel. You can see in the photo above that I've got three or four rounds of bacon fat in there. We like bacon more than we like frying, so we end up with a surplus. If you know some recipes that call for bacon fat, let me know.

In colder areas you can probably store this in the pantry, though you'd have to have a secure lid and make sure the outside is spotlessly clean or you'll attract pests. In fact, just put it in the fridge. If you want it softer for a recipe take it out an hour or so ahead of time.

Unlike lard, this will add some flavor to whatever you're cooking. But everything's better with bacon.