 Times blog Jacket Copy delves into "The Big Fat Duck Cookbook," published in the U.K. and U.S. this month:
Its price tag -- $250 in the U.S. -- is enough so that most cooks would think twice about turning its pages with a wet or oily hand. It may be part cookbook, part work of art -- which seems apt for a book about the cuisine of the Fat Duck Restaurant.
Read more here.
 Ever open the fridge only to feel like you've stumbled upon a science experiment?
If you stopped by the Test Kitchen any time during the last two weeks, you'd find one of our refrigerators stocked with what looked like a bunch of culture samples nestled among the dairy and produce -- except these samples were in martini coupes and glasses, not Petri dishes.
This week's cover story, Soda fountain favorites go uptown by Betty Hallock, features a recipe for Brix@1601 coconut coupe. It's a visually spellbinding dessert: colorful layers of sweet-tart kalamansi (a Southeast Asian citrus) gelee, fresh raspberry marmalade, buttery coconut sables and a quenelle of lime-coconut sorbet are playfully topped with a crisp, delicate coconut meringue.
Maybe not surprisingly, our attempts to adapt this artistic restaurant creation for the home kitchen provided just a few -- albeit tasty -- challenges....
Read on »
 We all have our moments of kitchen idiocy, but usually we learn from our mistakes, no? Well, no. Yesterday I was happily cooking away, making salsa and pickling some pretty New Mexico and jalapeno chile peppers I found at the market and -- yet again -- I forgot to put on gloves. When my hands started burning, I went online to see if I could find another remedy than those I'd unsuccessfully tried in the past (soap, milk, yogurt). Google, my default source for most things (also, apparently, John McCain's) had a number of threads on the subject. After catty suggestions to wear gloves next time, many people recommended rinsing the offending hands in bleach. Strangely, this worked. Not enough to put out the fires completely, but better than the ice baths and bowls of milk I'd been trying. Anybody have any other suggestions (other than gloves and maybe behavior modification), let me know.
-- Amy Scattergood
Photo of Windrose Farm's cayenne peppers by Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times
 Homemade whipped cream. Try it just once, and you'll never look at the prepackaged store brands again. Nothing beats the flavor or texture, and the method is simple. Purists are right--using a hand whisk is one of the best ways. But here's a secret: The food processor method is the best.
Here are some tips for making perfect whipped cream:
Read on »
 Whether you use it to tell when a roast is done or to make sure that the frying oil heats to just the right temperature, a dial (instant-read) or digital thermometer eliminates part of the guesswork for the cook. With Donna Deane's Hungarian pepper salad recipe this week (from "Hungarian peppers: a walk on the lighter side," by Donna Deane and Jenn Garbee), a thermometer might come in handy as you make sure that your chicken cooks to (safe) perfection before incorporating it into this colorful salad.
Indispensable as it may be, a thermometer is only as good as its accuracy. Calibration is key. Here are some quick tips to keep your thermometer on target:
Read on »
 I have seen the future, and there is food. But I’m not sure there’s quite enough for me. Not yet anyway. Like millions of other folks, I just bought an IPhone 3G. For someone who barely learned how to dial his old cell phone, it’s quite a marvel (even if my daughter just shakes her head pityingly at half of the things I’m amazed at … that was so 2004!).
And like millions of other folks, one of the first things I did was run right over to the App Store (not literally run, of course, because with these new machines you can do it over the Interweb!). Unlike millions of others, the first things I looked for weren’t games, but anything related to food. I did find some things, but food as a topic doesn’t seem to be nearly as popular as Crash Bandicoot.
Read on »
Check out recent articles on pickling ("Pickle Paradise" by Russ Parsons) and fourth-generation family preserves business E. Waldo Ward & Son Inc. ("Tradition Worth Preserving" by Laurel Delp), and it's hard not to want to take the art of preservation to its logical conclusion: canning.
Readers, like Deena Messinger of Los Angeles, wrote us asking about local canning and preserving classes, as well as general canning tips.
Although there are no local canning courses currently in the offing, we were able to pull together some great online resources, as well as stories and recipes from our archives....
Read on »
 For this week's cooking story, Pack it up! It's time for a Fourth of July picnic, Test Kitchen director Donna Deane worked with the editors to come up with smart updates to classic picnic dishes. Her recipes for double-dipped fried chicken, a versatile coleslaw recipe, and shamelessly rich orange brownie bites are fresh takes on iconic picnic items, and the dishes were a hit. Each test batch disappeared in minutes, and the recipes we made for the photo shoot practically had to be locked away — the brownies especially — just so they'd last for their camera close-ups.
Since Donna and I tend to get a lot of questions about how we come up with original recipes and the inspiration behind them, I thought I'd ask Donna about each of the recipes, so she could explain firsthand how each went from inspiration to actual dish.
How did you come up with your method for fried chicken, and what about the brining and double-dipping for the batter? I decided to brine the chicken because many times fried chicken is overcooked and dry. A good brine with herbs and garlic will add flavor throughout the meat and keep the chicken moist. Double-dipping adds crunch to the fried chicken; it makes for chicken that will stay crisp even when fried ahead and chilled before serving.
We've gotten so many requests for coleslaw lately; what made you decide to go the route you did in developing your recipe? After talking with the editors about the recipe, we decided to go with several cabbages to give color and texture variations — one basic recipe with variations. A vinaigrette is a must for a picnic, so I decided to do one with cilantro and tarragon to give a flavor twist on the traditional recipe, along with an Asian-inspired coleslaw, and one with pickling spices for a twist on flavors.
 The brownies are wonderful, and it's hard to eat just one. What inspired you to go with an orange pairing, and how did you get them to be that moist? The moist consistency comes from a lot of butter, and not overbaking. I wanted to make a very dense chocolate brownie, so I used two types of chocolate, along with the cocoa. I suggested using Grand Marnier and grated orange peel to give them a more unusual flavor from the traditional brownie. My inspiration came from the wonderful Grand Marnier truffles that you pick up at most chocolate shops. It's a favorite flavor combination of mine.
We hope you like the dishes as much as we did. We'd love to hear your thoughts on these recipes. Happy Fourth of July!
— Noelle Carter
Photos by Robert Lachman
 Every week, Test Kitchen director Donna Deane and I receive e-mails from readers about the week's recipes. Many are positive; the recipes may stir a memory or utilize an ingredient in an exciting new way. Often we receive questions about similar recipes or methods, wondering why we add ingredients when we do, or what we mean by a particular step. Some questions don't relate to just-published recipes but are totally out of the blue — what would we suggest doing with a particular ingredient or how might we cook a certain food? Occasionally we hear from a frustrated e-mailer who's wondering why a recipe didn't come out as expected.
That said, we thought we'd start throwing out some weekly general kitchen tips on this blog. Many will probably be familiar, some may be totally new. In any case, we hope they're helpful. If you've got any questions or tips you'd like us to explore, feel free to comment — we'll do our best to cover each one we receive.
The majority of questions we receive involve baking. With baking being the precise science it is, we thought we'd start by giving some tips relating to measuring and ingredients. Here goes:
• Use liquid measuring cups for liquid ingredients, and dry measures for dry. Honestly, we can't stress how important this is; nothing will throw a recipe off more quickly than measuring out your flour in a liquid measuring cup (you'll end up with much more than is called for in the recipe). Measuring spoons can be used for both liquid and dry ingredients.
• Place the measuring cup on a flat, level surface before measuring. This goes for both liquid and dry ingredients.
• Level off your dry ingredients so they're flush with the top of the measuring spoon or cup. Do this gently.
• Gently spoon — don't pack — the flour into the measuring cup. Packing will throw off a recipe by adding more flour than is called for. And don't scoop the flour using the same spoon/cup with which you're planning to measure — this will pack the flour.
• Pack the brown sugar into your measuring spoon or cup. Yes, this is the total opposite of the flour.
• Opened spice and herb jars should be kept no longer than one year. Spices, like anything else, get stale and lose their potency gradually after they're opened. In the Test Kitchen, we try to date the jars once they're opened so we know when each spice should be replaced.
• Baking soda and powder should be replaced each year. Like the spices, they lose their potency. Quick breads and cookies won't rise (or rise as they should) with stale ingredients.
• Eggs should be at room temperature before they're used in a recipe. One function of eggs in baking is to add volume; room-temperature eggs will give you higher cakes and more magnificent meringues than cold eggs.
• When we call for salt in a recipe, we are referring to fine salt (we use fine sea salt in the Test Kitchen). If a recipe calls for a specific salt, such as kosher or coarse, we will list this in the ingredients.
— Noelle Carter
Photo by Noelle Carter
 Le Sanctuaire in San Francisco hosted Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot (pictured at right) of Ideas in Food over the weekend for a series of classes on hydrocolloids — Methocel (derived from cellulose ethers), pectin, Activa (a transglutaminase) and carrageenan.
A hydrocolloid is a collection of particles suspended in water that can form a gel. They can come from natural sources — say, agar from seaweed, or even cornstarch could be considered a hydrocolloid. Much of what's referred to as the "new" hydrocolloids traditionally have been used as industrial stabilizers, but more and more chefs are becoming enamored of their myriad uses — not for extending shelf life but for refining texture (and not just for foams and "spheres").
Chefs and pastry chefs, including a handful from L.A., watched demonstrations of how to make re-heatable brown butter hollandaise sauce with Methocel, Hoisin sauce "lentils" with pectin, mozzarella "noodles" with Activa Y-G and crab meat tater tots with Activa RM.
"Maybe I'll 'glue' two burgers together to make it a double," Sang Yoon of Father's Office said of the Activa, which works by cross-linking food proteins.
"One thing I try to keep in mind when using these things is to ask, 'Do I really need this?' " says Craft chef de cuisine Matt Accarrino. "I never use these modifiers to extend shelf life, compensate for poor product or technique or generally change something which can be made just fine without adding something new."
For example, "xanthan gum is a great thickener. It works well with higher acid. I made an acidic ramp aioli with sherry vinegar, and a lot of ramp puree in it. I added a pinch of xanthan gum.... It provided the right thickness with the right flavor. We were making it every day just before service so it was really fresh. You just have to be careful or everything you make will look like snot." Words to live by.
-- Betty Hallock
Photo by Betty Hallock
 Check out the current issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and you'll find Laurie Winer's story on Sarintip Singsanong (friends call her "Jazz"), owner of Jitlada restaurant in Hollywood. Jitlada specializes in Southern regional Thai food, and the magazine was able to procure the recipe for its famous rice salad (khao yam).
As with the Food section, all recipes for the Times Magazine are thoroughly tested before publication. We received the recipe to test, not realizing that parts of it would be so difficult to crack. The salad itself was simple: a colorful display of finely shredded vegetables around a garnished mound of steamed rice. It was the dressing that got us...
Like many restaurant dishes we test, the dressing had no formal recipe. Jazz's brother Tui (the chef) makes gallons of the sweet, herbal, fish sauce-based dressing at a time -- each batch is enough for 400 to 500 salads. He throws in a little of this, and maybe a little of that, constantly adjusting and simmering each batch for about 8 hours so the flavors merge and harmonize.
The Test Kitchen was charged with adapting the dressing, adjusting the volume (honestly, who's going to want dressing for 500 salads in their fridge?) and total time (nix the 8 hours). Our original tests, based on notes between Jazz, Tui and Laurie, yielded about a quart of dressing and took only 4 hours to make, but it tasted nothing like the balanced sauce at the restaurant. Ours tasted like salty, burnt caramel and charred herbs.
  After a couple more tests, I decided to visit Jazz and Tui at the restaurant, hang out in the kitchen and watch them prepare the dressing and salad. I've included some cellphone pictures from my restaurant visit, including exactly how the lemongrass -- just one component -- is crushed and chopped before it's infused in the sauce, as well as how the sauce should look in the pan (we needed to determine the total liquid volume, as well as the ratio of solids to liquids).
We still had trouble figuring out the dressing. The flavor and texture were almost there after a few more tests, but we still weren't getting the rounded fish flavor of the restaurant's version. Our recipe instructions called for a budu (a Thai anchovy-based fish sauce) base, but the fish flavor was one-note. We felt something was missing. Finally, on a whim, we threw in some ground shrimp and allowed the sauce to steep an additional 10 minutes. It worked -- the flavors were rounded, and the sauce tasted true to the original.
As for that recipe? It follows Laurie's story here. For more pictures, check out the photo gallery of Jazz and Tui as they prepare the dish.
-- Noelle Carter
Photos by Coral Von Zumwalt and Noelle Carter
Sometimes it's hard to get sympathy from friends when you tell them you work in a test kitchen. For the last two weeks, we were "forced" to test cheesecakes.....
 One of our recipes was for a classic Italian cheesecake from Ciro Marino of Marino Restaurant in Hollywood. Like many chefs, he uses no measuring cups or spoons -- everything's eyeballed -- and the cake bakes in the oven until it's done -- no timers. That, and his method is different. Rather than bake the cheesecake in a water bath, Ciro places the cake on the bottom of a 450-degree oven and props the door open with a pan. And the baking process is twofold: The cake bakes first until it has risen properly, then bakes again for coloring.
Yeah, it is a pretty wonderful job, especially for this cheesecake fanatic. Amy Scattergood has today's cover story on cheesecakes, so naturally we simply had to test various recipes incorporating classic cream cheese, farmer cheese, mascarpone and even ricotta as a cake base.
But even cheesecake testing can have its stressful moments -- and I'm not just talking about how to burn off all the extra calories you consume with all the testing and tasting. Each recipe has to be tested (and retested) until we're certain it will work in the average home kitchen.
Amy scrupulously noted every measurement and step when she watched Ciro in his kitchen (check out the video on the Food section website), but could we duplicate the results? We tested a recipe from Amy's notes in the test kitchen, measuring out ingredients and assembling the cake. Everything looked fine. We put the cake on the bottom of our 450-degree oven and propped the door open with a small saucepan. Then we stood there and watched it bake. Everything seemed to work fine, but when the cake was sliced after chilling, it just fell apart. The flavor was there, but the texture definitely wasn't.
What to do? We wanted to keep the integrity of Ciro's recipe but still have a cake that worked. We talked it over and retested the cake, keeping everything the same except for the method. We moved the cake to the bottom rack of the oven, and cut the baking process to just one step. Oh, and we closed the oven door. (To be honest, we were a little uncomfortable with a recipe that required that the oven door be propped open.) The result? The cheesecake was great, faithful to the original, and the slices disappeared in no time.
For you fellow cheesecake fanatics, check out the recipe (and two others) in today's section.
-- Noelle Carter
Photos by Noelle Carter
 I happened upon the farm store at Cal Poly Pomona the other weekend and picked up a bunch of citrus and avocados grown right there on campus, in the middle of its AGRIscape project -- 40 acres that showcase farming and urban landscaping practices that are sustainable. (You have to love a store where the parking lot dividers are filled with mint.)
In the store, you'll find Cal Poly Pomona's avocados (Bacon, Fuerte, Zutano), Algerian tangerines (I love them -- sweet and floral), lemons, oranges and orange juice, pummelos and grapefruit (Oro Blanco, Frua), squash, onion, broccoli, cabbage. Even their own beef, pork, sausage and jerky from the cows and pigs raised at the Meat Science facility (a USDA-inspected plant) on campus. Oh, and there's a big vat of their own buckwheat honey, from which you can fill your own bottles. (Also: Pick your own strawberries through May.)
Cal Poly Pomona Farm Store, 4102 S. University Drive, just south of Temple Ave., Pomona. (909) 869-4906, Sunday to Friday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
-- Betty Hallock
Photo by Betty Hallock
 Hervé This, the French physical chemist (at Paris' Institute National de la Récherche Agronomique) and co-founder of Molecular Gastronomy, is in town promoting his latest book, "Kitchen Mysteries." Earlier this week, This held court at the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena, where enthralled students watched This play with eggs. (Molecular gastronomists love eggs.) Here he is making a foam, from an egg white, sugar and orange juice, which he later put into a microwave and fed to a student in the front row.
In heavily accented English, This gave a PowerPoint demonstration (lively, endearing, often difficult to understand) that included a diagram of Homer's Odyssey, slides showing shallot cells, pictures of Grant Achatz's food, and a formula for Faraday of Lobster -- ((G + S1 + O)/W)/S2, in which S2 equals foam, or at least I think it does. This told his audience that he hates whipping eggs, that people should never play with liquid nitrogen without wearing safety "spectacles" (a drop will blind you), and that he does not "collaborate" with Michelin-3-star French chef Pierre Gagnaire. "We go to the bar, we discuss," said This. "If Pierre does not cook, he is sad." This also urged students to go to Gagnaire's website, to which This posts a "new idea" monthly. (FYI: Both site and ideas are in French.) This ended his presentation with a rousing, if slightly impenetrable, explanation of Culinary Constructivism, the successor movement to Molecular Gastronomy. "I long for the lab!" he concluded. Maybe so, but he looked like he was having quite a bit of fun in CSCA's Lab 3 too.
"Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking" (2007), Columbia University Press.
-- Amy Scattergood
Photo by Amy Scattergood
|
|
Times blog Jacket Copy delves into "The Big Fat Duck Cookbook," published in the U.K. and U.S. this month:
