Ruhlman's Twenty (53 page)

Pinch of cayenne pepper (optional)

2 tablespoons minced fresh chives

3 ounces/85 grams bacon, finely diced and sautéed until crispy

In a small bowl, mash the egg yolks and blue cheese together with a fork or masher. Mix in the mayonnaise, both mustards, and the cayenne (if using). Add half of the chives and half of the bacon, and mix until well combined. Pipe or scoop the yolk mixture into the egg whites. Garnish with the remaining chives and bacon and serve.

This ice cream takes the complexity of caramel and marries it with cream. As with many caramel preparations, salt is a critical counterpoint to the sweetness of the sugar. Simple toasted pecans can be used in the ice cream, but I think it is much better with sweet and salty nuts, so candying them is worth the trouble.

1 cup/200 grams sugar

4 tablespoons/55 grams butter

1 cup/240 milliliters heavy/double cream

2 cups/480 milliliters milk

8 large egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla

¾ teaspoon kosher salt

3 tablespoons bourbon (optional)

Candied pecans (recipe follows)

Put the sugar in a high-sided, heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. When the sugar begins to melt around the edges, shake the pan to move the sugar around. Slowly stir the melted sugar into the center of the pan. Try not to stir too much, or the sugar may seize up (if it does, keep cooking it; it should eventually melt). Continue to cook until the sugar has dissolved and melted, and the caramel is a clear deep amber. It should read about 320°F/160°C on a candy thermometer. Add the butter and stir until melted. Add the cream and 1 cup/240 milliliters of the milk, and stir to combine. Raise the heat and bring the mixture to a simmer.

Put the egg yolks in a bowl. Whisk about ½ cup/120 milliliters of the hot cream mixture into the yolks, then pour the yolks and cream into the saucepan. Cook until the mixture thickens slightly, just before it returns to a boil. Remove from the heat and add the remaining 1 cup milk, the vanilla, salt, and bourbon (if using). Pour the mixture into a bowl set in ice to stop the cooking.

Thoroughly chill the caramel cream, then freeze it in an ice-cream maker. Transfer the ice cream to a 4-cup/960-milliliter container and stir in the candied pecans.

1½ cups/170 grams roughly chopped pecans

¼ cup/60 milliliters corn syrup

4 tablespoons/55 grams butter

2 tablespoons firmly packed brown sugar

Fleur de sel
or Maldon salt

Cayenne pepper (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C/gas 4.

Put the pecans in a basket strainer and sift out any nut dust. Combine the corn syrup, butter, and brown sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat. When the butter has melted, add the pecans and stir to coat.

Spread the pecans on a baking sheet/tray and bake, stirring occasionally, for about 15 minutes. They will be very foamy looking at this point. Spread the nuts on parchment/baking paper and, while they are still warm, sprinkle with salt and with a little cayenne, if desired. Allow to cool completely.

Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 2 weeks.

Just because this recipe is so easy doesn’t mean it isn’t special. A version of grapefruit granita concluded one of the most expensive meals I’ve ever eaten, at a four-star Manhattan restaurant, and it was perfect. The granita makes a refreshing end to a meal and is especially appreciated in hot weather.

2 cups/480 milliliters freshly squeezed grapefruit juice

2 tablespoons sugar

¼ cup/60 milliliters white wine, preferably Sauvignon Blanc or Riesling (optional)

In a nonreactive, freezer-proof bowl, combine the juice, sugar, and wine (if using). Stir to dissolve the sugar. Put the bowl in the freezer and let the grapefruit juice mixture chill for 30 minutes. Remove the bowl from the freezer and stir the mixture to break up the ice crystals. Return to the freezer and chill for 30 minutes. Again remove the bowl and stir to break up the ice crystals. Repeat until the granita is fully crystallized. Depending on your freezer, the process should take 2 to 2½ hours. Cover, or transfer the granita to another container, cover, and freeze until serving.

NOT TOO LONG AGO I DEFENDED IN THE
Huffington
Post a popular television cook derided in food circles for her use of processed food in “from scratch” recipes, saying that when I began cooking, I used powdered mixes for the most basic preparations. I simply didn’t know better, and it didn’t hurt me. Over the decades, we have been trained by multinational food companies to buy already-cooked products instead of eating food we cook ourselves.

This is a danger: If young cooks only buy the powdered Alfredo sauce and the boxed brownie mix, they don’t learn how to make the dishes themselves and may not even recognize that it’s an option. But cooking powders out of packets may also be an opportunity for anyone who decides to keep cooking. The more you cook, the better you get, and the better you get, the better you want to become. If you’re reading this, it’s because you like to cook or you want to get better, or both. Getting better is one of the most enjoyable things about cooking. And one of the facts about cooking is that you can always get better, no matter what level of cook you are—beginner or four-star restaurant chef. So my young self, after using powdered Alfredo mix enough, inevitably wondered what the real version was like and how I could make it.

But how does one actively, rather than passively, get better?

You’re already doing it by reading and thinking about cooking. You get better by asking and answering questions about food and cooking, and by comparing two recipes for the same preparation and seeing what ingredients and methods are the same and what ones are different.

You can also become better by following recipes, but not simply by rote. Recipes are not instruction manuals, like the instructions for making a LEGO helicopter. Recipes are like sheet music, the written descriptions of acts that are infinitely nuanced. If you are a cook who can only follow recipes, I recommend reading a recipe, understanding the steps involved, imagining moving through each step in your mind, gathering all your ingredients in their appropriate amounts, then closing the book and cooking the recipe that you’ve absorbed into your brain and fingers.

In your effort to be a better cook, buy the best food available. To do that, you have to know what good food is. Use your senses, chief among them being common sense. Evaluate the food: Does it look good? Does it smell good? Is it from a good source?

The often-used phrase in restaurant kitchens, “garbage in, garbage out,” applies to the home kitchen. If you buy lettuce that’s been sitting in a grocery store after spending a week on a truck, that salad is only going to be that good. If you buy lettuce handpicked at a local farm, you can be the best chef in the world simply by not doing too much to it. The best chef can’t make a factory-raised pork chop taste as delectable as a chop from a thoughtfully raised and slaughtered pig that you yourself cook. But sources can be deceptive. Grocery stores can have exquisite products, and well-meaning farmers can grow mediocre livestock and plants, or treat them carelessly.

The first secret of great cooking that all chefs know and all home cooks ought to know is that great shopping is a skill to develop like any other.

If you are a beginner, I recommend that you master the fundamentals, the basic skills upon which all cooking rests. These fundamentals are primarily in technique #2 and techniques #14 through 20. Then proceed through the other sections more or less in order. Pastry chefs and bakers need to attend to flour first. Once you understand those fundamentals, work on performing them better.

If you already cook or bake intuitively and instinctively, you are teaching yourself as you go. This is the fastest way to get better: cook and watch what happens. If you know the
fundamentals and why they work, you can create your own recipes without books, and you can use books the way chefs do, for ideas and inspiration, unusual pairings, and techniques that might be applied uncommonly.

As you work on fundamentals, go deep rather than broad. This means focusing on one new preparation or technique rather than several at the same time. If you’ve never made your own pizza or angel food cake, don’t try both for the same dinner. Make the pizza, but for dessert choose Auntie Em’s lemon bars, which you’ve made a thousand times and can do with your eyes closed.

Remember that you couldn’t always make those lemon bars with your eyes closed. You perfected them over time. Why are chefs so good? They’re good not because they’re more gifted than you are, but because they’ve prepared their dishes over and over. They’re not artistic geniuses—they just worked really hard. Dishes made by chefs almost never start out as good as what you are served at their restaurant. You, too, should make the same dishes over and over, and then you’ll get better at them. Vary the dishes and pay attention to how the changes affect each one.

Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention. The best cooks get that way by being more aware than the cook at the next station. Everyone, in a kitchen, in life, is on a different level of awareness. Some people are oblivious, and others are so aware of their surroundings you’d think they have eyes in the back of their heads. Most of us are somewhere in between, but we can become increasingly aware as we pay closer and better attention to what is around us.

The final way to become a better cook, and it’s a skill I rarely see acknowledged, is this: remember.

Remember what you just did. Remember how a custard looked and felt when you took it out of the oven; compare it to the one you remember from last month and last year. Remember how soft the steak was when you took it off the fire, how long you let it rest, and what it looked like when you cut into it, how juicy it was, or wasn’t. Compare it to the last four or forty that you cooked.

I remember when the importance of remembering became clear to me. I was hanging out in the kitchen of Zuni Café, in San Francisco, one of my favorite restaurants. Its chef, Judy Rodgers, one of the best chef-writers I know, was talking about roasting a leg of lamb. She knew lamb. She knew that if lamb hit an internal temperature of 100°F/38°C within the first 45 minutes of cooking, she was doomed. There was no way it was going to cook properly; the outside would be done before the inside. “I know,” she said. “I roasted a leg of lamb once a week for two years at The Union.”

She paid attention to all those legs of lamb at that restaurant. She remembered what yesterday’s looked like, and the one several months ago that was perfection itself, and the one a year ago that never seemed to finish cooking. She tried to figure out why the lamb behaved as it did. Was it cold when it went into the oven? Or had it sat out for an hour in the warm kitchen? When was it salted, and how was it tied? Judy had amassed years of days of cooking, and she remembered them and put them all to use each time she cooked.

You can, too. A cook is a lot like a physician in this respect. Physicians learn judgment by seeing a lot of different cases, developing a kind of Rolodex of cases in their minds, so that when they’re evaluating a new case, they are informed by the patterns they’ve collected over years of practice. Cooks use experience in much the same way to inform and evaluate the present.

Cooking is easy when you understand the basics and cook with your senses. The world is better when we cook for ourselves.