An Edge in the Kitchen

There is an excellent review of An Edge in the Kitchen at The Gastronomer’s Bookshelf (click this link for the full review). I wasn’t familiar with the website but I’ve become a fan of it’s thoughtful reviews and overviews of current food books. They were very kind to mine . . .

An Edge in the Kitchen provides a focused, readable guide that begs to be re-read as your skills improve. Well worth the purchase, this book has allowed me to whittle through countless vegetables with precision and ease, and to make my knives razor sharp.

I was particularly pleased with this quote because creating a book that was fun and readable as well as informative was my main goal.

So let me begin the formal part of this review by saying this book was extremely readable; not just readable, but enjoyable. Author Chad Ward’ s sense of humor and no-fuss writing style made for an easy read that was jam-packed with good material.

It is gratifying to see that readers are enjoying the book and really getting something out of it. Thank you, Gastronomer’s Bookshelf!

My article on the history of the fork is up at Leite’s Culinaria, the multi-James Beard Award winning food site run by David Leite. As one reviewer said,

“Edited by David Leite, [Leite's Culinaria] is kind of The Atlantic Monthly for food lovers, with well-written essays by Leite or one of his posse of fellow food-obsessed wordsmiths. There are always recipes that are begging to be tried, columns that are both funny and informative, product reviews, interviews…basically hours of enjoyment to delve into.”

So it’s gratifying to have my piece, The Uncommon Origins of the Common Fork on the front page. Stop by and give it a read. You’ll be surprised by the fork’s controversial history.

When we pick up a dinner fork we rarely think about how or why it came to be. Using it is as natural as using our own hands. But the fork is a relative newcomer to the table, appearing many centuries, even millennia, after the knife and spoon. The fork’s short and rocky history is the story of the evolution of etiquette and table manners. It’s also the story of how a doomed Byzantine princess, a French Cardinal disgusted by his dinner guests, and an intrepid English traveler forever changed the way western society eats.

Michael Ruhlman’s new book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking is out, and it is excellent. We’ve all made a recipe from a book or magazine that didn’t turn out and wondered if it was our technique or the recipe that failed. Sometimes it is a lack of basic technique, i.e. reproducing one of Thomas Keller’s dishes requires more than forking over the cash for the French Laundry cookbook and being willing to spend a couple of hours gently fellating garlic chips. You’ve got to know what you are doing. Many times, though, it is the recipe. When you understand the basic relationships between ingredients you can look at a recipe and see that the vinaigrette doesn’t have enough acid for the amount of oil, or that the gorgeous pie crust in the glossy magazine photo isn’t possible with the recipe as written because it contains way too much water and not enough fat.

Conversely, when you understand ratios and relationships you don’t have to panic when your dinner guests are at the door and you can’t find the scrap of paper with your favorite hollandaise recipe on it. You know that 5 parts butter to 1 part egg yolk to 1 part liquid (about half of which can come from vinegar or lemon juice or both) will give you a classic hollandaise. If you are feeling sporty, add a little white wine and tarragon to make sauce béarnaise. Done.

Basic cookie dough? Easy as 1-2-3. Literally: 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat, 3 parts flour and you’ve got a pretty good, if basic, cookie. Improvise at will. Add chocolate chips or peanut butter for an easy variation. Swap the sugar for brown sugar for a chewier, more complex cookie. Add egg and baking powder for a softer, fluffier cookie. Nothing to it, and no recipe needed. That’s the wonder of Ratio, it sets you free from the tyranny of recipes and puts you in control of your cooking.

I’ve got a quibble or two. I like my bread doughs a little wetter than the offered ratio. And I make my biscuits a little differently than the formula in the book, but I’m southern, and biscuit technique is nearly as divisive as barbecue style. But for the most part, Ratio is an antidote to the seemingly limitless heap of recipe-driven cookbooks that come out each year, none of which teaches anyone to cook, just how to follow directions. Learn the ratios and trust yourself.

As a way of promoting the greater good while promoting his book, Michael has set up a donation page on the Share Our Strength website. Make a donation and your name gets put in a drawing for an autographed copy of the book and exactly the sort of high-tech digital scale that makes working with ratios a breeze. So go do it. Donate to Share Our Strength & win a digital scale and autographed copy of Ratio

If you own a pre-2006 Kitchenaid Professional 600, be aware that it will probably come to a grinding, screeching halt if you make a lot of bread. When it crashes you will be assaulted by one of the most painful and soul-crushing sounds you are likely to hear in a kitchen. Your beautiful mixer is dead. What is worse, Kitchenaid just doesn’t give a damn.

My Professional 600 was a gift from my wife, who thought she was buying her bread-crazy husband the biggest, baddest mixer on the block. It is certainly marketed that way.

The overachiever of the stand mixer family, it has a Flour Power rating of 14 cups. That means it can mix enough dough for 8 loaves of bread or 13 dozen cookies in a single bowl …. Powerfully churns through yeast bread dough and triple batches of cookie dough.

So why did my 8-cup soft sandwich bread recipe kill it? As it turns out, the Professional 600 mixers made before August of 2006 have a plastic gear housing that is completely inadequate for the size of the motor. Put a strain on the mixing head — bread dough, for instance — and the housing flexes, throwing the whole gear train out of alignment. When that happens every gear strips, locking up the whole assembly and causing an ear splitting shriek that will be etched in your memory forever. It is a horrible sound. Kitchenaid redesigned the gear housing in 2006, replacing it with a metal housing capable of taking the load put out by the motor. They repaired the Professional 600s that died under warranty but didn’t put out a service bulletin or recall notice for the others. We were left on our own. You see, the mixer doesn’t self destruct the first time you use it, the problem is cumulative. The flex gets worse with time until one day the gearbox flexes just far enough to cause a train wreck. It happened often enough that the Kitchenaid engineers built a new gearbox. They just didn’t tell the rest of us. It took an engineer with a dead mixer to find out why the gears stripped the way they did.

My mixer is out of warranty so I wanted to see what my options were. I did a little research and found dozens of other Professional 600 owners who experienced exactly the same symptoms and mixer death. One of them was an engineer who took his mixer apart. It was he who discovered why the gears stripped the way they did. There was a detailed analysis with photos on his website, but it is no longer available.  Given that this was a known design flaw — one that Kitchenaid admitted when redesigning the gearbox — I asked them to cover the repair of my mixer. They refused, charging me $150 to replace the gears and gearbox housing. Their customer service representative claimed A) that mixing 8 cups of flour for seven minutes, rather than the recommended five, was responsible for the lockup that killed the mixer, and B) that while the gearbox did indeed crack, the gears stripped first, so the gearbox couldn’t have been the problem. I pointed out that the gearbox flexes, causing the gears to strip before the housing cracks but she didn’t want to hear it. The problem was obviously my fault, and her tone suggested that I was probably lying about only mixing 8 cups of flour. It was an infuriating conversation. In short, Kitchenaid markets the Professional 600 as a heavy duty mixer designed to knead bread dough knowing that 90% of their customers are going to be making cakes, cookies and meringues, which put no strain on the motor. It’s the 10% of us who do bake bread (or use the meat grinder) on a regular basis who are fucked because Kitchenaid won’t stand behind its products.

For my demo and book signing at A Southern Season (March 28, noon to 3:00), they’ve requested Summer Lentil Salad from the Knife Skills Workout section of my book. Spring is upon us and this light entrée is perfect for warmer weather. It’s also a good way to hone your dicing technique while getting dinner on the table. The recipe was inspired by a lentil salad created by chef Brandon Wicks, now at the Four Seasons in Seattle.

Summer Lentil Salad

From An Edge in the Kitchen by Chad Ward

Techniques: Small dice, chiffonade, mince

Ingredients:

1 large tomato, seeded but not necessarily peeled, cut to small dice (¼-inch cubes)

1 medium cucumber, peeled and seeded, cut into small dice (¼-inch cubes)

2 medium carrots cut into small dice (¼-inch cubes)

1 cup small green lentils (preferably French lentilles du Puy).

1 large garlic clove, peeled and crushed

1 teaspoon salt (2 teaspoons kosher salt)

1/2 yellow onion, quartered (optional)

For the vinaigrette:

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar or cider vinegar, or to taste

1 large shallot finely diced or minced

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard

6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1/4 cup thinly sliced (chiffonade) fresh basil

Dash of hot sauce (optional)

2 tablespoons minced parsley (optional)

1 teaspoon salt or 2 teaspoons kosher salt

Mixed baby greens for serving

Procedure:

Prep and set aside the tomato, cumber and carrots.

Add the garlic clove and onion (if using) to the pot with the lentils and cook the lentils according to the package directions. If the directions are unclear, start the lentils in about 3 cups of cold water. Bring to a soft boil, reduce the heat and cover. Let simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the lentils are cooked through but still hold a firm shape. Strain off excess liquid, remove the onion and garlic, and allow the lentils to cool to lukewarm.

In the meantime, combine vinegar, shallots, pepper, mustard and hot sauce in a mixing bowl. Whisk in the oil to create a basic vinaigrette. Gently fold in lentils while still warm and allow to cool further. Add tomatoes, cucumber, carrots, basil and parsley (if using). Season with salt and pepper. I add a splash or two of Cajun hot sauce just to keep things interesting. Cover and chill 30 minutes to an hour. Serve over mixed baby greens.

For a more elaborate presentation, spoon the lentil salad into a lightly oiled ring mold (I use a 2-inch biscuit cutter). Pack lightly so the salad retains its round shape. Remove the mold and top the salad with a disc of goat cheese or feta crumbles.

This same lentil salad can be made into a warm, hearty winter meal by substituting diced roasted beets or butternut squash for the tomato and cucumber. The beets add an earthy sweetness to the dish. You can also add dimension with diced fennel. Pour the dressing over the lentils while still warm, add the beets and optional fennel, fold gently and serve immediately.

Second in our low budget knife skills series.

I promise I’ll stop with the shameless self promotion shortly and get back to knife and kitchen topics, but this is just too wonderful. The online magazine Slate.com has named An Edge in the Kitchen one of the Best Books of 2008. Sara Dickerman, who does most of their food related writing, said, in part,

It’s hard to deny the lyric beauty of this year’s superchef monographs from Thomas Keller, Grant Achatz, and Heston Blumenthal. But I crave pragmatic advice in the kitchen and so recommend An Edge in the Kitchen, by Chad Ward. Ward’s knife guide is brash, bossy, and full of good counsel.

I’m a big fan of Slate, so this completely blew my mind.

Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune Food section listed their top food books for 2008, including “An Edge in the Kitchen.” Yay! Clicking the link in my name took me to a Sept. 10 review by Bill Daley, Tribune critic. I particularly appreciated this:

“An Edge in the Kitchen,” whose subtitle is “The Ultimate Guide to Kitchen Knives,” has the confident and almost sassy voice of its author, Chad Ward. He’s a writer and cook who offers an online knife sharpening class on eGullet.org. Ward is passionate; he knows his stuff and wants you to know it too.

Sorry for the lack of attention to the blog lately. I’m finishing up the proposal for my next book, which has kept me away from just about everything else. Things will be back on schedule shortly.

A couple of months ago I was interviewed on WHYY’s A Chef’s Table with Jim Coleman. Jim is a working chef who really gets down to the nuts and bolts of cooking and food trends. If your local public radio station doesn’t carry A Chef’s Table, it’s also available as a podcast.  Jim’s show isn’t as widely available as The Splendid Table, and public radio stations that carry one don’t carry the other, which is a shame, but the show is a lot of fun and a great resource. My interview aired on the August 9, 2008 show and happens about 18:45 into the show. Here is a direct link to the audio (Real Media file).

Chef Mike Pardus is a CIA instructor, one of Michael Ruhlman’s early mentors, and a frequent contributor to Bob del Grosso’s A Hunger Artist blog. He has posted a series of three videos detailing the proper way to break down a chicken, one of the most important things any cook should know. He does a great job with the videos. I was planning my own chicken video, but his are so good that mine would just be redundant. So here they are:

Mike Pardus’s Chicken 101 video 1

Chicken 101 video 2

Chicken 101 video 3

There you go, folks. That’s how it’s done. Emancipate yourself from bland, flavorless chicken breasts. Buy a whole chicken! It’s is fairly simple to break one down with a little practice, and the a whole chicken is usually six or seven times less expensive per pound. Remember to save the carcass for stock.