Cooking Q&A: The perfect eggs and all your other cooking questions (April 7 | 12 p.m.) - Washington Post |
- Cooking Q&A: The perfect eggs and all your other cooking questions (April 7 | 12 p.m.) - Washington Post
- How to cook shrimp to perfection - The Post - The Post - The Post
- 30 Underrated Cooking Tricks That'll Make Anything You Cook Taste Even Better - BuzzFeed
- How TikTok cooking stars defy the traditional career path - Los Angeles Times
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Posted: 01 Apr 2021 01:32 PM PDT [unable to retrieve full-text content]Cooking Q&A: The perfect eggs and all your other cooking questions (April 7 | 12 p.m.) Washington Post
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How to cook shrimp to perfection - The Post - The Post - The Post Posted: 01 Apr 2021 08:55 PM PDT  Need some protein variation in your diet? Sick of chicken and hamburgers but still want to keep your meat cheap? Try shrimp, the curly, little delicacy that most people only get at Italian restaurants, in cocktails or Chinese takeout. Seafood possesses a weird place in the American diet, especially in the Midwest. Those who don't live by the ocean never consider cooking seafood on the regular, despite its health benefits. Most Midwesterners' experience with seafood is limited to Long John Silvers and McDonald's Filet-O-Fish as a result. It doesn't have to be this way, though. There is nothing wrong with getting your seafood frozen (oftentimes, it's better quality). If you're new to cooking seafood there is no better place to start than shrimp. Buying shrimpBuying shrimp is a pain. To keep things simple, stick to the frozen bags. Shrimp labeled as "fresh" at the deli counter is frozen bag shrimp that has been defrosted. If you plan on deep frying shrimp, buy the largest size available. If not, grab whatever is cheapest and opt for the peeled and de-veined options. Vein-in/shell-on is cheaper, but only marginally so. Pay the extra 30 cents to save time and effort. Defrosting shrimpCompared to other animal proteins, defrosting shrimp is quick and easy. Take the amount of shrimp you want and place it in a bowl or sink filled with cold water. Then, let it soak for 20 minutes or until pliable. Because shrimp flesh is delicate, this is the recommended method. It allows for even thawing. Once thawed, drain the water and dab up any excess water with a paper towel. Cook as soon as possible. Never let seafood sit at room temperature for very long before cooking. In general, you do not cook seafood as long as protein like chicken and pork. This shorter cooking time does not kill bacteria as thoroughly. Note on cooking shrimpSeafood, especially shrimp, does not take as long to cook as other proteins. Often, it takes only two to three minutes when frying on a medium heat. It takes a minute or less on an extremely high heat, such as used in stir-fry or in a deep-fry. Recipes:Kung Pao Shrimp Ingredients (1 Serving): 6 to 9 medium shrimp ⅓ cup tri-cut onion ⅓ cup diced red bell pepper ¼ cup roasted peanuts Sauce: 2 tablespoons soy sauce 2 tablespoons water Pinch of salt (to taste) 1 teaspoon chili-garlic paste 1 teaspoon ground ginger 1 to 2 teaspoon cornstarch (for thicker sauce) 1 teaspoon rice vinegar Mix all ingredients together and stir before use Cooking Instructions: Preheat a highwall skillet (preferably nonstick) to a high heat and add in a small amount of neutral oil (estimated 1 tablespoon). Add onions and bell peppers stirring rapidly with a spatula or tossing with the pan. Cook until the onion is translucent. Add in shrimp and continue tossing till cooked (1-2 minutes). Once cooked, take out the mixture and add sauce to the pan. Simmer it until the sauce is thickened. Add in mixture and peanuts and toss until evenly coated. Serve with white rice or noodles. Italian Shrimp and Mushroom (Modified Shrimp Scampi) Ingredients (1 serving): 6 to 9 medium shrimp 2 to 5 sliced mushrooms 1 clove grated garlic 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 tablespoon butter Salt (to taste) Cooking Instructions: Preheat a highwall skillet to a medium heat and add butter and olive oil. Wait until butter is dissolved and move oils to mix them. Add in the rest of the ingredients until cooked. If eaten with pasta, add drained pasta directly into the skillet with a small amount of pasta water and stir until the oils have coated the pasta. This recipe is also good served with toasted bread or rice. For a light meal, I recommended eating it with garlic bread.  |
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30 Underrated Cooking Tricks That'll Make Anything You Cook Taste Even Better - BuzzFeed Posted: 31 Mar 2021 04:16 PM PDT  Kinda wish I'd learned some of these sooner. If you're anything like me, you've probably been spending way too much time cooking in your kitchen over the past year. To cut out some of the work that goes into making all those tasty dishes, read on for a ton of super-easy (and super-useful!) cooking tricks. 🔪1. If you're cooking a recipe that calls for sautéing both onions and garlic, do the onions first.Bartosz Luczak / Getty Images
2. Add brown sugar to your tomato sauce to make the overall flavor even richer.Graiki / Getty Images
3. To make oven-baked chicken taste fried, add a bit of mayo to the usual egg–and–bread crumbs coating.4. When juicing limes or lemons, cut the bottom off first so that all the juice runs through the fruit instead of getting trapped in the rind.5. Sprinkle flour on your bacon to reduce grease splatters.Zeljkosantrac / Getty Images
6. And for a mess-free bacon experience, cook it in the oven instead of on the stove top.Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Save yourself some time and energy by simply baking your bacon in the oven. Just toss it onto a sheet pan — and for even easier cleanup, line the sheet pan with parchment or foil first. Read more: 23 Basic Cooking Mistakes Everybody Makes 7. Know when to use ground pepper versus cracked pepper.Karimitsu / Getty Images, Ekaterina_lin / Getty Images
Finely ground pepper (the kind that looks like dust) is best used for things like sauces. It's pretty strong, and a little goes a long way. Coarse ground pepper, on the other hand, is best for finishing dishes at the table or seasoning proteins. It adds a burst of flavor to anything you add it to. Read more: 12 Little Seasoning Tricks to Take Your Cooking to the Next Level Westend61 / Getty Images
10. Cracking eggs? Use an eggshell to scoop up any stray broken pieces.11. Crack eggs on a flat surface instead of the edge of a bowl.Agrobacter / Getty Images
12. For a safer and less stressful cooking experience, sharpen your knives.Milan_jovic / Getty Images
13. Rinse your rice before cooking to prevent it from becoming gloopy.Powershot / Getty Images
14. Save the stems of herbs and add them to soups, stews, or stocks while cooking.Yael Malka / BuzzFeed
15. Use a bench scraper to easily transfer food from your cutting board to your pan.Lauren Zaser / BuzzFeed
16. Find the sweetest watermelons by looking for a yellow patch and listening for a hollow sound.Bogdankosanovic / Getty Images
19. Freshen up stale cookies by placing a piece of bread in your cookie container.Pilipphoto / Getty Images
Listen, I know you're short on time and want to get right to the eating part of your night, but if you want to slightly brown and crisp your vegetables (and you definitely do), then it pays to cook your ingredients in smaller batches. If you try to dump all your food into a single pan, the temperature will drop and you won't get that nice, cooked outer layer you're aiming for. Read more: 23 Basic Cooking Mistakes Everybody Makes 21. And be sure to cook all the water off first.Ugur Karakoc / Getty Images
22. After you're finished cooking your steak, let the meat rest.Helios8 / Getty Images
Don't be so quick to cut meat that's fresh off the grill or pan, since doing so will spill out all of its delicious juices. Let it rest for 5–10 minutes and you'll secure yourself a juicy slab of steak. Read more: Let's Find Out the Best Way to Cook a Steak 23. When making pie dough, use a grater to get mini chunks of butter.24. If you find a recipe online that you want to use, check the comments for any tips or precautions.Monkeybusinessimages / Getty Images
Learn from the mistakes of others and set yourself up for success by scrolling to the bottom of a blog post or recipe and checking for any warnings that other reviewers might have about the recipe. 25. When making fried rice, prep the pan by cooking an egg in it first.Jeff R Clow / Getty Images
27. Resize your sheet pan with a bit of aluminum foil.28. When it comes to heat, don't feel the need to flip things over or stir them constantly.Violetastoimenova / Getty Images
29. Generously salt your pasta water.Vladimir Kokorin / Getty Images
Don't be afraid to salt your pasta water. It'll make your pasta taste better by seasoning the noodles from the inside out. It will also help in bringing out the flavor of your pasta sauce. Read more: 23 Basic Cooking Mistakes Everybody Makes 30. Lastly, whatever you do: Don't rinse your pasta after cooking it.Aleksandr Zubkov / Getty Images
What's your favorite cooking tip or trick? Share in the comments below! |
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How TikTok cooking stars defy the traditional career path - Los Angeles Times Posted: 01 Apr 2021 07:00 AM PDT It's a typical COVID-19-era story for Los Angeles restaurant workers. In March of last year, 28-year-old line cook Brandon Skier lost his job when his restaurant closed after several unprofitable weeks under L.A. County's shutdown. Skier had been working at Auburn, the celebrated tasting menu restaurant on Melrose Avenue, and has 10 years of experience that includes stints at Redbird and Providence. He spent the first two months of the shutdown hunting for work. "All the restaurants that I would've applied to were closing," Skier said. "I was just bored at that point. I missed being productive, I wanted to work with my hands and create stuff, I wanted to keep cooking. "So, I went on TikTok like, 'Hey, I cook. If I post a video, would anyone want to watch?'" One year later, Skier has more than 1 million TikTok followers, brand deals with Hedley & Bennett aprons and Made In cookware, and a new vision for his career. As the heavily tattooed, hoodie-wearing @sad_papi, Skier shows viewers how to operate like a professional cook at home, whether he's making a banana cream pie or properly caring for carbon-steel pans. "I just stood behind a stove for the last 10 years and nobody cared," said Skier, whose dream before the pandemic was to become a sous chef at a fine-dining restaurant. "I didn't know that there was a living to be made doing this kind of stuff. I never thought I would be in the position where people would look up at me as a cook." Skier isn't the only one whose culinary aspirations have changed since the virus decimated restaurants and boosted the popularity of TikTok, which has at least 100 million users in the U.S. There's no one stopping a teenager from Indonesia or a grandmother in Nigeria from pressing "post." And some of those who are contributing content, stars who have emerged organically, have amassed an astonishing number of followers. Tway Nguyen was finishing culinary classes and planning to work in a restaurant or open a food truck before the coronavirus hit. One morning in March of last year, she woke up and started cooking for her family as usual. Only this time, she decided to film it. One of her first cooking TikToks, a 30-second clip of her making fried rice with lap cheong in a T-shirt and messy bun, has 7 million views. 
Morgan Lynzi, a TikTok star, makes a 24 Carrot Gold Cake with turmeric at her home in Walnut. She has almost 85,000 followers. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) For Nguyen — who has since hired a business manager, started a recipe newsletter and begun designing @twaydabae merchandise — online stardom is the alternate path in food she never knew she wanted to pursue. Of working at a Beverly Hills restaurant during her culinary training: "It was a nightmare, it was the worst experience of my life," she said, laughing. "I felt like, 'Why did I even go to culinary school?' Working on that line was just so much pressure. Whenever I cook at home, that's my happy place." Thanks to that fried rice video, Nguyen, who spent her childhood in the southern Vietnamese beach town Vung Tau before moving to L.A. with her family, can make a living by demonstrating dishes like canh chua (a sweet and sour soup with fish and tamarind) in bite-size videos from the comfort of her home kitchen. (She's working on one-off sponsored videos for some brands, and some of her kitchen tools are provided by Dalstrong.) "I just thought there was one path in culinary: You would work your way up to head chef," said Nguyen, who has 526,300 followers. "Thank God for social media. "Asian Americans, especially Vietnamese Americans, always tell me, 'Hey, I live away from home, and your recipes make me remember all the good times and remember my mom,'" Nguyen said. "I kind of found my message and ultimate goal of keeping my culture alive through sharing recipes." While Nguyen has been able to educate viewers that Vietnamese cuisine "goes beyond pho or spring rolls or egg rolls," 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore George Lee, known as @chez_jorge on TikTok, is helping to fill another gap in food media: vegan versions of Taiwanese staples, presented in English by a Taipei native. Many of Lee's videos start with sizzling garlic or soaking shiitake mushrooms and end in a plate of saucy noodles, crispy vegetables or bouncy dumplings. All of them include Lee's smiling face and obvious enthusiasm for plant-based versions of things he grew up eating in Taiwan. "I feel a sense of purpose when I make these videos and people tell me they love my recipes," said Lee, who has 483,700 followers. "It's helping the environment, and it's teaching people how to live a more sustainable life without having to sacrifice tasty food." Lee studies molecular cell biology and works in an alternative-meats lab (when classes are held on campus) at Berkeley. He doesn't expect to graduate for another two years, but his post-college plans are already taking shape; he's in talks with cookbook publishers and hopes that if he pursues his own meat-alternative startup — to develop more convincing vegan versions of foods like pork belly and chicken — his audience will be interested. "I like taking a kind of scientific approach to my cooking. I love to know why something works," he said, excitedly explaining how you can cook eggplant to mimic eel and make tofu extra crispy by freezing and thawing it twice before cooking. Like Skier and Nguyen, Lee has trained as a cook. (Lee attended Le Cordon Bleu and interned at Chez Panisse for a semester.) When starting out on TikTok, they all knew how to cook but had to teach themselves how to be content creators: What camera equipment to buy, which editing software to download, and how to use it all to make videos that people want to watch and save. Skier, who rarely cooked at home while working as a line cook, "didn't even have a decent cutting board" when he started posting to TikTok last year. A few months later, he outfitted his kitchen like a restaurant with hotel pans, squeeze bottles, magnetic knife holders and a sous vide machine. His tools also include a high-definition camera, tripod and Final Cut Pro software. 
Morgan Lynzi's 24 Carrot Gold Cake with turmeric. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Sometimes food TikToks are about more than just a recipe. For creator Morgan Lynzi (@morganlynzi), they should tell a story and create a feeling. In a chocolate cake video posted before Valentine's Day, Lynzi moves as if dancing, drizzling vanilla extract into a mixing bowl and unveiling the cake from the oven in slow motion. As the camera cuts in tune with the music, she soothingly narrates not about measurements or temperatures but a lesson she learned from a past relationship: The best love comes from yourself, to yourself. Born in the late 1990s and raised in the age of social media influencers, Generation Z is TikTok's main user base and craves "authenticity," Lynzi said. Instead of selling products in her videos, she talks about growth, identity and "the decadence of everyday life" while cooking foods she loves, from Jamaican sweet potato pudding to plantain pie. It's all to promote the idea that "self-care is a practice, not a purchase." Lynzi, who lives in Los Angeles, has 84,600 followers. "I think what this generation is looking for is content that has soul — even if that is a recipe or skincare or beauty, we have to feel that there is a human behind it who goes through the same emotions as anyone else," said Lynzi, 29. On TikTok, "It's not, 'I'm here to put out this superficial image of myself that I want you all to aspire to.' It's like, 'Here's the real me and here's what I'm going through, and I would love for you to hear about it so we can have empathy and compassion for each other.'" Other TikTokers say they have also noticed a demand for the genuine. Jenny Martinez, a 47-year-old mother of four living in the L.A. area, acquired more than 2 million followers by posting simply shot videos of her preparing dishes from the Mexican recipes used by her parents, like spicy camarones a la diabla and calabacitas with pork carnitas. 
TikTok sensation Jenny Martinez demonstrates making birria tacos at her Norwalk home. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times) She's now a local superstar, sponsored by brands like Bounty, El Super and Weight Watchers, but the woman behind @jennymartinezzz has a full-time sales job and no formal culinary training. Her kids taught her how to use TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic. "People like the rawness of what I record; they see me as a regular person and say, 'You make it look so easy,' 'This is how my grandma used to do it,' 'I see your videos and I can smell home,'" Martinez said. "That's what touches me." 
Birria tacos prepared by Jenny Martinez. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times) If you've seen a video of someone making birria within the last year, it's quite possible it's because Martinez helped get it trending on TikTok in February 2020. Now, home cooks are dipping quesatacos in their homemade birria consommé on weeknights, and the #birria hashtag has been viewed more than 500 million times. For Martinez, this is confirmation that people use TikTok to learn. When she films trips to the supermarket, followers are eager to hear what brands she buys. When kids see her videos, they ask their parents to make her recipes for dinner. Martinez says she frequently receives videos of elementary schoolers enjoying her food and repeating her signature phrases, "Beautiful!" and "Listo!" 
Tacos prepared by Jenny Martinez. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times) Lynzi agrees that TikTok can be a great learning tool. With Syrian, Jamaican, Indian, French and Black heritage, she said she grew up in L.A. surrounded by "a mini United Nations" but realizes that not everyone else did. Because TikTok's algorithm allows users to see videos at random, she thinks the app could promote better cultural understanding. "I don't know that there are very many echo chambers on TikTok," Lynzi said. "They're like, 'Today we're gonna take you to Egypt, and then you're gonna learn about molecular biology and you're gonna learn how to make a Jamaican pineapple peel tea.' "Being able to see so many people's cultures readily in a normalized context — it's so different and it's so amazing."  |
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