Tips Archives – Page 9 of 11 – Cooking Clarified

Blind Bake

Blind baking is cooking a pie crust before adding a filling. Blind bake if your filling either doesn’t require cooking or if your filling will cook faster than your crust. Blind baking prevents crusts from […]

How to Read a Recipe | Recipe-Reading Tips

Learning how to read a recipe is the first and most important step in cooking (this was one of my first posts), especially if you’re preparing something for the first time. Recipe Reading Tips A […]

Are You My (Mother) Sauce? | 5 Mother Sauces

The five mother sauces are the base sauces from which most other cooked sauces are made. By incorporating additional ingredients into a mother sauce, you can create numerous small or compound sauces. Let’s start at […]

Crowd Control | Don’t Overcrowd Your Pan

There’s a scene in the movie Julie & Julia where Julie realizes she’s been cooking mushrooms the wrong way her entire life. This is not uncommon. Like most people, she’d been piling her pan high […]

Rest Meat & Poultry After Cooking | Let it Rest

Tell me I’m not the only one who’s ever pulled a piece of meat or poultry out of the oven or off the grill, sliced into it and then wondered why my cutting board was […]

Knife Skills Tip | Size Matters on the Cutting Board

When I was in cooking school, we spent many a day practicing our knife skills. For every new cut we learned — from bruniose to macedoine to julienne — we diced and chopped our way […]

Room Temperature

Many recipes for cakes, cookies and other treats call for butter and eggs at room temperature. Here’s why. Eggs at room temperature combine more easily with other ingredients and they whip to a greater volume, […]