"techniques" news and stories

Do you love to cook and want to learn more about it, but don't really have the time or inclination to go to culinary school? Maybe you just need to fill in some of the gaps in your self-taught education. There's a new online resource that could really be for you.

Called Rouxbe (pronounced roo be), this wesite offers cooking lessons, short video tips, and step by step video recipes. One aspect I really like about Rouxbe is that it focuses on technique but then supplies a recipe to go along with that technique. That is exactly like culinary school. There, you learn a technique and are then expected to be able to apply that to any recipe that you come accross. There's also a store and a community/forum section.

You have two basic membership options: free or premium, which is $99 for one year or $199 for a lifetime membership. The free membership level will get you access to text recipes and the drill-downs (videos featuring techniques and tips), and you get recipe previews and one free cooking lesson. To get full recipes and access to all cooking lessons you have to get the premium membership. Sure, it's no substitute for culinary school if you have career ambitions, but $99 is quite reasonable for an online culinary school if you really want to get cooking.

[Via Accidental Hedonist]

Though there are a a lot of different things for Super Bowl parties, there are a few that will, without a doubt, make an appearance at every Super Bowl party this weekend -- beer to drink, tortilla chips and salsa for snacking, and as a "main" dish, some sort of chili. If you're hosting a Super Bowl party and chili isn't on your menu, why are you depriving your guests?!?!

There are a lot of recipes out there for chili - heck, we have at least a dozen here on Slashfood - and a lot of opinions about what makes the "best" chili. Ground beef or steak? Beans or no beans? Tomato-base or beef stock? The reality is that chili is more of a technique combined with any permutation of meat and vegetables, rather than a specific recipe. Last weekend, I made a Steak Chili in my brand new slow cooker, and though I had several recipes nearby as reference, I ended up doing everything based on my personal tastes. Here's the step-by-step of what I did, along with suggestions and explanations so you can make your own.

While browsing del.icio.us the other day I came across a link to WikiHow page on tasting dark chocolate. There are 11 suggested steps to getting the most out of your chocolate tasting experience. The first encourages you to "mute all kinds of background noise, such as television, music, a crying baby, etc." (Will someone please mute the baby?) After that comes palate cleansing and several tips for taking in the aroma, visual appearance and texture of the chocolate. There is also a list of suggested brands, in case you want to do some side-by-side comparisons.

It is difficult to tell when a steak is done simply by looking at it unless you like your meat very, very rare or very, very well-done. The cooking times given in recipes, if given at all, tend to be vague because the temperatures that our grills and stoves work at can vary so widely. For example, a dial set to "medium heat"  on one stove might actually produce as large a flame as "high heat" in another kitchen. Cutting meat open once at the end of cooking isn't a big deal, but if you need to keep checking the interior of the meat, you can lose a lot of the cooking juices. The best way to check if the meat is done is by using a meat thermometer (125F for rare, 135F for medium, and 155F for well-done, according to Real Simple), but you can also use your hand as a reference and determine the doneness from the firmness of the meat.

I labeled a diagram of a hand, above, to identify the reference points. Simply press the labeled spots on your hand. They correspond with the following levels of doneness:

1. Rare meat should feel soft and offer little resistance to pressure.
2. Medium meat should feel firm, but with a little bit of give to it. The less give, the more well-done the piece will be.
3. Well done meat should also feel firm, but will have only minimal give to it.

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We've all done it before--eaten at our computer. Perhaps we sneak a bagel in at work, or a muffin, or even a crunchy oatmeal bar. But have you ever tried cleaning your keyboard after years of crumbs have accumulated? It's not a pretty sight. TechRepublic has an article nominating the worst foods to eat while typing at your computer. Some of the winners were jelly, seeds, pasta, and flake bars. I'm sure there are even worse things to eat over a keyboard than what they missed, like chips.

At the end, they talk about some tips to clean your keyboard, including canned air, vacuuming, and using a dishwasher. What are some of your techniques to get out those pesky little crumbs?

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