kitchen skills
Pro Tips for the Home Cook
From skillet pasta to using your ears, five of our contributing chefs share some of their most essential tricks and dishes BY LIANNA MATT MCLERNON
HAVE A FOOLPROOF SIDE DISH. While plenty of people look to acclaimed chef and caterer Serena Bass for cooking advice, for roasted potatoes, she looks to her mother. Throughout this recipe are tips on how to peel the potatoes, cut even-sized pieces and more. By the end of it, you’ll have not only more knowledge but the perfect side dish to go along with roast beef, lamb or any roast meat with some gravy. 1. Start the day before you want to serve the potatoes. Pick uniformly sized and shaped Yukon Gold potatoes so you have an easier time cutting them into equal pieces. Trim the top and bottom of the potato off so you can hold it firmly. Using a potato peeler, remove the skin, top to bottom. Then, cut equal-sized chunks: Depending on the size, cut each potato either in half or cut off one third and cut the remaining potato in half. Put the cut potatoes in a big bowl of water as you peel them. 2. Transfer the potatoes to a large pot and cover by 1 inch with water—too much water dilutes the good potato flavor. Add salt until the water tastes like the sea. Bring to a simmer, not a boil, and cook until al dente, or half cooked. 3. Drain and tip out onto a sheet pan or rimmed baking sheet. When potatoes are cool, rough up all sides of each potato with a fork. Leave out on the counter overnight to let the water evaporate. 4. The next morning, before you roast them, drizzle with vegetable oil, dot with butter and sprinkle with salt. Roast at 400°F on the upper third of the oven for about 45 minutes. They should be a dark golden brown, creamy fluffy in the middle and very crisp on the outside. Flip the potatoes over with a metal spatula halfway through cooking. For more cooking advice from Serena Bass, head to serenabass.com, or try her food during your next trip to New York at the restaurant Lido.
BROADEN YOUR TASTE HORIZONS. Bruce Aidells is known for his meats (think more than 50 Aidells products including smoked sausage, meatballs and burgers plus his “Great Meat Cookbook”), but he didn’t get to where he is today without being a well-rounded chef. Some of his most useful skills in the kitchen include his sharp sense of smell, innate timer and being able to preliminarily judge how cooked a piece of meat is without using a thermometer. What he thinks will help every cook is a huge knowledge of flavors of spices. “Having cooked food from all over, that gives me a knowledge of all types of flavors and flavor combinations, what does and doesn’t work,” Aidells says. As one example, he points to soy sauce. Not only does he know that lemon juice and soy sauce are a great marinade combination, but he knows that soy sauce goes great in other styles of marinades, such as Mexican and Italian. If part one is knowing the flavor combinations, though, part two is knowing the balance. “You know someone’s going to ask me what separates a really well-made sausage from a mediocre one or one that’s poorly made,” Aidells says. “It’s balance, so that one [ingredient] doesn’t overpower the other.” For recipes and a taste of Aidells’ perfectly balanced meat products, visit aidells.com and facebook.com/bruce.aidells. PHOTOGRAPHY TERRY BRENNAN FOOD STYLING LARA MIKLASEVICS
6 real food fall 2020
