Michael Ruhlman's Blog, page 11

Please, Consider the Egg

  (First published in Finesse, Thomas Keller’s superb magazine, earlier this year.) In the 1970s, the egg was bad-for-you food in America. After being a mainstay of the human diet for millennia, doctors here decreed that the cholesterol-laden yolk clogged arteries and resulted in heart attacks. Eat an egg if you must, nutritionists warned, but only in limited quantities. And after 30 years of telling us to avoid eggs and order up those egg white omelettes, the American Heart Association changed its mind—oops!—and declared that eggs, like an unjustly punished child, could once again return to the dining table. As I began to write about the egg, I realized the egg fatwa was no isolated event. Indeed, it came to symbolize for me what was wrong with the way we think about food and how we let others decide what we eat. Read On »

The Boulevardier

  Happy Friday, all. Reposting this cocktail as I’ve been ordering it recently and enjoying it immensely. It remains a perfect cocktail for a chilly spring evening. I love how various flavoring components (bitters, vermouths) become different cocktails when you change the spirit. How the Manhattan becomes a Rob Roy when you change the bourbon to scotch (as opposed to a lame-sounding “Scotch Manhattan”), or how a Martini becomes a … um, never mind about that #lostcause (Paulius, can we hope for Darwinian selection here?). I love the elasticity of a solid cocktail, how the addition of apple brandy turns a Clover Club into a Pink Lady. Here, one of my favorite cocktails, the Negroni, becomes a Boulevardier when bourbon replaces the gin. A couple of recent essays (Tmagblog, Imbibe) have wondered why this cocktail isn’t Read On »

Bacon Time

  It’s bacon time again! I don’t know why but I’ve been getting a lot of bacon questions in my email recently, so thought I’d address a few issues I haven’t before. Of course, I’ve long commented on the fact that curing your own bacon is no more difficult than marinating a steak. Mix all the ingredients together and put them in a plastic bag with the meat. Use the recipe below. The aromatics, the bay leaves and everything else below can be considered optional. But there are other strategies. You could make a brine if you feel more comfortable with that. For those of you concerned about reaching the right salt and pink salt levels, you could use a technique called equilibrium brining, which I first read about in Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine. To Read On »

Mother’s Day Bundle

  Mom’s Day is important. Dads, sons, and daughters, undervalue it at your own peril. It’s May 8th. For those of you with wives and moms who love to cook, Mac Dalton and I have put together a special bundle we think all cooking moms will appreciate (no meat grinders and stuffers and smokers!). Moms, if you’re the ones reading this, feel free to send to husbands (we can be slow on the uptake). We’ve decided to include the bamboo scrubber for the giver of this gift—if Mom is doing the cooking, you’ll find this comes in handy after.   The Mom’s Day Bundle— 2 spankettes (the best wood spoons EVER) Badass (aka Egg) spoon A set of offset basting-tasting spoons A small bamboo scrubber (no more sponges gunked up with cheese, dough, egg, scorched milk!) An Read On »

Poached Beef Tenderloin

  Another dish I love from Ruhlman’s Twenty, is perfect for early spring when the nights (here at least) are still cool. I love it for its counter-intuitiveness—boiled beef tenderloin? Actual poached to rare and served in cooking liquid flavored by the root vegetables (celery and beef are always a great pair). But what makes this dish special is the lemon vinaigrette, seasoned with garlic, cracked coriander seeds (it’s fine to leave some seeds whole, as they give an intriguing crunch and flavor burst), and the amazing umami ingredient, fish sauce. I began making a version of this in the early 1990s after reading a similar recipe in The New York Times, but I can’t seem to find it. It’s important to use fresh beef stock; anything else would ruin the elegant flavor and texture of the Read On »

Shrimp & Grits

Reposting this method because, well, just the name of the dish is inspiring: butter-poached shrimp. Butter-poached shrimp and grits. Mmmm. Butter-poached lobster, not uncommon in French haute cuisine, was popularized in America by Thomas Keller in The French Laundry Cookbook and at that restaurant. “Lobster loves gentle heat,” he told me then. It’s not much of a leap for the thrifty-minded cook to reason that shrimp, too, love gentle heat. That’s why, in the butter chapter of my book Ruhlman’s Twenty, I showed how to use butter as a cooking medium (one of the many amazing ways butter can be used as a tool). This dish is absolutely killer. The shrimp stay very tender, rich and tasty with the butter; the grits are then enriched with the shrimp butter. Leftover butter can be used to saute shrimp Read On »

Leeks Vinaigrette

  This is one of my favorite bistro staples, which I feature in Ruhlman’s Twenty. The recipe uses a classic red wine vinaigrette. Pairing it with a member of the onion family, abundant shallots, results in a great bistro dish, the preparation showcases the power of red wine vinaigrette to illuminate cooked cold vegetables. The quality of the vinegar is critical, so its worth buying a good one. The vinaigrette can also be made with a good Spanish sherry vinegar.   Leeks Vinaigrette Serves 4 4 large leeks or 8 small leeks 1/4 cup/60 milliliters red wine vinegar 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard 1 tablespoon honey Kosher salt Freshly ground black pepper 3/4 cup/180 milliliters canola oil 1/4 cup/170 grams minced shallots 4 hard-boiled eggs, yolks and whites finely chopped 1 tablespoon sliced fresh chives Trim the roots Read On »

Homemade Corned Beef

  Never pass up an excuse to corn beef. Start now for St. Patrick’s day dinner. Or for whenever. The cure takes five days so plan ahead. I recently got a question about curing it at room temperature. The brine is a nearly 10 percent salt solution so I imagine it would be fine for five days. Also remember that after it’s cured you can keep it refrigerated for about a week before cooking. And you could keep it indefinitely in the fridge in the brine, but you’d have to be sure to cook the salt out of it after. Any cut of beef can be “corned.” (See my pastrami short ribs.) But the best cuts are the tougher, less-expensive cuts such as brisket. The only uncommon ingredient is the sodium nitrite, pink salt, available here, Read On »

Hawaii

  Just back from fabulous trip to Hawaii on a magazine assignment. Such a great time, wanted to share some iPhone shots. Top: Opah, at the Honolulu fish auction. Terribly shabby view from my hotel in Maui, the Andaz resort; breakfast at Lee Anne Wong’s Koko Head Cafe (garlic rice, beef patty, mushroom gravy, egg). Below Adam Watten of the soon-to-be-opened Hanai, a market and eating venue, standing at his makeshift smoker; Lee Anne Wong with chef Mark Noguchi; a farmers’ market on Kauai; Watten’s menu for the night he cooked for a group of us; chickens on the beach in Kauai, where the birds run wild all over the island. The Papahana Kuaola, a restoration site on Oahu; soursop fruit at farmers’ market; the biggest Spam display I’ve ever seen; smoke roasted baby pig from Read On »

Steak “Florentine”

When I’m in NYC, I live in a studio in the West Village with a teensy kitchen. I see why New Yorkers don’t cook more often. But I’m trying to develop strategies for cooking for one in tight quarters (and keeping a journal about it). This means one-pan meals (my go-to pan is a 12″ cast iron skillet), and dishes that result in a second and third left-over meal. The first, on a frigid weekend night, was a simple milk-based bolognese (diced San Marzonos added late). The next day I asked a friend what I should cook next and she said immediately “Steak Florentine!” There seems to be no agreed-on specifics as to what this dish is. I presumed it involved spinach. But no. It seems only to designate a steak from particular Florentine breeds Read On »