Michael Ruhlman's Blog, page 60

Salon Service at Per Se

I hadn't planned this post but when my wife, Donna, started emailing these iPhone shots of the dishes she was served at per se yesterday at lunch I just had to put them up. First of all, Thomas Keller and his ace staff two years ago began offering dishes a la carte in their salon [...]

Pressure Cooker Beans 3 Ways At Once

The guest post on pressure cooking eggs was so popular, I've asked the blogger Laura Pazzaglia of hippressurecooking.com for more posts. Here she comes through with an innovative way to cook three different types of beans, each requiring different cooking methods, simultaneously in a pressure cooker. There's some whacky shit in here, like freezing the green [...]

Something To Say: Stupid Kitchen Tools

Nothing more to say (on this subject, anyway…). Thanks Todd and Diane for your amazing work and of course Amy Scattergood for her reason.   If you liked this post on Stupid Kitchen Tools, check out these other links: Todd and Diane's first Had Something To Say video. Preview my collection of kitchen tools that [...]

So You Want To Write a Cookbook

So so so many people tell me they have a cookbook to write, asking for advice, and I almost always do my best to discourage them, with Asian delicacy and Germanic firmness, I hope. Because I believe that there are too many cookbooks out there already and the ones so often published add nothing new. [...]

Kreplach (Dumplings)

My neighbor, Lois Baron, gave me a version of this recipe, which calls for roasting and braising a beef brisket. When I told her I intended to give it a shot using leftover pot roast she said, excellent idea! Kreplach, a great way to make use of leftovers. Kreplack are often called Jewish ravioli, a staple [...]

The Egg and the Pressure Cooker

This guest post is thanks to twitter, when someone asked me about pressure cooking eggs. I had never done them, but Laura Pazzaglia had. Laura is a pressure-cooker maniac living in Italy and blogging at hippressurecooking.com. My friend Annie LaG took her up on how to cook easy-peel hard-cooked eggs and pronounced them amazing. I [...]

How To Fry Chicken

Fried chicken, done right, is one of the best things to eat on earth. It's all about the proportions—crunchiness: juiciness: chewiness: savoriness. And this ratio hits golden proportions with the wing, lots of crunchy peppery surface area and sweet succulent meat. The study of fried chicken began for me in 2007 during discussions, observations and eating [...]

The Hidden Health Hazards of Lettuce

I know what it was that set me off today. A random article, out of the blue, I shouldn't even have read it. It referred to great food cooked with rendered fat as "early-grave food heaven." Why do people say stupid things like this? Because the media bombards us with the simplistic message that Fat [...]

Israeli Couscous with Butternut Squash

I almost never "do" recipes. I've written a book that if anything is an anti-recipe book. I set out on this culinary journey in part because, as I wrote in Making of a Chef, I sensed that recipes were nothing more than a tease, that the real cooking lay beneath the recipes. This is not [...]

Eastern North Carolina BBQ

With these last few posts on cooking for groups, it occurred to me that I should post one of my go-to, fabulously easy, always-gets-raves main course that serves a lot of people.  East Carolina barbecue, called pulled pork here up north. When I arrived at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, from Cleveland, Ohio, in [...]