I'm cooking really badly at the moment

Now that I've inherited a dishwasher and I can just throw a bunch of empty small prep bowls in the top rack, I can look a big meal's worth of meez and say "nyah nyah"

Salt and acid (lemon, vinegar) will fix just about any blandness imo. Also something for subtle umami (couple of drops of Worcester or fish sauce, or some anchovy).

I lurve my prep bowls except they aren't big enough for piles of chopped veg so I use an extra dinner plate for groups of everything I'm going to add.

I know they say about "authentic" Italian food that the grandmas who make it don't even use cutting boards, they just cut things up over the bowl with a paring knife, but fuck it, I gotta be ready.

mr veg found these tiny little stainless steel plates? dishes? about the size of the palm of yr hand that are perfect for spice meez :D

http://www.surlatable.com/product/PRO-190188/Sur-La-Table-Sets-of-Five-Prep-Bowls

meez?

meal prep steez?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place

'read more than I talk to people or watch tv' pronunciation curse strikes again

pretty sure my mom suffers from the same thing since she calls it her 'mice on place'

as do did I

Might start calling it my mice on plates, just because.

i don't usually call it anything
don't even think i've ever said it out loud, in fact!

I usually just refer to it as "prep" and resent it for taking longer than the actual cooking.

I learned the term from that first Bourdain article in the New Yorker, way back in prehistory or 2000, whichever came first.

I learned it from Bourdain too

I only say it online or to Mr Veg bc I think I sound cooler that way

*hangs head*

Today my potato leek soup was sort of bland and last night my made from scratch spaghetti sauce that I roasted tomatoes for was also sort of bland. I've been using salt while cooking, fresh herbs, and making everything from quality ingredients, where am I going wrong?

overcooking no doubt

I love saying it out loud. Meez. MEEEEEEZZZZZZ. Got my meez, gonna turn it into an omelette. Like the "makin' copies" guy from SNL.

sausages should be boiled in beer - you don't need to cook them that much over boiling so if you cover them on a skillet with just enough water to cover the point where the sausage touches the skillet (so like 1/4 cup or less), beer or anything not oil-based in the bottom of the skillet, and cover it, the steam temperature will be plenty to cook it, then sear with a super-hot grill pan for not very long with the window open, voila not too much smoke. depending on shape/size of grill pan you could do boath in the same pan when the boiling stuff has sizzled off into nothingness

also the thing about salt is that you don't just add it arbitrarily at certain parts of the cooking

you want to add salt when you want to tenderize meat, so for example in a soup stock you would cook with salt, but throw out the vegetables, because the salt destroys the cell walls of the vegetables

OTOH you want to do that to finished vegetables, so sea salt on top of your finished vegetables is important

my advice to learn how to use salt is to read good recipes and follow them precisely, and you'll get a a sense of when and how much salt to add

salt pulls juices out of vegetables, so if they're quite dry, like eggplant, you start with salt, but if they're wet, like tomatoes, don't add salt until the end

etc etc etc

sausages boiled in beer? that is almost as crazy as duck boiled in coke. definitely giving it a go.

they're more steamed in beer than boiled

the alcohol tenderizes the skin, the even heat keeps the sausage from cracking and spilling its delicious juice too early

if you want the burned juices crust do that at the last second by mashing into dry sizzling skillet/grill pan with a fork (gently)

i took joycean pleasure in writing that btw

is that steaming thing applicable to already-cooked sausages?

overcooking no doubt
I was under the impression the longer you cook a sauce or soup on low heat, the more the bring out the flavors?

now i want sausages
xps

and beer

brats dude

I was under the impression the longer you cook a sauce or soup on low heat, the more the bring out the flavors?

each flavor cooks at a different heat

each flavor needs to be cooked a certain amount to be coaxed out of the food

for example, penne alla vodka:

cook the onions on super high heat for one minute, then slowly on medium with constant movement for five to six

that's a classic onion preparation but the idea is puncture the cell walls, five or six minutes of letting the cells sweat out the water and let everything else cook down into sweeter sugars

then you raise the heat to nuclear (oil should be splattering everywhere) and then the tomatoes go sliding in. similar idea, break the cell walls you even let them start to uh, not burn or crisp, i forget the word, really kinda dehydrate and then you add the vodka and it sucks up the heat by vaporizing and in the meantime it chemically cures the tomato, which you keep on high simmer while the pasta cooks just to dehydrate. and then adding the unrinsed salty pasta to the cooked-down tomato (as the pasta finishes) adds the salt that finally breaks down the remaining cell walls of the tomato, inside which the tomato sugars are caramelizing, and the salted pasta grabs the oily tomato sauce and the boiling water stuck to the pasta loosens the tomato-tomato molecule bonds so it's nice and creamy (or something)

so the point is not low or high heat, it's just dependent on what you're making

now that's a sauce, not a soup

but with a soup i think you generally want to bring to boil for same reasons, and then cook for like an hour or two on a simmer, and then TOSS everything in there and start again on medium heat, adding the things you want to cook in roughly order of time it takes to cook them, then simmer high at the end super briefly if you're adding anything back in (like chicken from the soup stock) and let cool.

otherwise what you're talking about is making a stock and not a soup, if you're starting a soup with stock then you could cook briefly at high simmer or slowly on low simmer depending on what you are trying to do w/ each vegetable / grain / meat texture

when i say TOSS i mean DISCARD everything that's been slow cooking for 1-2 hours, or if it's stern stuff that takes 1-2 hrs to cook perhaps blend, but that would be some seriously tough veg

you may want to experiment with starting off salty and never adding any more salt until finished, that's traditional in italy i think

also in a stock you add the spices (except salt) after the boil, i think, because you don't want to break down their flavor by cooking at boiling heat, and the aromatics go in the soup proper and not the stock (say cilantro) so don't slow cook away the aromas!

That's one of the most informative postings I have read on ilx, thanks!

all i did is just get some *simple* books (like nigel slater level) and followed them religiously and after awhile you get the sense of timing of heat and salt and that's kinda it to cooking

welp

it's like i just learned a new language.

the language of heat

literally cooking is all salt and heat! (and acid and oil i guess)

one of my favorite exercises is the thai flavor wheel:

start w/ a pinch of chili, then taste a drop of lime, which cuts the oil, then a taste of salty to break down the acidity and further cut the oil, then sweet to bring out and balance the salty (not sure what sweet was, maybe a bit of palm sugar or coconut milk

then to make a curry you do the same thing in different order, to make soup you do a different order, to do salad you do a different order (salad iirc was garlic + salt + chili -> add lime -> add sugar -> add fish sauce (aromatic) finish)

so that's the originary vocabulary for thai cooking, i think every cuisine has an equivalent (french has oil or egg or cream, lemon or vinegar, onion and garlic, italians have different oils and vinegars)

i think cooking as a kind of math actually

You're not wrong. I think that's why I love it so.

See I dont, really! I wing everything with instinct. Tho I guess I do think about reactions and whatnot. So, chemistry rather than math for me.

you mean amounts or the temperatures and order in which you the parts of a curry or whatever?

i prob do things more instinctively too, but then i tend to loosely follow recipes and only really improvise when i'm sure.

I mean reactions and heat and stuff, its hard to explain. I know when something's brown enough/caramelized enough/soft enough/flavoursome enough somehow?

from looking and feeling

that's experience too

I think there are very generally sensory cue-driven people and precise science-driven people when it comes to cooking. I'm in the former camp, but I respect the latter if that approach works for them. You just have to figure out what works for you (ie experience).

hey i paid way more attention to / thought about how heat and salt work and made the best version of a dish (my own recipe) i've ever made last night. thank u late great and thread!