by Chef Ben Kelly | Aug 10, 2018 | Cooking Tips
If you are struggling with cooking, finding it difficult to make things taste good, maybe you’re trying too hard. If all you want is for things to be delicious, I’ve got you covered. There is no need to stress, no need to over think. All you need, is love.
I’ve talked a lot about simplicity. About not over complicating food. The problem is that to do this takes a lot of skill. Simplicity, oddly enough, is one of the most difficult things to master. All too often we think that in order to make something better we need to add more and more and more. When in reality, the solution is almost always less. So today, I am going to do my best to teach you how to make almost anything taste good with as few ingredients as possible.
The idea behind what I’m talking about today is embracing the natural flavours of food. We’re not making curries or any big bold flavours. We don’t want to cover up the flavours of the food. We want to highlight the natural flavours of our ingredients using as few additional ingredients as possible. When you stop trying to add ingredients to make things taste good you become a better cook.
So what’s the secret?
All you need is four or five ingredients. And these are likely things you already have on hand. It’s important that these ingredients be of the best quality you can afford. So what are they?
Salt –
When I talk about salt I am not talking about table salt. Table salt has iodine added to it and a harsh flavour which it can impart to your food. Invest in some coarse kosher salt, or sea salt. The flavours will be much cleaner.
Pepper –
When pepper is ground it starts to lose its flavour. Don’t by ground black pepper. Invest in a pepper mill and peppercorns. Again, you will get a much cleaner flavour.
Olive Oil –
Not all olive oil is olive oil. There is no regulation about naming olive oil. Often times, and with a lot of name brands what you actually get is a cheap, bitter oil with a bit of olive oil in it. This bitter oil will mess up the flavour of your food. Good olive oil should taste slightly like olive and pretty much nothing else. There should be no bitterness. So do some research and find a brand that is actual olive oil. Once you taste the real stuff you will never use anything else. Yes, good olive oil costs more than shitty olive oil. But it is absolutely worth the price. Having said that, you do not need to spend $20 on a bottle there are good quality oils out there that cost only slightly more than the shitty big brand ones.
Fresh Herbs –
Having fresh herbs on hand is a great way to easily impart flavour. The three that I most recommend always having around are parsley, thyme, and rosemary. These also happen to be the easiest to grow. Thyme and rosemary can be added to food while it’s cooking, where parsley should be added after food is cooked. Also, you don’t have to worry about chopping thyme or rosemary just throw a few whole sprigs into your food. You will still get the flavour through the release of the essential oils in the herbs.
Garlic –
The final item on the list is garlic. It should be self-explanatory. I use about three bulbs of garlic a week. It works with almost anything, it’s delicious, and it’s really good for you.
How does it all go together?
Let’s talk vegetables first. You can take almost any vegetable from zucchini to tomatoes, potatoes to parsnips and toss them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and thyme or rosemary. Roast them in the oven at 400°F for 30-45 minutes. Done. 
How much do you use?
For an entire baking sheet of vegetables, you want to use between 2-4 tbsp of olive oil, 4-5 sprigs of thyme or rosemary, and 1/4 tsp salt and pepper. You can always add more salt and pepper later as you need it.
Okay, let’s talk about meat.
You can take a whole chicken, rub it with olive oil, salt and pepper, and herbs, roast it at 400°F for 1 hour and 15 minutes or so. The same can be done with chicken legs, thighs, drumsticks, or wings just cook them for less time.
This same thechnique works really well for a pork or beef roast or even fish. The exact same process, exact same temperature. The only variable is time and they really depends on the size of the piece of meat and how you want it done.
Conclusion
Being a good cook is much more about knowing when you don’t need to add something rather than when you do. The techniques I described above are going to yield really good simple food. Cooking with such simplicity will help you develop as a cook and will you understand the flavours of the food.
The reason why this technique works with some many different things is that everything tastes different. Because everything tastes different the flavours interact with the few additional ingredients differently. This gives a wide variety of flavours with very little work.
by Chef Ben Kelly | Jul 30, 2018 | Cooking Tips
I saw an article yesterday titled “Do Canadians know enough about food safety? Survey says no.” The article talks about how “Canadians are becoming less aware of how to safely handle and prepare food…” This is startling but also not that surprising. Too many of us have become so disconnected from our food that it only makes sense we would also become disconnected from safe food handling practices. And so today’s post is all about The Basics Of Food Safety.
When we talk about food safety the focus is on the prevention of food-borne illness.
When we talk about food safety the focus is on the prevention of food-borne illness. Food-borne illness can be food poisoning, it could be getting E.Coli from unwashed vegetables, or it could be an illness caused by food contaminated with cleaners or metals. It really covers a broad spectrum. The idea is prevention.
We’ve all heard about E.Coli on lettuces and even recently salmonella in cheese crackers. It can be scary reading these headlines and knowing that there’s not really a lot an individual can do to prevent this. What you can prevent is in home contamination and mitigate the spread of bacteria.
We often think of food safety only really being important when it comes to meat. But really vegetables, because they are often eaten raw are just as likely if not more likely to make us sick. When it comes to vegetables washing them thoroughly is always a good idea. Make sure that any counter surfaces or cutting boards that come in contact with raw food, meat or vegetables, is washed and sanitized. And make sure that raw or cooked vegetables don’t come into contact with raw meat.
95% of all food-borne illness is caused by microorganisms.
95% of all food-borne illness is caused by microorganisms. First of all, we are surrounded, covered, and filled with microorganisms. Some are bad and can make us really sick, but a lot of them are good. Obviously, we want to prevent the spread of bad microorganisms. So, how do we do this? Cleanliness is a good place to start. Wash your hands before and after handling food. Make sure work surfaces are cleaned with hot soapy water and sanitized with a chemical sanitizer.
Temperature is an important factor in the prevention of food-borne illness and food safety in general. Between the temperatures of 5°C-60°C or 41°F-135°F is considered the temperature danger zone. Within this temperate range bacteria growth is optimized. Imagine you have a pot of stew that you leave out on the counter. Every 20 minutes or so the number of bacteria on the surface of the stew will double. That doesn’t sound too crazy but if you had 1 bacteria which doesn’t happen, by the end of four hours you would have 598, 824 bacteria. That’s why it is highly recommended that cooked foods be left out to cool for a maximum of two hours.
This doubling in bacteria growth is also why foods should not be defrosted at room temperature. If you leave a chicken on the counter to defrost, by the time the whole thing is defrosted, the surface will be contaminated. Defrost foods, in the fridge. If you need the food item in a hurry defrost it under cold running water.
Temperature is also obviously important when cooking. Foods can contain parasites that can make you sick. Cooking to the proper temperature is very important. This Link will take you to a Canadian Government website that you will show you a chart about the government recommended cooking temperatures for foods.
This may all seem fairly complicated, but here is the just of it. Keep everything clean. Wash vegetables. Cook things to the proper temperature. Don’t let cooked foods sit at room temperature for more than two hours. Defrost foods in the fridge. Don’t let cooked foods come into contact with raw foods, and don’t let raw vegetables come into contact with raw meat. Just as a reminder, keep everything clean.
Some of you are probably thinking that you have left pizza out overnight, or pots of soup and not gotten sick. Sure, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen or can’t happen. It just means it hasn’t happened yet. Elderly people, children, pregnant women, or sick people are especially susceptible to food-borne illnesses. So, just because you’re not getting sick because you’re healthy, doesn’t mean you aren’t going to make someone else sick.
by Chef Ben Kelly | Jul 23, 2018 | Cooking Tips
Happy Monday everyone. I thought I would start this week off with a few cooking tips that will brighten your week. Enjoy!
Rock Hard Avocado
There are few things worse than going to the grocery store to buy avocados only to find that they are all hard as a rock. Waiting two or three days for the avocados to ripen before you can make your guacamole is really annoying. Luckily, there is a quick tip that can take your avocado from rock hard to ready-to-guac overnight.
The secret is flour. Regular old all purpose flour. Take your avocados and completely submerge them in it. Don’t peel them or anything. They go in the flour completely whole. The reason this works is that there is an enzyme in the flour that speeds up the ripening process. When you are ready to use your avocados just give them a rinse in cold water and you are ready to go.
Sweet Corn
Corn on the cob is one of those great summertime treats. Covered in butter, salt and pepper, and eaten under the summer sun; there are few things better. But what if I told you that there was a way to make that sweet corn taste even better.
Generally, when we cook things in water we add salt. The raises the boiling temperature which ideally allows the water to stay at the boiling point when we add items to be cooked. This is true when we cook most things. However, corn and beans actually toughen when cooked with salt. When cooking corn on the cob rather than adding salt to the water, add sugar. Add the same amount of sugar as you normally would salt.
Adding sugar to the cooking water for corn will cause it to be more tender and flavourful. It will come away from the cob easier and overall will just be more delicious.
Preheat
One mistake that people often make when cooking is they don’t let things preheat. Whether it’s your oven, bbq, or pan, 99% of the time you want to preheat fully. There are a few different reasons for this.
Number 1. When searing meat or seafood in a pan or on a barbecue, preheating helps to prevent things from sticking. When a piece of meat or seafood hits the surface of a hot pan a brown crust will be formed.This is called the Maillard reaction. The amino acids in the meat are reacting with the heat of the pan and turning brown and forming a crust. This crust causes a release from the pan or grill making things not stick.
If you are cooking, and meat is sticking to the pan or grill chances are you didn’t let it heat up enough, or your trying to flip it too soon. Let the item sit for another minute or two and it should release on it’s own.
Number 2. When stir-frying vegetables the whole idea is to use high heat to cook quickly. It’s very important that the wok or pan be very hot when the vegetables go in. As the vegetables cook they release moisture. The pan needs to be hot enough that this moisture evaporates on contact or you will end up with a pool of liquid in the bottom of the pan. This will drastically cool the pan leading to more liquid coming out of the vegetables and more liquid pooling in the pan. Rather than having crisp yet tender stir-fried vegetables, you will have soggy boiled veg which is not what you want at all.
This principle this the same when cooking in the oven.
Cold Pan Crispy Bacon
This is one of the few exceptions to the above rule. When cooking bacon, if you want it really crispy but not burnt to a crisp, start it in a cold pan. By cold I just mean room temperature. No oil, nothing. Just bacon in a pan. Put the pan on the burner over medium low heat and let it do it’s thing.
What’s going to happen is that as the pan heats up, the fat from the bacon is going to be rendered. This just meats the fat will melt away from the bacon. The bacon will then slowly cook in it’s own fat. The temperature of the pan won’t reach a point where the bacon is going to burn. This technique will lead to bacon that crispy, delicious, and flavorful.
Lemons
Juicing citrus can be kind of a pain in the ass sometimes. Occasionally, it seems that you can squeeze until your hearts content and nothing is coming out. To get around this problem and maximize the amount of juice you can get out of your citrus there is a two step process.
*This works if you are juicing citrus by hand. If you have a machine then disregard this tip.
Step 1 – The first step is to roll the citrus between your hand and your counter. The idea is that you want to loosen the insides of the citrus. You don’t want to use too much force because the fruit can break open.
Step 2 – The second and final step is to cut the citrus north to south and off center rather than across the equator like would be normally done. Hopefully you can see what I mean from the crude diagram below. When you cut citrus like this you are working with the natural structure of the fruit rather than fighting against it. This cause the citrus to release way more juice than it normally would.
The first thing you want to do is cut off two sides. Then put the citrus down flat and cut of the two smaller side. Squeeze these four sides plus the middle part.
**Disclaimer** If you have any cuts on your hand this is going to sting like a son of a bitch but the citrus juice is actually very good for the cuts.
So there you go, five quick cooking tips to start your week off. I hope that you all have a great Monday and I will be back soon.
P.S. I’m going to take a second and shamelessly plug myself. If you live in or around Halifax, Nova Scotia and are looking for cooking classes, and if you are hosting a dinner party or family barbecue or something like that check out my other site https://www.chefbenkelly.com/ I may be just what your looking for.
Thanks everyone.
by Chef Ben Kelly | Jul 20, 2018 | Cooking Tips, Food and Culture
When I was a kid there were two things I hated above everything else. Carrots and Mushrooms. I learned to love carrots pretty quickly. Mushrooms, on the other hand, took me a very long time to learn to like. Everyone has things, be it from their childhood, or recent discoveries, that they don’t like. What I have discovered through my own journey and through the stories of other people is that turning a dislike into a like is more a matter of perspective than anything else.
The below list contains five commonly disliked foods. You may like some of the items on this list, or they may be on the list of things you hate. Every one of the below items has one main thing in common. They were all on my list of dislikes but I now love them. So, if I learned to love them, perhaps you could too.
Before I get into this I should answer one simple question. Why? Why should we try to learn to like foods that we don’t like? The answer is as simple as the question, we don’t know what we’re missing.
Eggplant
Eggplant or aubergine for our British friends is an odd little item. It can sometimes be tough and rubbery, but it can also be mushy and slimy. If you were born into an Italian, Chinese, or Middle Eastern Family you probably grew up eating eggplant. If you didn’t you probably have an aversion to it.
Eggplant is not something I grew up eating. I had never had it until I was about 15 or 16 and to be honest it wasn’t my favourite thing in the world for a while after that. Eggplant on its own can have an odd texture and bitter flavour but if you learn to cook it properly, this all goes away and what you are left with is something truly magical.
The first thing you have to think about with eggplant is the bitterness. There are two main ways to get rid of this unpleasant flavour. The first way is to cook it out. This is generally done when you want a more creamy texture. To do this you either put a whole eggplant on a bbq or over a fire. Or cut it in half, drizzle it with olive oil salt and pepper and roast it, face up in the oven. Cook it until the insides pretty much liquify. If using the bbq method remove the eggplant from the grill after about 45 minutes to an hour, cut in half and drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper.
The second technique is used for a firmer textured eggplant. If you were to make eggplant parm, for example, this is the technique you would use. Slice the eggplant into rounds about 1/4in to 1/2in thick. Take a sheet pan or cookie sheet and put down a layer of paper towel. Place the eggplant on the paper towel and season very generously with salt. Flip the eggplant and salt the other side. Cover with more paper towel and let sit for at least 30 minutes or up to 1 hour. After the set amount of time, rinse the eggplant under cold water, pat dry, and proceed to cook it however you would like.
This salting draws moisture out of the eggplant and removes a lot of the bitterness. Because so much moisture has been removed, the eggplant doesn’t go to mush when it’s cooked but holds it’s shape and texture.
Preparing eggplant in either of the above ways will yield flavours that you never thought possible from such an odd vegetable. You will find sweetness instead of bitterness. Silkiness instead of mushiness. And who knows, you may even enjoy it.
Mushrooms
For a very long time, I hate mushrooms. I hated them! It was more of a textural thing than flavour. I couldn’t stand to but the slimy, spongy little bastards in my mouth. It really has only been the last four years or so that I have started to enjoy and even love mushrooms. I do sometimes still have textural issues but more often than not I enjoy them.
How did I turn my hate and disdain for mushrooms in love and admiration?
When I was growing up we mostly had button mushrooms. Those little white jerks you see in the grocery store. My mom and I would forage for mushrooms but because I “hated” them I never really tried the ones we picked in the forest. What I realized later in life, was that I didn’t hate mushrooms, there are over 10000 species of mushrooms in North America alone, I couldn’t hate them all. What I hated were those little S.O.B.s from the grocery store. Those white little devils that taste of blandness, mustiness, regret, and horse shit.
I started branching out and trying different mushrooms. What I realized was that I really liked most of them. Some of the mushrooms I tried like lions mane for example was one of the best things I had ever eaten. Sauteed with a little butter, salt and pepper, it tasted just like a steak. Amazing!
For me, the secret to learning to like mushrooms was realizing that a mushroom is not just a mushroom. They all taste different, they all have different textures, and they are all better than those terrible little white things you get at the grocery store that are called mushrooms.
If you don’t like mushrooms, I suggest trying a variety you have never heard of before. Go to your local farmers market or Chinese Grocery Store and see what you’re missing. You will probably find one that you like and that will open the floodgates.
Olives
My experience with olives was similar to my experience with mushrooms. What I learned is that I don’t hate olives, I love olives. I hate shitty olives. Those little fisheye looking black olive rings you see on pizza or get out of a can, those are terrible. They taste bitter, salty, and awful.
I fell in love with olives when I had Bravo Spanish Olives from my local specialty grocery store. I liked them so much I sat down at ate almost the whole container. Remember, prior to this I hated olives. These didn’t taste like the olives I had tried before. These had actual flavour.
You probably can’t get the same kind of olive as I can but if you want to experiment with olives go to your local specialty grocery store and ask for some samples at the deli counter. They will be more than happy to oblige and your world will be blown open.
Once you discover what an olive can taste like, you will never go back to those little black rings again.
Brussels Sprouts
It’s hard to say whether I hated Brussels Sprouts because I actually hated them or because as a child tv and media told me I was supposed to. Whatever the reason I pretty much just refused to try them and on the rare occasion I did try them they had no seasoning, or butter, they were overcooked and pretty gross.
What I discovered as an adult is that when they are properly cooked, either roasted or boiled only to the point that they are tender, not mushy, they can be delicious.
Roasting Brussels Sprouts on high heat caramelizes the outside making them sweet and giving them a bit of crispness. All they need is olive oil, salt and pepper but if you wanted to add bacon and blue cheese to them you wouldn’t regret it.
Boiling them is fine as long as they aren’t overcooked. When boiling Brussels Sprouts there are two main things to remember.
Number 1. Don’t Cover Them.
Just like any green vegetable, covering them will lead to discolouration. When green vegetables are cooking they release a gas that if captured will discolour them. This is easy to prevent by not putting a lid on the pot. This discolouration will occur from overcooking or adding acid to the cooking liquid as well. A little vinegar or lemon juice goes very well with Brussels Sprouts but wait until the very last second to add it.
Number 2. Don’t Over Cook Them.
When cooking Brussels sprouts think of them as little potatoes. You want them to be fork tender, meaning a fork can easily be poked into them, but they should not be mushy or slimy. This is really important if you want to actually enjoy eating them.
If you are boiling them drain them, season them with salt and pepper, and add butter and lemon juice. This will make them even more delicious than the already naturally are.
Fish
Over the years I have nailed down three main reasons why people don’t like fish.
Number 1. It’s often overcooked.
Overcooked fish is disgusting. It has a weird texture, it’s dry, and it tastes terrible.
I live by the ocean. I have lived by the ocean for pretty much my whole life. Most of the people I know have also lived by the ocean for their entire lives. The majority of those people don’t like fish. It’s crazy to say, but a lot of people here hate fish. If you ask them why they will usually say it’s because how their mom used to cook it.
Fish, when cooked properly should be tender and moist. You should be able to break it up with your tongue, you shouldn’t have to chew it.
The thing that leads to overcooked fish is fear. People think that fish needs to be well done or they will get worms. Do you know how many people eat sushi every day and don’t get worms? If the salmon has a bit of translucency in the centre it isn’t going to hurt you. In fact, it is going to be even more delicious. Yes, you don’t want your fish to be raw most of the time, but overcooking will not make it any better.
Most fish cooks really quickly. A salmon fillet in a 400°f oven will take between 12-15 minutes depending on size. It will be even quicker if you sear it first. A pan-fried haddock fillet will only take 3-4 minutes per side.
Be much more afraid of overcooking your fish than undercooking it and you will be amazed at the difference in taste and texture.
Numer 2. It has a “fishy taste”
Most fish should never taste “fishy” If your fish smells fishy or tastes fishy it is old. It doesn’t mean it’s going to kill you, it’s just not as fresh as it could be. To avoid this I generally try not to buy fish from the grocery store. Whenever I do buy it there it is almost always old and smelly. I generally try to get it from small suppliers or from places I trust. Nothing will make you hate fish more than getting food poisoning from it.
By fish from fish stores. It will be fresh and they can always recommend delicious ways to prepare it.
Number 3. It has ‘bones”
Yup. It does. So does chicken, beef, pork, lamb, turkey, or any other animal. If you buy your fish at a fish store they will generally be happy to remove any bones.
I hope that this list inspires you to try at least one thing you don’t like. Because you rellly don’t know what you could be missing.
by Chef Ben Kelly | Jul 18, 2018 | Cooking Tips
Let’s start by explaining what an emulsification is and how it relates to cooking. An emulsification is a mixture of two or more liquids that normally wouldn’t mix. Think oil and water. This is done through the use of a binder or an emulsifier. In cooking, this could be mustard in any form or egg yolk.
Common items that are emulsifications include any well-made salad dressing, mayonnaise, hollandaise sauce, hot dogs, chocolate, homogenized milk, and butter. All of these items contain at least two substances that don’t mix naturally. They are held together with either an added stabilizer or by a stabilizing process.
I find that emulsifications are a pretty good place to start when teaching cooking. The concept of an emulsion is pretty complex and even explaining the process at times can be difficult. However, the actual application of the emulsion technique, when simplified to it’s most basic processes, is much less daunting than one might expect.
Let’s look at the process of how to build a simple vinaigrette.
A vinaigrette is an emulsion of oil and vinegar. This is generally accomplished with the use of mustard as the binder. It is actually a protein or string of proteins in the mustard called lecithin, not the mustard itself that binds the two liquids. This same string of proteins is found in egg yolks and soybeans. So you have oil, vinegar, and lecithin in a bowl but the emulsion breaks. What happened?
If you have ever made a salad dressing or otherwise mixed oil and vinegar it is likely that the two liquids have separated. If looked at it through a glass jar you would be able to see the oil floating on top of the vinegar or water. This is a separation of the two liquids. In terms of an emulsification, we refer to this as breaking or spitting. When an emulsion is properly formed it will hold together for a very a long time.
There are two main things to think about when building an oil and vinegar emulsification.
Number 1. The ratio of oil to vinegar.
Generally, for a basic vinaigrette, a ratio of 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar will create a nice texture and a slight tartness. For a thicker vinaigrette, a ratio of 4 parts oil to 1 part vinegar can be made. The extra oil causes a thicker dressing, which may seem counterintuitive. But because more oil droplets are suspended and dispersed throughout the vinegar the dressing gets a thicker creamier texture.
Imagine a room 3/4 full of coloured plastic balls. This room illustrates a standard 3:1 ratio. It’s a lot of balls. It is difficult to move around but not impossible. Now imagine the same room but so full of plastic balls that you couldn’t fit one more in. It would be much more difficult, if not impossible to move around. This second example illustrates a 4:1 ratio. The more oil you add the thicker the dressing will get. Does that make sense?
Number 2. The process of making the emulsion.
A strong emulsion is one that is made slowly.
Imagine the room from the above example. If you tried to fill the room with all the plastic balls at once it wouldn’t work. You would never be able to get them all through the door. You have to fill the room with a few plastic balls at a time. The same principle is true of building an emulsification.
The first step in the process is to mix the vinegar with the binder. Imagining that we want about 1 cup of vinaigrette we would mix 1/4 of vinegar with 1 tsp of mustard powder. The next step is to take our 3/4 cup oil and mix it into the vinegar and mustard. But, as we know from the plastic ball in the room example we can’t just pour all of the oil in and build a stable emulsification. We have to start slowly.
While whisking, we pour a few drops of oil in the vinegar and mustard mixture. We whisk until the oil has been fully incorporated into the vinegar. We know this has happened because there are no visible sheen or oil droplets. Once this first amount of oil is emulsified we add a bit more oil. We continue this process until all of the oil has been incorporated.
Other Emulsifications
The above process is pretty much the same for any type of emulsion. Let’s look at mayonnaise.
In mayonnaise, the emulsion is bound by lecithin in the egg yolk. As a back up there is often a bit of mustard added as well though this is mostly unnecessary. For the mayonnaise, we are going to use a ratio of 1:1 for the egg to oil and 4:1 for the oil to vinegar. This is 1 egg yolk, 1 cup of oil, and 1/4 cup of acid which may be just vinegar, just lemon juice, or a combination of the two.
Just like with the vinaigrette we start by mixing the egg yolk (the binder) with the vinegar or acid. From there we slowly start to whisk in the oil a few drops at a time.
The process is exactly the same for hollandaise sauce except the egg yolks are tempered with the vinegar (heated but not to the point of cooking) and clarified butter is used rather than oil.
Conclusion
Like I said in the opening, the process of making an emulsion is less complicated than the theory behind it. It is not the easiest thing in the world to do or master but it is not the most difficult either. Learn this one technique and you can make any kind of salad dressing you can imagine, homemade mayo, and of course the most decadent of all the sauces, hollandaise.
by Chef Ben Kelly | Jul 13, 2018 | Cooking Tips
I have taught a lot of people to cook over the past few years. In that time one thing that has struck me as more of a hindrance than anything else is people’s need to measure ingredients.
Unless you are baking, measuring is really subjective. The quicker you can change the way you think about cooking, ie. getting rid of the measuring cups, the quicker you will get better at cooking.
Cooking is just as much an art as it is a science. But it seems that people often forget about the art of it. They focus way too much on getting the exact measurements and not nearly enough on using their senses. Eating is obviously a very experiential process. Cooking should be the same. If someone only focuses on getting the measurements right they are missing the joy of the process.
There are two main problems with focusing so heavily on measurements. First of all, ingredients don’t always taste the same. A tomato is sweeter or more tart depending on a lot of factors. Onions and garlic may be stronger at different times of the year. What this means is that if you follow the same recipe four times a year, you will get four different tasting dishes. If instead, you learn to cook with relative measurements (eyeballing) and focus more on taste you can balance the dish to taste the same no matter when it’s cooked.
The second problem with focusing so heavily on measuring is that you will likely never learn to cook without using a recipe. Cooking without a recipe is when you really start to learn to cook. When you make dishes that taste good and look good without a recipe in front of you, that’s when you become a good cook. Anyone can follow a recipe. Cooking is about putting yourself into the dish. It’s about letting go of the constraints and letting your creativity run wild.
I understand that this is not for everyone and that it can be a scary idea to wrap your head around. You don’t want to mess up dinner. But here’s the thing. Focus on learning the basics and think through the process before you start cooking. If you are making something with ground beef you should already know that the beef needs to be browned to add flavour. If you are making tomato sauce knowing that a touch of sugar will take away some of the acidity will make it easier to balance.
To be clear what I am saying is that if you want to be a good cook. If you want to cook without recipes and without measuring, learn as much as you can. Read recipes as suggestions, not laws. Start by removing the measuring cups and eyeballing ingredients. A little extra of this or that isn’t going to change things nearly as much as you think. Learn as much as you can, enjoy the process.
When you get to the point where you can let go and just enjoy putting ingredients together, cooking becomes so much fun. It becomes something you desperately want to do rather than something you have to do. It can even become a form a meditation and a source of relaxation. That is what cooking should be. It should be fun. So, lose those measuring cups, start tasting as you cook, and enjoy the process just as much as you enjoy eating the outcome.
by Chef Ben Kelly | Jul 4, 2018 | Cooking Tips
I want to start this by saying that I am obviously not a doctor or a nutritionist, I am a chef. I am also someone who could stand to take his own advice a little bit more. So, in all honesty, I am writing this as much for you as I am for myself.
Alright, let’s talk about how to eat healthy and not die.
There are a few secrets to eating healthy that are really easy to master. They take little to no extra time and can drastically change your life. What are they and how can you eat healthy? Let’s get into it.
What does it mean to eat healthy?
The first thing you need to do is define what eating healthy means to you. This may seem odd but a lot of people have a lot of different views on this. To some, eating healthy means eating vegan, or gluten-free, or Keto, or only bananas. You have to figure out what it is to you. What are you trying to accomplish?
For me, eating healthy means not eating take-out more than once every few months. It means eating salads with simple vinaigrettes with most meals. Not eating too much candy (which is hard for me) but a little is okay here and there. Really, for me eating healthy is not about exclusion. It’s about balance and eating less, a lot less of those fatty, salty, sweet things that we all know and love.
I find when I tell myself that I am going to fully exclude something from my diet it’s all I can think about. My mind is consumed with the thought of eating it until I break and binge on it. If I allow myself little things once in a while I find I am much less likely to binge, and I think about it a lot less. That’s why I don’t generally fully exclude anything from my diet.
Dieting is bullshit.
I don’t believe in dieting. I think that it is a self-defeating term. It implies a temporary situation. Being on diet means that eventually, you won’t be. Eventually, you will go back to eating the things you did before, and the way you did before. This will put you right back to where you started. I believe that if you want to lose weight and keep it off, or if you want to do anything for that matter, it’s about lifestyle change. A diet is like a band-aid on a severed finger. Yeah, it might hold it together for a second but without someone fully changing that finger’s circumstances by sewing back together, it’s not going to change.
Cook, cook, COOK!
Another thing I strongly believe in is that if you cook at home rather than eating out you are already miles ahead of most people. Of course what you cook matters. If you are cooking fatty, salty foods every day it isn’t going to be good for you. But, it will still be better than for people who eat delivery three or four times a week. To
I honestly believe that the single greatest thing you can do to affect your health other than exercise is to learn to cook. Cooking gives you control over what you put in your body. It gives you complete knowledge of salt content, and fat content because you are the one adding those fatty and salty ingredients.
When you do cook, cook and eat more vegetables than anything else. This is something I have trouble with. I love meat. I love it a lot, and I have never been terribly adventurous when it comes to cooking vegetables. This is definitely something I have to work on. I was brought up on meat and potatoes and I recently realized that that is pretty much how I still eat. It’s time for a change.
I am setting a goal for myself to eat vegetarian once or twice a week and to eat way more vegetables with every meal. Vegetables that aren’t just soaked in butter and salt. That is my goal to get healthy. Not to temporarily alter my diet, but to change how I eat going forward.
What about you?
by Chef Ben Kelly | Jun 29, 2018 | Food and Culture
At first glance, it’s easy to assume that French Toast is just bread dipped in egg and fried. Ha, ha, ha! How wrong you are! Okay, well yes, that is what it is but it’s also so much more. So, what secrets could French Toast be hiding beneath that golden, syrup covered exterior? Well, nothing big…just the secret to life!
Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic but seriously, French Toast holds an important lesson for all of us. But before we get into it, let’s look at the origin story a little.
Where did French Toast Come From?
One might assume that French Toast originates in France. That’s a fair assumption but you’d be wrong. It was those crazy old Romans who invented it. The term French Toast didn’t appear in English until about the 17th century. I’m guessing it was the French that introduced it to the British and that’s why we call it French Toast.
Although the origin is interesting, I’m more interested (because it serves my point) in what the French call French Toast and why.
In France (and Quebec) French Toast is known as “pain perdu”. “Pain” means bread, and “perdu” means lost. So the French term for French Toast is “lost bread”. So what does lost bread mean? Well, dear reader, this is where it all comes together.
The term lost bread refers to the fact that the dish, French Toast or Pain Perdu, is traditionally made with stale bread. Bread that otherwise would have little to no use. Not that long ago there was no plastic to wrap bread in to keep it fresh and so the bread would go stale very quickly. They needed a way to use leftover bread so that they weren’t throwing money away and most people had an abundance of eggs as they raised their own chickens.
The dish itself is obviously very simple. Literally, a child can make it. But it’s the ingenuity that’s important to think about here. It’s the use of leftovers, and what you have in abundance to create something new and delicious. It’s about letting little to nothing go to waste.
I think that this is really important to keep in mind as grocery prices keep going up but our incomes stay the same. We all need to find ways to save money in the kitchen as food is generally one of our biggest expenses. And so, looking at leftovers, and odds and ends in your fridge in a different way can save you money and from wasting perfectly good food. I know that I could stand to look at things a little more like Pain Perdu. What about you?
by Chef Ben Kelly | Jun 25, 2018 | Cooking Tips
I was recently asked for advice on how to learn to cook without measuring ingredients. As I actually get asked about this a lot and so I thought a blog post about it would probably be a good idea. I think people are interested in this because they see chefs cooking without measuring and it looks cool. But, I should say before we start that even if it doesn’t look like we are measuring, we are kind of. We’ll get into that in a minute. In the meantime let’s talk about…
How you can learn to cook without measuring ingredients.
First and foremost it is really important to rely on all of your senses when cooking. This is generally true but even more important when cooking without measuring, or without a recipe for that matter. Obviously, your senses of taste and smell are paramount in cooking. However, don’t underestimate your other sense. Being able to tell if something is cooked with just a cursory glance is a very valuable skill. As is being able to tell at what stage in the cooking process something is just by how it sounds.
These skills are developed over a long period of time but you should have them in the back of your mind when cooking. Pay attention to everything that is happening not just the one thing you are doing in that specific second.
Measuring without measuring.
To say that chefs don’t measure ingredients isn’t entirely true. All chefs measure just about everything. The difference and the confusion come from the tools that are used. Where you may use a tablespoon I may use the cup of my hand. You use a teaspoon, I use the cup of my hand again but with less. If you use an eight or quarter teaspoon, I use a big pinch or a small pinch. When you use a cup, I may use a three-second pour. So, like I said, chefs measure we just use different tools.
George Martin, who was The Beatles record producer for most of their albums said that he never really cared if an instrument was tuned perfectly. He said that to him it was always much more important that the band be in tune with each other. If all of the instruments were slightly out of tune, but together, it worked. That’s kind of the idea. As long as all of the measurements are relative to each other, everything will be okay.
Build a relative framework.
Start building a relative framework by finding measuring tools and techniques that are similar. An easy way to start this is to measure out a tablespoon of something and dump it into the cup of your hand. Now you have a reference. You have a general idea of what a tablespoon looks like in relation to the size of your hand. Now do it with a tsp.
You can use the same principles for larger measurements as well. If you have a pot or a pan that you use more than most, get it out and pour one cup of water in it. Look at the volume of liquid in relation to the pot or pan. Do this for two cups. Then do it for one liter. Now you have that reference in your mind as well.
Cooking isn’t an exact science.
I don’t really like calling cooking an art. It sounds pretentious and makes it inaccessible. So, it’s not an art, but it’s also very much not a science. This is really important to keep in mind. When you get experienced at cooking you realize quickly that things change. I can’t remember who said it, and I think I’ve quoted it before but, “You never cook the same recipe twice.”. No matter how much you try nothing will ever be exactly the same as it was before.
No two tomatoes taste exactly the same. They have different sugar contents depending on the time of day they were picked, if it was sunny or overcast, and based on the soil they were grown in. Some can be more acidic than others or even have a higher moisture content. And to be clear I am talking about the same variety of tomato. Because of this, and this is true of all ingredients, treating cooking like a science experiment where every single measurement is exactly the same as before doesn’t work.
Measurements have to be tuned to the specific ingredients and circumstances. This is done through relative measurements, tasting, and smelling. This is how you learn to cook without really measuring anything, but also how to cook without a recipe.
Start building your relative framework and experience the joy of cooking without the stress of trying to make sure everything is measured perfectly.
by Chef Ben Kelly | Jun 22, 2018 | Food and Culture
It is officially summer! The sun is shining, a warm breeze is blowing, and in the fields, fruits and vegetables are growing. Summer is undoubtedly the best time of year when it comes to fresh produce. Yes, we can get pretty much anything we want year round. But I promise that a strawberry tastes a lot better in late August than it does in January.
Eating produce at the peak of its growing season means that you are getting it at its most nutritious, and its most delicious. That’s why it’s important to take advantage of everything the summer has to offer. This is the time of year to eat a lot of salads, a lot of fresh fruit, and a lot of vegetables. It’s the time of year to get creative with cooking.
When you are cooking vegetables at their freshest, the simplest techniques are always the best. Grilling, roasting, steaming, or just eating raw. Try to avoid boiling produce like carrots when they are at their peak. Really, you are just losing a lot of the nutrients in the water. Keep it simple. Let the fresh flavours stand out rather than covering them up.
Buy local as much as you can. This may mean going to your local farmers market, looking around your grocery store for local produce, or buying from farmer stalls on the sides of rural roads. This is important for a lot of different reasons. The three main reasons are:
- You are keeping money in the community and supporting local business.
- If you buy local your produce doesn’t have to be shipped across the country, the continent, or the world.
- It tastes way better because it didn’t have to be picked before it was ripe to be transported.
Like I said, take advantage of everything the next few months has to offer. From the warm weather to beach days, to barbecues, and of course to fresh local produce. Summer is an amazing time of year. Enjoy it!
