Cooking Like a TV Chef

To a large extent, I think our food preferences are dictated by the foods of our childhood. That's not to say we can't learn to love foods that we never tasted until adulthood, but I think when it comes down to comfort food, we hearken back to foods that are associated with comfortable memories of our early years. For me, there are two particular culinary memories that I recall. Both involve my grandmother, who was born in 1911 and lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. She was, let's say, more than a little frugal. One of the first food memories that I have was a coffee can full of used grease, bacon grease mostly, that my grandmother kept. Whenever she fried anything or needed to grease a pan (except for baking, of course), she would take the can out from the storage bin under the stove and spoon out a big portion of grease. Likewise, whenever she cooked bacon or hamburgers or anything that left grease in the pan, it would be poured into the coffee can ...

As the latest season of "The Next Food Network Star" comes to a close, I just wanted to take a minute to highlight the difference between a Food Network Star and the average good home chef. Both of the finalists on the television show are what I would call niche cooks. Jeff is the self-styled "sandwich king" who says you can turn any sandwich into a meal and any meal into a sandwich. Susie's Food Network show concept is "Spice it Up," a show about adding a little extra flare to traditional Mexican cooking.  Those are great concepts for television shows or cookbooks, but each represents only a single facet of what a good cook delivers at home. We all make sandwiches and learning how to turn leftovers into a sandwich for lunch the next day is a skill we'd all love to have. Let's face it though, if we served sandwiches for every meal, we'd face a dining room rebellion before too long. Similarly, Susie brings her Mexican heritage to the kitch...

Basic crème br û l é e, ready to serve Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011, all rights reserved One of the advantages of being a TV chef is that you generally have access to every kitchen appliance and gadget known to man. Most of us who cook at home for friends and family simply don’t have all of the high tech gear we see on shows like Iron Chef .  There are, however, a number of inexpensive gadgets that we can accumulate over time, which can help us to prepare and present our dishes like a TV chef or like a top quality restaurant. For example, if you watch many cooking shows, you’ve undoubtedly seen one or more TV chefs using a torch. Although it is possible with considerable practice to use a blow torch from the tool shed to achieve the same effect. The size and extreme heat of such a large torch makes it unwieldy, dangerous, and difficult to control, especially for delicate dishes like the restaurant dessert classic crème br û l é e. Sifting through the infr...

On the second night, Hell’s Kitchen started with a grilling challenge. Each team was divided into pairs and asked to cook four pieces of meat to different levels of doneness: one each at medium-rare, medium, medium-well, and well-done. In the end, it came down to Will who needed a perfect four for four in order to score the victory for the men’s team. Will was working alone because the men’s team had an odd number of members after losing Steven on the prior episode. Will came through with the perfect score. The women’s team was left to clean the grills used in the challenge and for lunch they were fed pureed beef. The meat cooked in the challenge was thrown in the blender and then served in a glass for lunch. Later they took delivery of a full side of beef to be completely broken down. The winning team, meanwhile, took a private jet to Palm Springs where they had a luxurious lunch with Gordon Ramsay who offered them advice on winning hell’s Kitchen. As most of the women prepared for th...

Black truffles Photo by Arpingstone, Wikimedia Commons On MasterChef, the remaining home cooks were asked to cook with an ingredient that few home chefs have the opportunity to use: black truffles. I have never cooked with black truffles, and it was pretty clear that few of the home cooks on MasterChef had used it either. Truffles are a kind of fungus, so it was the first instinct of some to use them as they would other more common kinds of mushrooms and use them to flavor steak. As I said, I haven’t cooked with a black truffle, but I have had truffle dishes at restaurants. The winning dish of this MasterChef challenge was in fact quite similar to a ravioli truffle dish that I have had before. Experience, even having eaten a particular ingredient before trying to cook with it, definitely helps. I can sympathize with the cooks on MasterChef. Outside of television reality cooking shows, few of us would ever cook with an ingredient for the first time when we have important guests....

After watching the premiere episode of season 9 of Hell’s Kitchen, I’m ready to separate most of the contestants into one of two categories: Those who have no chance of winning Hell’s Kitchen and those who have a shot at the prize of a $250,000 salary as head chef of BLT Steak in New York City. True to form, Chef Gordon Ramsay is using the first few challenges on Hell’s Kitchen to humble the contestants. He seems to set them up to fail, in order to make them doubt themselves. In the premiere episode he began sitting people out early in the show, short-staffing the men’s team. As food failed to pass Ramsay’s inspection and was sent to the trash bin instead of the restaurant tables, diners began walking out of the newly redesigned Hell’s Kitchen restaurant in Los Angeles and Ramsay shut the kitchen down. That increases the heat in the kitchen so to speak. Extra pressure, people feeling like they need to be defensive and are in danger of losing, or being humiliated tends to make people ag...

Hell’s Kitchen Season 9 premieres tonight, July 18, on Fox at 8:00pm ET/ 7:00 CT. The show will once again take 18 cooking professionals of differing skills and pit them against one another in a series of cooking challenges. Most of the challenges are done in teams and the winning team gets rewarded. The losing team has one member sent home, and the rest of the team gets punished, usually with some onerous kitchen task. This year, says the Fox Promo site , the losers “will be required to decorate for a high school reunion, take delivery of and butcher an entire side of beef, create ice sculptures and put together an entire children's playground for family night.” Hell's Kitchen Contestants For season 9 of Hell’s Kitchen, the 18 contestants are: Amanda Colello, Brendan Heavey, Carrie Keep, Chino Chang, Elise Wims, Elizabeth Bianchi, Gina Melcher, Jamie Gregorich, Jason Zepaltas, Jennifer Normant, Jonathan Plumley, Krupa Patel, Monterray Keys, Natalie Blake, Paul Nieermann, S...

Chef Gordon Ramsay of Hell's Kitchen , MasterChef  and several other television cooking shows, is best known for his blustering, profanity laced tirades at novice chefs who have made errors. It's hard to see how that really helps people improve, but I did actually learn something useful from Gordon Ramsay. On the show MasterChef , Ramsay takes a group of home chefs and, through a series of challenges, teaches those who survive the gauntlet to become restaurant quality chefs. As you might expect when the average home cook is asked to prepare restaurant dishes with which they may or may not be familiar, mistakes are made. While the contestants are trying to cook, Gordon Ramsay and the other two MasterChef judges Graham Elliot and Joe Bastianich, walk around the cooking stations pointing out obvious errors and asking the cooks such confidence-building questions as "Are you sure that's what you want to do?" At any rate, getting to the point of this post, on one p...