Cooking Like a TV Chef

Most of us would like to be better cooks. Most of us also have day jobs that occupy our time and most of our energy so we don't all have the ability or desire to attend culinary school. Nor do we generally have direct access to a top professional chef to oversee our efforts, provide instruction, and correct our mistakes. Our efforts to improve generally need to fall into our leisure activities: cooking, reading, or watching TV. Maybe we'll ask a friend with a particularly good barbecue sauce for his secret, but in general, if it's too much like work, well who wants more work at the end of a busy day. If, however, you're a famous actor/ director with a strong track record, you get to tell your company (the studio), that you'd like them to get you a top chef to train you and that you would like them to pay both of you. That is pretty much what Jon Favreau did with the 2014 movie Chef . I'm not going to review the movie, but I bring it up because it served as t...

The Larousse Gastronomique is a valuable addition to your kitchen library and, incidentally, makes a great gift for anyone who takes cooking seriously. Cooking, like any art-form or highly technical pursuit, comes with its own jargon, or terms which may be unfamiliar to those not formally trained.  Can you cook well without knowing these specialized words? Of course, but understanding the language used by the great chefs can make following and creating recipes much easier. The Gastronomique gives easy to understand explanations for thousands upon thousands of specialized cooking words. For example, if you go to a restaurant and have a dish called estouffade of beef and decide that you'd like to try to recreate it at home, it is helpful to know that "estouffade" means that the dish is stewed for along time. Armed with that knowledge, you'd plan for several hours of cooking time for this dish instead of getting caught short of time and going to plan B. The Larou...

Summer in the United States is barbecue season. Millions of home cooks fire up the grill, invite friends over, and cook outdoors. Whether it's a charcoal grill or a gas grill, the main point is to make a great show of putting some kind of meat over some kind of fire and proving one's outdoor skills to a gathering of family and friends. This recipe for barbecued shrimp is sure to delight your guests while offering something just a little more out of the ordinary than hamburgers and hot dogs. By placing the shrimp on skewers, you can bring the presentation level up a notch, but even without the skewers, they are sure to be a big hit. The sauce described below is my personal favorite basic sweet teriyaki. It is also great for beef or chicken. Yield: Four pounds of colossal shrimp makes 15-18 skewers with four shrimp per skewer. Your mileage may vary depending upon the size of the shrimp you use and the number of shrimp that you place on each skewer. Preparation: about 30 ...

In many of the television cooking competition reality shows, prospective chefs are tested on basic skills or made to perform repetitive tasks demonstrating that they are proficient at certain tasks. This could be something as simple as dicing an onion or something like shucking an oyster. Shucking oysters, in particular, has even been used as a team punishment for a team that lost the service on Hell's Kitchen. If you're not familiar with oysters, this can be a difficult task. Oysters have evolved for millions of years to prevent predators from getting their shells open. That protection is often quite effective against a novice chef. Fortunately, even novices are smarter than oysters and can learn to quickly shuck an oyster (remove it from the shell). First, oysters should be securely shut without broken shells. That's because they are still alive when you get them and should be holding the shell tightly closed with their abductor muscle. If the shell is open, the oys...

Great wines start with great grapes, but a serviceable wine can be made with grocery store ingredients and without special equipment. Photo by Brad Sylvester, all rights reserved. While many great dishes take a great deal of preparation and skill, some of the best home-cooking is relatively simple and made from simple ingredients. Home-made wine can be just as easy and can be made from common every day ingredients without any special equipment. We're not talking connoisseur level wine, but the end result is very drinkable and quite potent. Homemade wine is something many people want to try, but may seem too intimidating  to try on your own. This recipe is easy, cheap and nearly fool-proof. The best part is that like the little pop-up buttons on store bought turkeys, there's a nearly fool-proof indicator to let you know when that it's brewing properly and when the wine is complete and ready to taste. This recipe yields one gallon of a sweet white wine Equi...

Fiddlehead Ferns Photo by Brad Sylvester. Copyright 2012, all rights reserved. When one orders pesto in a restaurant, one expects the flavor of fresh basil. After all the classic basil pesto recipe is simply fresh basil, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, a little garlic, pine nuts, salt and pepper. Pesto, however, doesn't have to be made with basil. Parsley, cilantro, and a variety of fresh, flavorful greens can be used instead to provide twists on the classic pesto. Pesto, of course, is a thick sauce often used in place of tomato sauce on pasta, but also appropriate for many other dishes. It's great with chicken, with gnocchi, in place of mayo in a sandwich, with pork chops, in place of horseradish with beef, with fish or in almost any dish that can be enhanced by the addition of fresh garden flavors. Since it is springtime in New England, it is the only time of year that we can get fresh fiddlehead ferns. These are often available in the produce department of good grocery...

This is as close to canned mushroom soup as it gets in my kitchen. Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2012. Someone pointed me to a recipe for Egg Foo Yung sauce that consisted of mixing one can of mushroom soup with 3 tablespoons of soy sauce and then heating the mixture. I was appalled. In my kitchen, that doesn't qualify as a recipe, as cooking, or as egg foo yung sauce. I took it as a personal challenge, and came up with the following egg foo yung sauce recipe. First, let's get the spelling out of the way. I've seen this dish referred to as egg foo yung, egg fu yong, egg foo young and all possible permutations of fu, foo, yong, yung, and young. You can use whichever you prefer since it is simply someone's best judgment as to which sounds more like the original Chinese words from which the name is derived. For consistency, I'll use egg foo yung, throughout this blog. Egg foo yung is traditionally an egg dish containing vegetables and meats and fried in...

Wontons folded several different ways and arranged in a bamboo steamer basket Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2012. Do not copy. There are probably as many different wonton recipes as there are cooks in China. Like curries, every cook adds their own flair. Wontons make a great party appetizer or a component of a larger meal. They can also be used to make soup. Although they can be fried, I find that steamed wontons retain more of the flavor of the ingredients. My son was home from college for the holidays and requested that we make some of his favorite meals while he was home as a refresher from college food hall fare. Dad's wontons were on his list, so I took the opportunity to jot down my recipe and take a few photos of the process for this blog. A standard package of wonton wrappers from the grocery store contains about 52 wrappers, this recipe will give you enough filling for an entire package with a little safety margin which can be made into Asian meatballs. Won...

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...