Basic Cooking Tips

This method of chopping an onion is a little different than most of the "cooking experts" teach, but it's what served me well through too many years in restaurant kitchens.

Safety first--always use the knuckle of the hand that holds the food to guide your knife, keeping the ends of your fingers curled back a bit so that they're out of the way.

First cut off both ends of the onion, then stand it on one of the flat ends and cut it in half. Remove the skin (and clean up all the little bits that flake off--they try to get everywhere). Lay each half down on its cut face and make three cuts parallel to the cut-off end (or more, for a finer dice)--see the top picture.

Keeping the slices together, turn the onion and make two more cuts from the outside toward the center (second picture). Now flip the remaining quarter so that you can make the last cut at the same angle as the first, as in the third picture (lefties just reverse the cut angle).

Technically, broth is made from meat and stock is made from bones. In the sort of cooking I'm discussing here they're interchangeable. It's best, of course, to make your own, but that's beyond the scope of this section.

Canned broth is perfectly acceptable, though you may want to look for the "reduced sodium" version (especially if you'll be adding salt in any other form to the dish).

If you don't have either available, you can substitute an equivalent amount of water with about 2 tsp of the appropriate flavor soup base per cup.

NOTE that soup base is NOT the same thing as bullion. Bullion comes either in cubes or in a dry powder, and it doesn't have a lot of flavor beyond salt overload. Soup base, on the other hand, is an oily, gritty paste. It's still inferior to real broth (or stock), but it's vastly superior to bullion. It's a bit harder to find, but worth the trouble.

To make a gravy or a stew, you need to thicken the liquid beyond the original watery consistency. Though there are other choices, I'm only going to discuss the two most common thickening agents here.

Cornstarch

Cornstarch makes as somewhat "clearer" end product than flour, and is a bit easier to use. Nonetheless, it has to be handled correctly in order to do the job. If it's added dry to hot liquid, it just clumps. Add the cornstarch to about half a cup of cold water and stir to mix well. This makes a suspension, or "slurry". This is frequently called "dissolving" the corn starch, but if it were truly dissolved it wouldn't settle out. If it does, just mix it up again before you add it to the hot liquid and stir, still cooking, until the mixture is thickened.

Flour

Flour is a little trickier to handle than cornstarch, but it adds a distinctive body to the results that just can't be achieved otherwise. The two main ways to prepare it are with a slurry or as a roux.

Slurry

Flour doesn't mix with water nearly as easily as cornstarch does. Rather than trying to stir the two together, you need to use a shaker jar. You can buy a special plastic shaker with "vanes" in the ends to aid dispersion (and I do recommend them if you can find one), or you can use any jar with a tight-fitting lid. Fill the jar no more than half full with approximately equal parts flour and water (by volume--just eyeball it). Put in the water first, then the flour, then close the lid and shake. And shake. And shake. You need to break up all the lumps of dry flour at this stage, or they'll just make lumps in your sauce. Pour the slurry into your hot sauce and return to a full boil, stirring constantly.

Roux

The other way to handle flour is to make a roux. This is a cooked mixture of flour and fat, usually butter. Cut a stick of butter into slices and melt in a small skillet over low heat. Add an equal amount of flour by weight (again, with practice you can eyeball this), and stir together with a whisk. Continue cooking, AND STIRRING, until the roux has stopped bubbling and is just starting to turn golden. As you gain experience with roux you can experiment with cooking it a little longer, but be careful not to let it burn. A darker roux will impart a nutty flavor, but won't thicken the sauce quite as effectively as a lighter one. As with the slurry, add to your hot liquid and return it to a boil, stirring constantly.

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