Submitted by crimfan on Tue, 01/05/2010 - 11:04am
Of course I'm far from the first person to discover them---being a Mediterranean staple and all---and in fact I've been using them for years but I guess recently I reflected on how much of a little flavor bomb even one of these is. Fresh tomatoes are nice but they tend to be pretty crummy out of season, whereas drying captures (and intensifies) the flavor at its peak.
Submitted by Stuart Broz on Fri, 05/22/2009 - 9:58pm
Submitted by Stuart Broz on Mon, 05/18/2009 - 12:03am
As I've mentioned before, I don't really read cookbooks for the recipes. Instead, I read them for the tips, techniques, and thought processes that they contain. By this standard Eric Gower's The Breakaway Cook is a great cookbook. This isn't to say that the recipes in it aren't worthwhile, but the real gems here are in the first fifty or so pages of information on ingredients and techniques.
Submitted by Stuart Broz on Fri, 03/20/2009 - 7:39am
Along with sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, umami is one of the five primary flavors that humans can detect via receptor cells on their tongue. The term umami was coined in 1908 by Dr. Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University, who was investigating the active ingredients in kelp that lead to the savory taste of dashi broth, a staple of Japanese cuisine. This lead him to isolating monosodium glutamate (MSG) as the chemical responsible for that taste. The Ajinmoto company was created to market MSG.
Submitted by Stuart Broz on Wed, 02/18/2009 - 12:00pm
One of the things chefs often strive for is building strong, pure flavors. Some of the techniques they use to accomplish this are easy enough that anyone can do them at home. Other techniques require some ingenuity, but we can handle that. Right?
