Notes on things

These are the things that come up often…aren’t I nice to consolidate them? Nope! Just lazy as I don’t want to type them out every fucking time I talk about them.

Meat: When buying pieces of meat (other than ground meats) look for the oldest, brownest pieces that might even be on sale. Why, you ask? Because these are aged and will continue to do so in your refrigerator for the next week. What is aging (other than the slow decline into madness)? It’s the process where enzymes break down the meat as it sits around, or putrefaction…but boy does it make meat tasty. (Now if only human living tissue worked that way. The diet industry would be out billions.)

Wine: If you wouldn’t drink it don’t cook with it. What you put in is what you get out: crap wine will give you crap food. It also makes it way easier to sound fancy and “pair” your wine to your food. I mean if you used it for the risotto or a reduction then you know it will go with the dinner. If you have guests over they might be impressed. I don’t know your dinner guests. And why do you have dinner guests. We aren’t supposed to have people over anyway. It’s a fucking pandemic!

Butter: salted or unsalted, that is the question. The reason most chefs/recipes call for unsalted is because when butter is made you don’t know how much salt is used in the making. Different brands will have different salt levels. If you use unsalted you can control how much salt is going into the recipe.  This is important if you are trying to control your salt levels for health reasons or you are a fancy chef somewhere. I find that it doesn’t fucking matter for home cooking. (There an exception to this…baking needs chemical precision to work so salt levels matter more there.) Just don’t use margarine for the love of god.