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Beef Doneness Temperatures

The FDA warns against consuming undercooked food, especially for those with immune deficiencies, children and the elderly. For the rest of us, here are the temperatures for beef doneness.

Correct Cooking Temperatures

All food products have a minimum safe internal temperature. These temperatures have been developed to stop the transmition of food bourne illnesses and have been writen specifically for children, the elderly and those with immune deficiencies. Keeping that in mind, it is important to check your cooked food with a thermometer to insure the temperatures match those listed below when cooking for those with immune difficiencies, or who are elderly as well as young children. However, the only temperature that should never be broken is that for chicken. Use your best judgement for other things, but remember if you don't follow the guidelines, your chances of getting sick increase.

*click here for rare, edium rare, etc cooking temperature for beef.

Finding Fresh Fish
The easiest way to tell if a fish is fresh, be it whole or fileted, it by smell. A fish should smell vaguely of the sea, not fishy. If this confuses you, think of the smell of sushi. If you're buying a whole fish, your jobs gets easier, as there are several other areas to look at. The eyes should be bright and round, not hazy and sunken. The lungs, if present, should be bright red. Often, a fishmonger will pull out the lungs while cleaning the fish, so if they're missing, no worries. If you're buying a whole fish and the head is missing, think again. The fishmonger doesn't want to you see the tell-tale signs of an old fish!

Forcemeat
Forcemeat, a variation of the word farcemeat, it a stuffing made of gound meat and highly spiced. The most common application is in sausages, where the forcemeat is stuffed in a casing. It's also common to stuff poultry, veal, and even seafood.

Gorgonzola Picante v. Gorgonzola Dolce

There are two main types of Gorgonzola, an Italian blue cheese from the region of Piedmont. Gorgonzola Picante is firm and quite spicy – hence it's name, litterally "spicy", while the Dolce, which means "sweet" in Italian, is creamy, sweeter and less pungent.

mis en place (MEEZ ahn plahs)

French for "everything in its place," mis en place is the practice of having all your ingredients measured, cut, peeled, etc and all of your bowls, pots and pans ready before you begin cooking. This is a great habit to get yourself into, and one of the hardest for people like me to learn. Once you've got it, though, you're never running out to the store mid-recipe when you find you're a tablespoon short on butter or you forgot to buy limes. It's not an overstatement to say it's the center of a great cook's universe.

Pasting

Surely you've seen garlic paste or anchovy paste at your local supermarket before. When recipes calll for garlic or anchovy paste, it's just as easy to make at home as to buy in the store, and it saves you from buying that can of paste that'll just languish in the frige. pTo paste all you need it coarse salt, minced garlic or anchovy filet and a chef's knife. Drop a pinch of salt over your miced filet or clove and use the flat of the knife at a 10 degree angle to mash the salt into the clove or filet. Repeat several times until it becomes paste. It should take less than a minute and allows the anchovy or gralic's flavor to more easily spread throughout the food.

Prosciutto

Prosciutto is a salt-cured, air dried, pressed ham that has been a staple of Itallian food for centuries. The most well known of which is Prosciutto di Parma, a salty tangy and dry prosciutto which is best served uncooked. Another less common Italian is Prosciutto San Danielle, which is also best served uncooked. If you are going to cook prosciutto, save your money on the real Italian stuff and buy the cheaper, less complex domestic version. Cooking chnages the taste of prosciutto, so why pay bug buck if it's going to lose it's taste?

Roux (ROO)

A roux is the key element in French flour bound sauces. It is equal parts flour and milk that is cooked to varying darknesses for different purposes. There are actually 3 different thicknesses for a roux, 1 tablespoon of flour and fat per cup of liquid for a soup, 2 tablespoons per cup for a sauce and 3 tablespoons for a souflé. Once a roux is made, the liquid is poured into the roux and whisked to incorporate the roux entirely into the liquid. The mixture is brought to a boil to cause the starch to thicken to its fullest, and presto, a starch thickened sauce!

Salted Boiling Water – Method for Perfect Pasta

The trick to any pasta sauce is how you cook your pasta. Make sure you salt the water – it should taste like sea water. When the water comes to a heavy boil (there shouldn't just be small bubbles here), add your pasta and cook until al dente. It's important to remember that the pasta will continue to cook after it has been taken out of the water, so pasta that is on the verge of being overcooked before strained will certainly be over cooked after. After straining, return the pasta to the pot in which you cooked it, add the pasta and toss to coat. Perfect pasta!