(Part 2) Top products from r/seriouseats

It's pretty fun, because (1) there are endless new toys to acquire (if you're into that!), and (2) it's actually fairly budget-friendly after you get the initial hardware out of the way (ex. KitchenAid mixer etc.)...I mean, a 50-pound sack of flour is like twenty bucks, and you can make a zillion loaves of breads & cookies out of that! I do get a few premium ingredients for specific recipes here & there, but mostly I just use run-of-the-mill ingredients & get really great results!

It's also really fun amping up both the quality of your results & the experiencing of your cooking & baking time. For example, I cook these amazing five-hour carnitas in the oven, which is one of the things that got me into using leaf lard (which then turned into other incredible things, like lard-based oatmeal cookies). But then the off-the-shelf tortillas were disappointing with those stellar carnitas, so I picked up a cast-iron tortilla press (for smashing, not baking!). I then combined that with a lard-based tortilla recipe and oooooh yeah that's an awesome combination of textures, flavors, warmth, and happiness, hahaha! So going down rabbits holes is quite fun with baking!

I do a lot with my 8-cavity mini-loaf pan, which surprisingly freeze well! Banana bread & pumpkin bread with sweet cream cheese spread, cornbread, chocolate chocolate-chip bread, the list is endless! I also bake excellent homemade Twinkies in various flavors on a regular basis. I was never an overly-huge Twinkie fan, but one of my favorite bakeries makes them in a million flavors with a million different fillings & coatings (chocolate-dipped, white-chocolate dipped & dark-chocolate striped, peanut-butter filled chocolate twinkies, raspberry cake coated with coconut, etc.). So endless variations are also quite fun with baking!

If you want to build up your skills on the more technical side, Bigger Bolder Baking is a fantastic website to check out. If you want a few top-notch (I'm talking like "WOW!") recipes to try out right off the bat:

• Chocolate-chip cookies with this specific dark chocolate (only for very special occasions, because $$$)
  
• Glossy fudge brownies with this specific pan ($$$ but will last forever) & this particular cocoa powder ($$$, but the economics actually aren't bad, once you calculate out the price-per-batch, haha!)
  
• Sour-cream pancakes (without blueberries) - great way to test your Danish dough hook!
  
  You'll discover a lot of little tricks over time. For example, which those chocolate-chip cookies above, whipping the cream & sugar & butter & eggs into something that literally resembled whipped cream is a really great trick to know about...most people just stir those together until combined, but they will actually change color, texture, and consistency when whipped long enough! Side note, if you have a KitchenAid, I highly recommend getting a SideSwipe blade (available on Amazon, be sure to get the right blade for your mixer!).
  
  On that topic, I also recommend getting a coated dough hook & an 11-wire whisk. Wait until you try homemade marshmallows! (super easy with that whisk attachment!) When it gets cold out, I cut those bad boys into 2" chunks, skewer them, heat up some water for the delicious Stephen's hot cocoa powder mix, and then torch the marshmallows. That combination came out so good that I started hosting annual hot chocolate parties, lol!
  
  You can get as creative as you want to with baking, too...like with cakes, you can airbrush them, do drip cakes, mirror glaze cakes, you can torch the tops of cupcakes, make cake pops, the list is endless! Depending on what stage you're at in life, especially in my case as a working adult with a family, I don't get a lot of opportunity for creative outlets due to a lack of free time (and energy, tbh lol), but my family has to eat, and baking is a fun way to amp up your enjoyment in life by making cool stuff you can eat & having fun doing it!
  
  Plus pretty much everything is actually really easy, no matter how complicated it looks...you're just following someone else's step-by-step directions, that they have painstakingly figured out for you through probably dozens of iterations to get it perfect (as Stella did when perfecting her lacy brown-butter cookies!), and that mostly boils down to (1) mix stuff in a bowl, (2) bake it, (3) don't burn it, (4) let it cool down & "set". That little four-step process yields amazing no-knead bread, pan pizzas, twinkies, cookies, brownies, you name it!

Absolutely. Chris Bianco (the grand master of Neapolitan-style pizza in the US) has actually slowly expanded - he created Pane Bianco which his brother runs day to day and is the place that they create all the bread and doughs for his restaurants (they mill their own grains/flour themselves) and ended up creating a second location of that. He opened a second Pizzeria Bianco location (just as awesome) and then next door to that opened the best Italian restaurant in the city, Tratto.

The man is a machine. He put out a book too!

I love these.

I use a big floppy teflon spatula to smash them. I spray the underside of it with vegetable oil (a spritzer or the aerosol stuff works great here) so it doesnt stick to the patty when smashing. I press down on the spatula with this meat pounder to get good leverage.

I bought their book. Definitely worth the $10 price used many times over. It's a great reference along with Bittman's How to Cook Anything. I've perused a few issues of the magazines while at friend's houses and don't think that I would get more value if I had subscribed.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Best-Recipe-Cooks-Illustrated/dp/0936184744/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503484874&sr=8-1&keywords=best+recipe+cooks+illustrated

Corn tortillas are tricky, because once they are cooled down they lose their elasticity and become brittle, and heating them back up won't help. This is because a gel-like substance forms during the cooking, and the substance become solid when they cool. Once the gel is gone, heating will not restore it and you get brittle corn tortillas. So there are really two options for fresh tortillas:

1. Cook the corn tortillas ahead of time (same day) but keep them warm (around 120 F is good, above 110 F). This will keep them soft on pliable. But too long and they could dry out. I forget how long they'll last like this, but I'll try and remember to check when I get home and update.
   
   
2. Make homemade flour tortillas instead. Unlike corn, they will reheat quite well and will still be much tastier than a store bought corn tortilla. Can be a bit more time consuming because you roll them out instead of pressing them.
   
   
   All my comments are sourced from Tacos by Alex Stupak. It's the book I happen to be working through right now. And before he gets into any Taco recipes he spends a bunch of time on corn and flour tortillas.
   

> Way better than fumbling with a phone to time things.


Easier than saying hands-free, "Hey Siri, set timer for 27 minutes"?

FYI, if you do want a separate timer, Serious Eats recommends this $9 Polder unit:

https://www.amazon.com/Polder-898-90-Clock-Timer-Stopwatch/dp/B00004S4U7

Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish has given us the best pizza we've ever made. The dough is so effing good. Highly, highly recommend this book.

I've been making tons of these smashed burgers for the last few months. I don't think what you use to press the burgers matters that much as long as it is wide and flat and you use enough pressure, its going to be 99% the same.

In terms of scraping, you do want something that can definitely get between the burger and the surface to preserve all of the char on the burger. I recently bought this scraper from Amazon and it works perfect: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00004OCNJ/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Pick up a used copy of La Varenne Pratique from Amazon. This is really an amazing foundational book for skills and techniques.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/0517573830/ref=olp_f_usedVeryGood?ie=UTF8&f_all=true&f_usedLikeNew=true&f_usedVeryGood=true&qid=1522012846&sr=8-1

Yep! I'm about to order Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.

The code is good until Nov 28 at 11:59pm PST.

If you haven't already I would suggest picking up a copy of Feast by Sarah Copeland! I've heard good things about Plenty also but haven't had a chance to get that one yet.

I would also recommend Broad Fork and Nopi!

You're right. I misread/interpreted your previous comment.

> Kenji is a home cook because he develops recipes that are attainable to the relatively dedicated home cook

Thomas Keller released a cookbook designed for home cooks - Ad Hoc at Home. I still wouldn't call him a home cook. Chef implies a level of achievement - much like the title Dr. would. Do you start calling a Dr. a medic because he practices in the field instead of the hospital?

PS

SV can normally be had on sale for less than $100 (thankfully, I literally dropped and cracked my polyscience two weeks ago), and Modernist Cuisine has a home edition (it sucks, Ad Hoc at Home is many, many times better).

I’ve been canning a couple years now and have also dabbed in fermenting (Kim chi, sauerkraut). I’ve made SO many kinds of pickles via water bath canning - zucchini, carrot, okra, onions, beets, watermelon rind, green beans, radishes, and of course cucumbers. I have my own home garden so have pickled from that, and also pickled some veggies from my CSA.

My favorite canning book is this one:

Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving https://www.amazon.com/dp/0778801314/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_aaMPCbF9JT4E2

Any questions? Just ask!

Take a look at Bittman’s Kitchen Matrix. It uses photos to suggest different variations of ways to approach the same ingredient. It is about technique, ideas and improvisation rather than recipes — sounds like what you have in mind.

Mark Bittman's Kitchen Matrix: More Than 700 Simple Recipes and Techniques to Mix and Match for Endless Possibilities https://www.amazon.com/dp/0804188017/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_pRcUAbY9S4RM3

For those curious, the Archer book actually does have this recipe included in it

America's Test Kitchen recently started a kids club which sends recipes every month (not that cheap) and published The Complete Cookbook For Young Chefs, which is reasonably priced downright cheap ($8.01 on Amazon).

https://www.amazon.com/Sous-Vide-Home-Technique-Perfectly/dp/0399578064

My grandmother's. Or this. https://www.amazon.com/Land-Plenty-Treasury-Authentic-Sichuan/dp/0393051773

If you're torn on them do both. We bought some small little pie tins from the grocery store for our testing so that we didn't have to bake 20 full size pies. You could do disposable ones or something like these. Do some tests to figure out which filling and/or crust that you want.