Basics

While I wouldn’t visit France just to eat there, it’s a lot of fun to go to a branch of L’Entrecôte. If you go, there are effectively no choices. You get a green salad, fries, and steak with sauce....

Great stock makes such a big difference to a dish. With good stock, your soups and sauces will taste so much better. While I’ve sketched out a specific recipe here, it’s pretty flexible....

Take it from someone who learned the hard way: tomatillos are very much not green (under-ripe) tomatoes. They’re a completely different product with a different flavor. Tomatillos also have a lot more pectin than tomatoes, which gives this salsa nice body....

While I don’t totally understand the soft matter physics at work, this is easily the best and, importantly, easiest tart base to work with. This is an unsweetened shortcrust pastry. That tends to lend it to savory tarts, but it can also work for a very sweet filling....

This is a great basic brioche recipe I’ve taken from my favorite YouTube channel on baking. There are million different ways to take this dough and turn it into bread. I’ll outline some here in the method below, but this is hardly exhaustive....

Confusingly, the words for sauce and green are identical in Spanish and Italian. This sauce is the Italian salsa verde. I’ll keep saying this over and over: don’t let the anchovies put you off....

A vinaigrette (as well as the mayonnaise and the aïoli) is an emulsion. That is, a mixture of two liquids that are otherwise difficult to combine. In this case, that’s the vinegar, which is mostly water, with the oil....

After doing some research, I decided to use this recipe from Nish Kitchen as a starting point. For the current version, I made some changes (i.e., omitted or substituted ingredients) based on what I had on hand....

This is the dough to make viennoiserie, risen buttery concoctions like croissants and pains au chocolat. It’s incredibly fiddly to say the least. One essential step: get the best — by which I mean highest fat content — butter you can find....

Credit where credit is due: I got this from Ken Forkish of Ken’s Artisan Pizza in Portland. It’s one of my favorite pizza places. Sadly I don’t have a wood-burning oven at home....