Scrambling for answers. By Matt Preston

Judging by the feedback we received for the recent column giving answers to common cooking questions, you're hungry for solutions to these culinary dilemmas. So here are more ideas for solving seven of the biggest questions from the Aussie kitchen.

1. Can I make my scrambled eggs creamy without cream?

Yes, definitely. At the risk of offending some celebrity chefs, cream is just the lazy or ignorant cook's way of making scrambled eggs quickly creamy. Instead, just cook them slowly in a large frying pan stirring increasingly regularly as the eggs heat up with nothing more than a little splash of water. The idea here is to cook the eggs without setting the proteins, so your scrambled stays creamy without the addition of lashings of cream or butter. Not that these two aren't still a very pleasant addition.

2. How do I get perfect quinoa every time?

Pour a cup of quinoa into two cups of boiling stock or water and simmer for exactly 12 minutes. Then remove the pan from the heat, cover with a clean tea towel and a lid and leave to steam for a further 10 minutes. This should give you fluffy, slightly nutty, quinoa every time. A word of warning, always read the cooking instructions on the packet in case you've bought some sort of rogue quinoa!

3. How do I stop pasta sticking together?

You'll find a host of suggestions on the internet for solving this issue from the good (adding olive oil to your water) and the bad (rinsing your cooked pasta) to the plain ugly (the less than helpful advice of not overcooking your pasta so badly) The best solution is far simpler. Just drop your pasta into a pot containing loads of enthusiastically bubbling, boiling and well salted water. Give the pasta a stir and then add a large glass of cold water and stir well again. This should firm up the sticky surface starches of your pasta pieces so they don't stick together. Then cook as normal.

4. How do I cook kale?

Kale might have lost some of its cool veg cred to the likes of cauliflower and kohlrabi these days but there's still a load of people who wanted to know what to do with kale other than just roast it into "kale chips" or use it to wreck a perfectly good green juice of apple, cucumber and celery.

Cut out the stems and you can use the leaves like slightly more rugged spinach in lasagnes, frittatas or pies, or just slice it finely to serve raw in a salad with bold flavours like pink grapefruit, roast pumpkin, sugar cured salmon, or pickled sheets of celeriac or fennel.

If you want to cook it, pantoss ribbons of the leaves with hot olive oil and the crumbled filling of Italian pork and fennel sausages to make a chunky sauce to throw over robust pasta shapes, use it in a hearty Italian soup like ribollita (where Tuscan kale is traditionally found), or quickly blanche the leaves to slightly soften them and then blitz with toasted walnuts, parmesan, garlic and a little chilli to make an earthy kale pesto.

Whichever kale you choose, remember that the bitterness of kale (and all brassicas, like broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, actually) is that they love the mellowing presence of salt whether in the form of bacon, soy, a salty cheese or even just salty butter.

5. Does searing meat keep in the juices?

No, it doesn't. This is a common misconception - you'll sometimes notice juice escaping from the seared side of the steak when you cook the other side proving this as the lie that it is - but what searing does is bring some delicious secondary and almost caramelised flavours to any meat that is "browned" in the pan as part of the cooking process. So basically you sear and brown most meats before braising them to boost the yumminess of the end product.

6. Help - I always overcook my fish!

Fish is the most gentle of proteins so invest in a kitchen thermometer that will tell you when it's cooked. Basically it will be just cooked at 55C and overcooked at 70C. If you don't have a thermometer you can use a metal skewer or thin knifepoint as a ready reckoner. As with the thermometer, insert this into the thickest part of the fillet or fish, leave it there for a minute and then VERY CAREFULLY rest it against your lower lip. If it feels hot, you've overcooked the fish. If it feels cold, you've got some way to go. If it feels warm, you are about there.

7. What tool must every kitchen have?

While I swear by my chunky potato peelers, lemon reamers, silicon spatulas, mandolin, measuring cups and spoons - and taking it that you already have knives - the most valuable piece of kit I have is a long skinny $40 microplane. I use it for zesting lemons over braises to add brightness, quickly dealing with garlic cloves for recipes that call for it to be "minced" or "finely chopped", and for grating parmesan into a light fluffy cloud of shavings.

Source

Taste.com.au — April 2016

Author

Matt Preston