Kitchen Skills

Pro Tips for the Home Cook

From skillet pasta to using your ears, five of our contributing chefs share some of their most essential tricks and dishes

BY LIANNA MATT MCLERNON

HAVE A FOOLPROOF SIDE DISH. While plenty of people look to acclaimed chef and caterer Serena Bass for cooking advice, for roasted potatoes, she looks to her mother. Throughout this recipe are tips on how to peel the potatoes, cut even-sized pieces and more. By the end of it, you’ll have not only more knowledge but the perfect side dish to go along with roast beef, lamb or any roast meat with some gravy. 1. Start the day before you want to serve the potatoes. Pick uniformly sized and shaped Yukon Gold potatoes so you have an easier time cutting them into equal pieces. Trim the top and bottom of the potato off so you can hold it firmly. Using a potato peeler, remove the skin, top to bottom. Then, cut equal-sized chunks: Depending on the size, cut each potato either in half or cut off one third and cut the remaining potato in half. Put the cut potatoes in a big bowl of water as you peel them. 2. Transfer the potatoes to a large pot and cover by 1 inch with water—too much water dilutes the good potato flavor. Add salt until the water tastes like the sea. Bring to a simmer, not a boil, and cook until al dente, or half cooked. 3. Drain and tip out onto a sheet pan or rimmed baking sheet. When potatoes are cool, rough up all sides of each potato with a fork. Leave out on the counter overnight to let the water evaporate. 4. The next morning, before you roast them, drizzle with vegetable oil, dot with butter and sprinkle with salt. Roast at 400°F on the upper third of the oven for about 45 minutes. They should be a dark golden brown, creamy fluffy in the middle and very crisp on the outside. Flip the potatoes over with a metal spatula halfway through cooking. For more cooking advice from Serena Bass, head to serenabass.com, or try her food during your next trip to New York at the restaurant Lido.

BROADEN YOUR TASTE HORIZONS. Bruce Aidells

is known for his meats (think more than 50 Aidells products including smoked sausage, meatballs and burgers plus his “Great Meat Cookbook”), but he didn’t get to where he is today without being a well-rounded chef. Some of his most useful skills in the kitchen include his sharp sense of smell, innate timer and being able to preliminarily judge how cooked a piece of meat is without using a thermometer. What he thinks will help every cook is a huge knowledge of flavors of spices.

“Having cooked food from all over, that gives me a knowledge of all types of flavors and flavor combinations, what does and doesn’t work,” Aidells says. As one example, he points to soy sauce. Not only does he know that lemon juice and soy sauce are a great marinade combination, but he knows that soy sauce goes great in other styles of marinades, such as Mexican and Italian.

If part one is knowing the flavor combinations, though, part two is knowing the balance. “You know someone’s going to ask me what separates a really well-made sausage from a mediocre one or one that’s poorly made,” Aidells says. “It’s balance, so that one [ingredient] doesn’t overpower the other.” For recipes and a taste of Aidells’ perfectly balanced meat products, visit aidells.com and facebook.com/bruce.aidells.

KNOW HOW TO MAKE A QUICK, DELICIOUS DINNER.

Cookbook author, teacher and recipe developer Molly Stevens has dived deep into dinner with her latest book, “All About Dinner: Simple Meals, Expert Advice,” and one of her favorite options is a skillet pasta. As Stevens says, skillet pasta isn’t a technical term; it’s the process of sautéing onions and vegetables in olive oil or butter, adding just-cooked pasta to a mediumhot pan and tossing it. (Make sure to use a skillet large enough to accommodate the pasta and the other ingredients!)

“For a meaty version, start by cooking a bit of sausage or cured pork and setting it aside for adding back later. Then sauté onion and garlic (or other alliums) until tender, followed by shredded greens or quick-cooking vegetables (mushrooms and bell peppers are especially good),” Stevens suggests. “You can also add precooked vegetables (blanched cauliflower or broccoli or roasted squash) and/or leftover cooked meats (think shredded roast chicken or pork).”

Once all of that is set, boil the pasta until just under al dente. Add the pasta and one scoop of the pasta cooking water to the skillet, and off you go to a fantastic dinner. Just remember: Unlike other pasta dishes, don’t rinse the pasta. When putting it in the skillet, Stevens says, “You want it hot with drops of starchy cooking water clinging to it.”

For a complete list of Molly Stevens’ cookbooks, classes, articles and recipes, go to mollystevenscooks.com.

TAKE A MOMENT TO LISTEN. “We use our senses when we cook,” says cookbook author and James Beard winner Roy Finamore. “We look at food. We smell it. We taste it. We prod it to see if it’s cooked. I think it’s important we listen as well.” Finamore first learned the lesson from his grandmother when he was 12 or 13, and while people can use their sense of hearing for anything from grilling to baking, he says it can be most useful when you sauté or deep fry.

Finamore says, “You want to hear a good sizzle right away when you lower a breaded cutlet into a skillet or when you add chunks of meat to brown for a stew. It can be difficult to see if the oil is shimmering—a good sign that it’s ready—but you can always hear that sizzle. Without it, you’re not going to get proper browning. And when you start paying attention, you’ll hear the difference between just right and too hot.”

The same goes with deep frying. “You see and hear the furious bubbles when we lower a piece of chicken or sliced potatoes into a big pot of very hot oil. That’s from the water in whatever you’re frying. As the food cooks, the water evaporates, and the bubbles get quieter.” Explore Finamore’s recipes and cookbooks such as “Tasty” and “One Potato, Two Potato” at his website, tastycentral.com.

CREATE FLAVOR COMPLEXITY WITH BROTHS.

Jason Ross, our regular Kitchen Skills contributor and instructor at Saint Paul College’s Institute of Culinary Arts, can list off a multitude of skills that are useful in the kitchen: knife skills, knowing how to use a thermometer, using a scale for precise baking. What you can really play around with, though, is building flavor through broth and sauces.

“A lot of my meals at home start with a deep-sided pot and some kind of either vegetable or meat that is browned with flavors that might be onions, garlic, peppers and tomato product,” Ross says. This is the start for stews, soups, broths, stocks, braises, roasts or even rice that packs a lot of punch. All you need to do is put it on the stove and let it be for a while.

Ross says that a common mistake people make is setting the heat too high or too low. It’s all about checking in with the broth: If it’s starting to foam, take it off the heat for a second and turn the heat down. It’s easier to tell if a broth is too low (as Ross says, “There’s not much action in the pan”), and besides taking a long time to cook, vegetables can acquire a squishy or slimy quality. Find Jason Ross on Twitter at @chefjasonross or in the classroom at Saint Paul College. 