Sometimes I amuse myself by reading those tips in various magazines and cookbooks on the proper way to cook and bake, and I can barely repress snickers and sneers at some of the totally impractical suggestions they come up with. For your edification, I provide you with the following silly rules, and the obvious logical reasons why you should disregard them:
- You must gently spoon flour into the measuring cup, and then carefully level it off with the back of a knife, thus getting three implements dirty instead of one. Do not scoop it directly with the measuring cup, or you will compress the flour ever so slightly, causing you to end up with more flour than you need. (When you are scraping the excess flour off with the knife, of course, that will not compress the rest of the flour into the measuring cup quite so erroneously.) Ha! We all know that there are a very few such recipes out there in which a few grains of flour one way or the other makes all the difference in the world as to how the final texture turns out, but most recipes are flexible enough to stand the slight variation that the tiniest bit of compression would allow.
- You must break eggs into a bowl, one by one, before adding them to the melange in the mixing bowl. This will enable you to pick out bits of shell, should they fall in. Ha! And we all know that you can only pick eggshell out of a bowl that has only eggs in it, as opposed to a mixing bowl that has oil and butter and sugar in it as well! Eggshells that fall into mixing bowls instantly sink to the bottom of the batter, while they magically float on the top of raw eggs, thus allowing you to pick them out all the more easily! Right.
- You must melt chocolate in a double boiler. Now we all know that extreme heat does weird things to chocolate. So obviously, you're not going to want to melt chocolate over a boiling hot burner. But if you don't have a double-boiler (which, in my opinion, is one of those specialty items - like escargot forks - with a very narrow range of usefulness - actually, escargot forks probably come out ahead in the narrowness-of-usage-to-difficulty-of-storage/hassle-of accessibility ratio), and you don't want to bother rigging up a pot of boiling water atop which you balance a metal bowl in which to melt the chocolate, then you will find that melting chocolate in the microwave works like a charm. Really, it does.
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3 comments:
Actually, I almost always crack eggs into a separate bowl. It's not because of the shells, though; it's a holdover from when as a little kid we used to get eggs direct from a henhouse. Mom would always crack the eggs into a separate bowl in case one was rotten.
--DJ
LOL - this is scary to admit, but I must be a control freak when it comes to cooking. I spoon flour into a cup and level with a knife, but in my defense, I only do it if I'm making a cake or something sensitive. Those extra bits of flour can make a difference, really, they can. :)
I confess that I always use a double-boiler to melt chocolate....it's more "chef-like" than using the microwave. But I don't use a real double-boiler - a glass bowl on top of a pan of boiling water works great.
And as for the eggs....I do them one by one most of the time because once in a blue moon you'll get a bad one.
But then, I suppose if you saw all of my kitchen gizmos and gadgets you'd probably think I was OC. I even use those little prep dishes like they do on TV! And I LIKE it. Hee hee.
Darren: I grew up on a farm, so I have that same association, too. That's why it struck me as so funny to hear a cookbook warning against something so non-dire as eggshells in the batter, when the danger of dropping a dead chickie into the bowl seems so much more alarming to me.
My dear Jeanette, you are a perfectionist, and it's people like you that we WANT to have making the wedding cakes! =)
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