The BBS Cookbook

craft
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Most recipes I have are fundamentally simple, except for One Weird Trick that usually turns people off from making it. Seriously, if I have one sekret ingredient but have access to a mirepoix/roux/glace and a torch/cast iron/Chinoise /seasoned hardwood, anything is possible.

Some of my favorites.

Take any one vegetable that isn’t insanely bitter, and sauté till super soft but not brown. Cauliflower works wonderfully. Add a light stock, puree, push through a Chinoise, thicken with roux, adjust for salt, and served warm+ with toasted baguette.

Brine a pork loin in salt, Prague powder, a little sugar, and sage for a week. Confit in the oven with 2/3 lard 1/3 duck fat for six or eight hours. Do your best Hannibal lecter impressions and make jokes about Long Pig while serving.

Sautee freshly sliced mushrooms of good quality (not those white pieces of shit from the store) in a pan with a tiny amount of fat of your choice. When they reduce by half, add a tsp of red Miso paste, stir, cut the heat, wait a few minutes, and eat from the pan.

Onion jam. I’m not even gonna give a recipe, those two words are all you need.

Roast chicken. Virtually every roast chicken you’ve had is an abomination. My eyes were opened to the sublimeness of roast chicken in 2000 at a Wolfgang puck restaurant, but it wasn’t until years later that I learned Thomas Keller had ripped off my recipe. Okay, that’s harsh, but we both got to the same place independently. Again, not going to give a recipe, this one you have to earn. But one difference is I always stuff with a bruised, overripe, pricked lemon before trussing.

The secret to a world class risotto, and this may cause a flame war, is Go Easy On The Cheese and Soupy Is Better. The flavor of the rice and stock should shine, herbs second, and asiago/part/reg after that. Risotto should never be sticky, it should be velvety.

Paella is a different beast altogether. After cooking rice for decades (well, two and a half) the idea of a rice crust–i.e. the soccarat–felt primally wrong. But beyond the toppings by a mile if you don’t have a good, crusty, but none burnt soccarat, you don’t have a paella. The only advice I can give is Start Simple, and Start Thin. Cast iron works as well as a paella pan, no need for a unitasker.

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22

That’s because very, very few people have had balsamic vinegar so good you can drizzle it on chocolate cake and actually like it more.

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23

I normally hate cooking chicken. It’s mostly that my hands get cold breaking it down and I don’t like worrying about salmonella. Also the dog liked getting in the trash and I had to go out to the garage just to throw out chicken bits when I ended up with too little to make stock.

BUT, this sounds good and easy and exactly the kind of thing to add to this week’s menu!

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I was a vegetarian during my early adulthood. Once I started including meat in my diet (and by ‘meat’ I mean fish), it took me several years before I was comfortable handling raw chicken. Experiencing salmonella reset my comfort level back to zero. Now if I buy raw chicken, it goes straight from packaging to Pyrex roasting pan. Only chicken that is fully cooked ever sees a knife and cutting board in my kitchen.

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Dice parsnips into small cubes (1cm or so). Fry in butter til brown and crispy (it is surprising just how much butter they will absorb), then season & add some good chicken stock and reduce til they’re sticky. There will be none left. Even people who don’t like parsnips like these parsnips.

Apropos onion jam, may I present to you The 45 Minute Sausage Sandwich:

Slice at least two large onions roughly, put on a low heat in a good-size skillet with four sausages (pork and leek for preference, because Rule Britannia), and dump plenty knobs of butter on the top (are you seeing a pattern here?) and put a lid on there while they sweat. Check occasionally, turning the sausages as they brown, and giving the onions a flip as they caramelise so they don’t burn. Looooow heat. It takes a while to get it right. Like it says, these are 45 minute sandwiches. Sunday breakfast, you get me? Once you’ve got a beautiful, golden-brown amalgamation of onions and sticky unmentionable meat tubes going, take off the heat, transfer to a plate, and cover.
You’re gonna want to strain as much melted butter out of those onions as possible back into the pan to oil up the sticky pig bits that have leaked out of the sausages. Fry four slices of good bread (preferably brown - there’s a sauerkraut bread a baker does near where I used to work would make you fall to your knees and cry made into this sammich, but just good brown sourdoughb will do) on one side, then butterfly the sausages and put back in the pan til crisped. Assemble, crispy side of bread inwards, with a good helping of brown sauce, eat one, and feed the other to someone you care about. It will strengthen the bond between you, oh yes.

P.S. Branston brown sauce, if you can get it, exposes HP for the hollow, tamarind-free sham it is these days.

I am regretting not buying any sausages this afternoon now.

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I’m with you there; raw chicken is way too sketchy. More than once I’ve made a very simple recipe involving chicken breasts, cooked them carefully, cut into them to check doneness, and halfway through dinner someone discovers an extra thick spot that’s still pink. But tenderloins are hard to screw up and that recipe is easy to vary: mix some mustard into the wet coating, or add some paprika and chipotle powder to the dry coating.

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Always use a thermometer when cooking chicken. It’s a far more accurate means of knowing when the chicken is done.

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165, stayin’ alive.

(Incidentally the beat to that song is recommended during CPR. Is there no end to the usefulness of the Bee Gees?)

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One of my favorite super simple recipes is kind of a showpiece. Good for a party. I stole it from the Momofuku cookbook: Bo Ssam.

• Get an 8-10 lb pork shoulder (aka pork butt). They’re cheap.
• Mix 1 cup white sugar with 1 cup salt. Rub it on the shoulder, cover in plastic wrap, let it marinate overnight.
• Roast it at 300 degrees for six hours (take the plastic wrap off first, dummy). Baste it every hour or so.
• Mix together a half cup of brown sugar with a tablespoon or so of salt. When you’re about ready to serve, coat the roast with it, and roast at 500 degrees for about ten minutes until it turns into a crust.

Serve it with rice and lettuce leaves to wrap the pork in along with any sorts of sauces you like. I use kimchi and a dipping sauce made from soy, fresh ginger, scallions, and sherry vinegar. If you want to get super fancy you can serve it with oysters, but that’s really not necessary. If you serve this at a party everyone will be amazed and will talk about it in hushed tones afterwards.

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Resource on varying ingredients in cookie baking.

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A king’s bounty to the person who can bring me a reliable liquid mix for pancakes that can be prepped once a week and used throughout.

I’m familiar with most “instant” batter recipes, but mixing the dry ingredients on the spot is usually the least complicated part of pancakery. Premixing doesn’t save that much time or effort.

All I want is
#Faster Flapjacks.

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32

I have very little to offer as I’m not a foodie.

But when I was going through a poor stretch I discovered that those flaky ‘Grands’ biscuits make EXCELLENT personal pizza crusts!

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The way some people like pizza around here, a matzoh would make a suitable stand-in. :wink:

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This is relevant to my interests. As would be a decent, tried and true waffle-batter recipe as I scored a free waffle iron (needed cleaning and re-wiring).
Local supermarket has bottles of instant pancake mix (shake and pour stuff) on special, too.

Grill? Grill?

ETA: Got a nice flapjack recipe, but might not be the one you’re after.

200g unsalted butter
6 tbsp Golden Syrup
330g porridge oats
Pinch salt
Pinch cinnamon.

Met butter into syrup in a pan on a low heat and stir.
Put oats into a mixing bowl with salt and cinnamon.
Pour butter/syrup over oats and stir until oats are coated.
Tip into lined square pan and bake at 180C for 25 minutes.

Enjoy tasty carbs soaked in sugar and fat.

Each bottle makes about 12 and lasts for 3 days in the fridge once rehydrated. Could easily get four days from it though. Dunno how good it is, but I like it and it’s cheap at the moment. :smiley:

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The Grands are tasty, but I’ve never thought to do that!

Homemade biscuits are so easy to make though! Here’s a quick recipe that over complicates things slightly. I personally don’t have a food processor (or at least- not one that isn’t such a pain to use that I never use it) I use a handheld dough blender to same effect.

The general idea is the same for pretty much all biscuit recipes. My only problem making them is the same problem I have with flapjacks and which compels me to buy the little white ticklish demon’s products: I don’t fucking have the time in the mornings.

Ewwww, Thin crust and a waste of perfectly good matzoh.

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I believe you can only use it once and you can’t store it. I’ve never tried it.

Instant milk mix, powdered eggs, and powdered buttermilk. All of these things exist… The only problem is getting them to dissolve and integrate quickly enough that the batter isn’t thoroughly mixed.

Hmm…

TO THE LAB!

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Desperation breeds inspiration! I was WAY down during my bereavement and as I was clawing back up I had a stretch where I lost a bunch of benefits long before I had the income to make up for it. (I appreciate my luck and you’ll never catch me disparaging the poor who can’t get off welfare now. Holy crap was that difficult, and I had a strong resume’ that most don’t benefit from)

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Bear in mind that some of what I write below is review for fellow readers, since foodies and future chemical engineers will already know some of this stuff.

Let’s start with your favorite flapjack recipe. If you don’t have one, ask for mine, it seems to always end up that person’s favorite. Virtually all* flapjack recipes are leavened by an acid-base reaction. Usually it’s [buttermilk+baking soda] but there’s no reason it couldn’t be [cream of tartar+baking soda] or baking powder (which is a ready-to-use acid-base mixture).

*There are recipes for yeast-leavened flapjacks but from what I’ve read, the general consensus is that they take more time to cook, which disqualifies them for OP’s objective.

If it’s a buttermilk recipe you’re working with, you’re golden. First step: prepare the batter without baking soda. Now: the longer a flour-based batter sits, the more it will thicken due to water being absorbed into the fiber component of the flour, so add a bit of neutral liquid (milk, water) to account for this.

In a separate whatever, take the proportionate amount of baking soda and mix it with some water to create a slurry. Consider this your reactant, which you may now add to its respective amount of batter. For those of you who’ve worked with two-part epoxies: the batter is your filler, the baking soda is your hardener.

If your recipe calls for a neutral liquid (read: no acidifying cultures) with a separate acid-base leavening mixture, mix the acidic component (cream of tartar, vinegar, etc.) in with the batter and create a separate slurry with the alkaline component as described above.

If you want a single-part batter that can go straight from the fridge and into the skillet, you’ll need to use a neutral liquid along with an acid-base mixture that reacts much more slowly (if at all) at refrigerated temperatures. If this sounds exotic, it’s not. Double-acting baking powders are so-named because they include at least two different acid salts, one of which reacts only at high temperatures. Disodium pyrophophosphate is the most common high-temperature acid salt in aluminum-free double-acting baking powders. Where you’d buy it as a separate ingredient, I have no idea.

Good luck.

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It’s not faster, but have you tried Rosa Park’s pancake recipe?

It’s worth the time.

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Do you mean hands? I’ve yet to hear a complaint and I use mah hands…

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