Words matter. These are the best Sohla El-Waylly Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Ive found my way into a life surrounded by food people, which often leads to intensely passionate conversations about nonsense: deep-dives on devils food cake, monologues on jammy eggs, and proclamations of love addressed to Popeyes fried chicken sandwich.
At home Im usually cooking for two, and sizzle platters let me make the most of my limited oven space. Because I can roast multiple things at once on several small platters rather than all together on one big baking sheet, each item can go in and out of the oven just when it needs to.
Regardless of whether you prefer your waffle light golden or dark brown, it should be crisp on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside.
Even though there’s always a place in my heart for frozen Eggos, nothing beats the taste of homemade waffles, and making your own lets you skip the busy brunch rush.
When you mix wheat flour and water together, the proteins in the flour combine to form a gluten network. This structure is what gives bread dough the strength and elasticity to capture all the bubbles and burbles produced by yeast in order to grow fluffy, chewy, and light when baked.
My mother is cursed with making the best biryani in town. I know everyone says that about their mothers cooking, but this is different. When theres anything going down in Californias San Fernando Valley, she gets a call.
The ‘Test Kitchen’ is really fun as long as you play your role, and I didnt like the role I was put in. It became increasingly frustrating to become a sidekick to people with significantly less experience than me.
I never really knew my 12-inch-long tweezer tongs were special until I started getting 50 Instagram DMs a day about them. Dont you all have these? Well, you should.
Definitive statements get people riled up, which is why I usually moonwalk away from them, but here goes nothing: You cant eat a South Asian meal without raita. Raita is the savory yogurt condiment thats served alongside everything – from Pakistani lamb biryani to Bengali shami kebabs and South Indian okra stir-fry.
Toum is a staple of Lebanese cuisine, and more than just another condiment. This garlic sauce is great for stirring into soups and pasta, marinating chicken, and tossing with roasted vegetables; it adds an energetic punch of garlic to anything without requiring the hassle of peeling and mincing.
With a small wire rack set inside your sizzle platter, youve got the perfect setup for dry brining one or two portions of meat. The small footprint of a sizzle platter fits easily in any fridge, while the matching mini rack keeps the meat from hanging out in its own juices.
Biryani can be an elaborate, ambitious affair, packed with layer upon layer of spiced meat and vegetables all steaming together with ghee.
In the ‘Test Kitchen’, I have a strict knife sharpening process.
Crispy-skinned fish is an elusive thing. As soon as your filet makes contact with a hot pan, it wants to curl up, which leads to uneven cooking and floppy skin.
I find the easiest way to peel ginger is to start with a vegetable peeler to remove the majority of the skin. I then switch to a spoon, which is good for scraping away any remaining skin trapped within the grooves and nooks of the knob.
Chickens from smaller producers tend to be smaller in size, and therefore have an optimal ratio of bone to meat, for a juicier fried chicken.
Giving nuts and seeds a few minutes in the oven deepens their flavors and improves their texture – and it provides more even cooking than the stovetop.
Instant dashi is to dashi what a bouillon cube is to chicken broth. While dashi is subtle and subdued, instant dashi is a cartoon drawing with all the features enhanced and hyper-expressive.
The base of raita is traditionally unstrained whole-milk yogurt, but I like to break away from convention and reach for whatever fermented dairy I have on hand. Ive used buttermilk, Greek yogurt, sour cream, and any combination thereof for the base of my raita.
Once you know how to make koshari, youll never think twice about whether to save those last few scoops of rice or the half-cup tomato passata.
I did not develop a recipe for my mothers biryani. I tried, and I failed, and so I made my own.
The intense aroma and warmth fresh ginger adds to dishes is irreplaceable. The heat found in ginger is attributed to a chemical it contains called gingerol, which is closely related to the capsaicin found in hot peppers and the piperine in black pepper, but is much milder than the two.
Although the skin on ginger is edible, it lacks flavor and, depending on how you plan to further process the ginger, can also lend an unpleasant texture to a dish.
We need representation of different chefs, as well as different foods.
Working in a restaurant is tough. You’re standing in front of hot things, holding sharp things, for hours on end with little pay. But, oh, the seltzer. The one respite from never-ending back pain is a bubbly, bottomless supply of it.
We know more people who have gone to the ER for an immersion-blender injury than just about any other, and we’ve seen almost every kitchen mishap imaginable.
A great scale should be accurate first and foremost, but also easy to clean, intuitively designed, simple to read, and convenient to store. These are the qualities that will have you reaching for a scale every time you portion meat for burgers or whip up a batch of fresh pasta.
Unlike chicken, duck breast has a hue and texture akin to that of red meat and is safe to consume medium-rare, so bring on the pink. Perfectly cooked duck breast will have moist and juicy meat, with a luscious and crunchy skin.
Chickens that are sold whole tend to be smaller in size, ranging between two and a half and five pounds, while chicken sold as parts generally comes from larger birds.
If you want to step up you mashed-potato game, regardless of whether you like them fluffy or creamy, a food mill or potato ricer is your best bet.
Unlike tongs, these tweezer tongs are slim and compact, fitting into any tool crock, drawer, or even apron pocket if youre all about that quick draw. Theres no fussy locking mechanism to slow you down while cooking, no weird nooks or pockets for food or hot water to get caught in.
While my husband and I were still just dating, we courted over Popeyes fried chicken. What better way to really get to know someone than by getting elbows-deep in biscuit crumbs and chicken grease?
A mountain of nachos might look fun – but at what cost?! Only the outermost layer gets topping love, while everything underneath is either naked and dry or sopping wet under the weight of it all.
Lightweight and slim, immersion blenders can appear to have all the grit of a Bichon Frise, but the reality is that they’re no less than the business end of a blender, minus nearly all of the protection. If mishandled, they can be one of the most dangerous cooking tools.
Treated more like a vegetable than a fruit, plantains can be prepared in various ways depending on their stage of ripeness. Just like a banana, the further the fruit ripens, the more of its starch is converted to sugar.
Koshari is a cozy pile of warm carbs – traditionally, cooked rice, lentils, macaroni, and chickpeas, all mixed together – smothered in perky tomato sauce and buried in fried shallots.
The time I learned the most in restaurants was when I was alone in a basement, figuring it out on my own.
I think one big thing with food and race that is a hot topic is cultural appropriation.
My brand is to make things harder for myself. I carry too many things at once, I volunteer to make a 12-layer cake no one asked for, and I do all my mixing with a tiny spatula.
Kneading dough is as simple as pushing the dough away from you with the heel of your palm, folding it over itself with your fingers, and pulling it back. This repeated push-pull cross-knits the protein strands, developing a strong gluten net.
Although the plantain is a staple ingredient in cuisines around the world, its not as popular in America as the banana just yet. However, with its limitless versatility, the plantain should make its way into your cooking repertoire if it hasnt already.
An ideal potato gratin will contain creamy and tender potato slices, topped with a crunchy, golden crust, and browned edges underneath and all around – a quality that requires good heat transfer from the dish to its contents.
Queso, homemade or not, is my cheese of choice. It stays saucy even at room temperature, which means I can eat at my typical snails pace and still get good nacho vibes.
When you usually think of dessert for one, its something microwaved in a mug or a precious, portioned miniature.
