Your culinary Agony Uncle
The first in a new monthly series where I try and help with seemingly mundane cookery conundrums
Here’s the thing. It is my belief that, so enamoured are publishers and the food press with glossy spangly clever and on-trend recipes and food writers, they often lose sight of the regular domestic cook and the more mundane culinary decisions and quandaries we are presented with throughout our cookery lives.
I once received a text that read: ‘Will has been in Scotland for the weekend, has come home with 2 x pigeons and a rabbit, says we can eat them but why? And how?’ Now this is at the extreme end of the culinary conundrum spectrum, and mainstream food media could be excused for ignoring such issues, but I was very much into it. The resulting game pie, on the one hand, and pigeon pho on the other, was, I believe, thankfully received and apparently very successfully executed.
The reality is though that the conundrum is rarely so dramatic. I’ve had messages asking how to stop onions colouring when sweating them for a dish, or how to balance the need to rest meat with the desire to maintain that nice crispy crackling when it’s straight from the oven, or how to save a curdled cake batter or rescue the stew that’s been forgotten about and burnt to a crust on the base of the pan. There are solutions to each and every one of these things, be it seemingly complex or worryingly simple, and so I want to help people in the only way I know how.
Below are the first three conundrums that were sent in when the call went out, and there are plenty more where these came from:
Is there a one-size-fits-all best way to cook rice? Or does it differ from rice to rice?
Are there any good ways to use up fruit and vegetable peelings?
To stir or not to stir, that is the question. Is there a principle to stick to?
Remember, if you have a little culinary concern or niggle that you’d like explored, explained, expanded upon or dispelled, let me know and it will be added to the list to be dealt with in good time.
Is there a one-size-fits-all best way to cook rice? Or does it differ from rice to rice?
Here’s the thing, I cook all my rice in the same way, every time, maybe three times a week at home, but that is not the correct answer to this question. My question back to you would be, what is the context and how much do you care about the nuance of the rice that you’re left with? I ask because rice is a thing that spooks a lot of cooks. We’ve all been served (or perhaps even produced for ourselves) rice that is boiled to the point of featureless baggy-grained bright-white mush, and it is a violation and liberty. On the flip side, there is a world of vitriol and voodoo where people have ceremonial pots and pans and washing routines and special spoons that will only stir anti-clockwise, or even better still refuse to handle the rice once wet so as to avoid threatening the integrity of the grain as it enters the sanctity of the purifying and pasteurising process. Please. It’s rice.
I am, of course, not here to denigrate rice cooking where it is a central feature of a culture or tradition. Take saintly care when cooking sushi rice, by all means, but if we’re discussing making a decent fist of cooking long grain, basmati, brown, jasmine, sticky or wild rice as a pleasing accompaniment for something you’ve knocked up for dinner, then I have a failsafe technique for you:
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