Three-out-of-four

[errantember]

So far I'm pretty impressed with The New Best Recipe. I've cooked four items, with the following results:

Panna Cotta with Berry Coulis - Everybody liked it but one anti-gelatin person, and one person said it was "the best dessert she'd ever had."

Roasted Squash - This didn't turn out as well. It was tasty, but a little dry and clearly not up to the standard of the book. The recipe was fairly simple, and the oven temperature was monitored, so I think the failing was probably the fact that the kind of squash I used isn't mentioned in the book. In the section on squashes, they explicitly mention that different types of squash require different techniques. The culprit was Early White Bush Scallop.

Braised Cabbage - Totally out-of-this-world fantastic! Much better than I thought cooked cabbage could be. A simple recipe with butter, chicken broth, salt, pepper, thyme and parsley. Good thing I liked it, because I stuffed myself comatose on 1/4 of a basketball-sized cabbage I got at the Austin Farmer's Market on Wednesday.

Scrambled Eggs - Light-years better than the way I usually cook them, and ready in about five minutes or less.

Comments

[jb-27.livejournal.com]

What's the egg technique?

I recently read in one of Alton Brown's book that scrambled eggs are best cooked over a low temperature with constant stirring to create the "scramble". I tried them this way, and the texture was much lighter than ones I've cooked over a medium heat.

Alton said that the "French" way of cooking scrambled eggs would involve a double-boiler, to produce a consistent, low heat. But I don't think I'm willing to go to that much trouble or to give up my beloved cast iron skillet.

The technique here...

[errantember.livejournal.com]

...is largely opposite. You pre-mix the egg with a little milk, salt, and pepper with a spoon, until the color is uniform, but not to a point where the big bubbles disappear. It's then dropped into a pan on high heat, where the eggs are plowed through and flipped over with a wooden spoon until done. They said they had tried medium heat with poorer results.

When I get hungry again in an hour or two maybe I'll try it Alton Brown's way.

Re: The technique here...

[stnuke.livejournal.com]

Weird.

I have 3 different recipes that I use. Probably my favorite involves about 1/4 to 1/2 of a stick of butter and medium/low heat with very little stirring. But I also don't like them to be completely uniform.

Another one is to separate the eggs, whip the whites stiff, fold back in the yolks and then scramble them slowly over medium heat. This ends up tasting a lot like what you get at nice restaurants.

Then there's the toss-all-the-eggs-in-the-hot-grease-and-stir-like-a-demon-with-a-spatula method. ;-)