What Recipes Don’t Tell You

Secrets from a Small Kitchen—What Recipes Don’t Tell You demystifies every home’s most essential space: the kitchen. You’ll find tips and techniques, rather than recipes, from a home cook with a lifelong passion for food. Learn why cast iron cookware is worth its weight or how to easily peel a hard-boiled egg. Discover how to make the most of a food, from buying its best version to choosing its best route to cooked deliciousness. Page after page of the book promises to enrich the skill and knowledge of a cook at any level, and that is the best secret of all.

TIPS AND TECHNIQUES

A beautiful roast will taste as good as it looks if the right kind of heat is applied.

Expensive meat is tender at the start, and you can keep it that way by exploiting its strengths. Without rubbery fat to melt down, it benefits from mere minutes on a hot fire—375-425°F. Broil, roast, grill or sauté it to relish a crispy exterior and soft interior. No need for a cover on the pan or for supplemental fat or liquid. Its love affair with high heat is so brief that an extra two minutes will alter its level of doneness, so watch it.

Before you drain your wallet on pricey meat, know that you can extract great flavor and supple texture from an economical cut. But . . . it requires a different method of cooking. Softening its fatty, connective tissue takes a long time—hours vs. minutes. Pace it in a slow oven—170-280°F, depending on the meat. Add liquid, aromatic vegetables and a tight lid to hold in moisture. This method, called braising, starts with a sinewy chunk and ends with savory, succulent meat that nearly melts in your mouth. If forgotten in the oven for an extra ten minutes, this roast will forgive you.

FOOD FACTOIDS

Lemons and limes blur the boundary between taste and aroma, offering tingly, tart compounds that glorify almost any concoction!

Did you know that . . .

Most of the fragrance comes from its peel? You can harvest this, as many recipes demand, by “zesting” (scraping) just the colored peel; the white layer beneath (pith) is bitter, so avoid it.

A Meyer lemon is thought to be a hybrid of a Mandarin orange and a lemon? This accounts for its smoother finish, as orange is less acidic than lemon.

You’ll squeeze more juice from a citrus fruit at room temperature than from a cold one?

KIND WORDS FROM OUR READERS

RECIPES DECODED

Recipes can be unclear to a cook, whether novice or veteran. How does an instruction to “mince” differ from a call to “dice” or “cube”?

HELLO, I’M JUDY

Cooking wholesome food for a growing family fueled the kitchen fires long ago for Judy Hedges.

To that spark, add a career of writing and designing informational materials for museums, schools and small cities. The skill of effectively gathering and paring down a wealth of information to essentials prepared her to build the book, Secrets from a Small Kitchen—What Recipes Don’t Tell You.

Again, motivated by family—this time, in response to phone calls from her grown children: “Mom, how can I tell if a fish is really fresh?” With a home cook’s sensibilities, Hedges synthesized her knowledge of tools, practices and techniques collected over decades.