ARCHIVE RANDOM RSS Home About Manifesto Foods Contact Us COOKINGRECIPES Cajun Cooking and the Holy Trinity Many of the world’s cuisines start with a simple vegetable base. From the aromatic French mirepoix to the leek-based German suppengrun, the foundations of great sauces and dishes usually all start from affordable, simple vegetables that have been cooked down to a monochromatic mush, releasing in flavor the life and vividness that has been visually seeped out of them. The American equivalent is The Holy Trinity, a combination of three vegetables that form the foundation for Cajun cooking - onions, celery, and bell pepper. Continue reading ] k5 notes Share R COOKING The Best Way to Crack an Egg One of the best things about cooking with eggs is how easy and versatile it is. You can boil them, fry them, or bake them. Sunny-side up, over easy, or scrambled, it’s very hard to go wrong with eggs…once they’re out of the shell, that is. Whatever you’re looking to eventually do to your egg, the trickiest part is often cracking it correctly. You want to avoid a mess in your hands, make sure there’s no shell in the mixture, and get the job done with one good crack. So what’s the trick to doing it right? Turns out there a couple pointers you should follow: Continue reading ] Share R COOKINGHEALTHY How to Pick the Right Cooking Oil In the old days, it seemed like the grocery store only had two choices for cooking oil - canola or vegetable. Even PAM was considered revolutionary when it debuted. Today, it takes so much more to impress. With the litany of different cooking oils available on the market today, it can be hard to figure out what works for all-purpose cooking, what’s worth the price, what has the best health benefits, etc. To help navigate through the diversity on the shelves, we’ve assembled a quick summary to the most commonly found types of cooking oils, detailing their uses and health benefits, in order to help you make a better decision. Continue reading ] Share R COOKINGGUIDES Hot or Not? How to Assess Jalapeño Spiciness Jalapeño lovers undestand that there’s a risk in every bite. That is, that you never know if the pepper you’re using is spicy or not. Indeed, jalapeños range from 2000 to 9000 scovilles, which is a very high range that makes it difficult for cooks to titrate their usage for cooking. If you’re not sure how spicy any given pepper is, how do you know how many to buy/use, whether to take out the seeds, whether to warn more sensitive guests, etc? That’s why we’ve done some research to put together some clues for determining how spicy your pepper is before you start cooking with it. Be aware that the extant body of research offers no guarantees* as to the efficacy of these tips, but if you know the following tips, you increase your chances of properly assessing the spiciness of a given pepper, which leads to smarter, better cooking. Below, a summary of what to look for, as well as a handy cheat-sheet you can glance at the next time you’re at the store. Continue reading ] Share R GUIDESCOOKING Are You Using the Right Salt? Salt has been an important commodity throughout human civilization. Due to its efficacy in food preservation, its necessity has been second only to water, and accordingly, people have built communities around it, fought over it, and bartered for it. Today, salt is readily available and affordable, but it is still an essential in food preparation. The typical chef is more likely to use salt as a flavoring agent than in curing his or her own meat. For that task, several common salts have emerged as popular choices. We go into the most commonly used salts in American cuisine, outline the characteristics of each, and provide advice for the best ways to use each. Continue reading ] Share R COOKINGGUIDES All About Spatulas When stocking up on kitchenware, one of the most important tools is the spatula. This handy device, in its simplest form, is a stick with some kind of flattened spoon or blade at the end. It’s a versatile tool that can be used for baking, scraping, flipping, stirring, and more. For the casual chef, the best spatulas are multi-purpose tools with features that maximize all of these functions, which minimizes the number of additional tools that you’ll need to buy and store. There are probably thousands of spatulas readily available on the market, but what should you look for when selecting one? We list some of the features to consider and reveal our ultimate preferences. Continue reading ] Share R COOKINGHEALTHYGUIDES A Guide to Brussels Sprouts Brussels sprouts are among the most hated foods in America. In this post, we explore the hatred, history, and health benefits of this controversial vegetable, and end with a brief guide to its successful preparation. Continue reading ] Share R COOKING Better than Sriracha? Yes! It’s Lao Gan Ma Several years ago, sriracha sauce burst into the mainstream dining scene. Previously relegated to pho noodle houses, where it, along with hoisin sauce, were common optional add-ins to the beef broth, this sauce suddenly became the condiment of choice for restaurants far and wide. We witnessed it swirled onto fusion sushi rolls, dotted over fresh oyster, and brightly coiled around lamb chops in upscale eateries. Suddenly, everyone had tried this sauce, and what had previously only been sold for $2.99 in Asian supermarkets could be found north of $7 at Dean & DeLuca. Fast-forward to 2016, and once again, the food scene might be ready for a “new” hot sauce – one that’s been around for ages, but most likely hasn’t been incorporated into mainstream eating – yet. Continue reading ] Share R COOKINGRECIPES Hot Chocolate – An Annotated Recipe Winter is the ultimate season for hot chocolate and so naturally, we set out to make our own. But, once we started to look for hot chocolate recipes, we found a confusing multitude of recipes that all varied quite a bit for no apparent reason. Upon further research, we realized that all these variations led to different thicknesses, flavors, and sweetness levels. So, we combined elements of all of these to make our own ultimate hot chocolate. Below is the recipe we ultimately used, and, to spare others the trouble of figuring out why there is yet another slightly different hot chocolate recipe on the internet, we have added annotations that set out the purposes and effects of each ingredient. That means that you won’t have to compare a million recipes yourself and figure out why they’re all different, but instead have the choice to follow this to T, or use it as a guide to making your own custom brew. Continue reading ] Share R Page 1 of 1 Pages Home About Manifesto Foods Contact Us Posts We Like Dark Roast Espresso + Magnum Bars Photo via yummyinmytumbly RASPBERRIES N’ CREME BISCOFF CREPES Photo via kawaii-food-is-kawaii See more ] © 2015–2021 Manifesto Foods