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Here’s a little train of thought video I made after I read this NYT article on which recipe steps stop a cook in their tracks.(via Lifehacker)

photo credit: Zesmerelda

Ugg. I am tired of drunken housewives and divorced dads trying to dip wonder bread in beaten eggs and call that French toast. That’s egg coated processed wheat sponge, there’s a difference. If you’ve never made French toast Alton Brown created the greatest recipe here. If you have here are the 3 rules you must follow to make awesome French Toast:

1. Use fresh baked bread, sliced thick. Wonder bread adds no flavor and the thinness of it really makes it hard to get the crunchy, custardy texture that makes French toast awesome.
2. Use stale bread. Let it sit out for at least 8 hours(or up to 48), or dry in in the oven at 250 for an hour beforehand. If you really want to soak up all that custard(and you do) then the bread has to be dry. After all French toast was invented as a way for housewives to reuse old bread.
3. Use full fat milk or, even better, half and half. I know that everyone drinks 2% or less. I know that people are terrified of the cholesteral in dairy. Fuck that. If you don’t have the fat in there it won’t gel right. If the worst thing you eat in a day is French toast made with half in half instead of skim then you’re eating pretty healthy that day.

photo credit: rick
Making sausage has always been a monstrous pain in the ass. And considering how easy it is to make bacon, sausage’s better looking cousin, why bother. Sausage splatters all over the place, it’s impossible to tell if it’s done without cutting it open and the god dam patty shrinks 40%. That’s like starting with Kim Kardashian’s rack and ending up with Paris Hilton. No thank you.

But then like a bolt of insight from Elijah I had an idea. Couldn’t I cook sausage in the oven the same way I do bacon? Wouldn’t slow, even heating work for both? So I tried and it does. In fact, it works amazing. One slight problem is you don’t get a good crust on the sausage patty this way, but I flipped my toaster oven to broil at the end and that fixed that. And in addition to being no mess(if you put the patty on some aluminum foil) what’s really nice is this way there’s no maintence. One of the huge hassles with making sausage is watching to ensure the house doens’t burn down, not a problem in the oven.

So for breakfast tommorow throw a couple of sausage patties in the toaster oven at 400 degrees and finish them off with the broil setting. You’ll get perfect, regular sized, cooked through patties every time.

You’re welcome.

photo credit: icadrews

We all know that unless you took my advice and found yourself a butcher, real hamburger is hard to come by. Real, meaty, fatty, found in the corner and ground up before anyone notices scraps are the only true hamburger out there. Now we have 80/20. 90/10. 99 percent lean beef. Yuch.

And not only does super lean meat taste bad, it’s unusable for what we normally like to do with our hamburger. That is, make hamburgers. You see, hamburgers need about 25% fat just to hold them together, anything less and it’s going to crumble apart. That’s anoying if you’re frying them, it’s a ruined dinner if you’re grilling them(and really, why wouldn’t you be grilling them?)

So what are you to do if you’re old lady brought home a tube of 90/10 for your Saturday night neighborhood grill? First, dump her. Second, pork sausage. Pork sausage has plenty of fat for everybody. Just mix in about a tablespoon of pork for every burger and you should be good to go. And quite frankly, the results are beyond awesome. You’ll never make burgers without sausage again.

You’re welcome.

The other day I linked to a great recipe for Thai Chili-Salt. I made it today(in my bad ass mini-food-processor) and put it on some mangoes. It was delicious, but it wasn’t a salt. It was more of a sauce with the fresh chili’s. If you really want a powder try Cayanne pepper, sugar, salt and, if you’re feeling fancy, some lime zest. That shakes on nicely.