You know all of those cooking shows and recipes (ahem, like ones on this very site — guilty!) that suggest cooking with wine is really fun because once you’ve opened a bottle for cooking, you get to drink the rest? Then there’s a series of “ah-ha-ha!”s and LOLs; it’s all very raucous. And look, people, I love a glass of wine with dinner from time to time but fact is, a lot of the time I open a bottle of wine for cooking, we forget to finish it, and this makes me very, very sad.

Enter dry vermouth. (The other variety of vermouth, usually red or pink, is called “sweet,” I like that, in part, for Manhattans, not that you asked.) Vermouth is a fortified white wine that is mildly aromatized with a variety of “botanicals,” such as herbs, spices, and fruits. Apparently, the word vermouth is derived from the German word for wormwood, wermut, as wormwood was the chief flavoring ingredient for vermouth until the herb was found to be poisonous, which I am sure was tremendously awkward. Nevertheless, the main reason I like to have vermouth around is its shelf life. When stored in the fridge (and you should, because this extends its shelf life), dry vermouth is good for anywhere between three and six months. (Sweet vermouth will keep for a year this way.) This means if you need just a splash here or there for a recipe, you don’t have to uncork a bottle of wine you may not finish before it quickly turns. Vermouth is also a lot less expensive than drinking wines. Gallo, the favorite in a Cook’s Illustrated taste test, costs only $5 for a 750ml bottle. The fancy-pants Dolin brand I picture above, almost considered too nice for everyday cooking, was $16.

A few usage notes: Vermouth’s flavor is of course a little different from a straight white table wine, due to the herbs and spices, so it may not be for everyone, but I find it to be lovely when cooking savory dishes. Due to the fortification, vermouth has a slightly higher percentage of alcohol than white wine (16 to 18 percent versus wine’s 12.5 to 14.5 percent), which means if you’re trying to partly “cook off” the alcohol it may need an extra minute of simmering time. But I find that it can be seamlessly interchanged with wine in just about any recipe, and deliciously so.

It all comes down to taring or zeroing out the existing weight of what you’ve got. Place you empty bowl on your scale and “tare” or “zero out” you weight. (On most digital scales, which I think are the easiest for kitchen use, you simply hit the “On/Clear” button again. On a mechanical scale, you can turn a knob back to the zero mark; on a balance scale, you would set the pointer to the center mark, but somehow I doubt you’re using a balance scale in your kitchen, right?) Add your first ingredient, slowly, until the scale reaches the weight you need. Zero it out again. Add the next ingredient. Zero it out again. If the recipe calls for you to whisk, whip, or blow gentle kisses across the surface of your ingredients, go do that too, but when it calls for the next ingredients, re-zero out the weight of the bowl so that you can continue.

You’ll have this method down in no time. You’ll wonder why you hadn’t tried it sooner. And when the rest of the world (coughUSAcough) gets on this weighed ingredients bandwagon, you’ll wonder what you’ll do with all of the extra drawer space you once devoted to a tangle of dash-pinch-teaspoon-cup measuring implements. I’m voting for stashing chocolate. ]]> http://smittenkitchen.com/tips/how-to-use-a-kitchen-scale/feed/ 20 http://smittenkitchen.com/tips/not-all-salts-are-created-equally/ http://smittenkitchen.com/tips/not-all-salts-are-created-equally/#comments Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:22:30 +0000 deb http://smittenkitchen.com/tips/?p=102

Have you ever used Kosher salt in a recipe and found the end result to be like a salt lick and you couldn’t imagine how on earth a recipe tester could have not noticed how horribly, horribly oversalted the dish would end up? Let me guess: you were using Morton Kosher Salt. Guess what the recipe tester was probably using? Diamond Kosher Salt. And I know what you’re thinking: Now you tell me!

Believe it or not, I only learned about this disparity weeks ago but I had suspected something was wonky for a while. I use Diamond Kosher Salt so I hadn’t run into the issue but I’ve often received comments that people found even a lightly-salted dish way over the top. In short, Morton and Diamond are made differently; Morton salt presses salt granules into large flakes with rollers; Diamond, through a patented process, stacks salt pyramids to form a large crystal — one is dense, the other is like a snowflake. One is intensely salty for its volume, the other has an expected level of saltiness.

So how to adjust for this in recipes where one is measuring salt by volume? A cup of Morton’s salt can weigh almost twice as much as a cup of Diamond’s salt, and therefore taste twice as salty. The intrepid Jill Santopietro at Chow.com came up with the following equation simply by weighing the salts:

1 teaspoon fine sea or table salt = roughly 1 1/4 teaspoons Morton’s kosher salt = roughly 1 3/4 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt

“Uh, Deb, are we supposed to memorize that?” Of course not. Basically, you can think of a teaspoon of fine sea salt, regular old table salt or Morton salt as just about equivalent in salty impact. If you’d like to use Diamond kosher salt instead of table or sea salt in a recipe, use double. [Updated to clarify]

“But aack, this stresses me out because how am I supposed to know what a recipe tester used?” Here’s my advice: Pretend they used Diamond salt. You can always increase the amount of salt later (and hey, isn’t “salting to taste” the best way to cook, anyway?) but good luck scrubbing it out.

Five years ago, I moved into an apartment with a skylight over the kitchen and built-in spice shelves along a wall and decided to overhaul my mess of spice bottles and bags to make them fitting for such a pretty display. I looked for containers that would be uniform, have a wide mouth (to easily dip measuring spoons or fingers for a “pinch” in), were opaque (so that the sunlight wouldn’t damage the spices over time) and wouldn’t cost a fortune to buy in the quantity I needed.

I ended up with 4 ounce tins and affixed them with Avery 5160 Mailing Labels that I’d printed from a Microsoft Word document and all was right and pretty in my orderly, well-spiced world. Until it wasn’t. Four and a half years later, there were problems. Paper labels were peeling at corners, many were smudged but that was the least of the problems… after five years of catching kitchen grease and bits of powders in their rims, a few were grimed shut leading to many expletives when I needed ginger, stat for a recipe and the bleeping lid wouldn’t come off. Some tins had rusted slightly over repeated washings without wiping them dry.

I was not pleased, as I’d hoped those tins would be a once-in-a-lifetime investment, and begrudgingly began seeking out a new solution. Many months later, I found one in these wee bottles.

Pros: Yes, they’re very pretty. They’re also 4.5 ounces each (which means that they will hold the contents of most spice bottles), have a wide mouth and although the pictures don’t make this clear, they are completely airtight (the tins were not). There is a silicon rim along the inside of the lid that snaps shut when completely closed, so wonderfully tight that I’d recommend you open a full bottle of powder over the sink, just in case the vacuum created makes a mess. Because they’re glass, they’ll never warp or rust and will always wash up shiny, which will please me immensely. They’re made by a company named Libbey Vibe, and sold through Amazon and Target (and Crate and Barrel, but they charge more). I’ve affixed them with Avery 18695 Clear Return Address Labels (font: Bell Gothic, Size 16) that are remarkably smudge proof, easy to remove (with no residual grime) and re-affix should they land crooked, which all of mine did. For extra “smudge protection” you could cover them with a second blank clear label.

A Tangentially Related Pro: These jars also come in different sizes, all the way up to 82 ounces if you’re looking to pretty up your whole pantry, not just your spices.

Cons: I’m having a hard time getting the labels around the curve of the bottle exactly flat, there are bubbles. The difference between now and five years ago? It barely bothers me. A bigger issue is that clear jars don’t protect the spices from sunlight, which I will either decide to live with, keep them in the cabinet, or put them out on shelves with a kind of makeshift curtain draped over them. Finally, they’re a little less space efficient as I wouldn’t advise stacking them more than two high (I’d stack the tins in threes, sometimes fours) as it gets too wobbly.

Need even more inspiration? Check out David Lebovitz’s suggested uses for extra egg whites. Now get whisking!

There are factors beyond temperature too. A greased cookie sheet promotes spreading; one tip is to flour it after you grease it to hinder spread, or to use silicone paper or a Silpat mat instead. Because sugar liquefies as it is heated, a more sugary cookie (with less flour and/or fat in it) is more likely to spread than one with a lower proportion of sugar. When a recipe says to “cream” your butter and sugar together, just beat it long enough to combine the ingredients — about 30 seconds on an electric or stand mixer, says David Lebovitz — so you do not whip too much air into your cookies, causing too much expansion as the air bubbles steam in the oven. (With cakes, there’s no such limit on airiness.) Finally, at higher altitudes, cookies with baking soda in them tend to spread more.

Lastly, it is worth noting that butter, which melts at your body’s temperature and is nearly one-fifth water, spreads more than margarine, and both spread more than shortening. Now, all cookie recipes on Smitten Kitchen are all-butter (because I like butter’s melt-in-your-mouth feel and flavor above all else), so making sure that your butter, dough and baking sheets aren’t too warm is especially key.