Questions and Answers About Cooking

Questions and Answers About Cooking

Q: What are the best apples for baking?

A: Cortland, or Ida Redor Paula Red. You want a large apple that will hold its texture (and its flavor) during the long baking process. Apples that are good for applesauce, such as Macintosh, are useless for baking because they’ll turn to mush.

Q: Can you substitute baking soda and baking powder for one another?

A: Not directly. But baking soda—sodium bicarbonate—is a good leaven in pastries that contain acid such as buttermilk, sour cream, or yogurt. If there is little or no acid in a recipe and you want to use baking soda (or you’ve run out of baking powder), mix 1 teaspoon baking soda and 2 teaspoons cream of tartar. This works because cream of tartar is acidic and eliminates the need for additional acid in the batter. You can use this as a replacement for commercial baking powder—on a one-for-one basis—but you must work quickly once you combine wet and dry ingredients.

Why? Because this homemade baking powder is a single-action baking powder and begins to do its work the instant it is combined with liquid. Commercial baking powders are double-action; they partly begin to work when exposed to liquid, but another part works only when exposed to heat. You can see this: Little bubbles form between the time you combine ingredients and move the batter to the pan, but the batter continues to rise in the oven.

Commercial baking powder, therefore, is more effective than the homemade kind. But it isn’t necessarily more desirable because it has a distinctive flavor. (This is especially true of those containing aluminum.) It also becomes less effective over time. You should replace your baking powder, even if it isn’t used up, at least once a year.

Q: What sort of training do I need to become a professional chef?

A: If you want to train to be a practical chef—the kind of

Top 10 Reasons Why Starting Up a Business to Sell Cookbooks Online Is a Good Thing!

If you’re looking for a good work-at-home Internet business that’s honest and will make you money, think about selling old, used, vintage, or modern cookbooks. Besides making good money fast, it’s a lot of fun too.

Now to the top ten (and more) best reasons why starting a small home-based business selling cookbooks online is a Martha Stewart recipe for a good thing:

You can work from home, part-time, full-time or any time of day, weekends, or whenever you have some free or spare time.

You can set up this new business opportunity fast.

You can sell cookbooks from your existing collection (soon to be called inventory), or from your family or friend’s private cookbook collections.

It’s easy to amass inventory. Cookbooks can be found at garage, yard and estate sales, thrift shops, flea markets, or online, etc.

And it’s cheap to amass inventory — very little investment is needed.

You can buy up boxes of cookbooks from garage sales and many cookbooks can be picked up free, at the end of the day’s sale, or for as little as five for . Cookbooks can also be purchased in ‘lots’ from eBay.

You’ll quickly become knowledgeable about selling cookbooks on eBay and other auction and non-auction sites — you’ll get lots of ideas — useful for selling other items too.

You’ll know which Betty Crocker Cookbooks and Better Homes and Gardens Cook Books are the best, in high-demand, collectible and truly valuable. You’ll learn the true value of the popular 1973 Betty Crocker Cookbook pie edition and even church cookbooks.

You’ll have very little, if any, competition. Few people know how to value cookbooks. Often cookbooks that people think are valuable are not.

You’ll be considered an expert by others and can capitalize on your new knowledge in a number of ways, including appraising cookbooks and collections of cookbooks and teaching classes at home.

You can easily add this on as a ‘sideline’

Indian Recipes Indian cooking To start off with an accolade

Indian cooking…mere words are not sufficient to express or rather draw out the diversity and the ethnicity rendered by all Indian regional cuisines to get our Indian cooking well acknowledged in the global arena. And I consider myself absolutely privileged to be relishing on this wonderful Indian cooking menu daily…cooking, experimenting and innovating on our old traditional Indian recipes and finally concocting something, hopefully palatable…not only for me but for my family as a whole…. Primarily influenced by our old conventional traditions, religion, socio-eco-cultural aspects and availability of resources, Indian cuisine has scores of tantalizing delicacies to offer…in fact to each Indian household to suit all individual palates. Such is the greatness of our Indian cuisine and thx to all those wonderful people who have used their imagination and creativity to provide us with a variety of lip-smacking Indian
recipes for us to devour.

And here I’d like to take you all for a petite rollercoaster ride to the amazing world of Indian cuisine, with a peep into the exotic Indian dishes, in general…. A diffident yet candid attempt from my part to introduce to you the vast range of delicacies Indian cuisine offers and its’ various perspectives…. A virtual look into the mass variety of Indian cooking, both North Indian and South Indian cuisine, from a hard-core foodie but an extremely simple and average cook (yes, an honest confession indeed)…. A mild attempt to parse the various tastes and aromatic cuisine styles of our country that evidently is subject to change with respect to region, culture and customs…. To be precise, this is infact a truly modest attempt to recreate the magic of “Unity in diversity” in the backdrop of Indian cuisine.

As known, our Indian cooking has loads of recipes to offer for every single dish. And since I’d only be sketching out the dishes and a few personal favourite

Do You Secretly Want to Publish Your Recipes in a Cookbook?

If you’ve ever secretly thought about publishing your recipes in a cookbook, you will want to read the following.

The popularity of cookbooks as a product that’s easy to sell has continued to go up, along with the sheer quality of the recipes, the design of the book and the downright creativity of self-publishers.

Cookbooks have proven throughout the past 50 years or so to be much more than a collection of recipes. Cookbooks are a great public relations tool. They add to local history.

Cookbooks are an important documentation of a nation’s heritage. They are a collector’s item, a family’s memoir and a way to maintain our sense of identity. Passing down recipes from generation to generation has long been a tradition whether published in a cookbook or not.

The cookbook market will never be saturated because the public is always looking for new recipes and for the best possible way to make food taste great.

With more and more cookbooks featuring color photography with their recipes and interesting sidebar information, cookbooks are even leaving the kitchen and finding a home on the coffee table.

Actually most cookbook buyers are referred to as armchair cooks. They really don’t have time to cook but love to read recipes, read about cooking and food, and collect useful and beautiful cookbooks.

I know this is true because I have spent many a bedtime poring over the recipes in my cookbooks — avidly marking recipes that I intend to try — some day!

Food and cooking are a part of everyday life, making cookbooks a staple in every American and European home. Even in a weak or down economy, cookbook sales always remain strong.

Whether people buy cookbooks for casual reading or to fix meals, they continue to sell year after year. We live in a cookbook crazy culture. Actually 80% of cookbooks are sold by

Eliminate Outdoor Cooking Mistakes

As humans, we all make mistakes. It is human nature to do so, and cannot be prevented each and every time. When it comes to barbequing, this rule is no different. We often make mistakes that we do not even realize until we taste our food, or something potentially dangerous happens.

Some mistakes just mean that the food you cook is not going to taste very good, while others could potentially mean a trip to the hospital, or a visit from your claims representative on your home insurance policy. No matter the severity of the mistake, you should do your best to try to avoid them whenever possible.

Cooking Mistakes

You must properly prepare the meat you are cooking, before cooking it. You should never attempt to cook meat on a grill when it is still frozen, or even partially frozen. Thaw your meat by sitting it out about 12 to 24 hours before you plan on cooking it, or by thawing it in a microwave.

Once meat is cooked, never put it back in on the same plate you had it on when it was raw. This could cause the spread of many unwanted illnesses.

Cooking with charcoal lighter fluid can be good or bad. The lighter fluid will cause the food you are cooking to taste different then with other types of grills. Alternatively, attempting to not use lighter fluid may cause a lot of frustration due to the fact that charcoal can be difficult if not impossible to light without lighter fluid.

Never poke you meat while it is cooking. Poking holes in meat will cause the juice inside to leak out into the bottom of the grill.  Not only will this make your food dry and unappealing in the end, but it also could potentially ruin your barbeque grill. At the very least, it will cause a buildup of unwanted grease and juices on your grill, which will make cleanup harder.

Once the meat is on the grill, try not to open the lid to many times. Each time you open the lid, you change the temperature in the grill. The constant change in