Ultimate Cook Book_ 900 New Recipes, Thousands of Ideas - Bruce Weinstein [426]
Bread Crumbs. Available in fresh or dried form, you cannot substitute one for the other. Fresh bread crumbs are made with, of course, fresh bread. Tear the crust off slices of stale white or wheat bread; pulse in a food processor fitted with the chopping blade a few times until the consistency of coarse sand. One ½-inch slice of bread will make a little more than ¼ cup fresh bread crumbs. One caveat: “whipped” bread will often yield only gummy crumbs because of the high-fat content. Dried bread crumbs are available seasoned or unseasoned (that is, plain); no recipe in this book calls for seasoned crumbs. If you’d like to make your own, bake crust-removed, ½ inch slices of bread on a lipped baking sheet in a preheated 275°F oven until brown and crisp, turning once, 25 to 35 minutes. Cool completely on the baking sheet, then pulse in a food processor fitted with the chopping blade until coarsely ground.
Broth. We recommend using reduced-sodium broth; you can thus control the salt in the dish. If you use standard canned broth, cut out the salt in the recipe and check again when the dish is done to see if you need more. In no case do we recommend bouillon cubes as a substitute for broth; these are mostly salt and a coloring agent.
Brown Sugar. See Sugar.
Butter. Our recipes only call for unsalted butter. If you use salted butter, reduce the salt in the recipe by half, then check at the end of cooking to see if you need to add more.
If you melt butter in a microwave, beware of splatters caused by the butter melting internally, superheating, and bursting out. To prevent this, cut the butter into 1-tablespoon sections, place in a small bowl, and microwave in 15-second increments, swirling the bowl after each heating. When almost all the butter has melted, remove the bowl from the microwave and let the residual heat melt any remainder.
Buttermilk. Here’s one baking staple most of us don’t keep on hand. One solution is to substitute powdered buttermilk, available at gourmet markets, specialty food stores, and from suppliers on the Web. Simply make the amount of buttermilk you need, based on the package instructions, then add it to the batter as indicated. Once opened, powdered buttermilk must be refrigerated for up to 1 year.
If you have neither fresh nor powdered, you can substitute 1 cup whole milk and 1 tablespoon lemon juice; stir together and set aside at room temperature for 5 minutes.
Cake Flour. See Flour.
Chili Oil. This Asian condiment is chile-steeped oil, tinted orange or red by the chiles’ oils and infused with the chemical inferno in their membranes and seeds. By and large, Malaysian and Thai bottlings are hotter than Chinese. Because it goes rancid quickly after opening, store chili oil in the refrigerator. It should not be used as an oil for sautés.
Chipotle Chiles. Chipotles are smoked dried jalapeño chiles; they are often sold in larger supermarkets or Latin American markets. They should be toasted or softened before use, as the recipe indicates. Remove the inner membranes and seeds for a milder taste.
Chipotles are often canned in adobo sauce, a fiery mixture of chiles and vinegar; these can be used in place of dried chipotles if they are rinsed before seeding and chopping.
Chocolate. It usually comes in varieties like semisweet, bittersweet, and unsweetened. Basically, these indicate the ratio of cocoa solids to sugar: semisweet has more sugar than bittersweet; both have more sugar than unsweetened. Milk chocolate adds milk solids to the mix. High-end brands often have a percentage on the label: 66% or 71%, for example. This number represents the percentage of the mixture that is cocoa solids. As a rule,