French Onion Soup. Seemed like it must be a royal pain to get that much flavor into such a simple set of ingredients but it’s surprisingly easy.
I concur. My non-Ramsay recipe is a cinch. The trick with a ‘log’ or thick cut of fillet steak is to precook it for a couple of hours at a low temperature (70C) before adding it to the pastry. No need for prosciutto, and you can just put the duxelles on the pastry as a bed for the beef. Make sure the pastry is rolled really wide, then slash strips into the edges of the pastry once the beef is down, roll the pastry over the top of the beef, then braid the strips together over the top and egg glaze. Into the oven at a really high temperature and you get the pastry cooked, the edges of the beef browning, lovely pink heart and it tastes incredible. It’s so simple.
Chicken Marsala and Shrimp Scampi. Cook meat, cook appropriate veggies, add alcohol, serve and have family think you’re a five star chef.
There’s a Salmon en Croute that I make for dinner parties that looks as if it takes for ever, but really is a total of about 15 minutes active work. When sliced open it has a wonderful combination of colors and flavors (pastry, salmon, spinach, shrimp, pastry), but is soooo easy. Admittedly I use frozen puff pastry, but does anyone make that stuff from scratch?
Steak au poivre turned out to be much easier than it sounds.
Yet another vote for bread. If you take classes and work hard, you can make spectacular bread, but as long as you don’t kill the yeast, it’s very difficult to make terrible bread. Let it rise and knead it – it will taste good.
Chicken parmesan. It was so easy that I now feel bad ordering it in a restaurant.
- Take chicken breasts, pound 'em thin.
- Dip the breasts in flour, egg wash, and bread crumbs.
- Fry until crispy and just about done.
- Put in an oven-safe pan with a thin layer of tomato sauce on the bottom. Cover with more tomato sauce and thick slices of mozzarella.
- Bake in the oven for 10 minutes or so.
And that’s it. And it’s crazy-delicious.
Truffles. Time consuming as you wait for it to chill, but so easy. Make a ganache, chill, shape, chill, coat, eat. Video.
Seconded. This is my go-to, I-don’t-feel-like-cooking, wife-is-out-of-town dinner. The ingredients are always on hand, it’s quick, it’s easy, it’s tasty, and you can even add some frozen peas so you can make a credible claim at having had a vegetable with dinner.
I think too many people have had some sort of alfredo-based, or bechamel-based “carbonara” at bad Italian restaurants; they don’t know how simple and flavorful a pasta carbonara can be.
Mine is embarrassingly easy. Essentially, it’s the recipe on the back of the White Lily self-rising cornmeal mix, I think, plus whatever I feel like adding (cheese, jalapenos, pork products of some sort - mmm, cracklin’ cornbread!)
The only real “hint” I can pass on is to use a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet for baked or stovetop cornbread, and to preheat the skillet along with the fat. (IOW, put the shortening, lard, or butter into the pan, turn on oven to preheat, put pan in oven, add hot fat to the cornmeal mix at the last minute, bake.) No doubt, people can, have, and do make perfectly good cornbread in some container other than an iron frying pan, but I love the crispy crust that I can only seem to get from my skillets.
Tiramisu.
The only trick is to make sure the espresso is cold.
Peanut butter cookies. Follow the recipe on the jar - 1 cup pb, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 egg. I like to add chocolate chips, but that’s not in the original recipe.
Combine, drop on cookie sheet, bake and eat. They’re really, really good.
? Choux pastry difficult? Not really, pretty damned easy if you ask me. All it is is twice cooked pastry.
Look, you do the first half :
1 cup water
1 stick butter (1/2 cup)
1 cup all purpose flour
1 good pinch of salt
1 cup eggs (4 large eggs)
Preheat oven 425F.
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In a medium pot, bring the water, salt and butter to a simmer on medium heat. Add the flour and with a wooden spoon or spatula, stir very quickly in one direction. Carefully watch and you’ll see that the flour starts absorbing the liquid – and a dough will form. Keep stirring to continue cooking the flour and cook off some of the water, another minute or two.
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You can do the next step one of two ways:
- Transfer the paste to the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment or to a bowl if you’re using a hand mixer.
- If you want to mix the eggs directly into the dough in the pot, let it cool slightly, 4 or 5 minutes, or cool off the pan itself by running cold water over its base if you will be mixing the eggs in that pot. You don’t want to cook the eggs too quickly.
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Add the eggs one at a time mixing rapidly until each is combined into the paste. The paste will go from shiny to slippery to sticky as the egg is incorporated. The pâte a choux can be cooked immediately at this point or refrigerated for up to a day until ready to use.
Second part - same day or day later.
Spoon the dough into a large gallon-sized plastic bag (or piping bag.) Use your hands to squeeze dough towards the bottom corner. With kitchen shears, snip off just the tippy tip of the bag, about 1/4" of the tip. Pipe onto a baking sheet into little puffs, keeping the puffs 2-inches apart. With your finger, press down the peaks (as they can burn.) Bake at 425F for 10 minutes, then 350F for 18-30 minutes, depending on the size of your puffs.
I like to fill with creme anglaise or you can cheat and use vanilla pudding [or any flavor pudding, really] piped in through a filling tip. I have done strawberry jam, or even crab salad depending on sweet or savory.
There are probably guides on youtube as well. He, le voila
Oh, and if you want eclaires, make long rows of choux instead of rounds.
Hm, I made my first souffle at 8 years old. Puff pastry is also easy, but you have to keep everything cold. Can’t really think of anything I thought was difficult. Fricklety, yes but nothing really difficult. Proper strudel dough is just a pain in the ass, but not difficult.
I do … but I have the marble top off a marble table that I use for pastry making, it makes a great heat sink. I also have a marble rolling pin.
The trick is that everything has to remain cold.
OK - I am jealous. I have a lousy galley kitchen, and nowhere to roll any sort of pastry out. The only space I have is the same size as a chopping board.
Also voting for bread. I’ve got through so many different bread recipes over the years, and not one loaf has turned out less than “very good.” Bread is really one of those things that it’s worth to make yourself because the difference between store-bought and home-made is so vast.
And poached eggs. I didn’t realize until I was an adult that poached eggs have a “difficult” reputation. There are whole websites devoted to troubleshooting poached eggs. Yet it’s one of the first things I learned to cook. Boil the water, turn it to low, drop in your eggs and nudge them a bit to prevent sticking to the pan, take them out when they look white.
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The only real difference between non-bastardized cranberry sauce and the kind with orange peel is that you add a tiny bit of orange peel and a stick of cinnamon to the pot along with everything else.
Now that I’ve poached eggs in soup, it’s much easier than when I tried it in a pan. My trick is that I crack the egg into a ladle, then gently let the egg out of the ladle and into the soup. I’m sure that this could be applied to just water as well, but would require a little nudging for non-stick effect; in soup, the soup ingredients keep it from reaching the bottom.
I mostly agree with this. Pizza is one of the easier foods to make, and most chain pizza is quite bad.
Unfortunately, in order to get really good pizza, you need an oven that goes to 1000 degrees.
Depends on the style you’re aiming for. But, yeah, for those wood- and coal-fired styles, you’re looking at 800+F to get the crust right.
Still, while I like making homemade pizza (am doing so today), most of the time, I prefer pizza from a good restaurant. It’s exceedingly rare I find a homemade pizza as good as from a reasonable take-out place.
Sorbet, for me. It’s pretty much as easy as mixing sugar syrup into fruit juice and then pouring in an ice cream maker. If you don’t have one, all you need to do is freeze it, but take it it every hour or two and mush it up with a fork vigorously. It’s super easy, but also super tasty, and serving homemade sorbet at a dinner party is just chock full of class.
Not mine, but a friend of mine told me once how alarmed a Mexican friend was when she taught him to make grilled cheese sandwiches. He’d been ordering them in diners for years, always assuming there was some “trick” to it. It being as simple as butter, bread, cheese, heat blew his mind.