One of the most sweeping irrationalities in our society is the broken fertility cycle.  Fixing it is one of the most basic and effective ways to impact the environment through your eating.   Here are 5 Easy Steps for Composting in a Small Urban Apartment – and having a lot of fun doing it!

By “broken fertility cycle”, I mean that we utilize huge amounts of fossil fuels to artificially generate fertility in soil, and then we seal off giant landfills to store all the food waste.  In those sealed coffins, food breaks down anaerobically, releasing huge amounts of methane, which is 25x worse than carbon.  Many municipalities report that up to 50% of landfill space is taken by food scraps.   This very same material, when composted and used as fertilizer, promotes excellent plant growth, puts nutrients back into the ground and your food, and generates living soil which actually breathes – sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.  This is the traditional way to create soil fertility, and it is what we will all end up doing again some day — one way or another.

This guide is inspired by a rash of wonderful articles on GoodEater about the importance and experience of composting. First, tea executive Stefan Schachter wrote Composting: Sustainability in Action. Then, James Beard award-winning author Deborah Krasner wrote: Worm Harvest. They bring various viewpoints to the table, and so I decided to create a practical guide to direct the energies they’ve stimulated among readers.

If you’re new to composting, you probably have a lot of questions.  How do I set up a compost in my little apartment?  How much does this thing cost?  Is it a lot of work?  What about the smell?

To answer these questions, I’ve been running thermophilic (traditional) compost bins and vermiculture (worm) compost bins side by side for months in order to learn best-practices and create this guide for GoodEaters:

5-Step Process for Easy Composting in a Small Urban Apartment

First, Decide Whether to do “Traditional” or “Worm” Composting

Traditional, or thermophilic, composting uses bacteria and fungi to break down food aerobically.  The food passes through a heated stage created by the bacteria (your bin will get up to 170 degrees) to aid in the digestion.  The benefits of this system are that you can create a huge bin, fill it with a large volume of stuff, including autumn leaves, grass clippings, etc., mix it with “greens” (kitchen scraps), and then virtually set it and forget it.  In the spring you’ll have your rich soil for the new year’s garden.

Worm bins use a certain type of worms called “red wigglers” to digest the foods more rapidly.  You can view the purpose of these worms as merely transports for efficiently delivering the bacteria in their stomachs to fresh food (of course, one could say the same for humans).  This system is favored for it’s speed, quality of compost (“worm castings”, which are actually their poop), and the fact that the fast digestion results in little anaerobic bacteria – the source of bad smells.  If you definitely need to compost indoors and/or have very little space, worm composting is the way to go.

Here’s a chart to aid in your decision:

Second, Decide Whether To Build or Buy

If you are setting up a traditional bin, I suggest buy one.  In a rural environment you can set one up cheaply with chicken wire far from the house.  But in an urban environment, you don’t want to attract raccoons, rats, or squirrels.  A professionally-made bin is pest-proof.  I use the classic Bosmere K767 Garden Compost Bin 11-Cubic-Foot Capacity, which was recommended to me by the folks at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and works like a charm. If you live in New York, you can buy this and other bins at-cost through the city.

On top of that, you’ll probably want a small little bin in your kitchen to collect scraps between regular trips to the outside compost.  For this I recommend the classic Norpro Grip EZ Stainless Steel Compost Keeper, which has an active carbon filter to stop smell.  It also looks nice.

All this adds up of course.  But if you are going to go with worms, it’s so easy to build a worm bin.  It cost me $5 in materials and took less than 30min.  I watched a dozen of YouTube videos, and this one is the best for building the most basic and inexpensive worm bin. This one can go right under your kitchen sink:

The cost of worms is your main expense in this system: usually $20-25.  In New York City, to get your worms, contact the Lower East Side Ecology Project, phone: 212-477-4022, email: oreinc[at]earthlink.net.  Order your worms, and they’ll have them for you at the Union Square Farmers Market.

Of course, there must be a workaround?  Yes.  Check Craigslist and Brooklyn Free Cycle.  People often give away free containers of red wigglers, as they are quite prolific and everyone wants to promote composting.  I got my colony started thanks to two give-aways from friendly folks.

Third, Bag It Up for Vegetable Stock

Now that you have your bin, the fun begins! The last three steps are is actually my secret 3-Phase Process for getting the most out of every ounce of food purchases.

Keep a plastic bag in your freezer.  Throw kitchen scraps that can be used for vegetable stock into the bag as you go – e.g. stalks, stems, mushroom stubs, etc.  Everything else – e.g. eggshells, teabags, coffee grounds, etc. – throw right into the compost.

The secret ingredient to many dishes – from soups to stirfrys – is not in fact butter, but homemade stock.  Once your bag is full, throw it in a big pot with a head of garlic, an onion, a couple of bay leaves, and maybe some thyme or parsley.  Bring to a boil and then simmer for an hour.  Finally, skim out the solids and throw them into the compost.  I refrigerate some of the stock for short-term use and freeze the rest in ice-cube trays for later use.

Fourth, Make Your Compost Pile

See here for a list of what you can add to your compost and what you can’t.  The three main principles you need to know are:

1. Add roughly equal volumes of browns (cardboard, bread, etc. – all rich in carbon) and greens (veggie clippings, etc. – all rich in nitrogen).
2. Keep it moist, but not sopping.  Like a damp sponge.
3. Don’t add meat scraps, cheese, or anything oily.

Also, if you have a traditional bin, you should stir/rotate your compost around as much as possible so oxygen gets in there and you don’t get too much anaerobic bacteria.  For worm bins, the critters do the work.

Fifth, Harvest and Add to Your Plants!

To harvest from a worm bin, follow this example.  To harvest from a traditional bin, just take from the bottom.

Mix a scoop of compost right into the top of the soil in your potted plants or vegetable garden.  For new plants, mix at about a 1:3 ratio with the cheap “garden soil” from the nursery to make your own, super rich potting soil.  Lastly, you can steep a couple scoops in water for 24-hours to make compost tea, a super rich liquid fertilizer full of beneficial micro-organisms.  When poured over plants, this will create that living soil that sucks carbon out of the air, makes veggies go nuts, and fixes micro-nutrients to the plant roots for your own healthy consumption.

Who needs MiracleGro?

And if all this is really beyond you, no problem.  Every city has organic waste drop-off points which you can look up online.  In NYC, there’s some right in Union Square, as well as at all the major parks and gardens.  Just a warning, however, that you’ll be missing out on lots of fun, as well as a huge ego boost when you crown yourself “Master of the Bacteria”.

Thank you to all who participated in the “Best Seasonal Grilling Ideas Contest“ for a signed copy of Deborah Krasner’s James Beard award-winning The Flavors of Olive Oil: A Tasting Guide and Cookbook.

There was an outpouring of delicious and creative early summer grilling ideas put forth by readers, ranging from pesto shrimp to jerk sweet potatoes to grilled watermelon!  We drew randomly to celebrate all the contributors, and the prize goes to:

Lew Miller with his “Adult Taco”. Recipe as follows:

INGREDIENTS

• Soft flour tortillas
• Marshmallow creme
• Chopped banannas and strawberries
• Crushed 1 cup each pecans, chocolate chips,chocolate graham crackers
• 1 cup Kaluaha

INSTRUCTIONS

• Spread marshmellow creme on shell
• Down middle add fruit
• In bowl mix chips,crackers and pecans in bowl and mix with Kaluaha and 2 tables spoons over fruit and fold over shell in half
• Place in tin foil on grill till soft (3 minutes)
• Serve with scoop of ice cream drizzzled with kaluaha

Definitely a show- (and heart-) stopper.  Thanks Lew!

Following Kenji’s lead, I would like to confirm your meta-pantry is going to set you free.  But, as soon as you begin growing much of your own food and really begin to control what you feed yourself and your family, you are going to discover one reason why we pay farmers: They get stuck with all the abundance we don’t know how to handle.

Through learning to stock your meta-pantry, no more will you dread having too much basil or summer squash.  And even better, no more will we be at a loss for that creative touch at a special dinner.  Creativity becomes picking a jar off the shelf and enjoying the unique flavors that have come from your own work.

Candying is one great way to preserve a huge variety of vegetables, fresh spices, and herbs.  Here’s a basic method which works for many tough plants as well as squash and melons.

Angelica is an Apiaceae, an aromatic vegetable related to celery, cicely, fennel, and lots of other stalky vegetables.  The leaves make great tea, but can also be preserved as jelly or used to flavor a neutral spirit as one would make limoncello.  Yet the stems are the treat for which you will grow this aggressive plant.  The first year you plant angelica it will just give you leaves.  In the second year, it will come back on its own with tall fast growing stalks as one of the first plants in your spring garden.

Don’t have access to Angelica? Try this same recipe with the stiff green stems off of a fennel bulb, or even stalks of celery.

Candied Angelica

- makes 1-2 cups preserved stalks -
1 bunch Angelica stems
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups sugar

1. Cut the stems into lengths and remove the leaves.  Bring 1 gallon of water to a boil over high heat, add the baking soda (alkalinity helps green vegetables retain their color), and blanch the angelica stems until they just begin to soften, about 2 minutes.  Remove to an ice bath and chill.  Remove the strings around the outside of the stems with a pairing knife or vegetable peeler.

2. Combine the sugar with 1 1/2 cups water and bring it to a simmer, stirring until the sugar is fully melted. Add the blanched angelica and allow it to soak over night.

3. The next day, drain the syrup off and into a sauce pan.  Cook the syrup to 225 deg. F (107 deg C) as measured on a candy thermometer. Pour it back over the angelica and chill overnight. Repeat this process for the next two days as well (you’ll pour hot syrup over angelica a total of four times)

4. On the last day, drain the syrup into a sauce pan and cook it to 245 deg F (118 deg C) as measured on a candy thermometer.  Add the angelica to the pot and boil until the stalks look translucent.  At this point, either chill and store the angelica in the syrup for long term storage, or remove the stems to a drying rack and sprinkle them with sugar to crystallize them.

Even though this is a recipe that takes days to make, it only takes five or ten minutes each day, so don’t be put off. It’s easy.

The candies are lightly floral, beautiful. . . great for decorating cakes, making straws for home-made sodas, serving next to your cup of tea, folding into ice cream — you name it.

It’s the first week of June! We’ve had a glorious Spring, and although it’s too early for fresh tomatoes and eggplants, it’s not too early to rock the party with your grill skills.

To enter the contest, all you have to do is give us a short description of your favorite dish to grill in the early summer—you can even embed an image by adding a link to it in your comment.

The prize is a copy of Deborah Krasner’s book “The Flavors of Olive Oil: A Tasting Guide and Cookbook”

Deborah is a star Author at GoodEater and has generously donated a signed copy of her James Beard award-winning book.

The winner will be chosen at random out of all of the entries and announced next monday.

Let the grilling begin!

N.B.: this is a reblog of a post written last summer by Larissa Zhou

Living in Paris is both a boon and bane to my culinary ambitions. On one hand, walking through the city means an inevitable tour through the panoply of markets, specialty stores and artisanal shops. On the other hand, it’s expensive. Coupled with the fact that I’m on a tight student budget and previously had been living in the cheapskate heaven that is China, I’ve become slightly neurotic about spending money.

Thus, even though the Carrefour supermarket down the street has a 5 meter long display of yogurt, I’ve begun making my own. It’s simple economics: a 500g jar of plain yaourt brassé costs €2.49, but 2 liters of milk costs costs €1.75, and unlike making cheese, where a gallon of milk might yield a pint of curds, yogurt is a zero-loss project. Granted, I also like the feeling of je-ne-sais-quoi that I get from saying the phrase “I make my own yogurt.”

For those who haven’t read Harold McGee’s article on yogurt-making in the NY Times, the concept may seem impressive. But in reality, it’s quite easy. For mine, I heat up some milk until steaming and slightly bubbling, but not boiling, then pour it into jars and let it cool to the point that I can comfortably hold the jars. Hot, but not scorching.

Next, I drop a couple spoonfuls of active-culture yogurt into it, wrap it in kitchen towels, and wait. McGee recommends waiting for 3-4 hours for the bacteria to do its work before putting it in the fridge, but I’ve eaten yogurt cultured for a full 8 hours at room temperature, and I’m still alive. This is good to know for times when you’ve heated your milk at 11 pm and don’t feel like leaving bed in the middle of the night to check on the warm jar. It may be swaddled in cheesecloth like a baby on your couch, but it’s only yogurt.
Picture
Back in high school, I took the concept of “frozen yogurt” literally and stuck a carton of strawberry Yoplait in the freezer. Though true frozen yogurt needs to be churned like ice cream while freezing to give it a smooth and creamy texture, I discovered that I could achieve a whole range of textures that are interesting in their own right depending on how much time I let it freeze. The best was half frozen, the point when spiky ice crystals just start to form, creating a refreshingly abrasive texture on the tongue.

Here in Paris, I’ve discovered that French yogurt works even better because of its lower moisture content. Even though I could dish out €5 for ice cream or gelato from one of the 3 shops (Haagen-Däazs, Amorino, and Grom) within a three minute walking distance from my apartment, I instead freeze my homemade yogurt for a few hours, stir it up, freeze again, and then eat. Here’s another great texture: I let completely frozen yogurt thaw at room temperature while I go out for a run, then come home and stir it vigorously with a spoon. The yogurt becomes melty, creamy, and slightly frothy, just like the melted ice cream that forms around the perimeter of the ice cream carton. Exactly the way I like it.

If plain yogurt gets too boring, I place a heap of grated coconut and sliced almonds on top, or big fat blond raisins too if I want some chew. For something closer to dessert, I lace my yogurt with spoonfuls of crème de marrons (cooked chestnut purée with sugar); the yogurt’s sourness provides a welcome contrast to the super sweetness of chestnut puree.

But yogurt is just the tip of the dairy iceberg in France. There’s crème fraîche, fromage blanc (commonly served with a pool of honey at the end of a meal), and of course, cheese itself. And here’s what may surprise you even more than my making yogurt in this land of yogurt-plenty: I don’t enjoy cheese. At all. When I first moved to the US, it took me a while to even accept cheese on pizza. In fact, cheese is so intimidating that here I am, about to mark the end of 3 months in the land of Roquefort, Comté, Emmental and Brie, and stepping into a fromagerie is still an experience that I steel myself for and ultimately chicken out of. But that’s another story for another day…

Last summer I decided I wanted to learn how to can properly. I’d dabbled in jam-making a few times before—it’s just saucelike pie filling, I always figured—and made some quick bread and butter chips, but I hadn’t ventured much beyond raspberries and cucumbers, and the whole jar-boiling process was still a mystery to me.

Of course, after I took a Saturday morning crash course in canning with food writer and cookbook author Eugenia Bone and did a bit of reading, I realized the whole operation is no big deal. Canning isn’t just something you do when you have bushels of overripe produce on-hand and a full day to spend stirring the pot; it’s perfectly reasonable—in fact, extremely practical—to put up just a few jars at a time. (Bone said she often cans while making dinner; after all, you’re already standing at the stove.)

Unless your backyard crop is busting at the seams or you have plans to go fruit picking, it’s nice to pick up just enough in-season produce that you don’t often get a chance to work with to generate a few jars, and do some experimenting. At the very least, you’ll end up with a terrific stock of handmade host/hostess gifts that are way cooler than that scented candle you keep around for emergencies.

In a Pickle

At this time of year, my produce of choice turned out to be rhubarb and ramps. The wild baby leeks don’t come cheap—between $12-$14/pound this season in my local markets—but a friend of mine had pickled some for a Kentucky Derby party last weekend, and I just had to make a batch for myself. She kindly shared her recipe—a riff on a Tom Colicchio brine, she said—which involved boiling a 1:1 ratio of white wine vinegar to water, ½ cup sugar, 1 T kosher salt, and small sprinkles of coriander, mustard, and fennel seeds; pink, black, and Sichuan peppercorns; and a bay leaf. The ramps should be trimmed and thoroughly washed; plunging them into a bowl of cold water works well, especially if you gently peel back the layers to release the bits of grit and dirt.

The recipe also suggests blanching and shocking them before pickling, which cooks them just a little and preserves their bright grassy color. The last step is easy: Pack the ramps into a mason jar and pour the hot brine over to cover. I didn’t actually buy enough to fill the tall jars I have, so these will be refrigerator pickles. No matter. They won’t last that long anyway. (Note: They’re great with really fresh hard-boiled eggs.)

Jammin’

As for the rhubarb, I get a little giddy when the first crimson-blushed, celerylike stalks show up in the market, and not just because I find odd satisfaction in slicing through the crisp, snappy stems, or because I have abnormal cravings for all things sour (Ever try munching on a piece of raw rhubarb? It’s more bracing than espresso beans and doesn’t leave that stale aftertaste on your tongue).

Rhubarb is arguably better for jams than it is for pies or tarts because it breaks down quickly, contains more than enough water (meaning you don’t have to add any to help it thin out), and combines well with just about any other fruit you want to add. Last year I used raspberries, this time I went with blackberries; their flavor is punchy and they dye the rhubarb a deeper shade of shocking pink.

Once the fruit is washed and sliced, the stove does the rest: Toss the rhubarb with a generous amount of sugar and heat it, stirring occasionally, until the fibers break down and the sugar dissolves; shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to soften and then another 10 or so to turn thick and jammy. I usually add the berries when the rhubarb is about 75 percent cooked down, taste for sweetness, and finish the lot with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice; even tart jams can use a little brightening, I think.

Watching the Pot Boil

Meanwhile, I have a tall stockpot that now gets more use as my jar-boiling vessel than anything else. The canning rules are few and simple: Boil enough water to cover the jars by at least 1 inch; fill each jar up to its neck and make sure no drips run down the sides (a funnel comes in handy here); center the lid over the mouth of the jar and screw on the ring until it’s just beginning to tighten—be sure to leave it loose enough so that air can escape; boil for about 10 minutes; and carefully remove them from the water to a cooling rack (People with steady hands and really sturdy tongs might be able to get away without a jar lifter, but I think it’s an essential tool for plucking the slippery jars from the boiling water without burning yourself).

Voilà, you’re done. The new jars joined the small crop accumulating on my kitchen mantle: pickled fennel, bread and butters, garlicky dills, winter fruit chutney, nectarine-plum-raspberry sauce, and apple-raspberry sauce. I’d say canning’s as easy as pie—but, really, it’s much simpler than that.

It’s time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he’ll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

A salad, well-dressed. [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Without even realizing it, “The Food Lab,” has really started to become “The Meat Lab,” which is unfortunate, because I love vegetables (particularly spring vegetables—hello ramps!) even more than I love meat.

This week, we’re going to remedy that by taking a look at the lowly salad, if only for the sake of my poor wife’s waistline (I still love you dear).

For me, the big question about vinaigrettes has never really been “how?” but “why?”

Is emulsifying the oil and acid really necessary? Does adding the olive oil and the vinegar to the salad bowl individually really make for an inferior salad? Could every red-sauce Italian joint that serves salad with a side of oil and vinegar be wrong?

Well, stranger things have been true. I decided that a bit of hard-core kitchen work was in order.

Vinaigrette: Defined

My semi-busted edition of Larousse Gastronomique defines “vinaigrette” as:

a cold sauce or dressing made from a mixture of vinegar, oil, pepper, and salt, to which various flavorings may be added.

That’s a starting point, but I think for most practical definitions, a vinaigrette must also be wholly or at least partially emulsified.

What exactly is an emulsion? At its most basic, it’s what you get when you force two things that don’t easily mix to form a homogeneous mixture. In cooking, this most often occurs with oil and water (and for all intents and purposes, vinegar or lemon juice can be considered water, as it behaves in the same way). Put them in a container together, stir them up, and eventually, like cats and dogs, they will separate and stick with their own kind.

There are a couple of ways around this.

The first is to disperse one of the two—the oil, say—into fine enough droplets that water can completely surround it. Kind of like putting a single cat inside a ring of dogs—there’s no way for it to escape and rejoin its fellow feline friends. A common example of this kind of emulsion is homogenized milk, in which whole milk is forced at high pressure through a fine screen, breaking up its fat molecules into individual droplets that are suspended in the watery whey.

An easier way to form an emulsion is to add an emulsifying agent known as a surfactant.

Remember that cartoon CatDog? The one with the head of a cat on one side and the head of a dog on the other? Well, CatDog was kind of like a surfactant: he’s got something that’s attractive to both cats and dogs, which makes him a kind of feline-canine ambassador, allowing them to mix together a little more easily.

Culinary surfactants are molecules that contain one end that is attractive to water (hydrophilic), and one that is attractive to oil (hydrophobic). Common kitchen surfactants include egg yolks, mustard, and honey.

It’s easy to see the work of a surfactant in action.

The container on the left contains oil and balsamic vinegar mixed in a ratio of 3:1. The container on the right has the same ingredients, with the addition of a small amount of dijon mustard. Both containers were sealed and shaken vigorously until they looked homogeneous. I then allowed them to rest at room temperature for 5 minutes. As you can see, the container without the mustard separated much more rapidly than the container with mustard.

At this point, you’re probably thinking what I’m thinking: this is all very neat, but what difference does it make to my salad?

Good question.

Oil Slicks

My next order of business was to examine what happens when vinegar and oil are added to greens. I’d always been under the impression (and I’m not the only one) that a dressed salad eventually wilts because the acid in the vinegar attacks the leaves.

To test this theory, I dressed half an ounce of fresh salad greens with 1 teaspoon of distilled white vinegar (5% acetic acid), another half ounce with plain water (as a control), and a third half ounce of leaves with olive oil, then let them sit at room temperature for ten minutes.

Surprise! Turns out that vinegar is not the culprit at all.

The greens dressed with plain oil wilted significantly faster than those dressed in vinegar. In fact, the vinegar-coated greens fared pretty much just as well as those dressed in water!

The truth is that salad greens, like any leaf, spend their time exposed to the elements, and as such, need to protect themselves from the rain. They do this via a thin, waxy cuticle. It’s like a little built-in raincoat for the leaf. On the other hand, this oily cuticle makes it very easy for the olive oil to penetrate the spaces between cells (dogs and dogs stick together, remember), causing damage to the leaf.

As a further test, I then dressed another batch of salad greens in a vinaigrette that I constructed without any surfactant (i.e. oil and vinegar, mixed as well as I could manage). I took an up-close-and-personal look at the results, and what I saw was this (above, right): drops of vinegar suspended above the surface of the leaf by larger drops of oil, like little blobs sitting in bean bag chairs. Lifting the leaf up between my fingers prompted a cascade of vinegar to tumble back into the bowl, while the oil continued to cling tenaciously to its surface.

A ha, I thought. This must be the key.

I set up one last experiment, this time dressing two 1-ounce portions of salad side-by-side. The first was dressed with a homogenized mixture of 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1 teaspoon vinegar, and 1/2 teaspoon dijon mustard. The second was dressed with the same mixture, minus the mustard. After tossing the greens, I immediately placed them inside funnels, which I set over a couple of small glasses in order to catch any drippings.

Almost immediately, the non-mustardy batch on the right started dripping a steady trickle of vinegar into the cup, while the well-emulsified dressing on the left staid firmly in place.

After only ten minutes, the right cup had nearly a full teaspoon of vinegar collected in its bottom—almost the entire amount that I had put on the salad in the first place—and was starting to drip a few drops of oil as well. The cup on the left had shed at most a dozen drops.

Moral? Unless you emulsify your vinaigrette, you end up with a pile of leaves dressed in oil, and a pool of vinegar at the bottom of the salad bowl, completely destroying the flavor of the sauce. An emulsified vinaigrette however, uses the power of surfactants to help both oil and vinegar cling tightly to the leaves. Balanced flavor in every mouthful.

Looking at the greens themselves was even more revealing.

The salad dressed in the badly emulsified vinaigrette showed definite signs of wilting, while the salad dressed in the proper vinaigrette was still crisp and fresh-tasting. Apparently, straight-up oil is much more damaging to leaves than an oil-vinegar mixture.

Obsessive-Emulsive

The last few questions that still needed answering: ratio, the best surfactant for the job, and mixing method.

For ratio, the classic proved to be best: two to three parts oil to one part vinegar. It forms the strongest emulsion. If you’d like your vinaigrette less acidic, you can replace part of the vinegar with straight water and get equally stable results.

Mustard is the most common surfactant, and it works best when you have at least 1 teaspoon per tablespoon of vinegar (you can add more if you’d like). Mayonnaise works even better, easily forming a creamy sauce, though it lacks the pleasant tang of mustard. For a sweeter dressing (say, on a beet salad or an asparagus salad), honey also works very well. Try adding honey and toasted crushed nuts to a basic vinaigrette. It rocks in more ways than one.

As for mixing? Some advocate slowly whisking in the oil. Others shake it up in a jam jar. Still others insist on the blender.

Well, after testing, I found that not surprisingly, a blender will give you the tightest emulsion (I made a blended vinaigrettes that stayed emulsified for a whole week), while the shake-it-in-a-jar version will be the weakest, lasting around 30 minutes or so.

But the truth of the matter is: your vinaigrette only needs to stay stable for the length of time it takes you to eat a salad. So if it takes you a week to eat a salad,* then by all means, whip out the blender.

*The only situation I can imagine this happening is if my mom had served us more salads when we were kids. She had a no-leaving-the-table-until-you’ve-finished-and-I-don’t-care-how-long-it-takes-or-even-if-you-vomit policy.

Personally, I put the ingredients for my vinaigrette into a 1-pint squeeze bottle in the fridge and shake it up right before I use it. Or, as is more often the case, take it out of the fridge, realize that once again my wife has finished off all but the last drop and replaced the bottle, hoping I’d notice and make more. Of course, I always do, but one of these days, I’m going to leave out the mustard, just out of spite.

We’ll see how much you like your soggy salad then, dear…

Continue here for Three Great Vinaigrettes »

About the author: After graduating from MIT, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt spent many years as a chef, recipe developer, writer, and editor in Boston. He now lives in New York with his wife, where he runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and co-writes the blog GoodEater.org about sustainable food enjoyment.

Note: Want to know all about homemade ricotta?: Check it out here.

- Makes approximately 1/2 cup ricotta cheese -

Note: Ultra-Pasteurized milk may produce a lower yield with a slightly different texture than regular milk. Due to differences in microwaves, cooking times may vary. For best results, use a thermometer and check milk frequently. This recipe can easily be doubled or tripled by using a larger liquid measuring cup and adding approximately 2 minutes of cooking time for each additional 2 cups of milk. For ideal resting times, please refer to the main article. Ricotta can also be made on the stovetop by heating milk in non-reactive pan over medium-low heat, stirring frequently and scraping bottom to prevent scorching until lightly bubbling before adding lemon juice and proceeding with recipe as instructed.

Ingredients

2 cups whole milk
1/4 teaspoon table salt
2 tablespoons lemon juice or distilled white vinegar

Procedure

1. Line colander with four layers of cheesecloth or 2 layers of food-safe paper towels and set over large bowl. Combine milk, salt, and 1 tablespoon lemon juice in microwave-safe glass 1-quart liquid measure. Microwave on high heat until lightly bubbling around edges, 2 to 4 minutes (milk should register about 165°F on an instant-read thermometer). Remove from microwave, and stir gently for 5 seconds. Milk should separate into solid white curds and translucent liquid whey. If not, microwave for 30 seconds longer. Repeat until fully separated.

2. Using slotted spoon or wire skimmer, transfer curds to prepared colander, cover exposed top with plastic wrap, and allow to drain until desired texture is reached. Store in covered container in refrigerator for up to 5 days.

It’s time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he’ll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments. —The Mgmt.

Given that every single food blog has covered the subject at least twice, it’s probably no surprise to all you internet-savvy food hounds out there that ricotta cheese is almost stupidly simple to make at home. Basic instructions: heat milk, add acid, drain, enjoy.*

*Before you nitpickers jump on me (which you undoubtedly will, despite this disclaimer), yes, true ricotta is made from leftover whey, not fresh milk. What we are really making here is a paneer or queso-fresco like cheese.

So how do you make something faster and easier when it was already pretty darn fast and easy to begin with? If you are the impatient type (and honestly, if you are intrigued by making fast and easy things faster and easier, then you probably fall into that category), skip to the bottom of the page for the reveal.

But! For those of you who aren’t really into the whole brevity thing, and would like a little more detail about the processes involved in curdling milk, read on.

Why, you might ask, would anyone want to make ricotta at home?

This is why:

News Flash! Store-bought ricotta is almost invariably awful.

True ricotta is made by adding acid to heated whey. The combination of heat and acid causes milk proteins (mainly casein) to bind together, trapping in some moisture and fat, and forming soft white curds.

To make really high-quality ricotta, these curds are then carefully removed from the whey (too much mechanical action can turn them rubbery) and allowed to drain, decreasing their water content, and concentrating their flavor and richness. The result is mind-blowingly simple, yet decadent. Or at least it should be.

The reality is that pretty much all mass-market ricotta producers don’t bother to take the time to drain their cheese properly. Instead, they load the stuff up with gums and stabilizers intended to keep the water (and thus their profits) from leaking out.

What you get is a gritty, gluey, rubbery paste that breaks as you heat it, turning your lovely cheesecake or lasagna gritty and watery. No thank you.

Homemade ricotta, on the other hand, poses some problems of its own. Despite the fact that the results are invariably better than the store-bought variety, I’ve had some truly outstanding batches, and some pretty-decent-but-not-great-enough-to-text-message-my-wife-to-come-home-early-for-dinner batches. There’s a lot of mixed info out there about the best method to use, so I decided to test each variable, one by one, to separate the curds from the whey.

Cooking Temperature

Most ricotta recipes call for heating the milk to 180°F, the temperature at which it starts to simmer. But is it really necessary to heat it that high?

I tried heating pots of milk to various temperatures (every five degrees between 150°F and 190°F) before adding vinegar as a coagulant and observing the results. Guess what? Between 165°F and 185°F or so, there was no real noticeable differences in the amount of curd produced, nor the texture of the curd.

So where does this particular piece of culinary you-wishdom come from? My first instinct is that it’s a carry-over and misapplication from the days when custards were made with un-pasteurized milk. Back then, milk had to be heated to 180°F in order to deactivate certain enzymes that can prevent a custard from setting.

These days, milk is pretty much always pasteurized (heated before packaging) so this step is unnecessary.

But wait a minute! Pasteurized milk is only raised to 161°F and works perfectly well in custards. So that whole 180°F for custards rule must also be a myth.

My best guess as to why many recipes arbitrarily pick 180°F? It’s the point at which milk starts simmering: an easy temperature to gauge even without a thermometer. But seeing as we’ve all got one (you do all have an instant read thermometer, right?) We’ll stick with the 165 to 185°F range, instead of aiming for that perfect 180°F.

The Milk and the Curds

I’ve read reports that UHT (ultra high-temperature) milk—milk that’s been heated to 275°F in order to kill all bacteria and spores—does not work for making cheese.

Since pretty much all organic milk is UHT treated (due to the fact that it has to sit on supermarket shelves longer than standard milk), and even the crummiest corner store seems to sell organic milk these days, this one was simple to test.

This time, I’m in agreement: UHT milk does not work as well as regular pasteurized milk. It has a smaller yield, and the curds do not cling together properly. The results weren’t terrible, and would do in a pinch, but given the option, I’d choose regular pasteurized milk (if you can get organic non-UHT milk, or even fresh, local milk, then you’re in luck).

The Acid

This was the single most important variable both in terms of flavor and texture.

• Buttermilk has many advocates claiming it’s the tastiest acid of choice. I had problems with it. In order to get the milk to curdle properly, I had to add buttermilk at nearly a 1:4 ratio, resulting in a cheese with a very distinct sour flavor. It wasn’t bad per se, but the flavor certainly limited its applications: I couldn’t imagine stuffing it into a ravioli, for instance. The curd structure was also ever-so-slightly overdeveloped, giving the ricotta a sticky texture.
• Distilled vinegar gave the cleanest flavor, with soft, tender curds. Since bottled vinegar is always diluted to 5% acetic acid, it is also the most consistent method. As long as your milk is fresh (older milk is more acidic than fresh milk, and thus requires less coagulant), you’ll get identical results every time.
• Lemon juice

also works very well, though I found that in some cases the amount I needed to use varied by about 25% give or take. Most likely this is due to varying pH levels from lemon to lemon. It gives the ricotta a very slight citrus tang that, while not as distinct as the buttermilk flavor, can be slightly off-putting in certain savory applications. On the other hand, it’s wonderful for pancakes, blintzes, or feeding to your hard-working wife, drizzled with olive oil**, sprinkled with sea salt, garnished with lemon zest and pesto, off a demi-tasse spoon.

**the ricotta, not the wife

Bottom line? For the most universal ricotta, stick with vinegar. Use lemon juice when lemon flavor is appropriate, and avoid buttermilk unless you’re really into it.

Drainage

In an ideal world, my kitchen would be stocked with butter muslin, or at the very least cheesecloth. Of course, in an ideal world, my kitchen sink have a “veal demi-glace” tap right next to the “hot” and the “cold.” Being without either drainage aid, I tried two alternative methods side-by-side: draining in a super fine-mesh chinois, and draining in a strainer lined with two layers of paper towels.

When transferring the curds to the strainer, I discovered that despite the strong temptation to simply dump everything in, it’s much more efficient to spoon the curds into the drainage device, trying to minimize the amount of liquid whey you add—the fine curds can gunk up the works, making it a very slow process for all the whey to completely drain.

While the chinois did work quite well, it’s also a tool that costs around $90, and is beyond annoying to clean. Paper towels, on the other hand, worked perfectly, and are cheap. As for how long it should drain? Well that all depends on what you’re going to do with it:

Drainage Length: Under five minutes.
Texture: Extremely moist and creamy (a cream-cheese-like consistency) with small, tender curds.
Best Uses: Immediate consumption, while still warm. For savory applications, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt and black pepper, and serve. For dessert, drizzle warm ricotta with honey, and serve with fruit.

Drainage Length: 15 to 20 minutes.
Texture: Small, tender curds with a cottage cheese-like consistency. Moist and spreadable, but not runny.
Best Uses: Moist savory applications like lasagna or ravioli fillings and dips, or certain un-cooked pastry applications, like cannoli filling.

Drainage Length: At least two hours, or up to overnight (refrigerated).
Texture: Firm, dry, crumbly curds that can easily be molded into firm shapes.
Best Uses: Pastry, such as ricotta pancakes, ricotta gnocchi, or ricotta tortas.

The Problems

Now, despite the fact that homemade ricotta is about as difficult to make as, say, a boiled egg, there are still two serious issues imost pundits seem to gloss over:

Problem 1: First off, milk burnt onto the bottom of a saucepan is a bitch to clean. There are all sorts of tricks out there to help prevent this, but the fact of the matter is, unless you carefully stir and scrape the bottom with a spatula as the milk heats, you’re going to get some degree of burnt milk protein coagulation on the bottom of your pot—a messy affair, to say the least. I rank stirring a slowly heating pot of milk for 20 minutes up there in excitement level with Gilmore Girls marathons and John Mayer concerts.

Problem 2: You think burnt milk on the inside of a pot is bad? How many of you have ever had to clean burnt milk all over your stovetop? Chances are, if you’ve ever heated milk in your life, this has happened to you. As milk heats, the proteins and fats on the top surface begin to coagulate, forming a sort of “raft” on the surface. Once it starts getting close to its boiling point, water vapor forms, getting trapped underneath this raft. As soon as enough pressure has built up, the raft goes the only way it can: up and over. This tipping point can occur in a matter of moments, and in fact, it has been independently proven by several renowned chefs and scientists that milk will only boil over when your back is turned.

The Solution

So knowing everything we’ve learned about ricotta, can we somehow find a method that avoids the chance of a messy spill, makes clean-up a snap, is completely idiot-proof, and a heck of a lot faster to boot? Yep. Just throw out the saucepan and thermometer, combine your ingredients in a glass container, microwave on high for a couple minutes, stir once, and drain. Ta da!

Since we already know that the ricotta has a wide range of tolerance in terms of temperature (anywhere from 165°F to 185°F will do), we don’t need the thermometer—simple visual inspection will suffice in this case. Unlike a stovetop, which heats the milk only from the bottom, a microwave heats the milk evenly from all sides, preventing both burnt-on milk proteins, and the chance of a dangerous boil-over.

Finally, since milk is mostly water, and microwaves excel at efficiently heating water, your ricotta is ready in just about a third of the time that it would take on the stove-top.

There you have it: perfect, fresh, homemade ricotta, in five minutes or less. Now if only I could discover a way to get my lasagna to assemble itself, I’d be free to engage in more exciting enterprises like studying the effects of hydrocolloid gelation in the perfect chicken noodle soup.

What do you like to do with your fresh ricotta?

Continue here for the Five Minute Homemade Ricotta Recipe »

About the author: After graduating from MIT, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt spent many years as a chef, recipe developer, writer, and editor in Boston. He now lives in New York with his wife, where he runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and co-writes the blog GoodEater.org about sustainable food enjoyment.

Note: Want to know why you have to double fry? Check it out here.

- 2 to 4, depending on how hungry or depressed they are -

If you don’t have a fry cutter or thick mandoline, take your time cutting the potatoes thinly and uniformly—it will pay off in the results. If your stove is especially weak, fry potatoes in two batches during step 3, keeping the first batch warm in a 200°F oven while frying second batch. Oil can be strained and reused.

Ingredients

4 large russet potatoes (about 2 pounds), peeled, cut into 3/8-inch matchsticks
2 quarts peanut oil
Salt

Procedure

1. Place potatoes in bowl of cold water and rinse, changing water until water runs completely clear. Drain potatoes and dry thoroughly with paper towels or kitchen towels.

2. Using oil thermometer or instant read thermometer, heat oil in large Dutch oven or wok (oil should come no more than half way up the sides) to 350°F. Add potatoes and cook, stirring and turning frequently until pale blond with lightly bubbled surface, about 5 minutes (oil will drop in temperature when you add potatoes—adjust heat to maintain oil between 300 and 325 degrees F). Remove potatoes and drain on paper towel-lined baking sheet. At this point, potatoes can be refrigerated overnight, or frozen and kept in an airtight container in the freezer for up to 3 months.

3. Heat oil to 425°. Add potatoes and cook, stirring and turning frequently, until golden brown, about 2 minutes (oil will drop in temperature when adding fries—adjust heat to maintain temperature between 375 and 400°F). Transfer to paper towel-lined bowl, season with salt, and toss to remove excess oil. Serve immediately.