I was trolling through The Kitchen blog which I highly recommend. It is part of the Apartment Therapy website and has a nice mix of kitchen equipment finds, store reviews, and food and recipe advice. 

One store that The Kitchn wrote about back in 2007 is Fante’s Kitchen Wares Shop out of Philadelphia, PA. The physical store is over 100 years old, and there is also an online shop, but what sets this kitchen store apart from others is its bewildering amount of kitchen items. Just look at the rolling pin page as an example.

But Fante’s goes even further. On the product category pages, they also put helpful kitchen tips and information on how to make better shopping choices and even go so far as to put recipes and public service announcements. For instance, the ‘honey’ page warns that honey should not be fed to infants under one year of age. They even have pages dedicated to informing about plastics, coffee beans, how to choose cookware and many other topics. This kitchen store has truly gone the extra mile, and after seeing how many pages there are with unique content, I can truly appreciate the effort that went into this online store.

With that said, even though Fante’s offers a wide range of products, the site is pretty basic and cluttered. It is not so much navigation as it is exploration, and their store directions, privacy policy and contact pages are buried along with all the kitchen products. However, there is some charm to the simple chaos too, and browsing through Fante’s is akin to rummaging through an antique store or used-book shop. Just reading through the categories will beg you to click and see what is offered: ‘patriotic cookie cutters’ and ‘Mongolian fire pot’ were two that piqued my curiosity. Then again, some categories are so basic that they make one curious for other reasons such as ‘banana‘. What I found was a selection of amusing and probably not-so-useful banana gadgets such as the slicer pictured above.

Regardless of the site’s shortcomings, Fante’s Kitchen Wares Shop is a useful resource. It might not be the site where you end up purchasing an item online, but it could very well be that place where you start looking for something that is hard to find. And even if you don’t find it, chances are you will see something else of interest.

In the quest to tackle my top-10 cooking goals for the year, I decided to lead off with making cheese. I recently found a home delivery dairy service from a nearby town in Minnesota that will give me fresh local milk. The dairy is called Stoney Creek Dairy, and they currently offer non-homogenized milk, but they they will be discontinuing the product line in November. Too bad. 

So I put in my first (and last) order for my non-homogenized whole milk and just ordered a cheesemaking kit online for making ricotta and mozzarella. In the future I will just have to use regular milk instead of non-homogenized, but I thought I’d try it while supplies last. Getting milk delivered at home is also going to be interesting in an old-school sort of way. They deliver to small towns in the area, and I love the fact they offer to personally put it in your fridge if you are not at home. Now that is small-town service. I just hope the kit and the milk get here about the same time.

I decided to go with a kit instead of buying the supplies locally as I wasn’t sure I could find all of the ingredients on short notice. For instance, I need rennet and I had no clue what that was. After a quick wiki search, I learned that it was a complex of enzymes produced in a mammalian stomach to help digest mother’s milk. You can also get vegetable rennet if you are a vegetarian. At grocery stores you can find a brand of rennet called Junket usually near the Jello, but some say that it isn’t strong enough as it is used in making ice creams and custards instead. And to top it all off, a lot of recipes call for special cheese salt, citric acid, lipase powder and calcium chloride. So it was an easy choice: I bought the kit and now I wait for everything to arrive.

If you wish to purchase cheesemaking supplies you can shop online at cheesemaking.com, leeners.com or thecheesemaker.com. All three have a large selection of products, kits, ingredients and offer help for the novice cheesemaker.  

After making making ricotta and mozzarella, I am going to move on to chèvre as there are two goat dairies near to where I live. I will just have to call them up to see if I can buy some milk off of them. I also want to make goat-milk butter, but that is down the road and for now I need to focus on my intro cheeses. Just reading through the eGullet forum gives me an indication that these cheese making kits aren’t quite as easy as they seem, so this should be interesting.

Via the Food Wishes blog comes this video on how to eat chicken wings. Usually people struggle with eating a chicken wing and it turns into a battle of human versus tiny chicken bones — with the chicken bones often winning. And in the end our fingers end up all messy, and we have probably looked a bit ridiculous too.

Maybe it is just me, but whenever I am eating a chicken wing, I feel as if people are watching me and probably passing judgement with appropriate Midwestern shock, uttering things like ‘gosh’ and ‘oh my’ as I try to eat that itty bitty wing.

Anyhow, no longer will that happen. This presentation by Chef John is delightfully simple, and it is one of those videos that makes you question why it has taken so long to do it the right way. It is similar to when I learned 15 years ago how to open a banana correctly. (Look it up on YouTube; you may be doing it incorrectly.)

Aside from this video, the Food Wishes blog is an extremely good food site. Chef John presents a lot of fine recipes, and the videos are very well done. Where most food blogs hover at the amateur level, this one takes food blogging to the next step. The content and instructions are professional, and this site definitely deserves some props for that.

As for recipes, I thought the seared scallops with orange and jalapeno dressing and cauliflower soup with blue cheese fritters looked great. Chef John also has a post on how to make your own fromage blanc, which I think I am going to try.

Butter for a long time was maligned, looked down upon, and seen as unhealthy, but it is great to see that it has comeback and its cooking place has been firmly re-established. In the October Bon Appetit, they pose the question “Is butter better?” They make the point that butter has less fat than olive oil and about 20 percent fewer calories, and the article mentions that lard and duck fat also have redeeming nutritional value. You can read the article here.

Of course to be a truly healthy food, one must consider the bad saturated fats versus the healthful monounsaturated fats, and butter does have fewer of these healthy fats and more of the bad stuff than lard, duck fat, and olive oil. But there is no denying that there is some value in butter too; you just have to moderate intake a bit more.

I personally love butter. While living in France, I would become giddy just walking down the dairy isle and looking at the great selection of butter (and yogurts). And tasting them changed me for life; there was no going back. European butter had more flavor and it was creamier.

The reason European butters generally taste better is due to the culturing and fermenting of the cream before making it into butter. In Europe this culturing process is standard practice but it isn’t in the US — though you can find more and more European-style butters being sold in the US now — both domestically made and imported.

The butter shown above is a premium hand-made one from France. Gourmet wrote in 2007 about how Jean-Yves Bordier, a boutique butter maker, was selling his product to many of the best chefs and restaurants in Paris. It is called Beurre Bordier, and though the English portion of the website wasn’t working when I visited it, you can still browse the site in French and see some wonderful butter.

Bordier hand churns his butter in Brittany, and he offers plain cultured, salted, smoke-salted, and seaweed butter. Bordier uses slightly soured cream from cows that graze on organic farms in Normandy and Brittany, and utilizes a wooden device that grinds the churned butterfat particles at a very slow speed to yield an exceptionally smooth butter. Salt and seaweed are added by hand. This article in Saveur talks about his process in more detail, but if you want to buy it you will have to go to France.

That butter sounds great, and one reason it also tastes better is that European butters have more fat. Taste in many cases equals fat, and domestic butter generally has a lower amount (80% fat) and European butters have 81-86% fat. That is one to six percent more flavor on top of production differences that make the butter creamer and more flavorful.

Cook’s Illustrated did a taste test of premium unsalted butters in November 2008, and even if you don’t live in Paris, you can still find good butter here. The tasters preferred Danish Lurpak but also recommended Vermont Butter and Cheese Company Unsalted Butter, Isigny Ste. Mère Beurre de Baratte, and Beurre de Chimay. Land O’Lakes Unsalted Butter was recommended too, though it was clearly plain compared to the flavor of the other varieties.

The San Fransisco Chronicle did a butter taste challenge for European-style butters, and Lurpak also did well, coming in second place. The butter of choice though was Challenge European Style, but it is only sold in western states. Plugra came in third, and you can find this widely throughout the US, including at Target stores. When tasting on itself, this butter outperformed Lurpak, which performed better for baking. In a different challenge, Food & Wine editors tried 20 butters and they chose Organic Valley’s Cultured Unsalted Sweet Cream as their winner.

Regardless of which brand you use, just remember to take butter out the fridge to let it soften and develop its flavors before using. Also it is best to keep your butter in a storage container in the fridge or wrap it tightly as it will absorb odors. It will also develop a rancid taste over time so try use it up within a month’s time, and if you won’t immediately be using it, keep it in a zip lock bag in the freezer. Butter keeps for about 4-6 months.

For storage, I personally use the Butter Bell Crock which inverts a butter cup over a vessel of water. This prevents the butter from going bad by eliminating air and light exposure, and you always have soft butter because you can keep it on the counter.

If you want to browse 30 good butters, Saveur has pictures and descriptions here. Many of the varieties may not be available in the US, but several of the brands are sold at stores and online. There is also an interesting article at saveur.com about making your own butter and they also have a good summary of types of butter.

For online ordering check out:
iGourmet
Zingerman’s
Marky’s
Vermont Butter & Cheese Company
Gourmet Library
Gourmet Food Store

Oh yeah, and as for me personally, I use Land O’Lakes for cooking, Lurpak on its own, and I am also trying right now an Italian butter from Delitia, which is made from the same cows from which parmegiano reggiano cheese is made. If you can’t find it locally, you can order it from Gourmet Library.

Some other suggestions if you want to try something new are Amish-style roll butter and goat-milk butter. Goat-milk butter is offered by several online retailers.

A few years back Food & Wine recommended the stone-ground grits from Charleston Grill ($10 for 2 pounds), and I ordered them. Then I kept on ordering them. Good stone-ground grits can make a fabulous dish, and even as a northerner I loved those Charleston Grill grits. If you want to order them, the restaurant has a website, but you will have to call them to order at 843.937.9142 as there is no online shop.

Then fairly recently in Alabama, I started using an organic blue corn grits from McEwen & Sons ($7 for 2 pounds) out of Wilsonville, Alabama. They were also great and the blue color gave the grits some flair, though I couldn’t tell much difference in taste between yellow or white corn. They all seem pretty much the same to me, and it is hard to compare them to the Charleston Grill grits because I used them in different recipes.

Also in Alabama is an excellent restaurant called Highland’s Bar & Grill, and they serve a wonderful creamy grits. I don’t know what brand of grits the chef, cookbook author, and restaurateur, Frank Stitt, uses but his recipe is really good. I’ve had them a few times and they never fail. You can find his recipe here relayed via Martha Stewart. Or you can buy his cookbook, Frank Stitt’s Southern Table, at Amazon.

Several cooking magazines have recommended Anson Mills out of Columbia, South Carolina. They produce heirloom grits for many restaurants worldwide, and the October Gourmet also recommends their Carolina Whole Hominy Quick Grits if you don’t want to spend the extra time preparing them. The picture above is of Anson Mills’ coarse ground yellow grits.

Of course a search of the foodie Chowhound and eGullet forums usually reveals an abundance of recipes and resources for every cooking topic under the sun — grits included. Here are some of the other recommendations from those sites on where to buy grits online. I am sure there are more sellers as they didn’t mention my two sources, but these will provide more than a good start at least. Keep in mind that shipping costs can be high, so the price per pound is only part of the bill, and sometimes the shipping is more than the cost of the product itself.

Charleston Favorites ($6 for 1 pound)

Bob’s Red Mill ($2.19 for 24 oz. bag) You can find this brand in most stores with a natural foods section.

Hoppin’ John’s ($7 for 2 pounds)

Falls Mill ($16 for 10 pounds, the minimum for mail order)

Adams Mill in Dothan, Alabama. There’s no website, so you must call 800.239.4233.

Carolina Plantation ($8 for 2 pounds)

Nora Mill Granary ($10 for 5 pounds)

Adluh ($2.50 for 1 pound)

Logan Turnpike Mill ($5.50 for 2 pounds)

Lastly, there are tons of recipes and opinons out there on how to prepare grits, and I won’t even try to enter this discussion, but on Bon Appetit’s site, they give a very basic explanation of the types of grits and also some tips that most people agree upon. You may want to check that out before delving into the very personal world of grits preparation and hundreds of recipes.

I’ve run into enough Italian food resources this last week that I thought I would put them all in one post. I guess October has been Italian month with cooking magazines.

Gourmet in the October 2009 issue recommend in their ‘Obsessions’ section the La Famiglia Delgrosso Pasta sauce. Delgrosso has eight different types of jarred pasta sauce. I know it isn’t fresh, but I think most of us cheat with jarred sauce every now and then. I haven’t tried these sauces, but you can find them at delgrossosauce.com.

Rancho Gordo, the heirloom bean provider out of Napa, says one of their highly sought after Italian beans is back in stock. They have Borlotti back in, which is the preferred bean in northern Italy for pasta e fagioli. According to Rancho Gordo, “They have a thin skin and make a lovely sauce, which is also why you find them so often in minestrone soups.”

In Saveur this month, there were a couple of interesting Italian food/drink resources. The first is Salumeria Biellese, which offers a variety of sausage and cured meats. This establishment in New York City has been preparing meats since 1925, and the shop has established relationships with many top chefs in New York and even makes cured pork jowls for Mario Batali. Salumeria Biellese sells nearly 80 types of sausages and meats and browsing the website will make your mouth water — if you eat meat that is.

Here are some examples:

• Rabbit & Chanterelles Sausage (marinated rabbit and sauteed mushrooms)
• Parsley & Cheese Pork Sausage (fresh parsley, a little red wine, and parmigiano)
• Raisins & Grappa Veal Sausage
• Rosemary, Garlic & Red Wine Lamb Sausage

But the dry-cured meats are the real draw. They are not pasteurized and are dry cured just as they did in the 19th century — very slowly. I counted six different soppressata and the wild boar cacciatorini sounds fabulous. They also have samplers (for a limited time) that you can order for a tasting of several cured meat offerings. You can find their meats at salumeriabiellese.com, and if you want to read the article you can go to saveur.com. The photo above is from the article, and shows a variety of their cured meats.

The last resource also came from the October Saveur, and it goes well with sausage. Italians are known for wine, but the northern area of Italy has a craft beer revolution apparently. You can read the article here. The bottles are big, I mean wine bottle size, but you can check out B. United International Inc. if you want more information and find them locally. The importer has a selection of 50+ Italian beers and ales on offer, but you can only buy direct if you are a wholesaler or retailer. They do, however, have a store locator for consumers that might help you in finding at least some of the brands mentioned in the article.

As far as online stores for Italian specialty food, you can also shop at Di Palo Selects out of New York. This site is well organized and has a good selection of specialty items. Other stores such as as iGourmet also have extensive imported food items to include Italian products. According to Food & Wine, look for the Italian tuna at iGourmet. And for cheese, Formaggio Kitchen has a great selection of Italian cheeses.

If you want to stock your pantry with some good imported Italian staples, Food & Wine had an Italian taste test challenge a couple years back with a variety of ingredients and foods such as polenta, capers, tuna, and honey. In addition to providing some good shopping advice, this article will point you towards several specialty online food stores where you can find a range of imported items. Other than that, there is no shortage of specialty Italian food shops on the web if you just search.

This video of Hung Huynh, the season three winner of Top Chef, is interesting. It isn’t that great of an instructional, but it is always interesting to see chef’s with great knife skills. He also uses the Misono UX10 knife, and you can see this entire knife series at japanesechefsknife.com.

I tried searching for good instructional videos on knife skills and wasn’t too successful going through Amazon.com. There were some offerings, but they seemed to get mixed reviews. One source I did find was the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). They offer over 2 hours of instruction on knife skills on DVD. I haven’t seen the video myself, but the sample video appears to be well made. The cost is $99.95.

For free, there are some good videos at Rouxbe, an online cooking school associated with the Northwest Culinary Academy in Vancouver. Just click on the hyperlink above and then click on the tab for ‘tips and techniques’. 

Another good free source comes from eGullet contributer, Marsha Lynch, who has put together a tutorial (with pictures) on the eGullet forum. It provides useful information on basic knife skills and cuts.

Photo from FoodMayhem.com

Via the blog Lifehacker I ran into this post from FoodMayhem.com about a chef making steam-scrambled eggs using an espresso maker. Though I don’t think I would ever cook my eggs this way, the whole concept is intriguing, and I must say the eggs look pretty good.

If you want to try this at home or where you work, I would suggest reading the comments as there are several tips on how best to make eggs this way. There is even a video of Chef Jody Williams making the eggs, so that would also be helpful to watch.

Kudos to FoodMayhem.com for a great story.

Image Courtesy of Bon Appetit

Fall gets me in the mood for game meat especially as I see pheasant all around and geese migrating south for the winter.

In Bon Appetit magazine they give the following advice when shopping for duck breast at a supermarket:

• Most duck is sold frozen so look in the freezer section.
• Buy boneless with skin. Don’t buy precooked or smoked.
• Buy 6-8 ounces per person if cooking for others.

Bon Appetit also has a good tutorial on how to sear duck breast.

If you can’t find duck in the store, you can shop online by going to:

dartagnan.com, gourmetfoodstore.com, grimaud.com

Sophie Uliano has several videos on the Eat Drink or Die website that instruct people how to be more environmentally friendly in the kitchen. She gives tips on buying organic produce, recycling, making healthy recipes and she also covers other topics. I like the video about how to make your own produce spray for when you buy non-organic produce.

On her own website she also has videos and I found the one interesting on how to read the little labels on produce. I didn’t know the numbers actually could tell you if the product is organic (starts with 9), genetically modified (starts with 8 ) or just not organic (starts with 4). She will give you a little mnemonic to help remember when you are out at the store.

You can become a member of Eat Drink or Die and follow her there, go to twitter at ‘sophieuliano‘, or go directly to her website gorgeouslygreen.com, which is also the name of her best selling book. She has videos on her Gorgeously Green website along with other useful information.