How to Break an Egg: 1,453 Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes, Emergency Substit

By Fine Cooking Magazine

Book Overview

Need a cool way to handle hot chiles? Looking to cut down on kitchen clean-up? Let the readers, contributors, and editors of "Fine Cooking" magazine show you the way. "How to Break an Egg" is a one-of-a-kind resource of more than 1,400 kitchen-tested tips, shortcuts, and ingenious solutions to culinary emergencies, all organized in an easy-to-access format for quick reference or more leisurely reading. Look under Basil in the Ingredients chapter and you'll find tips for drying it, keeping its bright green color, and making your pesto go further. Look under Cookies in the Cooking chapter for clever ways to roll out cookie dough without it sticking, or to form perfectly shaped cookies, or to get just the right texture you want in your chocolate chip. You'll also discover tips on cookware and utensils, serving, storage, clean-up, and kitchen safety.
If disaster strikes, flip immediately to When Things Go Wrong, an invaluable chapter of troubleshooting charts, whether your souffle is falling, your cheese sauce is curdling, or you've just discovered you don't have the right size pan for the cake you're in the middle of mixing up. In Handy Kitchen Techniques, you'll find 42 basic prep techniques, from trussing a chicken to clarifying butter, illustrated step-by-step in full color.
The perfect reference for cooks at any level, "How to Break an Egg" will be your indispensable go-to kitchen resource.
"In my cooking classes and on my radio show, I get those thorny questions regarding recipe disasters. Phew Now I won't hve to make up 'creative answers' anymore. For the solution to every culinary dilemma, run out right now and pick up a copy of, "How to Break an Egg,""
--TomDouglas, restaurateur and author of "Tom's Big Dinners"
"No kitchen is totally complete unless this book is on the shelf. It's a wealth of information, and I personally could not do without it "
--Paula Deen, author of "Paula Deen&Friends: Living it Up, Southern Style"
"How do you create a warm place to proof bread or make a quick cup of buttermilk? Ever think of cutting cheesecake with a fishing line or defatting stock with ice cubes? The answers to these and hundreds of other practical questions rarely addressed in even the most sophisticated cookbooks are provided in this revolutionary new reference manual no serious cook can do without. I've waited a lifetime for an authoritative, sensible, reliable kitchen companion such as "How to Break an Egg" and cannot recommend the book highly enough. Just reading through it is an invaluable class in itself."
--James Villas, author of "Crazy for Casseroles" and "Biscuit Bliss"
"This is a terrific resource reference book and one that I think every cook, whether just beginning or old pro, will find helpful on a regular basis. "Fine Cooking" has been one of my favorite culinary magazines for a long time and "How to Break an Egg" reflects their friendly, researched, and illustrated approach that I look forward to reading every month."
--John Ash, restaurateur and author of "John Ash Cooking One on One"
"A good chef never serves his or her mistakes. Now you don't have to. Finally a fix-it manual for your kitchen."
--Tom Colicchio, Chef/Owner of Craft restaurants and Gramercy Tavern

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1561587982
• ISBN13: 9781561587988
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Taunton Press
• Length: 394 Pages
• Weight: 2.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

How to Break an Egg

I am at best an amateur cook. I have more cookbooks then I will ever be able to use. This book has so many useful hints and techniques. I actually set down and read it thru. I have already used several with complete success. One of the most useful books I have used.

An all-in-one guide to kitchen troubles

For an all-in-one guide to kitchen troubles, whether it be rescuing a failed recipe, making emergency substitutions, or brushing up on techniques, How To Break An Egg: 1,453 Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes, Emergency Substitutions And Handy Techniques packs in tips by the editors, contributors and readers of Fine Cooking Magazine. Each chapter on 'tips' or 'techniques' is subdivided in the table of contents by method or tip: this makes it quick and easy to locate tips on say pitting fruit, or cooking potatoes properly. New cooks will find this a much more extensive reference than your usual substitution guide - and provides much more overall culinary detail on method than most, while retaining the at-a-glance referencing system so important to a cook facing problems and needing immediate solutions.

Excellent

Library Journal Utilizing information from qualified food writers, chefs, and experienced readers, the editors of Fine Cooking magazine have compiled a troubleshooting guide for home cooks. The recipients of the 2005 International Association of Culinary Professionals Compilation Award for their previous book (Cooking New American), these editors have delivered another classic. Included are troubleshooting charts, step-by-step preparation techniques (with photographs), ingredient information, a substitution guide, equivalent measures, tips on kitchen safety, and much more. The most useful section helps cooks understand what went wrong with the recipe and recommendations of what to try next time. An extremely valuable guide assisting the home cook in learning how to cook as opposed to just cooking; recommended for all public libraries.-Jennifer A. Wickes, Suite101.com, Pine Beach, NJ Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Lots of Clever tips for Amateurs and great Photo Techniques

`How To Break An Egg' is a collection of `1,453 Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes, Emergency Substitutions, and Handy Techniques' by the Editors, Contributors, and Readers of `Fine Cooking' magazine. One of the first things this means is that if you are a dedicated subscriber to `Fine Cooking' magazine and have every issue going back about ten (10) years, you already have most of what is in this book. This volume belongs to one of the three general classes of books which focus much more on why and how to do things in general rather than on specific recipes. The first of these classes is represented by Shirley Corriher's `Cookwise' which has many recipes, but whose real purpose is to demonstrate why things work the way they do. The second of these three groups is represented by the Williams-Sonoma `Kitchen Companion' and Christopher Kimball's `The Cook's Bible'. These two books deal less with science and more with technique, and are typically organized like an encyclopedia. The third class, to which this book belongs, is a collection of individual tips and suggestions from many different sources. The other most recent entry into this category was `Chef's Secrets' collected by Francine Maroukian'. This `Chef's Secrets' was not entirely up to the standard represented by the reputations of the contributors (see my review of this book). `How To Break An Egg' has some of the weaknesses of `Chef's Secrets' in that a few may simply be wrong or at least unnecessary, but the very large number of suggestions and the diligence of the `Fine Cooking' editors has kept the chaff to a minimum. It is also important to note that many of these suggestions come from several culinary heavyweights such as Bruce Aidells, John Ash, Rose Levy Beranbaum, and Shirley Corriher. And, I can see that the suggestions from these authorities are uniformly better than those submitted by `Fine Cooking' readers. Many of the suggestions are probably common knowledge to most amatuer cooks who spend a lot of time reading these authors, `Fine Cooking', `Saveur', and `Cooks Illustrated Magazines', and spend time watching the Food Network, especially Alton Brown's `Good Eats' show. Thus, the book's value drops off if you are an experienced foodie own a sizeable culinary library. On the other hand, the average level of the suggestions is really pretty good. I suspect there may be a fair amount of friendly copying, as I recognize many suggestions from other sources, especially, Alton Brown and the baking Gurus such as Beranbaum and Flo Brakker. The suggestions fall into several different categories. First, there are the amateur techniques to make up for the lack of technique typically gained through practice. Many of the baking tips fall into this category such as the technique for draping a pizza dough over an overturned bowl to spread it out in place of the usual method of stretching it on your knuckles. These are often revealed by caveats saying that `the usual method of doing this only works