Cooking: - Follow Some Suggestions, You May Get Better Results

As a restaurant owner, I constantly get requests for recipes of various dishes we serve at one of the restaurants. Our policy is to give guests the recipes. We also know that will lead to more questions about why the dish didn't turn out right when the home cook tried it.

Rarely can you duplicate a restaurant's recipe. You may get close, but it will never taste exactly the same at home. There are many reasons why copy-cat recipes don't work, but it boils down to three common elements found in the restaurant kitchen, not found in most home kitchens - heat, fresh ingredients and adaptability.
For more details go to: www.apples-recipes.com if you follow some suggestions, you may get better results and become a better home cook for your own recipes.

Heat can be your friend and enemy, depending on the circumstances. A steak, for instance, will require your char grill to reach temperatures of 700 degrees or more. Few home grills get that hot. High heat is necessary to get the seared exterior, while being able to produce a steak that is done to the requested temperature. When you buy your next grill pay attention to the number of burners and the butts they produce. The higher temperature each burner can produce, the better.

High heat is important, but consistent heat is even more critical for many applications. Restaurants use convection ovens that blow circulating air throughout the cavity of the oven to keep the temperatures even. Home ovens have hot spots and will drop 50 to 75 degrees each time you open the door. A solution to the consistency problem is a piece of 1 inch granite on the bottom shelf of your oven. The granite will hold the temperature and eliminate many of the hot spots. The granite will also double as a pizza stone that will bake the best pizza crust you have ever tried at home. Measure the bottom shelf of your oven and visit a granite store for a scrap piece that they can cut to you dimensions.

One of the biggest hurdles to matching restaurant food is the difference in ingredients. For instance, most grocery stores carry select and some choice grades of beef, while restaurants generally use only top of the line choice and some prime cuts. Restaurant chef's demand fresh spices, herbs and even have specifications that suppliers must meet. For can visit to: www.bread-machine-cookbook.com the home cook rarely has a lot of choices. When shopping, be vigilant and don't be afraid to talk to the butcher or fish monger about their products. You will be surprised at the things they hold in the cooler for particular customers like yourself.

Ingredients may also be difficult to find. A food supplier to restaurants may carry 25,000 items, while the common grocery store may carry 7000 items. Fresh ingredients may mean that a restaurant is getting chickens that were cut the day before and fish that were caught yesterday. Many times restaurants are getting local produce as opposed to grocery produce that may come several thousand miles to a distributor before being delivered to the store. Talk to the produce managers and they can tell you what is local. Find some fresh produce stands that offer local produce.

Finally, the ability to adapt to your ingredients, surroundings, equipment, mistakes and necessary substitutions takes years of experience and education. If your baking powder is a year old, do you know what to do? If you have all purpose flour and you need higher protein flour, what kind do you need? Don't have Kosher salt, what's the next best? The ability to adapt to conditions at the time is second nature to restaurant chefs. Home cooks need a whole reference library to accomplish the same thing. The Internet is a great place to research your common problems. A little searching can find several websites that offer substitution charts, cooking tips, solutions to baking problems and other helpful and quick fixes to common kitchen dilemmas.

Follow some of these hints and you can achieve better than average results. There is one element you probably can't match - someone else is cleaning up and serving you at a restaurant! At home you won't find any dishwashers, prep cooks or waiters hanging around the kitchen.