Making even a simple dish three times in two weeks can teach you more about cooking than trying three different dishes in the same period. Pay attention to the process of making it, and to the small and large differences in the results

Judy Rodgers

Her advice is spot on and we would all do better to follow it more often. Every time I heed what she says—cook, repeat, repeat, repeat—I become far better at delivering table pleasure. It's not a terribly rigorous discipline for me since I'm also a relatively boring cook. I probably overdo it, repeating myself to everyone's boredom, the same dish coming off my stove week after week, year after year, seeking its own root cause.

Judy Rodgers passed away recently. Her restaurant, Zuni Cafe on Market Street in San Francisco has been one of my—and half the universe's—favorite for twenty-five years. Much less stuffy and reverential than Chez Panisse but equally CaliFrenchiFornia in every way. The layout still blows me away, especially the bar. Who sets up a bar to deliberately block a plate glass view? There are floor to ceiling windows, but you must look past the bartenders and their bottles to the street beyond, which is like looking at a partner partially clothed versus naked. Turns out partially clothed is way more sexy.  In the fifteen years or more I've visited San Francisco the city has gotten much richer and uglier and Market Street has stayed its poor ugly self. Judy's restaurant stays pitch perfect.

Pantry Peek

Brad (who writes ZMO's enews) and I are working on a Pantry Peek campaign for our Mail Order Enews. We'll go around to different people and take a picture of their pantry, hopefully unadulterated, unbeautified, and share what they have and why. I thought I'd kick it off with a blog post. This is what my counter top looked like today. (I'll do the cupboard another day.)

Back row, left to right

Frankie's 457 house olive oil. Frankie's is just down the street from me and pretty much every retailer in my neighborhood carries the Sicilian oil that the Franks select. It comes in a liter tin only, though I'm sure they probably bring in bulk containers since they say it's their house oil.

Moulin de Chartreuse Olive Oil. The Provençal oil we started carrying last year. This was the sample that I took to help edit the copy, though Brad wrote it I think. It's currently petering out as my cooking oil, something I usually employ a cheaper oil for (usually Lucini, it's pretty good and everyone around here carries it), but I ran out.

Mario Bianco's Moscato Vinegar. A white wine vinegar we used to carry. We stopped because I thought it was just a little too expensive for what it was.

Unlabeled Red Wine Vinegar from Marina Colonna. Ten years ago I visited Marina Colonna in the Molise and she had some dodgy bottles of vinegar someone had crafted from wine she makes. It tasted really good. For some reason or another she never decided to make any more, a fate shared by a line of olive oil cosmetics she had also made. She gave me a bottle to take home. A word of advice: don't pack vinegar in your suitcase. For that matter don't take samples from anyone when you're traveling. They always end up evolving into disaster.

Monini White Wine Vinegar. Rather crap vinegar I got for some reason I can't remember.

Pofi Brothers White Wine Vinegar. Pretty much my go-to for vinaigrettes and has been since I first tasted it.

Front row, left to right

Butternut Squash Seed Oil. We've carried this for a couple years. It was the first good American nut/seed oil I'd found—all the rest have been from France or Austria. It's a once-in-a-while thing I use for vinaigrettes or dousing a soup, raw vegetables or cooked vegetables. I probably shouldn't keep it near the stove but I know if I put it somewhere else I'll forget I have it.

Halen Mon Sea Salt. Or it could be fleur de sel sea salt just as often. I keep it in a little La Creuset pot and use it for salting dishes at the end. It's the salt I bring to the table if we have company, hence the little bone spoon.

Tellicherry Black Pepper. After busting my way through three or four pepper grinders Vic Firth's is the best one I've tried. I guess I beat the hell out of them because they just stop after a while. Not this one. I got mine before Mario Batali started licensing his name to them and now I think the only way to get a red one is if you get one with his name on it. Well, I like Mario, so that's not a deep tissue wound. The pepper is Indian Tellicherry pretty much all the time, and I keep the grinder set rather coarse.

Marash Red Pepper Flakes. Pretty much the only red pepper I ever use.

Portuguese Salt. The fine grade, which I pretty much use for everything except finish salting. This could just as easily be French grey salt, I have one or the other and switch up for no good reason. I house it in one of the old gorgeous fleur de sel jars that we used to get. Man I miss them!

Potato Salad Nicoise

Basically, instead of tinned tuna I used tinned mackerel. It makes a lighter dish that's slightly less sweet. Then other changes appeared.

This Nicoise salad is courtesy my usual style of random crisper box cooking, what my daughter has affectionately dubbed "chickpeas and groceries." The Nicoise elements are potatoes, green beans, hard boiled egg, tinned fish. To that I slipped in sliced radishes, parsley, capers and a couple anchovies. Black pepper, salt and some olive oil, too. No olives, no lettuce. And I mix it all in a jumbled mess which makes it more like a potato salad Nicoise, not the picture-perfect composed salad you usually see.

Nicoise salads — like most salads — are trickier than they seem. Besides starting with good ingredients there are a few techniques that keep it away from bland-dom.

Potatoes: cook them whole, in their jackets, in very salty water. Cool them in the water, then undress them. Slip the peel off with your fingers or the edge of a paring knife. Chop into odd sized chunks.

Tinned fish: dump in the whole tin, olive oil and all. Don't skimp on the quality of the fish. This is one place you'll really taste the difference.

Green beans: barely blanch in very salty water, then chill quickly in a bowl of ice water. Dry them off.

Egg: cook it on the softer side of hard, then chop it to bits so it emulsifies a bit with the olive oil.

Olive oil: add a lot of a tasty one. This one is from Nice if that helps.

Mix: with your hands. This is my advice on mixing nearly every salad. Hand mixing lets you know when all the parts are coated. It gets the salad to be dressed more homogenously. When it's ready to eat it's not pretty (like the picture above), but it's very tasty:

Olive Oil: Do Not Heat Before You Eat

 I've always thought it was good advice to save your best, most fragrant olive oil for the end of cooking, not to use it during sautéing or frying. Heat drives away aroma, which is what your paying for in a great oil. Harold McGee confirms the logic in this article where he heats different oils and holds a taste test.

McGee finds that all the oils pretty much end up tasting the same after heating. He doesn't talk about texture, though—better oils have a luscious, not greasy, texture—so I'm not sure if that changes. He also fails to clearly underline that olive oil's unsaturated fat is better for your health than the saturated fat in some of the other oils. You may want to stick with olive oil, just use a less expensive one for cooking.

> Read the article.

McGee's landmark book, On Food and Cooking, is one I recommend without hesitation. There is no better book on science in the kitchen that I know of.

The Power of the Probe

I've been cooking for long enough -- more like overcooking for long enough -- that using a probe thermometer felt like I was giving up. Like I stopped caring and started wearing sweat pants out of the house. I told myself I should be able to do better. I told myself I had experience. I should be able to put my thumb on a piece of meat, immediately gauge how firm it is and declare: medium rare! Then I would deliver it to the table and there would be deafening applause.

I got over it. I use a probe thermometer regularly now. I can vouch it  works; when you don't overcook things they  taste way better. The pork loin. The hunk of salmon. The chicken parts. I even used it on the first steak to pass through my door in half a year and it came out perfect, though there was a distinct lack of applause.

Invest less than ten bucks in one of these. It'll make you look like you know what you're doing. It did for me. Finally.

One note. Most thermometers recommend cooking pork to a temperature that renders the meat criminally overcooked and tough. I cut it back by several tens of degrees, and, while I have yet to catch a fatal disease, the pork has been way tastier.