Category Archives: Food 101
Food 101: How to Make Basic Frosting
I am very particular about frosting. I find a lot of frostings to be too sweet and often times are piled on too thick on cakes. Then there’s also the frostings (generally I’ve encountered them on store bought cakes) that don’t have much flavor at all but are weirdly artificial and greasy in texture. No thank you. This means that I pretty much have to make my own frosting if I want it to be to my tastes. Fortunately basic frosting is really easy to make at home. We’ve covered basic icing on the blog before, but while some people using “icing” and “frosting” interchangeably to me they are different things. Icing is more thin and glaze-like, whereas frosting is more thick and fluffy. This is primarily due to the addition of fat in the form of butter. Icing is mostly just sugar and milk, while frosting has sugar, milk, and butter.
This is a good place to mention why making your own frosting is better than using the kind that comes out of a can. While flavor-wise store-bought can frosting isn’t terrible, its ingredients aren’t really great. In order to be shelf-stable it tends to be full of things like hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, preservatives, and artificial flavors and colors. Even if you’re someone who is anti-butter I would think one ingredient you don’t like is better than a whole list of potentially sketchy ingredients.
Food 101: How To Make Tomato Sauce (or “Red Sauce” if you will…)
Tomato sauce, it’s everywhere. For Italians, it’s on and in everything, to the point that there probably isn’t a single human being in Italy over the age of 7 who doesn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge on how to prepare a pot of sauce. The majority of my family’s heritage is Italian. I grew up in a household where it got tossed on everything from pork to pasta to pizza. Every Sunday was time for everyone to head on over to my aunt’s house for a big-ass Italian dinner with pasta and antipasti and bread and etc… You get the picture. And yet, I have a confession to make, I actually don’t really like tomato sauce all that much.
DUN-DUN!!
Yes I know, I know, blasphemy. But in all honesty I felt like the fact tomato sauce had to be thrown onto every edible item on planet Earth kind of made me sick of it by the time I hit my teen years. Now, I don’t necessarily hate it, but it just feels overused and homogenous to me. That may not be a popular opinion, but I feel like many in Italian-American families simply don’t have the guts to actually come forth and say that, for fear of ridicule and mafioso style ” ‘ey, come on.” half-slaps on the cheek.
That all being said, I ironically am a staunch opponent of jar sauces, both because I’m pro-from-scratch on the food front and also because despite my relative lack of enthusiasm for it, I know what a good tomato sauce tastes like. And jar sauce tastes like shit, frankly. Rather, I will admit objectively that having a good tomato sauce technique in the back of your head is a vital skill for most cooks, if for at very least making pizzas.
Because, well, pizza.
Food 101: How to Make a Pizza
As you may have guessed by now if you’ve spent any time on the blog at all, we’re big fans of pizza. Pizza is one of the most perfect foods around. It’s delicious, it’s portable, and it’s relatively cheap both to buy and make. Specialty slices are great, but nothing beats a really good regular cheese slice. The sauce, the cheese, the crust…they all just go perfectly together. In my opinion pizza is comfort food at its finest. There’s no problem pizza can’t solve.
It can even double as a Frisbee!
Now we make a lot of specialty pizzas (at least one per month),and we’re all for people experimenting with their own fun pizzas, but with all things you should master the basics before moving on to the advanced. So this post will go over the basic pizza making techniques for those who may be less familiar with pizza making than we are (and there’s nothing wrong with that!).
Food 101: Compound Butter
Compound butter may sound kind of weird and scary. It sounds like some kind of chemically scientific thing that’s probably really fake and bad for you. But really it’s just butter that has stuff added into it to give additional flavor. You could just as easily call it “flavored butter” but for some reason compound butter was the name it was given, so that’s what we call it.
You may have seen the Land O’ Lakes Sauté Express butters in the grocery store. These are essentially compound butters. They’re also pretty pricey, and you know how we feel about things that are too pricey here at Poor Couple’s Food Guide. Luckily making your own compound butter at home is ridiculously easy. It’s cheaper, and you can make any flavor you want.
Spices 101: What is chipotle?
Chipotle peppers have really taken off in the past decade. I never really saw them in many dishes outside of Mexican cuisine when I was younger, but holy crap are they popular now. I’m not sure who was responsible for it but boy are they happy. Perhaps part of it is tributed to the rise of the burrito franchise Chipotle’s, but I dunno… no offense to them, but they kinda suck. Or rather the food is good there, but the prices are unnecessarily high. But forget them, we’re here to talk about real-ass chipotle peppers and what to do with them.
Chipotle pepper
Origin: Mexico
Appearance: Dark-red flakes / wrinkly, dark-red peppers
Scent: Smokey
Taste: Smokey, Spicy
Foods: Mexican and many other Latino cuisines
Rareness: Common
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
You must be logged in to post a comment.