Do Cold Eggs Really Make a Difference in Baking? | The Kitchn

Hint: the answer is not really. But maybe a little bit…

After doing a blind tasting with two yellow cakes, one made with cold eggs, the other with room-temperature eggs, the panel concluded that the difference between the two cakes was negligible.

The cake made with room-temperature eggs had a slightly finer, more even crumb, but the cold-egg cake was entirely acceptable. Overall, tasters strained to detect differences between the two cakes, so it’s fine to use cold eggs in most basic cake recipes.

via Do Cold Eggs Really Make a Difference in Baking? | The Kitchn.

Julia Child Was Wrong: Don’t Wash Your Raw Chicken, Folks

Saw this post on a recent NPR blog and I thought I’d share: Julia Child Was Wrong: Don’t Wash Your Raw Chicken, Folks : The Salt : NPR. If you’ve ever wondered, “Should I wash raw chicken?,” you now have a definitive answer!

“There’s no reason, from a scientific point of view, to think you’re making it any safer,” she says, “and in fact, you’re making it less safe.”

That’s because washing increases the chances that you’ll spread the foodborne pathogens that are almost certainly on your bird all over the rest of your kitchen too, food safety experts say. We’re talking nasty stuff like salmonella and Campylobacter, which together are estimated to cause nearly 1.9 million cases of foodborne illness in the U.S. each year.

Some studies suggest bacteria can fly up to 3 feet away from where your meat is rinsed — though you can’t necessarily see it.

Read more on the original post on NPR’s The Salt.

Keeping Your Knives Sharp with a Whetstone

I’ve been using a whetstone to sharpen my kitchen knives, and while I haven’t mastered the technique, I’ve really enjoyed it. It makes you feel very zen with your kitchen tools and gives you a nice, sharp edge! Here’s a great video that Sur La Table made that explains the process really well.

And if this video doesn’t do it for you, there are plenty more on YouTube, like this one, and this one. Have fun!

Planning to Cook This Weekend? Try Out This Tool and Thank Me Later

I have recently been using Evernote and their Food app while cooking…and it is amazing. Life changing (well..you know, kind of). If you haven’t used evernote, it’s a great tool for clipping things such as websites, links, pictures, etc. from the web. You can organize articles, photos, recipes, or whatever through a variety of apps. Their best app is their Food app. It takes any recipe you post in Evernote and automatically throws it into “Your Cookbook.” It’s searchable, it only keeps the good stuff (no more ads or random sidebars), and it works offline. With the proliferation of recipes and blogs online, I’ve spent a lot of time printing and trying to organize recipes off the web – but I usually lose like half of them in the process. This has made my online recipe usage soooo much easier. Here’s a bit from their blog:

Kitchen Cheat Sheet

There seems to be a (giant) obsession with infographics on the web, but to be honest, many of them are cute to look at but a bit useless. However, that seems to be changing. Yay! Recently visual.ly posted a series of infographics to help you organize your kitchen. They’re really well done and something you will actually use over and over. Here’s my favorite, but make sure to check out the link as there are 13 more!

And if you like these, you can also check out their most recent post on recipes in a visual style. They’re not quite as useful, but still fun to look at. Now we just have to figure out how to best print and frame these…