Know These Things About Guacamole

Are you a guacamole fan?  If you are, you are probably very excited for the big game this Sunday.  However, if you are making guacamole, you want to make sure you are doing it right. Here are five things to remember when making guacamole!  You can learn more here. 

Whether you're a football fan or just snowed in at home, this weekend is probably a big one for guacamole. Whether you like it chunky or creamy, spicy or mellow, guacamole is basically the best thing on the snack table, and a welcome addition to a weekend meal of breakfast tacos or carnitas.

But if you're making guacamole, do it right. Here are five important things you should know about making the best guacamole.

1. Know this trick for picking the best avocados!

Do you have a knack for picking avocados with a streak of brown inside? Or ones that aren't quite ripe enough? Here's a fairly genius tip for you: the key to your avocado's health lies under the stem "button." Peel it away and take a peek.

2. Also? Always buy an extra avocado.

But even when you get really good at picking avocados, you should always buy an extra one when making guacamole. Christine explains: "If a whole avocado or even parts of a few of them have gone bad, I have an extra one as a replacement to make up for it in a recipe." And if all are good? Well, there's always room in our lives for one more avocado.

3. Avocados not ripe enough? Try a banana.

Gauging the perfect stage of ripeness for guacamole when you want it is a little tricky, though. If you buy avocados on the unripe side a few days ahead, and they're not ripening fast enough, a banana is your friend! Anjali explains how putting a banana in a paper bag really hurried the ripening process along.

4. Avocados too ripe? Refrigerate until you need them.

On the other hand, sometimes you buy avocados that are just a little too ripe and they threaten to turn into mush well before guacamole game day. The solution here is simple: refrigerate them! Refrigeration stops the ripening process, fixing your avocados at the perfect stage of ripeness.

5. Make guacamole ahead and use this tip to keep it green!

Last and certainly not least: yes, you can make guacamole ahead of time. No, it won't turn brown, provided you use our handy little trick for keeping it green. The power of water to banish oxidization is the key here: you simply cover guacamole with water, and refrigerate for up to 24 hours. Then pour off the water and stir. It doesn't get soggy or watery at all — the water all pours off. Give it a try!

5 Ways to Improve Your Ramen

Do you enjoy Ramen?  Chef Masa Hamaya is helping you make the best ramen for dinner.  Follow these five steps next time you open one of your many flavors of Ramen.  You can learn more at Apartment Therapy.


Even though chef David Chang proclaimed that ramen is dead, I have to beg to differ. With the proliferation of ramen restaurants cropping up near me in San Francisco, it's hard to escape this complicated but soul-satisfying Japanese comfort food. To put it bluntly, everyone's serving it!

If you're brave enough to attempt making ramen (and not the instant kind) at home, here are five tips from chef Masa Hamaya to help you put together the perfect slurp-worthy bowl.

5 Expert Tips for Making the Perfect Bowl of Ramen

1. It's all about the noodles and broth.

Hamaya said that if the noodles and broth are perfect, toppings are pretty much unnecessary. Focus on getting your broth full of flavor and richness, and take your time doing it. If you're not making noodles from scratch, source the best possible ones you can find and buy them fresh.

2. Flavor and body in the broth come from lots of ingredients.

A lot of bones (and vegetables if you want to do a vegetarian broth) need to go into the stockpot, and he means a lot. You can't get good flavor and a thick broth without lots of ingredients and time to extract all the flavors. The stockpot should be packed full of ingredients before water is added, and a few gallons of water should reduce to only a few liters of broth when it's ready.

3. Never season your broth.

The broth is never seasoned because it is combined with a seasoned base (tare in Japanese) when individual bowls of ramen are composed. The base can be the braising liquid from meat, soy sauce, tamari, dashi, or countless other things, but salt is never added to the broth itself so that the seasoning in the final bowl of ramen comes from only one source.

4. Never salt the ramen noodle cooking water.

For the same reasoning as why the broth is never salted, Hamaya says that ramen noodles are never cooked in salted water. This is a departure from the Italian pasta cooking technique, but he was emphatic that again, the soup base seasons both the broth and the noodles when everything is combined together.

5. Cook the noodles properly.

Ramen noodles should be just cooked through, similar to cooking Italian pasta al dente. Undercooked noodles will be floury and tough, but overcooked noodles will be soggy and pasty. Cook your noodles at the last second when everything else is ready, keep a watchful eye on the time, and make sure you keep tasting the noodles so that the second they are ready, they come out of the water.

5 Mistakes To Avoid In Your Stew

The winter is here, which means many people choose to make stew for dinners with friends and family.  However, we want your stew to taste delicious.  Get the perfect stew by going over these five mistakes to avoid. This will help your stew turn out just as you imagined.  You can learn more at The Kitchn.

1. Using the wrong cut of meat

Beef is beef, right? Wrong! Stew is the ideal time to skip the lean, pricier cuts of meat and go for the less expensive, tougher cuts. The long, slow cook time leaves lean meat, like sirloin, tough and chewy, while tougher cuts, like chuck, break down and become really tender.

→ Follow this tip: Stick with using chuck meat. As it cooks, this cut breaks down wonderfully and rewards you with tender, delicious bites. Bonus points — chuck meat is also budget friendly!

2. Not searing the meat

Whatever you do, don't just add raw meat to broth and expect it to make stew. Also, when browning, don't stop at lightly browning the cubes. Searing the meat is an essential step for making a great beef stew. This is where the stew really starts to build its deep, rich, flavor.

→ Follow this tip: No, if, ands, or buts, you've got to sear the meat! Don't just brown it. Set the cubes of beef in a hot pan and let them cook for a few minutes until the bottom has a dark crust, then repeat that process for the other sides of the meat. It's timely, but you'll be rewarded with an extra flavorful stew.

3. Adding the vegetables too soon

Vegetables cook a lot quicker than beef, so there's no reason to add them to the pot at the same time. Add them too soon, and you'll be left with mushy (and unappetizing) veggies.

→ Follow this tip: Add hearty vegetables, like carrots, turnips, and potatoes halfway through cooking. If you plan to include delicate vegetables, like peas, wait to add them until a few minutes before taking the stew off the heat.

4. Not cooking the stew long enough

Chuck meat is your best bet for beef stew, but it's also a pretty tough cut so it needs time to break down and become tender. Rush the cooking process and the beef will be tough and chewy.

→ Follow this tip: For really tender meat, cook the stew low and slow, for approximately two hours.

5. Serving your stew solo

Don't make your stew stand alone. Without bread or noodles how will you mop up the bottom of the bowl?

→ Follow this tip: Serve stew along with egg noodles, polenta, or a thick-cut baguette.

Top Ten Desserts

Having a go to dessert is crucial for any dinner party. Check out these top ten desserts from apartment therapy that everyone should know how to make.  What is your go to dessert?

What are the desserts you know by heart? The sweets you make over and over, to the point where you barely need the recipe? Dessert can be a special treat to end a meal, or a simple comfort during a tiring week, and we have a few we love enough to memorize. These are often the simplest and the easiest to remember, like a batch of warm chocolate chip cookies or that light-as-a-feather one-ingredient ice cream.

Others of these sweets have a classic elegance, like the chocolate layer cake that your friends always beg you to make for their birthdays, or that most perfect of all desserts: panna cotta. Here are 10 desserts, big and small, that we think are worth knowing by heart. 

A "by heart" dessert really means two kinds of recipes to us: Those that are so easy that they barely require a recipe, like One-Ingredient Banana Ice Cream and fruit poached with wine and spice. And then the recipes that are maybe a little trickier — like a good pie crust or a batch of ice cream — but that we make so often that the process feels intuitive. 
Both kinds of desserts form the bedrock of our dessert repertoire. Know how to make a pie crust and you can whip up a galette or a fruit-filled pie on a whim. Memorize the formula for a creamy panna cotta and you have an easy, crowd-pleasing dessert whenever you need one. The process for making a chocolate cake is more or less the same for any kind of cake — take this muscle memory with you as you take on new recipes. And so on with just about every recipe on this list. 
What desserts do you know by heart? Which ones do you think are essential for the home cook to know? 

TOP ROW
• 1 
  How to Make Chocolate Chip Cookies - You just can't go wrong with chocolate chip cookies. With this version, you don't even need a mixer.
• 2 Chocolate Layer Cake - Does a chocolate cake sound intimidating to you? It shouldn't! This fluffy, tender, and deeply chocolatey cake is ready in about an hour and couldn't be easier. 
• 3 One-Ingredient Banana Ice Cream - Yup, that's right. Frozen bananas whizzed in a food processor are a dead ringer for vanilla ice cream. Take a look at our 5 favorite flavor variations when you feel like switching it up. 
  
• 4 How to Make Panna Cotta - This is Faith's ultimate dessert for everything from a weeknight treat to a big dinner party. It's easy, it's elegant, and it's endlessly adaptable. 
  
• 5 Roasted Strawberry Goat Cheese Squares on Puff Pastry - This is the perfect example of what you can make with a package of puff pastry in the freezer. If strawberries aren't in season, go for apples, a few black berries, or any other ripe fruit — even just a dollop of jam and a sprinkle of nuts!

BOTTOM ROW
• 6 How to Make a Pie from Start to Finish - Knowing how to make a good pie crust is one of those essential skills that's always handy to have in your back pocket. And it's not as intimidating as you might think! 
  
• 7 Chocolate Wafer Icebox Stacks - These ¨ber-simple little cakelets are more delicious and more addictive than they have any right to be. Just trust us on this one. Switch it up with different cookies or by flavoring the whipped cream. 
  
• 8 How to Make Ice Cream at Home - Use this base to add any other flavorings your brain can imagine — fresh blueberries, a swirl of chocolate fudge, candied nuts, peppermint... Plus you can still make ice cream without an ice cream maker. 
  
• 9 How to Make a Fruit Crumble with Any Kind of Fruit - No matter the season and no matter the fruit, a fruit crumble is always there for you. 
  
• 10 Honey and Spice Poached Pears - Last but not least, we have poached fruit. It's amazing how decadent a simple piece of fruit can feel once you've poached it in a little simple syrup or leftover wine with a handful of spices. The method in this recipe applies to any tree fruit you have in the kitchen — apples, apricots, peaches, plums... You get the idea!