Milk Street Q&A

Answered by Elizabeth Mindreau

Hi Elizabeth - Ones tolerance for the heat of a chili is a very personal thing. To complicate matters, as you noticed, the same kind of chili can vary in its heat level from one chili to the next. Something to keep in mind when you substitute dried chilies or chili flakes for fresh chilies is that fresh chilies offer more to a dish than just heat. They also add color, fruitiness, brightness, freshness and texture whereas dried chili flakes offer just heat. If you are hesitant to add fresh chilies to your dishes, you could try using dried chili flakes. You'll probably want to start with ¼ teaspoon or less. You could also skip the chilies altogether and offer a selection of hot sauces for folks to add to their own serving to their particular taste. Reconstituted dried chilies are another story as they do offer more than just heat but that is a topic for another discussion. When Thai chilies are called for, it most likely refers to the bird's eye chili, a small, slim, fiery chili.

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Lily - We love using preserved lemons here at Milk Street. They add a briney, yet tart, depth to a whole host of dishes. In fact, Milk Streeters love them so much our favorite, Casablanca Market Preserved Lemons, are currently sold out of the Milk Street Store. Because conventional lemons are easier to find, we did not test our Lemon-Saffron Chicken (Tangia) recipe with preserved lemons. So my recommendation is to experiment! I would start with one or two small preserved lemons, chopped fine. Add them at the end, off the heat, as you would the zest and juice called for in the recipe. From there, you might want to experiment with adding some preserved lemon with the spices and the remainder off the heat to add different layers of flavor. Since preserved lemons are not quite as tart or sour as fresh lemons, you may want to add a little bit of fresh lemon juice at the end as well to brighten up the flavors. I hope this helps and happy cooking! Best, Lynn C.

Answered by Lynn Clark

We don't do equipment reviews here at Milk Street but we couldn't live without our food processors! A food processor is great for prepping vegetables, grating cheese, chopping nuts, and making doughs. The food processors we use at Milk Street are in the 10 to 14-cup capacity range. This size is great for large-quantity pestos, like our Peruvian Pesto, and for shredding vegetables like the carrots in our French Carrot Salad. A small food processor (under 6 cups) is technically considered a food chopper, rather than a food processor. This means it will be able to chop small amounts of vegetables, make sauces, dressings, marinades, and bread crumbs, but will not come with a slicing or grating blade (like we use for the French Carrot Salad) and the work bowl will be too small to make doughs and larger volumes of sauces. If a food chopper does meet your needs, you'll want to look for one in the 3 1/2 - 4 cup range that includes a feeding tube for best performance. There are only a few out there that have a feeding tube in this size range and you should be able to find one for $40-$50. In order to get all of the features of a true food processor you would need to go up to at least an 8-cup capacity food processor. Personally, I have an 8-cup food processor which is considered pretty small by most people's standards. Sometimes I have to work in batches, but it generally performs most tasks I need it to and includes a slicing and grating disk. I think this size would still be under $100 and doesn't take up too much space on the countertop. Good luck and thanks for writing us! Best, Lynn C.

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Fei - Since we have not tested this recipe in the oven it is hard to give a definitive answer on time, temperature and results. Especially with a recipe that we're baking with yeast. My first question would be - why would you prefer to do it in the oven? One of the best characteristics of this bread is its deeply browned, crispy crust which is achieved, in part, by cooking over direct heat. The other element here is steam. The bread is covered for a little more than half of the cooking time, which not only helps the bread cook through, but also creates steam. As bread bakes, its outer layer (crust) eventually reaches 180°F. At that point, the starches on the surface burst and then harden to a crackly consistency. Steam hitting the bread’s surface facilitates this process. You could certainly try to do this entirely in the oven either in a cast iron skillet or on a baking steel. However, I doubt it would be anywhere near the same as the version we've developed. I'm guessing a relatively hot oven would be necessary to get any browning - probably 450 degrees? As for timing, I think it would be best to temp the bread to determine when it's fully baked. For a bread like this we recommend 210 degrees on an instant read thermometer inserted into the center of the bread. Again, we haven't tested this so I am just making guesses. Good luck and thanks for writing to us!

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Jason - I actually make our Chiang Mai chicken on the grill all the time. It's a great alternative to standard American BBQ chicken on a hot summer day. I grill it using indirect heat - the same basic method as the Lemon-Lime Lacquered Chicken - but because the Chiang Mai chicken calls for leg quarters and breasts, rather than chicken parts, the cooking time will be a bit longer. Just make sure to temp the chicken (160 degrees for the breasts and 175 for the leg quarters) and you should be good to go. I do usually grill it over the hot side of the grill at the end to get the skin crispy, but I am comfortable with a little bit of char on the skin. This only takes a couple of minutes since all of the fat has rendered during the slow, indirect cooking process. You do need to keep a close eye on it, though, because it definitely can burn due to the glaze. For recipes with fish sauce, as long as you are doubling all of the ingredients it should be fine to double the fish sauce since everything should still be in proportion and balanced. However, you can always add some and taste as you add more until you feel happy with the flavor. I highly recommend Red Boat brand fish sauce and we carry their aged version, which has really complex flavor that has mellowed during the aging process, in the Milk Street Store. You can read about it and purchase it here: https://store.177milkstreet.com/products/blis-barrel-aged-fish-sauce. Thanks for writing us!

Answered by Lynn Clark

We aren’t a health food company so, if I’m honest, we don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about food additives. That being said, we are definitely proponents of buying fresh, local ingredients whenever possible and using high quality products that you can afford. I’m not sure where you’re located, but I would recommend seeking out a local farm to see if they make their own fresh dairy products. If not, for buttermilk, I know Kate’s Fresh Real Buttermilk from Maine and Organic Valley Low-fat Buttermilk do not contain carrageenan. The organic food industry in general is making a push to eliminate carrageenan from products labeled "organic" so more and more companies are removing it and/or replacing it with gellan gum. I would certainly look to organic producers for carrageenan-free products. A little background on carrageenan: Carrageenan is an extract from red seaweed called Irish Moss. This edible seaweed is native to the British Isles where it’s been used in traditional cooking for hundreds of years. It’s natural gelling ability makes it a common thickening ingredient in the commercial food industry. Here is an excellent article from NPR that explains some of the controversy on its purported toxicity:  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/12/12/504558025/carrageenan-backlash-why-food-firms-are-ousting-a-popular-additive.

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi William – Thanks for contacting us! I assume you are referring to our recipe for Lemon Lime Lacquered Grilled Chicken (Inihaw Na Manok)? Recipe here: https://www.177milkstreet.com/recipes/lemon-lime-barbeque-grilled-chicken-inihaw-na-manok-filipino If we were simply intending to use the marinade as a sauce with the same texture then, yes, we would have to cook it to kill any residual bacteria that may have been present from the raw chicken. However, at Milk Street, we are all about layering flavor and doing it as easily and possible. So, the reason we cook the marinade in our recipe is because we want to use those same ingredients (vinegar, ketchup, soy, garlic, bay, and lemon-lime soda) to flavor the chicken in another way. Rather than make an entirely new sauce to baste and serve with the chicken, we simply reduce the marinade to get a thick basting liquid and sauce. Doing so also creates a slightly different flavor profile than our marinade. Overall, the flavors are more concentrated - the sauce is sweeter, tangier, and saltier than as a marinade alone - so we are creating layers of flavor with the same ingredients. Because we are using this thick, sweet sauce to baste the chicken as it cooks, we cook the chicken over the cool side of the grill, using the ambient grill heat to cook the chicken through. Then we give it a quick blast over the hot side to brown it. This ensures the sauce won’t burn before the chicken cooks through. Indirect grilling is our go-to method for grilling chicken (or really any protein) where the surface would burn before the meat was cooked to the proper temperature.

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Scott - we don't have a recipe at Milk Street that calls for Boursin cheese and Wondra flour. Perhaps it's from another source? Good luck in your search! Best, Lynn C.

Answered by Chris Kimball

The easier method is to place a tablespoon or two of oil in the pan before heating and when it starts to ripple AND JUST STARTS TO SMOKE, the pan is ready for sautéing. Use an oil with a relatively high smoke point - I prefer Grapeseed oil as my go-to cooking oil although a refined olive oil will also have a high smoke point (roughly 450 degrees). All that being said, I do not preheat my pan when cooking garlic or onions - I prefer gentle heat which I think draws out the flavor better and avoids burning. I avoid canola oil since I find that it has a slightly fishy flavor. And, you are correct, heat levels for stovetops are completely meaningless. Barbara Lynch, a local Boston chef, once told me to LISTEN to the food as it cooks - that is the best way to judge heat level. Onions need a gentle sizzle whereas searing a steak will be louder and more aggressive. Two other suggestions. Make sure that the bottom of your pan is perfectly flat otherwise the oil will pool around the perimeter. This makes the pan unusable. Second, use enough oil. Hot oil will coat the food much better than the metal of the skillet, creating more even cooking.

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Samantha - Only salt penetrates meat. Ground spices, sugar, citrus zest or any other seasoning besides salt just rest on the surface. You may taste them when you take a bite, but that’s just because it’s on the exterior. Salt, on the other hand, separates into ions—sodium and chloride—when it hits meat, which can work their way to the center, altering the protein so that it can better hold onto moisture and also amplifying flavor. Sprinkle a spice rub on right before cooking for good texture and a flavorful crust, but don’t expect it to do anything more. The spice rub for our Coriander-Orange Skirt Steak includes salt. You could keep the salt separate from the spices and apply it in advance to "dry brine" the meat if you wanted. Cuts 1" thick or less (such as skirt steak) really only need an hour or two for the salt to fully penetrate. Then apply the rest of the spice rub right before cooking. Thanks for writing us! Best, Lynn C.