After you juice a grapefruit, lemon, lime, orange or other citrus, do you throw it away?

If so, you’re tossing out a delicious ingredient: the zest.

Zest is the outermost part of the rind/peel/skin. Before you juice the citrus, remove the zest for use in other recipes. Scraping or cutting it from the skin is known as zesting.

Zesting a lime. Zest got its name from the “zestiness” it adds to food. Photo by Villy Fink Isaksen Wikimedia.

 
The fresher the zest, the more aromatic and flavorful; so don’t let it wane in the fridge.

HOW TO ZEST

Be sure to wash and dry the fruit well before zesting. If you can, buy organic or unwaxed citrus.

While some people use a paring knife, it’s much easier to use a zester (which creates julienne strips) or a zester grater like a Microplane, or the fine side of a box grater.

First decide how you’re going to use your zest: grated or strips. If the zest will be used for flavor and then removed (marinades, steeping in tea) it doesn’t make a difference. For garnish/eye appeal, use a regular zester. To dissolve into recipes (vinaigrette, sorbet) use a zester grater. We love our Cuisipro box grater.

If you’re going to buy a zester, get a combination zester-stripper, which also creates strips of peel for cocktails or garnish.

What are your favorite uses for lemon zest?

You’ve added too much salt. Now what?
Salt server available on Amazon.com. We
use this one in THE NIBBLE test kitchen.

It’s happened to all of us: too much salt inadvertently added to a recipe, making it inedible. How can you salvage your dish?

Whichever technique you try (except for adding potatoes), use a bit at a time, tasting along the way.

And remember next time: the longer food cooks and reduces, the more the salt intensifies. Consider adding half the amount of salt and adjusting it at the end of cooking.

Do you have a favorite salt-minimizing technique? Share it here!

Season your food with a pinch of gremolata,
a mixture of herbs and other seasonings.
Photo courtesy Aunt Nellie’s. Get the soup
recipe.

Italy is known for its flavorful cuisine. One of the secrets is knowing how to use fresh herbs.

Gremolata (alternate spelling gremolada) is a lively fresh-chopped condiment that commonly includes parsley and/other green herbs, lemon zest and garlic.

It’s probably most familiar to Americans as the traditional accompaniment to osso bucco, a braised veal shank dish that’s a top-seller at Italian restaurants.

But it’s a great accent to many dishes. And because it’s so flavorful, you can cut back on salt.

Whether you’re serving meat (from lamb, pork or rib roast to veal and venison), poultry, pasta, potatoes and other vegetables (we love it with sautéed string beans), salad, risotto, soup or stew, a pinch of gremolata spices up any dish. The citrus note is perfect with white fish like cod and halibut to dark fish like mackerel (in fact, it’s great with any seafood). And it’s easy to make. Just chop and mix:

 
You can add sea salt; but we prefer to serve salt separately so that people can use it or not.

There are many variations to a basic gremolata. Mint, other green herbs, anchovies or chopped hazelnuts can be included. If cilantro will pick up your dish, for example, make a cilantro gremolata.

The varieties are only limited by the imagination of the cook. Here are some pointers:

 
Some sources say that gremolata is the Italian word for chopped or ground. We haven’t found it in the dictionary, but chalk it up to dialect.

Spring your spices from their sealed jars and
add them to a new recipe. Photo of
star anise courtesy Wikimedia.

There are some spices in the cabinet that you use more often than others: chili powder, cinnamon, garlic powder or paprika, for example.

And then there are those that were bought for a recipe—like cardamom for Christmas cookies or cloves for the Easter ham. After you’ve made the recipe, the bottle of spice just lingers on the shelf.

Certain wines age well as they sit; but not spices or herbs. So use them up before they age out. Here are examples of how to expand your perspective:

Want suggestions for how to use up your spices? Just ask!

Have you checked your spices for freshness lately? See how.

Bouquet garni, an aromatic bundle of herbs (the term is French for “garnished bouquet”), is a seasoning for some of the world’s favorite dishes. It’s called upon to flavor dishes such as Beef Bourguignon, Bouillabaisse and Osso Bucco. It’s a go-to seasoning for sauces, soups and stocks.

Bouquet garni is classically tied with string and enclosed in cheesecloth, for easy removal at the end of the cooking process. The herbs can also be added into a sachet (the type that are also used to fill-your-own tea bags); and you can use a tea ball.

But what if you have no cheesecloth? No sachet? No tea ball?

Use a couple of coffee filters (or just one if the herbs fit). Insert the herbs, tie it closed and add it to the pot.

A bouquet garni of bay leaf, sage and thyme.
Photo © David Monniaux, courtesy Wikimedia.

A bouquet garni is made of particular herbs that accent a recipe. There is no one herb mix: three or four choices are made among a group that typically includes bay leaf, chervil, parsley, sage, savory, rosemary, thyme and tarragon.*

*Did you realize that Simon & Garfunkel were singing about bouquet garni? Here’s the background of the song, Scarborough Fair.

As you cook, enjoy Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, or at least the MP3 of “Scarborough Fair.”

There are two reasons to toast spices.

First, a bit of heat releases the flavor of the spices, giving you much more punch. This extra flavor is worth the five minutes of time to toast them.

It’s easy to toast your spices:

Before grinding, toast whole spices in a dry skillet over low heat. Stir frequently until the spices begin to release their aromas.

The aromas are a delicious kitchen sachet, which leads to the second good reason to toast spices:

If you’ve recently burned some popcorn, fried a batch of fish or have that leftover meat-browning odor in your kitchen, toasting some spices in the oven should help alleviate bad kitchen aromas.

Simply place 4 or 5 cinnamon sticks, a few tablespoons of cloves and/or some orange peel onto a baking sheet, and bake at 350°F until the aromas fill your home. The scent is much longer-lasting than aromatic sprays and more effective than kitchen candles.

Toast me! Photo of cinnamon sticks by
Ben Fink from Indian Home Cooking
by Suvir Saran.

Oh: And if you’re selling your home, you don’t have to go so far as to bake cookies for a homey household aroma. Just toast some spices.

We use this salt cellar in THE NIBBLE test
kitchen. It’s easier to clean than wood
versions, since it gets a lot of spatter from
the stovetop).

Is there a proper way to salt meat prior to cooking? Of course!

Chefs salt meat and fish by sprinkling the salt from a height of roughly 6 to 8 inches.

This ensures that an even layer of salt seasons the meat, and there are no bland spots.

Another thing: Many chefs don’t use a salt shaker. Instead, they use a large salt cellar and sprinkle on salt by the pinch.

Salt is often kept in an oval wood box with a swivel lid. We prefer our glass and stainless salt cellar, for ease of cleaning.

Similarly, many chefs prefer to use kosher salt or sea salt for seasoning. The coarse texture makes it easier to take a pinch for seasoning.

Kosher salt (also called koshering salt) gets its name because coarse-grained salt is used in the koshering process to draw the blood out of meat and poultry.

Kosher salt. We use this salt server in
THE NIBBLE test kitchen to add pinches
of salt as we cook.

Since cooking is chemistry, you have to combine ingredients in the right order to get the fluffiest cakes or soufflés, for example.

It’s the same with salt: Pay attention to the order in which you add salt. Here are tips from Chef Louis Eguaras:

See the many different types of salt in our Salt Glossary.

Love a baked potato?

Love it even more with a sprinkling of your favorite fresh herbs or spices. They add a rush of flavor and aroma with virtually no calories.

Herbs are also very nutritious, adding vitamins and minerals to the meal.

You can serve one or more herbs in ramekins and let everyone customize his/her baked potato. While the photo shows a light sprinkling, pile up as much as you like.

Fresh herbs add flavor, nutrition and
no calories! Photo courtesy Wisconsin Milk
Marketing Board.

Another nutritious, low-calorie tip:

Substitute nonfat Greek yogurt for the sour cream. It’s very creamy with no fat or cholesterol. Most Greek yogurt is very low in tanginess as well, making it even more like sour cream. Try it!

Tellicherry, the “Champagne” of black
peppersorns.
Photo by B.A. Van Sise | THE NIBBLE.

There’s no question that freshly-ground pepper delivers exciting flavor, while pre-ground pepper tends to be flat.

That’s because the grinding process releases aromatic and palate-pleasing qualities that begin to dry out after they’re released. The spicy heat derives largely from the piperine compound, found both in the outer fruit (the black layer) and in the seed (the white ball underneath). The outer fruit layer also contains volatile oils that give pepper its scent.

Yet, it’s not easy filling a classic pepper grinders with those tiny peppercorns. Even with nimble fingers, peppercorns escape, sending us on a pepper chase.

One day, we decided to use a small kitchen funnel to fill the grinder. Voilà, a solution!

If you don’t have the right-size funnel, you can put the peppercorns into a plastic snack bag or sandwich bag and cut off a corner.