I caught the first couple of seasons of FOX’s reality series, Hell’s Kitchen, but lost interest when I got sick of hearing chef Gordon Ramsay scream at the poor bastards every week; from what I hear, it hasn’t changed. One thing I’d noticed in nearly every episode was that EVERY one of the contestants smokes during the breaks outside. It’s well reported that smoking negatively affects one’s sense of smell, which in turn affects one’s sense of taste. Shouldn’t those senses be a chef’s greatest assets?

Fellow writer Bob Sassone once mentioned to me that, during his time working in kitchens, he noticed the same thing: everyone smoked. The dish washers, the waiters, the chefs. Everyone. He wasn’t really sure why, himself. So, I did a little digging around. The answer isn’t concrete, but I’ve narrowed it down to two main reasons:

1. The kitchen is stressful. Working in a busy restaurant is stressful business, no matter what your job happens to be. You’ve got order after order to be taken and served, meals upon meals to be prepared and cooked, and dishes upon dishes to be cleaned. On any given day or night, it can be a seemingly never-ending cycle. In the instance of Hell’s Kitchen, add a screaming Gordon Ramsay into the mix and you’ve got a stress cocktail that — in the limited time you have outside of the restaurant — only a nicotine fix seems to fix.

2. Smoke breaks are tolerated, but “fresh air breaks” are laughable. Even with smoking taking a decline in American society due to health concerns and banning from most public establishments, an employee smoke break is not only tolerated, it’s met with understanding. Let’s say you’re a busy waiter and you just need to take a step away from the mania within the restaurant, just to compose yourself so you don’t go insane. Tell me which request will be laughed at and which will be allowed with little hesitation:

“Hey boss, I’m going to take a smoke break. Be right back.”

“Hey boss, things are getting stressful around here. I just need ten minutes of fresh air. Cool?”

I’ve never even worked in a kitchen before and I’m already laughing at that second one.

In short, the smoking is simply a byproduct of stressed out workers simply wanting to step away and, in some cases, be social with their coworkers, outside from where the craziness is happening. Perhaps there are more restaurants out there that happily allow for fresh air breaks in hopes that it will keep their top chefs’ senses honed for their awesome dishes. Maybe screaming maniacs like Gordon Ramsay should see what their spewing rants of stress are doing to their workers and understand why, sometimes, the stuff they’re cooking “TASTES LIKE SHIT!!!”

There’s more to food than recipes. We’ll approach the answers to growing questions, and new ways of taking on tricks of the food trade, and Boil It Down for you.

Deb (and probably Bob) has mentioned on a few occasions already that her father is one hell of a cook. A few times when I’ve watched him cook, he’s done this fancy pan flipping food thing that I’d only previously seen on Food Network shows. Up until recently, I’d been mixing my veggies and such using a spatula or a spoon, e.g. the total wuss way. That’s because flipping food in a pan isn’t as hard as it looks.

First of all, this video by the one and only Ming Tsai is a good place to start if you want to learn how to get the hang of the handy trick:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=noizuQwvL0M

He makes it all seem so easy, doesn’t he? Well, the thing is, he seems to have left out a pointer or two.

First of all, it’s really, really hard to flip food in certain pans. Unless you’re a bodybuilder, you’re not going to find yourself flipping food all that easily in a cast-iron pan. No, you’ll want to do this with something like a stainless steel pan, like the one used in the video. Many of them are lightweight and easy to maneuver for a trick like this.

Secondly, the pan should have a good bowl shape to its sides. Sure, you can do the pan flippy thing with any pan, but you’re going to have a tougher time getting some good air from your veggies if you’re using a straight-walled saute pan. What I’ve found is that you use that rounded edge as a sort of ramp to lift the food out of the pan; you’re not really tossing the food up, you’re sliding it down, up and out, then bringing the pan back down under it. Make sense? No? Just look at the video above again and pay attention to what Ming’s doing and you’ll catch a little of it in action.

Follow these tips and, before you know it, the days of mixing your veggies and rice with a spatula in the pan will be ancient history. Impress friends at parties! Make the ladies swoon! Be the life of the bar mitzvah! Or, you know, just have one less thing to throw in the dishwasher.

There’s more to food than recipes. We’ll approach the answers to growing questions, and new ways of taking on tricks of the food trade, and Boil It Down for you.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had some sort of vegetable garden in the yard. From my parents’ house and my father’s veins coursing with the blood of generations of farmers, to my own home, where I seem to have a lot of success with growing squash and tomatoes, but not much else. I tend to try to grow what we have a use for, and if you know my wife Deb personally or through this site, you’d know that saying she’s fond of cilantro is an understatement.

So, of course, I attempt to grow cilantro every year … and fail at it miserably. The reason: the damn stuff bolts, or flowers, way too quickly. No sooner will I have a small pot of cilantro planted in my 8’x8′ sorry excuse for a garden, when I’ll find it teeming with flowers.

Let me tell you something about cilantro: I think it tastes like soap. And when cilantro bolts, it’s soapy times ten. It’s like I took a dive into a vat of Irish Spring with my mouth open. It’s just not good for anyone. So how the heck do I stop cilantro from bolting? Short answer: you can’t. You can, however, do something to stop it from happening to quickly.

First of all, I’m going to have to relate the following to growing cilantro in New England; I have no experience with growing it elsewhere, though this all may benefit everyone. There are two main problems with growing cilantro in your own garden: nursery-bought cilantro and planting too late.

Most owners of small herb gardens or casual at-home farmers will buy herbs from a nursery, meaning they are already growing. Sometimes you’ll see them as teeny, tiny plants that are just barely peeking through the soil, while other times (and, in my experience, most times) they’re to the point you could probably just harvest the leaves right away! Many times these large seedlings of cilantro are put on nursery shelves much too late in the season, so there’s almost no point in planting it — what you see is what you’re going to get, until it goes to seed (bolts).

Cilantro will tend to bolt once you get into 80-degree temperature days. Once that happens, all bets are off — if you don’t keep an eye on your plants daily, you’ll find you’ve waiting too long into the hot spring/summer and now you’ve got useless, bitter (though a little pretty) cilantro. It’s frustrating as hell, and a high-maintenance nightmare if you’ve got a lot of plants you’re counting on.

Your best bets for successfully planting cilantro without it flowering too soon:

• Plant from seed. Make sure you give it time to turn into a seedling just before the danger of outside frost has gone. Planting from seed can be as problematic and frustrating as early-blooming cilantro, so farmer beware!
• Keep the plant inside. Keep a little indoor herb garden for your cilantro and make sure you keep the room it’s in at room temperature or so — don’t let the 80-degree temps get to it, or you’re back to bolting again.
• Buy your seedlings earlier. Don’t be tempted by those beautiful, lush cilantro plants meant for your outdoor garden when you’re hitting Home Depot on a hot spring or summer day. If you do that, plan to just cut up the cilantro and use it right away, because it’s not going to get much bigger.

One final best bet for dealing with cilantro: don’t try to plant it. It’s usually rather plentiful in supermarkets. Or you could just not use cilantro at all, because it tastes like soap.

There’s more to food than recipes. We’ll approach the answers to growing questions, and new ways of taking on tricks of the food trade, and Boil It Down for you.

For the past couple of years, we’ve been using a bamboo cutting board as our main chopping surface in the kitchen. It made a whole lot of sense at the time. Bamboo’s a green wood and replenishes itself quickly and abundantly; we’re not contributing to the deforestation of some ancient woodlands to prepare our meals.

So far the bamboo cutting boards have served their purpose well. However, I’ve noted that our knives seem to get dull more frequently than they had years ago. Are the knives getting old? Are we just cooking more? Is the bamboo bad for the knives?

We could have gone with plastic cutting boards, but it’s been reported that bacteria finds it a lot easier to hide in crevasses in plastic than with wood boards. Sounds crazy, I know. We have one plastic board that we’ve declared as the fruit-only surface, so we’re not getting some weird onion flavor in our sliced pineapple.

First thing to know about wooden cutting boards is that there are typically two types: edge-grain and end-grain.

Edge-grain — or flat-grain — is the most common wooden cutting board you’ll see in a typical household kitchen. This is the kind of bamboo cutting board we use. It’s easy to tell it’s a flat-grain board because it looks like a bunch of flat pieces of wood, stuck together edge-to-edge. They’re relatively inexpensive, as they’re easier to manufacture.

End-grain cutting boards are what you’ll often see on a big butcher block. The wood is arranged in a checkerboard pattern rather than the edge or long end of the wood. End-grain boards are more expensive because they’re more durable, cost more to make and look damn nice on your kitchen counter.

So, why are end-grain boards better than edge-grain, besides in looks and durability? Think of how a tree’s fibers run. A long board of wood is cut to the length of the tree, not through its width. The fibers of the tree run vertically, and thus vertically within the long piece of wood. It’s much easier to take an ax and chop the length of a log of wood rather than across it, since you’re splitting down through the fibers of the tree.

In an edge-grain board, your knife is cutting down at the wood grain as though you’re trying to chop down a tree. With end-grain, you’re coming down through the wood fibers as though splitting with an ax (though, of course, without the splitting). End-grain’s easier on your knives because of this, and because you’re not actually cutting the wood and are instead splitting the fibers, the board lasts longer.

Is that the answer then, that the grain of the wood is affecting the knives’ sharpness? Not so fast! There are other things to consider. There’s the type of wood and the resin used to adhere the pieces together, for example. Teak contains silica, which can be very hard on knife edges (though it looks really nice). Some exotic woods contain oils that can come out onto your food and potentially cause allergic reactions (walnut, for example). But what of bamboo, specifically?

Bamboo is a durable and plentiful resource, though is considered by some to be a hard wood (it is, in fact, a kind of grass!) Yes, it’s going to be harder on knife edges, though it’s not the wood to blame as much as it is the way you’re cutting the grain. An edge-grain, hardwood (or grass) board is going to work out your knives faster than any end-grain board.

Basic rule of thumb: stick with end-grain boards if you can afford it. If you must go edge-grain, stick with softer woods if you don’t want your knives going dull on you quicker.