the lousy cook is back! creamy-based pasta sauces, please advise!

[Anonymous]

ok, so i found a good looking recipe online - 2 cups milk - warm/simmer with salt and pepper, then add 3 tablespoons flour, add browned garlic and 6 ounces of chopped up canned sundried tomatoes in oil. then simmer some more, mixing a lot, then add 1/2 cup shredded parmesean, 2 chopped up fresh tomatoes and basil... and it sounds good and it was pretty yum, but the texture was weird - its sort of grainy - as if the flour didn't mix in, but i'm positive that it mized in well in that step - my other thought is that the parm didn't dissolve as well as it should have - i wonder if i had the heat too low for that part? i also took a long - 45 min - break between the sundried tomatoes and the cheese - did that do it?

why is it so grainy?

also, how do you pick a mango - i pciked one with a good giving texture and it smelled sweet and it tastes sour. do mangoes sweeten/ripen if left to wait on my counter? aka - does the second mango i bought have any hope?

[Anonymous]

First off, I would recommend getting a good, reliable cookbook-maybe something like Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything." For online recipes, I find Alton Brown's pretty reliable. The recipe you describe sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but if you don't know how to cook it is very hard to judge whether a recipe is good or bad.

If you are going to make a sauce thickened with flour, it's best to use a roux (butter and flour cooked together), and then add your liquid to the roux with whisking really well. I would never add flour directly to milk, because it often gets clumpy and gross no matter how much you mix. Other possible problems, adding the fresh tomatoes could have curdled the sauce, or during the break you took the sauce could have broken (sometimes you can fix that by heating and whisking the sauce again).

Do you have any friends who cook? I have a good friend who was a terrible cook and she had each of her friends who cook show her a few recipes-cooking with other people can really help you learn basic techniques and principles.

Mangos-sometimes they are just really hit or miss, but yes let the 2nd mango sit out for a couple days.

[Anonymous]

Here's a short video on making a white sauce:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yrbsbQGjRM

Also, mangos here are little like avocados. I let mine sit a few days (not in the fridge) b/f using. I like the Asian ones better--they are small and golden and soften slightly when they are ripe.

Good for you though for giving it a try. Sauces can be difficult and it's a bummer when your hard work doesn't pay off. (I also keep a pizza in the freezer for when this happens.)

A basic cooking class might be worthwhile. Personally, I'd start with a knife skills class b/c so much of cooking starts there.

[Anonymous]

Op here - oh my god - this is such good advice - now ghat you mention it, I do think it was the addition of the fresh tomatoes that curdled the sauce... And I find it so interesting that you could recognize a hit or miss recipe so easily - I read that and thought it was a hit. And thank you for the suggestion of cooking classes. I work FT and have two little ones, but I recently became determined to cook the majority of our means at home... Instead of having dominos and Moby dick run my kitchen. Any thoughts of where to look for basic classes? I live in Bethesda - a mike over the MD-DC line.

[Anonymous]

Meals. Not means.

[Anonymous]

L'Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda has lots in the evenings or weekends.

I would take a recreational class. I like Somchet Chumpapo, Brian or Sandy Patterson, or Joel Olson in terms of instructors. Friendly, laid back personalities who don't make you feel like an idiot.

[Anonymous]

Agree with the suggestion to use a roux instead of flour - you can also try using a butter ball (which is basically the same thing, just for use to thicken stubborn things - mash up softened butter with flour and add to sauce, stirring til dissolved). Also, how did you mix in the flour? With straight flour, if you don't beat the hell out of it with a whisk, often it does not fully mix in.

I have also had trouble with adding crappy parmesan to cream sauces - the fancy kind that you grate yourself works much better than anything you purchase pre-shredded.

If you want to try this recipe over again, I would add the fresh tomatoes and the basil as a garnish before serving. It will prevent them from curdling the sauce and (in my opinion) is tastier that way.

[Anonymous]

If grainy you might have the heat too high. Cream sauces will curdle/start to separate if too much heat is applied and the first step of that looks grainy..just a thought. Try not so much simmer next time and see what happens. Good luck.

[Anonymous]

You can cook your meals from scratch but I think you picked a tough one to start with! I have been cooking (basic) meals for years and I would not have attempted that one, for the exact reasons of what happened to you-I have never had success with flour...
I use the Joy of Cooking cookbook and the red and white checked betty Crocker (I think) cook book. These are great for basics and give random tips like your flour issue above.
This is not a plug, but I use dream dinners for the nights where I don't want restaurant or delivery type food but I don't have time to cook. It's been a lifesaver for us since we have young kids

[Anonymous]

I agree that you should not just add flour to a liquid and try to combine it. It will almost always end up uneven, lumpy and have consistency issues. Another suggestion to try to work with this recipe is after you warm the milk, take out several TBSP of the milk into a bowl (say about 6 TBSP milk for 3 TBSP flour), add the flour to it and which it together like a slurry. A slurry is a mixture, usually cornstarch and water that is mixed together into a thick watery paste and then added to a sauce after heating to thicken it. Often used in stir fries or stews added towards the end. In this case, take some of the milk out and mix with the flour in a bowl using a fork or whisk and mix until all of the flour has dissolved and you have no lumps. Then add the liquidy paste into the main pot and whisk in. It will be easier to separate the flour in suspension in a smaller amount of liquid.

I second classes with Brian Patterson at L'Academie. Years ago, I took some wine and food classes that Brian and Scott Peters from Tenleytown Liquors did at L'Academie. They were very fun and very good about explaining the how and why to cooking (how to do something or why you do something). Good teachers.

Good luck...we all started somewhere and I can tell you that I had some really douzies when I was starting out.

[Anonymous]

start with alton brown's good eats. easy, broken-down steps, with variations so that you get to understand a "technique" rather than a specific "recipe"
also, cheap (I'm guessing? on Itunes maybe? netflix?) and can be done on your own schedule.

[Anonymous]

The above poster talking about the "slurry" forgot to point out that it needs to be done with cold liquid. Don't take milk out of the pot -- reserve some cold milk for this purpose. You can mix flour with cold liquid and come up with something non-lumpy but once you put it in hot liquid it gets lumpy unless it is dissolved first in a liquid. You don't really even need to whisk flour dissolved in cold liquid much. But hot? Have a work a lot harder if you want to use hot liquid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The above poster talking about the "slurry" forgot to point out that it needs to be done with cold liquid. Don't take milk out of the pot -- reserve some cold milk for this purpose. You can mix flour with cold liquid and come up with something non-lumpy but once you put it in hot liquid it gets lumpy unless it is dissolved first in a liquid. You don't really even need to whisk flour dissolved in cold liquid much. But hot? Have a work a lot harder if you want to use hot liquid.

PP here...oops...you're right. I usually make the slurry at the same time as I put the other liquid on to warm and then when the liquid reaches temperature, I add the slurry. Sorry for the carelessness...that's a good way to confuse a new cook.