Pies: Finishing
General instructions
The decoration of the cake is a free opportunity to let your imagination and your creativity. A beautiful finish make the pie charming.
We present some easy decorative techniques, which will meet in various recipes.
Edges
It is very important for closed pies stick well to the edges, so I need to seal it somehow. The most common and easiest way is to press the teeth with a fork. You can also pinch the hand: the thumb and forefinger.
The decor in open pies are not necessary, but certainly the more beautiful.
Some pies are baked in a pan and you can close the edges by pressing them with a fork or spoon. Some more traditional pies have no base, but only one layer of dough on top. Strips of dough are placed on the rim of the pot, and forced to stick coated with egg. Place them onto a sheet of dough, push stick and draw the edges with the broad side of a knife within an inch of the dough to rise in layers.
Decoration
In most recipes you some dough left over from trimming. Use it for decoration.
Traditionally, only savory pies decorated to stand out from the sweet. You can use shapes leaves, flowers or seashells, which match or even fruit shapes if you want to highlight content. Gather the leftovers and turn them into three millimeters thick. Cut into shapes using for a more complex pattern of cardboard. Very useful is Cookie Cutters. To make shells, use a circular cutter for the basic shape and then cut to the shape of the shell and draw lines on a knife (see fig 1). To stick to the cake, first glasarete according to the recipe, then place over the pie shapes and the glasarete.
Figure 1: With the exception of the peripheral red lines, this is a great example of how building shell.
Grids
It is difficult to make a grid. Turn the dough into a circle on waxed paper and then cut strips into the desired size using a knife or wheel and a ruler. Place on waxed paper to another half vertical strips approximately 1 cm longer Put the strips in half and the shorter edges. Carefully lift one rather than one of the strips and lay one a.m. to one a.m. horizontal stripes, lifted by placing the strips in place before proceeding to the next. Put the grid in the fridge to tighten the dough, flip the cake onto the waxed paper and remove it. Press to hang over the pie and trim it. Glasarete and bake according to recipe.
Meat
General instructions
First of all you have to buy meat from a butcher to whom you have confidence and you are unsure about the quality of its products. Do not hesitate to ask the specialist for any questions you have and ask him to recommend a suitable meat for your recipe. Indeed, in such cases, the butcher is a valuable source of information. Besides, who knows better quality and lots of meat from him;
Just come home from the market must unwrap the meat from the papers and membranes, and the moisture of the meat along with them creates slime and make sticky. In fact, many times, if meat is left long enough within the membranes smell strongly. Place, then, in glass or stainless steel with lid and keep them in the coolest part of the refrigerator.
Failure to maintain the raw meat in the refrigerator for more than two days: in such cases it is best to freeze. Also, minced meat and offal is best to consume the same day.
If you freeze meat, minced meat, etc., do not forget the freezer because they lose some texture and flavor. When you freeze meat products, it is advisable to place them in special bags and food to write on (the bag) the date the freeze in order to consume in a short time and do not store them there for long.
A meat is exposed, even in part, in the freezer, you'll find that black and dry when you cook it remains hard, dry and tasteless. When you want to defrost meat, we must do everything in the refrigerator. So we help the meat to thaw slowly to recover, slowly - slowly, its juices.
Do not leave it outside the refrigerator and do not put it in water to defrost. There is a risk that bacteria grow and certainly will not be as tasty and juicy.
Tips
In general, you might remember that:
- Very soft pieces of meat to grill or bake oven and harder (harder are the pieces of the animal moving more) in a saucepan or microwave with a little water. Of course, always a soft meat can be cooked with liquid sauce. Instead, a hard meat never cooked dry.
- Sigomageirefoume covered the meat to soften and melosei well.
- When cooking, baking or frying of meat do not use sharp tools, well, boring one undercooked meat juices lose all that we trap.
- If you want more flavor, buy a few slices of pork belly, wrap the one a.m. to one a.m. and put in freezer until you need it.
- When not need the tomato paste diluted with water to add. Before stopping the meat with any liquid, dissolve the tomato paste at the bottom of the pot by rubbing with a spoon.
- When you pull the meat from the oven, cover immediately with foil or parchment paper, to no recover back to suck the juices for 15 minutes. Then cutting the slices, we have a juicy and delicious roast!
Pasta
General instructions
Divide the pasta into two categories: standard dry and fresh. We can manufacture our own and the two species. In the preparation should be remembered that:
- The pasta should be cooked al dente, that is to keep a bit, because it becomes dry taste and is more digestible. Those that have not been thoroughly cook raw dough taste, while those paravrasan, silt. As a general rule, we use a deep saucepan to 500 gr. pasta want 5 liters of water and a tablespoon of salt. Once the water boils and curing, immerse the pasta, stir once and boil the water again counting from that moment the boiling time. Generally, fresh pasta want 2 ', fresh pasta stuffed with (eg ravioli) want 5 minutes, dried pasta 8' - 12 ', depending on the length and shape, to put it, showing the proposed Boiling years.
- If you add fat in cooking the pasta, they become impervious and does not stick then the sauce over them. All you need is a frequent shuffling. Also, after the cook did not ever rinse with water, both for the above reason and also because they lose starch, which helps to bind the sauce to add and to be better absorbed by the pasta. Oil and rinse the pasta when it is cold to use them, eg for the manufacture makaronosalatas. It is preferable if we want a perfect pasta that holds sauce on it (and not to have, ultimately, to fill the dish), to boil the pasta 2 minutes less than they appear on the packaging and torch, as it dripping, add to the pan with the sauce, stirring and boiling for 2 minutes. We find that the sauce will melosei, ie will thicken with the starch of the pasta, they will absorb and be stuck on them.
- When you cook pasta gratin, always preheat the oven to allow temperature to 220 degrees Celsius and just put the pan in the oven turn down to 180. In this way, eggs and cream cheese quickly makes the body (solid) and not enough time to settle to the bottom of the pan.
Tips
In general, you might remember that:
- We can use leftover cooked pasta with a tomato sauce or cheese to turn it into a new food. It also enables us to exploit cooked ingredients like roast or boiled chicken, braised veal or lamb spit to create new food. For example, lamb spit and stranded pasta or macaroni can make a perfect pasta.
- Use a little water from boiled pasta to dilute thick cheese sauce.
Foods low in calories (light)
General instructions:
The diet is the most basic functions of our lives. All the latest scientific studies point to the fact that the relationship between diet and health is a key factor in longevity. Diets with foods rich in fiber and protein, with very little fat in half a century ago were described as food for the poor, now have a leading position in the diet of humans. There are good and bad foods. All edible products we offer are healthy nature. The overconsumption is doing a natural food harmful to our health. We must therefore learn to eat properly and eat different foods in the proportions requires a balanced diet. The National Academy of Sciences of the USA recommends that you take every day, only 30% of our needs in calories from fat. In accordance, not with the latest announcements of the National Cholesterol Education Program of the U.S., at least 2/3 of those calories should come from olive oil.
To reduce fat, especially saturated, we get the food, you should:
- Avoid as much as we prepared meals, desserts and snacks and meals in restaurants, because we can not control the quantity and quality of fats used in their manufacture.
- Choose lean meats and products with little fat.
- Clean all obvious fat from meat before or after cooking.
- We eat bread, fruit and vegetables every day.
- Drink skim galakai to eat fat-free dairy products.
- Cook the meat or fish with vegetables.
- Remove the skin from chicken.
- Eat meat boiled or roasted, draining the fat.
- Replace fat with beef broth to cook sauces or garnishes to accompany the meat.
- Limit the amount of oil, mayonnaise or other fat in salad dressings and fat we add to food during cooking or serving.
- We use only olive oil in cooking or salads.
- Replace meat with fish as often as we can. Fish lipids contain a group characterized as "omega-3", which have beneficial advantages for our health.
Many materials that add flavor to food does not contain any fat, such as sundried tomatoes, garlic, fresh ginger, lemon juice, vinegar, balsamic mainly replacing pleasant dressing on salads, crushed red pepper are, mushrooms and even as the aromatic truffles or porcini, sauces such as mustard, soy, teriyaki and Worcester. Important role in the taste of food, herbs play. With the wonderful aromas and flavors of the various mitigating the lack of fat. Given the general awareness of nutrition in recent years a number of commercially available low-fat products. Consumption of these products must be done in moderation. Many times, in the belief that our products do not gain weight, consume large quantities. Just consider that since the light products released in America, increased obese. Caution, therefore, not so much on what we eat, but mostly in how we eat. The way I cook, too, is as important as the quality of the materials we use. The bad cooking can alter a healthy natural product into something harmful to our health, such as oil which, when the burn, formed dioxins, toxic substances are very harmful to our health. Fresh vegetables, rich in vitamins and minerals, they lose their beneficial properties for the body when the cook much and melt or burn when frying.
To cook healthy should keep in mind the following:
- Be always count the oil or butter before using it and be sparing in their use.
- Avoid frying and prefer baking in the oven.
- Instead sauté the vegetables, boil or steaming them without putting oil and crude oil at the end.
- In pies prefer sex crust and not puff pastry dough. Aleifontas leaves us, we check the quality and quantity of fat to use.
- To tie a sauce or soup, to prefer the ground steamed vegetables instead of cream or eggs.
- Avoid using alcohol will not give anything in nutrients, only calories parapanisies.
- Do not forget to eat well and healthy, rather than to add years to our lives, but to add quality years to live.
Sources:
- 35 recipes for delicious pies, ed Maliaris Paedia.
- My confidential recipes - Meat, Arg. Barbarigos, insert of magazine 7 days Tv
- My confidential recipes - Pasta, Arg. Barbarigos, insert of magazine 7 days Tv
- The 20 best light meals, B. Alexiadou, insert of "Phileleftheros" newspaper.
