How to Break an Egg is a unique cooking problem-solver! Don't miss this handy collection of 1,453 tested culinary tips, easy shortcuts, and clever solutions to typical kitchen emergencies. All beautifully organized in an easy-to-access format for quick reference or leisurely reading!

Your trusted culinary guide for fast, answers. Whether you need a cool way to handle hot chilies or tips for cutting down on kitchen clean up, How to Break an Egg has all the answers -- especially when you're in a hurry.

Practical tips from editors and contributors Look under "basil" in the Ingredients chapter to find tips for drying it, keeping its bright green color, and making pesto go further. Look under "cookies," for clever ways to roll out cookie dough so it won't stick, how to form perfectly shaped cookies, and more. You'll also discover dozens of useful tips on cookware and utensils, serving, storage, clean-up, and kitchen safety.

If disaster strikes, go to: When Things Go Wrong This invaluable chapter will come to your rescue when your soufflé is falling, your cheese sauce is curdling, you don't have the right size pan for the cake you're already mixing -- or whenever the unexpected happens.

42 basic kitchen techniques From cutting a mango to shelling a lobster, you'll learn how to do it correctly with help from full-color, step-by-step photos. Since this guide deals with everyday questions most cookbooks don't address, it prepares you for dealing with cooking catastrophes, like cream that refuses to whip! So, you'll want to keep this book handy.

"No kitchen is totally complete unless this book is on the shelf. It's a wealth of information, and I personally could not do without it!"
--Paula Deen, author of Paula Deen & Friends: Living it Up, Southern Style

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Contents

Introduction

1. Cookware, Appliance, and Utensil Tips
Pots and Pans
Kitchen Appliances
Knives and Kitchen Shears
Kitchen Tools and Cutting Boards
You Use That to Do What?

2. Ingredient Tips
Baking Ingredients
Dairy and Eggs
Fish, Meat, and Poultry
Fruit
Herbs, Spices, and Other Flavorings
Vegetables
Odds and Ends

3. Cooking Tips
Picking a Recipe and Getting Started
Baking
Deep-Frying
Sauting and Pan-Frying
Stir-frying
Roasting Chicken and Turkey
Grilling
Beans
Eggs
Meat
Pasta
Polenta
Potatoes
Rice and Other Grains
Sauces and Gravy
Stocks and Soups
Odds and Ends

4. Serving, Storage, Cleaning, and Kitchen Safety Tips
Serving
Beverage and Food Storage
Kitchen Organization
Cleaning
Kitchen Safety
5. When Things Go Wrong, Substitutions, and Equivalents
Cake Catastrophes, Muffin Mishaps, and Befuddled Biscuits
Pie Pitfalls
Cookie Chaos and Brownie Blunders
Bad Bread Blues
Candy Calamities
Chocolate Conundrums Saucy Situations
Eggravations
Stovetop Struggles: Pan-frying, Sauteing, Stir-frying, and Deep-frying
Baking Pan Substitutions
Emergency Substitutions
Measurement Equivalents
Oven Temperature Equivelents
Ingredient Equivalents

6 . Handy Kitchen Techniques
Trussing a Chicken or Turkey
How to Turn a Whole Chicken into 10 Serving Pieces
How to Split and Partially Bone a Chicken
Boning a Chicken Breast
Butterflying a Chicken Breast
Carving a Turkey
Trimming a Tenderloin
Butterflying and Rolling a Boned Pork Loin
Trimming a Rack of Ribs
Carving a Leg of Lamb
Carving a Rib Roast
Debearding a Mussel
Peeling and Deveining Shrimp
Shelling a Cooked Lobster
Cracking a Cooked Crab
Removing Pinbones from a Fish Fillet
Chopping an Onion
Prepping Leeks for Easy Washing
Julienning a Carrot
Cutting a Chiffonade
Trimming and Coring Cabbage
Seeding a Cucumber
Seeding a Bell Pepper
Peeling and Seeding a Tomato
Trimming an Artichoke for Steaming
Preparing Artichoke Bottoms
Trimming a Baby Artichoke
Coring and Slicing an Apple
Coring a Pear to Poach Whole
Coring Pear Halves
Cutting Segments from an Orange or Other Citrus Fruit
Zesting a Citrus Fruit
Pitting a Peach or Nectarine
Pitting a Plum
Cutting a Mango
Pitting an Avocado
Peeling a Melon
Peeling and Coring a Pineapple
Hulling a Strawberry
Chopping Chocolate
The Stages of Whipping Cream and Egg Whites
Clarifying Butter

Contributors Bios

Index

What if you could download the collective wisdom of hundreds of great cooks? Better yet, what if those cooks were the readers, authors, and all-around cooking enthusiasts who populate the pages of Fine Cooking magazine? If this sounds like a pie-in-the-sky idea, Im happy to tell you its not. How to Break an Egg is an amazing collection of over 1,400 tips, tricks, advice and solutions straight from the pages of Fine Cooking.

Need a gentle way to melt chocolate? Use a heating pad. Want a quick tool for making fresh breadcrumbs? Try a coffee grinder. Butter frozen? Grate it onto a plate to soften it quickly. A handy way to fill a pastry bag? Use a tall glass to hold it. The best way to store crusty bread? In a paper bag. How can you tell if an artichoke is fresh? Itll squeak when you squeeze it! How to Break an Egg is packed with time-saving and problem-solving gems like these.

Its not just the Aha! moments that make this book special, though. Its the source of those ideas, too -- our unique collection of authors. From our readers -- the clever contributors to our popular Tips department -- come many of the best solutions. But weve also distilled the sage advice of our editors, our test kitchen staff, and the talented chefs and cooking experts who write our features, too. Great ideas from great cooks, all organized into an easy-to-reference format youll find indispensable.

How to Break an Egg is incredibly useful, to be sure. (Dont miss the chapter on troubleshooting; if you suffer from lumpy gravy syndrome or are fed up with pie dough thats too sticky or that cracks when you roll it, this is the place to turn to.) But just like Fine Cooking magazine, it will also just plain get you excited about messing around in the kitchen. I wouldnt keep this book too far from the stove; youll likely use it every day. Though I must admit, it makes great bedtime reading, too.

Susie Middleton
Editor, Fine Cooking magazine