Eggs 101

Has anyone ever watched the animated TV series Archer? It was, when we used to watch it anyway, twistedly funny and tragic, with a totally dysfunctional and a little narcissistic protagonist who also is an outright cool spy. Besides innate 007-esque abilities, Archer's second nature is to belittle or berate people. In the show's early seasons Archer screamed on multiple occasions his outrage, "How hard is it to poach a God damn egg properly?! Seriously, it's like eggs 101." That made me spring forward in my seat with my outrage. But that was the comedic mechanism of Archer.

Seriously, who even knows what a perfectly poached egg is, unless you have been served one or know its description. Most of us, okay I, would think the stringy, craggy edges of egg white and a completely off-centered yolk are perfectly acceptable, if that is all we see most often. Not all restaurants serve perfect poached eggs, either. I have in the past been served some with completely runny as well as completely cooked yolks, instead of dreamy soft with a runny center. Suspicious ones exist too. A popular restaurant in the Cuba quarter of Wellington, New Zealand, used to serve poached eggs that were always round but strangely with barely a thin film of white enclosing the yolk. Could that be called a perfect poached egg, when a big part of the egg is missing? Egg white constitutes a whopping 65% of an egg, not counting the shell.^*  Pretty ingenious shortcut - probably just a little stringy bit to trim off, if any, and the rest can go in a pavlova. Of course, I'm only guessing.

Poached egg to me was like a 300-level skill at least, definitely not 101. But, I still prefer the authentic skill to shortcuts.

There are a lot of articles on the Web making an attempt to help us make the perfect poached egg. Most help at least in some way, but this one by Kristen Aiken from The Huffington Post is the best - concise yet thorough in explaining the causes of problems. Following her instructions, I succeeded making the perfect poached egg the first time and consistently thereafter.

My main takeaways from the instructions:
* do not add salt to the water
* vinegar is unnecessary if you do it right
* stir the water to create a whirlpool before sliding the egg in the center of the whirlpool
Do visit Kristen's article for a proper read of her instructions.

The only thing missing in her instructions (and from other people's) is how to determine if an egg is fresh without breaking it first.

Boiled egg is eggs 101, right?


Tip:

How to tell if an egg is fresh without breaking it open?

Eggs come in batches, and if you buy them from supermarkets, they should have a best-before date on the carton or whichever packaging they come in. So, the closer the time is to that date, the older they are. However, from my experience, even the supposed same batch in the same carton often contain mixed degrees of freshness. The trick is to put the egg in a large bowl of water, and use it only if it is lying down on the bottom, NOT floating upright and definitely NOT floating at the top of the water. Apparently, according to Eggcyclopedia a freshly laid egg does not have an air cell - the pocket of air, or space, under the shell that we can see when we peel an egg. The air cell is developed and becomes larger as the egg ages.



* yolk to white proportion information obtained from a study published by Iowa State University:  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d8a4/986905f5dd90f62495f6f07b6740a549dd2f.pdf


#eggs  #poachedegg

Loosely Creative

Do you diligently follow recipes? I always faithfully follow a recipe the first time round. To me, it is like having someone else's cooking, it is polite to taste it first to determine if it's really neceesay to reach for the salt shaker. Not everyone has the same taste, obviously. I see a lot of people give their 2 cents on bettering recipes in the comment sections.

I haven't used a recipe in a long while, mainly because I am too lazy. Nowadays, I don't usually plan and shop ahead any more. The kitchen in this tiny apartment has little room for storage, or even elbows during cooking or cleaning up. Besides, there are always things in the fridge and pantry (if it can qualify as such) that should be used up while fresh, but together they don't often never neatly map on to any specific recipe. Unfortunately, when I have to cook, there is usually no spare time for running to the shop.

But there is always an upshot to everything. Improvising led me out of my comfort zone of following recipes.

In Julia Child's The French Chef, episode Elegance with Eggs, she taught more than just fancy ways of cooking eggs - baked eggs and molded eggs. She also talked about how to serve food by combining various things you already know how to make, into a presentation of a new dish. She put cooked spinach mixed with white sauce on a sautéd round cut piece of bread, added a molded egg on top, spooned sauce over it and sprinkled with chopped parsley. And, voila! A brand new dish morphed from the hackneyed Eggs Florentine. She went on to suggest a few more ideas with other dishes to inspire the audience to be creative. So, I feel thoroughly encouraged to make dishes up, even if it is strange.

Use of Juicy Water from Canned Beet

The other day I wondered what to do with the juicy water left from a can of beet - that is, rather than drinking it. I looked for ideas on the Internet but most suggestions were to mix drinks or use it as replacement ingredient for its color. So, I kept thinking...

Then, it came to me, if you can mix 2 teaspoonful of tomato paste into a coconut cream curry, why not beet juice? Crazy experiment ensued. Crimson splatter on the walls, orange hued yellow dust circles overlapping various deep brown ones, grayish white smeary drag tracks across counter top and around the hobs... It could have been an incident that triggers a who-done-it investigation. Nah, I am not that messy a cook, really. Really!

The result was a really nice balance of acidity and sweetness with a piquant accent, yet delicate. It has been nice served with chicken, but I can image that it would be perfect accompaniment to crustaceans. If you would like to try this experiment, may I suggest you first try one measure of beet juice to two measures of coconut cream. Play around, and I am sure you will come up with the ratio that is right for you. Naturally, you will want to take into account of any liquid stock you normally use in your recipe, and substitute with stock powder, instead.

Tips:

A good natural coconut cream or milk, without whitening agent, is often slightly grayish.
There is a really good guide to different coconut milk and cream products and even how they are actually made, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXzELWHyOAg

Balancing Act

As Julia Child advised multiple times on adding nutmeg to white sauce, add just a few specks but not so much that people can say, "Oh, nutmeg!" (Yes, I have watched quite a few videos of her old cooking shows and learned so much from her.) It seemed crazy but there does actually exist a zone where a quantity of an integral peripheral ingredient is just right, virtually undetectable by the palate, yet without which the quality of the dish would be impaired or incomplete. It's real. It's no twilight zone.

A long while back, before I watched any Julia Child videos, I tried following a recipe to make the South African stew Tomato Bredie. The recipe called for a dash of Worcestershire sauce. I was curious and tasted the stew before adding it, just so I could tell if it made any difference afterwards. And, boy, did it transform the dish! It as a very simple recipe, but it was the best, most elegant tasting of all the ones I tried. Other recipes called for tablespoonfuls of Worcestershire sauce, and while the results of such heavy-handed flavoring were tasty, the periphery upstaged a central ingredient, so much so that nomenclature for those ones would dictate a correction to Worcestershire Sauce Bredie. Also, I think, sometimes subtlety is an enormous factor in elegance.

There are many examples of dishes utilizing the delicate touch of something extra. Some of them are quite surprisingly contrasting too, such as salt in a dessert dish (e.g. custard pie, sponge cake), lemon/vinegar/tomato puree in a creamy dish (e.g. Hong Kong style Portuguese Chicken has 2 teaspoons of tomato paste in its primarily coconut cream base), or sugar in savory dish (e.g. brown sugar in meatloaf, rock sugar in dishes with five spice).

I guess, at the end of the day cooking a tasty dish requires balancing flavors. Lively, prominent contrasts can be a win too. Famous examples are Hawaiian ham, chicken with cranberry and camembert pizza, and sweet and sour pork, just to name a few. Perhaps, not everyone like the combination of pineapple and ham, but plenty of roast meat dishes pair sweetness and sourness of fruit or otherwise and the saltiness of meat. You can find lamb roasts recipes by the dozen that use apricot or balsamic vinegar. My husband cannot get his head around bacon and banana served together with maple syrup on French toast. I love it. Whoever came up with the idea probably well understood about balancing contrasting flavors and definitely daring in his/her pursuit in creating good food.

Let us all too boldly go where no one has gone before ... or least not often ... in creating exciting new flavors.

Much Applied

Most recipes can yield enough to feed a village. OK, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but still, if it is your first time making it and your village consists of just you and your better half, a bad result becomes an abusive diet to your loved one, or an abuse to the environment through huge waste. Even if it was a good result, the huge quantity lasts for days and you end up feeling sick of it.

A lot of recipes are probably passed down from many generations ago when a household commonly was as large as a village.

If it was a meat dish, you probably can freeze the leftovers. Freezing detracts from the quality of most food, not just the taste and nutrition, but especially the texture. Anyway, it is (loosely) viable. When it is Carbonara, you are eating it, the whole lot of it, that very meal! No matter how yummy it is, which it was, as I struck beginner's luck, there is a limit to the size of your stomach.

It is often difficult to scale a recipe and keep the recipe-intended quality at the same time.

The good news is that if you got all the basic skills down, and you have learned from wide enough range of recipes, you can spot the pattern and understand which basic building blocks are used in the recipe. Then, you can scale down the recipe by your experience. In the case of Carbonara, it is essentially the same concept as making custard with whole eggs, except the liquid is the pasta cooking water, it is savory instead of sweet, and cheese is added. 

Boy, it has been a long fattening road. But I am glad that the experiences are starting to pay off. I think, life is funny. No experience ever goes to waste, no matter how bad or useless they may seem at the time. They always serve us later, even if it is in small ways.

tip: 

Here is a general egg to liquid proportion reference for custard: http://www.incredibleegg.org/eggcyclopedia/c/custard/

I think the quarter cup to one egg ratio, with the cheese, gave a nice thick but not stiff sauce in Carbonara. However, as you don't want to drain the pasta for too long and allow it to lose too much heat, it will retain some cooking water. You may want to start with just 1 tablespoon of hot pasta water for each egg first and add more as needed.

Through the Barrier

Have you ever cooked with Chicken Tonight, jarred bolognese sauce, or whatever simmer sauce available on the market (forget the curry in my last post for a moment)? As they are generally referred to as simmer sauces, I thought the simmering process must be how the meat absorbs flavors from the sauce. It's not about letting the meat have a soak in the jacuzzi, right? How wrong I was! The taste stays in the sauce, which may even gain juice from the meat after a simmer and becomes tastier, but the meat usually ends up surprisingly bland.

But there was something else I observed in making other things that adds to this simmer sauce experience. I made stew quite a number of times before. Brown the meat first or not, throw everything in the pot, at the same time or may be not, wait a few hours, and voila! You have a stew, or perhaps, a casserool. Yes, yes, casserole. It is a lovely dish but purely in the sense of contrast, because everything tastes good, separately, cozying together in the same pot. But when I heated up the leftovers the next day, something happened. You might have seen it a lot of times before and never gave it a second thought. The potatoes looked darker, plainly having absorbed the liquid of the stew. So were the carrots etc., but it was most obvious with the potatoes as they previously were literally pale, in fact the palest of the lot. In terms of taste, they were beef, potatoes, carrots, etc in a stew before. Now, they were beef, potatoes, carrots, etc OF a stew.

So, it would seem that raw ingredients immersed in a flavoring liquid don't absorb flavors from the liquid during their first round of cooking. They may leach flavor into the liquid, though. Think soup.

Back to my butter chicken experiments, it only took the first try to reveal that recipe instructions for simmering previously browned meat are all about finishing off cooking the meat, be the recipe from a jar or otherwise. The 'failed' meat tells more, though. It was insipid besides being tough and shrunk, in spite of having been marinated before cooking. You know the saying "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." I tried again marinating the chicken with even more spices and herbs. And again, and again... Herbs and spices were flying in all directions and stuck to the ceiling and coating the windows. OK, that's an exaggeration, but you get the point. More herbs and spices did help more flavor to be retained after the simmer, but the chicken meat was still much less tasty compared to being cooked without the sauce.

I applied the new-found principle by stews in an attempt to preserve the flavor of the marinade. I cooked the marinated chicken pieces completely and cooled them prior to immersing them in the sauce. I then brought the lot back up to a simmer, and simmered just long enough to heat the whole dish through. The result was staggering. The chicken meat still lost most of the flavor!

The same was observed in marinated mince in a bolognese or other marinated meat cooked in a sauce. But then I pondered on the stew from a different angle. The ingredients started out having no flavoring, immersed in the flavorsome stock. Could it be a simple flavor diffusion thing?

Of course, it is. I marinaded the pieces of chicken meat as normal but intensely flavored the sauce. Voila! The meat hardly lost any flavor of the marinade after a simmer. It didn't even really matter whether I fully cooked or just browned the meat first.

So, there you go. I could not offer you any conclusion in my last post for finding a recipe to re-create the restaurant's butter chicken, because as the course of my experiments progressed, it changed my taste buds for curry. Not that there was no triumph, but triumph transcended the one-dimensional pursuit of a recipe. I guess, I gained the understanding of the truth about recipes. A recipe is an embodiment of individuality, mood, adaptation, and creativity. While there is no one best butter chicken recipe to me, I can offer the conclusion that there are two rules for making meats cooked in a sauce/liquid tasty, not just on the surface but on the inside too.

The Spice of Life

What do I know about spices and herbs? I know when I was a child, they all seemed to give some convoluted combination of tastes, rather than a simple sweet, salty or sour. So, herbs and spices, with spices more so than herbs, got relegated to the taste category that my juvenile taste buds could understand - bitter. I had no idea that they would one day become an important part of my journey to better myself in creating deliciousness.

Italian food is not just renowned for containing abundance of garlic and onion, but herbs too. Their recipes introduced me to a whole new world of taste through the use of herbs. Adding flat leaf parsley to your pasta, or simmering a meat sauce with oregano, for example, is simple enough, but it brings a dish to life. I would liken it to a vase of flowers or pot of plant to a living space.

As many challenges as there are still awaiting in the same type of food, we all need a change sometimes. Cooking tasty food was still a big deal and a huge quest for me, if you remember what motivated me to embark on this journey in the first place. Italian food is like my first love in this journey. But it was an inevitable eventuality - I had to move on to further my cause. It's not really goodbye. We will always have pasta.

Curry! Who could deny that an Indian curry is like an explosion of tastes and an epitome of utilizing spices and herbs too. My husband and I love this butter chicken dish from our most frequented little local Indian restaurant. Naturally, numerous experiments ensued in attempts to recreate the dish in my own kitchen.

At the beginning of the pursuit, the more recipes I read the more I was convinced that this one recipe titled "best butter chicken" must be it. Its ingredients list contained quite a number of different spices, and most importantly it listed butter, lots of it! Well, it is butter chicken after all.

Marinating the meat, coating them in all the spices, tomato paste and yogurt alone looked delicious. It looked promising. When I fried the spice paste and sautéed the onion and chicken, the fragrance was powerful, exciting, and reassuring. Cream was called for, thus allaying any doubt of a creamy result. But by the time the sauce was made up, before the chicken had a simmer, a little sampling suggested that this butter chicken ship might have sailed off course.

The produced dish had a magnificent complex taste, distinctly of a lot of spices, and bore absolutely no resemblance to the restaurant dish we love. The restaurant dish had a much more subtle taste in spices but was much thicker, more velvety and simply delicious.

The recipe said to stir in extra butter at the end. Perhaps, it needed more butter to give the thickness and smoothness of the restaurant version, so I thought to myself. I stirred in more butter, and tasted, and stirred in more butter, and tasted... I must have added 3 times the recipe's amount of saturated fat to the dish, to no avail. I gave up. We had a bowl of overloaded spicy heart-attack, with tight shrunk chunks of insipid chicken swimming in the watery cream solution. I still relive the jumble of disappointment, bewilderment, remorse and contentment whenever the memory of that fateful night resurfaces. Remorse - because of feeding my husband the unhealthy horrible food. Contentment - because I have such a wonderfully supportive husband who would eat the inedible horror just because I cooked it.

I guess we are particularly affected by criticism in our everyday life. It is a basic mechanism we humans have developed for survival - avoid pain or danger. But how high is the bar we subconsciously set for ourselves as a result, just to prove ourselves? I think my choice of recipe might have been substantially influenced by the need for overtly impressive taste. Hopefully, my husband didn't think it was some kind of punishment.

At the end of the day, a recipe is simply a means to consistently reproducing a dish for a specific palate. The number of different recipes from the different regional Indian cuisines that exist for the same dish, is sufficient testimony. Perhaps, one day our palate will grow up some more to enjoy vast convoluted mix of spices in abundance.

Wow, I can't believe it's been months since I last wrote. My apologies. I should be more committed to writing as I am to cooking.

Something I meant to say last time was that milk infused with bay leaf really makes a superior tasting white sauce, or béchamel sauce. While the slice of onion also makes the final product tasty, which could be replaced by garlic or shallot, the bay leaf is indispensable. It not only gives complexity to the sauce, but takes away the raw milkiness of milk. If you have sensitive taste buds about milk like I do, you would know what I mean.

Nutmeg, too, gives complexity to the taste. Mmm...the world of herbs and spices awaits. So much to learn!

This is a short post, I know. But I'll be back! (Can anyone say that without hearing Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice? Hahaha)

Bubbling Along

A little challenge was what I wanted. Penne pasta al forno with wild mushrooms and cheese sounds all sophisticated but it's really just a fancy version of macaroni cheese, I thought to myself. The recipe had a much longer list of ingredients than the one-pot recipes that eased me into cooking. No big deal. The method, albeit with pictures for each step, was a lot more complicated. Scalding milk, what's the big deal! Grating cheese, grinding bread, …, slicing mushrooms and onions – not my favorite thing in the world as mentioned in my first post, stir-frying, cooking flour in butter, ... Certainly not the one-pot recipes I was used to. Toto, we're not in Kansas any more!

Before long, I started getting cold feet. It seemed daunting. Don't we all prefer staying in our comfort zone when it comes to challenges that aren't exactly our passion? Perhaps, that's what people misinterpret as laziness in others – fear! Some of us have fear of complexity, fear of arduousness, fear of embarrassment that follows failure, or in my case, the fear of lumps in my white sauce! Not to mention the cheese turning into strings of curds. For my love of creamy sauces, I actually attempted making white sauce a long time ago. Unfortunately, the recipe back then had abysmal instructions like “add flour to the butter and cook for a while, then slowly add milk”, giving no clue to what is “a while” or the temperature setting for the hob. Yes, always blame the recipe, not yourself (hahaha!) As you can imagine, it all turned into custard, and it's not the type you would want to eat. But! Perseverance is a virtue.

Certain amount of faith is required to achieve success, for anybody, in anything. This is a new recipe after all. I measured out the cheese and grated it. I pulsed the slices of bread in the food processor to make the breadcrumbs and mixed in the specified amount of grated cheese with a snip of chives. I scalded the milk with a bay leaf and a slice of onion. I put on a pot of boiling water and cooked the pasta, sliced the mushrooms and onions, stir-fried them, and proceeded to make the béchamel sauce with the liter of scalded milk and 2 tablespoons of flour. Wait, what? 2 tablespoons of flour to 1 liter of milk? Faith, remember? Faith!

One more look at the recipe had me discover that only two-third of the milk is initially used, before adding the cheese. The rest of the milk was to be added after the cheese sauce was formed. Still, 2 tablespoons of flour to over 2 cups of milk didn't seem quite enough. The instructions said to first heat the sauce until it boils and thickens and then add the cheese. Being inexperienced takes so much longer to do things than it would for a master chef on TV. The milk was cold by the time I reached this stage in the recipe. Cold milk takes a while to boil, and a lot of cold milk takes a lot longer. Tick-tock, tick-tock, ...

Two sore feet and nearly an hour later, I had a cold pasta in lukewarm, not so much a sauce as, a cheese liquid, finally ready to be put in the oven. But nearly there; it is the home stretch. I was so excited and anxious that I kept looking through the oven window to see if the topping was browning and the pasta starting to bubble. Well, I wasn't watching a pot boil. :p Thirty minutes later, as promised by the recipe, it was golden and bubbling around the edges. It tasted great too! The cheese liquid had magically transformed into a beautifully gooey cheese sauce. Yay!

Three weeks passed, I tried the recipe again. <&*#@!> Please excuse the special characters. Everything turned into custard again. I followed the recipe the same way, and the only difference was that I managed to work faster with a little more experience and higher confidence, and I didn't watch the baking. The assembled dish was still warm before turning into the oven. This time the fancy mac 'n' cheese turned into baked mushy pasta with dry cheese strings. What is the conclusion? The recipe must have anticipated a cold assembled dish, for the cheese to not be overheated and the pasta not overcooked. Why didn't it just say so?! I couldn't give up now, having tasted success before. And, perseverance paid off. Now, I've learned to gauge the state of my cheese sauce against the recipe's cooking time. When the dish just starts to bubble around the edges, it has already reached the temperature for the cheese sauce to thicken, regardless of how little baking time has elapsed. If the dish is not browned enough by then, switching from bake to grill still can overheat the dish. A pale look is better than a horrid inside, in my opinion. Perhaps, I should try a chef's blow torch one day.

A Strolling Start

With the motivation mentioned in my previous post, I embarked on my culinary endeavour. The first thing I wanted to do better was, of course, pasta, since it was the ground-zero dish that ignited the whole thing. And, what better to begin with than something I already had some rudimentary skills in!

I already knew to cook pasta to al dente. Taste, not just for pasta but everything, naturally was the target. All the salt and pepper and olive oil didn't make tasty pasta, just a salty bland pasta. My poor hubby tolerated it for so long.

Fortunately, my younger sister gave me a big stack of cookbooks amongst her wedding gifts to me. Now I was finally using them. My first attempts were simply following the one-pot recipes. It was easy to do and great to eat. Cook the pasta, drain, stir in cheese and chopped meat, plus microwaved frozen vegetables, and may be chopped nuts, adjust seasoning and serve. Viola! For cheese, I used not just cheddar but sometimes feta, camembert or even creamy blue. Meat was mostly ham or other cold cuts and sometimes cut up sausages that was baked in the oven, or shredded meat of a ready-to-serve roast chicken from the supermarket. Convenient, though not really elegant.

So, it was a nice, easy success. No pasta sauce to make (or ruin). Adding double cream was the saucey (and saucy!) shortcut. But, it soon became boring.

Making pasta sauce from scratch is not a difficult thing, if you already know how to do it right. It actually is a vast subject, as you may already know. A rich tomatoey meat sauce is but one out of hundreds of sauces. There are books written entirely on sauces alone by culinary greats (and not exactly greats, but definitely many). So, what should I take as my next challenge? Hmm....

Of course, macaroni cheese! A pasta al forno, just to make it sound all fancy. Then, I discovered how opposite to simple it was. There a quite a few things to trip you up, starting with the béchamel sauce, or basic white sauce, to getting the dish to a golden brown without turning the cheese into curds inside. It was an obstacle course. But more about this battle and triumph next time.

The Spark

Most passionate cooks and chefs found their passion from the beginning. I really enjoy cooking and baking now, but my kitchen life began rather differently from everyone else – I hated cooking. I have always loved food, but it didn't entice me to cook. Cooking seemed like a tedious chore.

In my college days, flatting with my younger sister the awesome cook, she used to laugh at me when I helped out with chopping vegetables. I did the task so gingerly that she thought I looked like I was laboring on my arts class homework with engineering precisions. I didn't like art classes, either. She and our mother were talented, fantastic cooks. I used to say that I would rather wash dishes than to cook. However, I loved chemistry lab classes in high school. Not chemistry theories, for all the memmorization I had to do, but the experiments were fun. Little did I know, that would be a seed to my cooking life.

My husband didn't mind that I did not know how to cook when we first got married. It doesn't mean that I did not have to cook from day 1 – he was raised the old-fashioned way. Well, I guess I slipped into the role naturally too, because although my parents did not teach me to conduct myself as an old-fashioned housewife, my parents' old-fashioned relationship was a model for mine in my subconscious. My hubby has always been very kind about my cooking, except this one time... He was not well, and I made him pasta with ham and peas. My culinary repertoire then was rather restricted. I asked him if the dish was OK. The illness-induced irritability took over my sweet husband and snapped, "Yeah, if you add salt to it!" Ouch! That was the motivation I needed. I decided to learn to cook properly.

My family was oceans away by the time I wanted to learn to cook. So, I followed recipe books, but frankly, most of them don't teach basic skills very well, if at all. Incredibly, some recipes still in circulation have been passed down through generations and may be century(s) old. These old recipes contain instructions written in archaic vernaculars and out-dated context that don't apply well in modern day situations. For example, "beat eggs until light" and "dissolve in cold milk". Two common, simple steps that silently test your knowledge of history in cookery, imparting no wisdom on "beating" in the old days being with a wooden spoon, not an eggbeater, electric mixer or whisk, thus "light" refers to color, not texture, and "cold milk" being non-hot milk, not refrigerated milk. And to complicate things, not every 'cryptic' recipe is an ancient recipe. It can be quite frustrating for beginners. Thank goodness, my love in chemistry experiments helped. In a way, the experimentation had me hooked.

One tip I can offer with no reservation is that straight from the refrigerator is a lousy temperature for dissolving flour in milk. Temperature in the range between room temperature and lukewarm are good, with tepid being the best. Sieved flour would help if cold milk is required. Did you know you can make a white sauce without oil or butter this way – without making a roux first? Beware that as it cools, it exhibits a slightly non-Newtonian consistency, similar to cornstarch-thickened sauces.

With the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web, you can now look up how to do virtually anything - pun not intended ;)  There are hundreds and thousands or more recipes you can cross-reference, or pick and choose from. The only problem is having to try out a recipe in order to find out if it delivers a result that meets your expectation of the dish or baked goods.