Add a Little Kindness & Salt to Your Cooking
Three tips for improving your kitchen game from restaurateur Doug Crowell (COM’98)
DOUG CROWELL is the owner of Brooklyn, N.Y., restaurants Buttermilk Channel and French Louie, both foodie favorites. The New York Times named Buttermilk Channel a critic’s pick, calling it a “restaurant of real standards.” French Louie pulls in an enviable 4.5 stars on OpenTable. Now, Crowell and business partner Ryan Angulo are sharing the secrets of their success in Kindness & Salt: Recipes for the Care & Feeding of Your Friends & Neighbors (Grand Central Publishing, 2018). It brings recipes and stories inspired by the bistro fare and hospitality they serve up at their two restaurants. Crowell shares three tips with Bostonia to help you elevate your cooking game:
- SALT SMART “When people ask, ‘How did you make that taste so good?’ the simple answer is often salt. It’s not that you have to use so much, but rather that you need to salt smart. Different salts have different densities, so a teaspoon of fine sea salt—our go-to for most recipes in the cookbook—packs way more saltiness than the same amount of kosher salt. With salt, it’s always best to taste as you go and adjust right up to the end.”
- MIX GENTLY “Buttermilk Channel has a very popular brunch—pancakes are on almost every table. The key to tender, fluffy pancakes, whether you use our recipe or Bisquick, is to mix the batter gently. You need to stop mixing when the batter is still pretty lumpy and let the batter sit until the lumps dissolve.”
- WINE PAIRINGS DON’T ALWAYS WORK “We’re not big fans of ‘pairing,’ the supposed art of matching the correct wine with each dish. The wine pairers of the world have the best intentions, but their theories create unnecessary stress about making a mistake. We mostly just encourage people to drink the wines they like.”
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