Home & Lifestyle, Food

A Well-Stocked Pantry

Lesson time 24:28 min

Alice teaches you how to choose the best quality ingredients with which to stock your pantry. She shares seven dishes all sourced from her own pantry including “Coming Home Pasta,” her go-to when returning home to an empty fridge after a long trip.

Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars

Topics include: A Pantry You Can Rely On • It All Starts With Good Olive Oil • Vinegars for an Edge • Master a Vinaigrette • The Geography of Spices • Alice’s Essential Condiment: Cumin Salt • Versatile Staples: Rice and Beans • Dried Pasta: The Taste of Home

Alice Waters

Teaches the Art of Home Cooking

In 16+ lessons, learn to cook beautiful, seasonal meals at home from the James Beard Award-winning founder of Chez Panisse.

Preview

ALICE WATERS: Alongside high-quality staples from the market, I also like to make things for the pantry myself. You can quickly pickle the last bits of vegetables from the market that week. They taste delicious with grilled cheese or smoked fish. Wholesome pancake batter can be kept in the fridge up to a week. And I almost always have brown rice and sauteed greens available to use throughout the week. Fanny and I are going to make a very simple quick pickle with the vegetables that we found at the farmer's market yesterday. It's a basic brine. It's got beautiful thyme, and bay, garlic, coriander, clove, and hot pepper in it. - This is something you can do inside 15 minutes, you know-- - And you can keep it for a month in the refrigerator. So it's just kind of always, always ready when you need it. - Perfect for that grilled cheese you love to have for lunch. - It's made with a pickling brine. It has some sugar in it. So why don't you make the brine? And I'll cut the vegetables. - I will. All right. I'm gonna measure out a cup and 3/4 of water. - And I'm going to just cut up this cauliflower, taking the bottom off first. And just cutting around because I wanna keep these little florets. I like to keep them uniform in size so that they cook evenly. FANNY: Mom, I'm using a champagne vinegar. Is there a reason why we use champagne instead of, say, like a red wine vinegar? ALICE WATERS: It's more neutral than the red wine vinegar. It's one of those things in the brine that you're just trying to marry it so that it doesn't fall either too sour or too sweet. FANNY: But then, when it comes to the spicing, you really can be a little bit more informal and spontaneous with your measurements. I mean, you can use a little pinch of chili and maybe a couple tablespoons of the coriander seeds. Clove are strong, so I usually use just two, maybe three. But when it comes to the herbs too, just a little handful or a few leaves. And this is bay, and that was thyme. Four cloves of garlic for this recipe, which I'll peel and halve and add to the brine as well. ALICE WATERS: And these fresh vegetables are so sweet in the winter. They really have a great taste. But I'll cut up a few carrots. And, again, what's important is that they, that they are cut approximately to the same size so that they cook evenly. There are amazing colors of carrots. The heritage seeds have produced carrots that are red red, carrots that are purple, carrots that are white, these yellow ones. I'm just seeing today that these are a sort of almost like orange color, peach colored. FANNY: They also have really different tastes, right? Like I find that some of the orange ones are sweeter, or the purple ones are earthier, you know. But that's some of the excitement in tasting them. ALICE WATERS: I like this shape, but they could be really any shape. They could be long sticks. They could be round. - So this is just beginning to come to simmering here. So...

About the Instructor

Alice Waters started America’s farm-to-table revolution. When she founded the iconic restaurant Chez Panisse, her local, organic ingredients sparked a movement and earned her the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef. In her first-ever online cooking class, Alice opens the doors of her home kitchen to teach you how to pick seasonal ingredients, create healthy and beautiful meals, and change your life by changing the food you make at home.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Alice Waters

In 16+ lessons, learn to cook beautiful, seasonal meals at home from the James Beard Award-winning founder of Chez Panisse.

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