Many chefs overlook their restaurant salad menu, but this is a great place to capitalize on current trends, especially when healthful eating is so in style. A combination of the prominent food industry patterns of multiculturalism and higher nutritional value has pushed Mediterranean salads to the forefront. Mediterranean salad recipes often include such hearty ingredients as couscous, pasta, and potatoes, resulting in salads that you can serve as appetizers or main dishes. With a little imagination – and, of course, a mandolin slicer – you can easily create an endless list of original bestsellers. Here’s a little inspiration to get you started.

Salad Recipes with Pasta

One of the greatest appeals of Mediterranean salads is the satisfaction factor. Use recipes including pasta and cheese to highlight this strong point. For example, al dente tri-color spiral pasta perfectly complements halved cherry tomatoes, avocado, and pine nuts. Stir in some cucumber and feta cheese and compose a vinaigrette of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, and four varieties of pepper: red, green, black, and white. To ensure that the salt is well-mixed into the vinaigrette, first use a French whip to whisk the balsamic vinegar, salt, and peppers together. The acidity of the vinegar will disintegrate the other components of the sauce. Continue to whisk ...continue reading

Chef Brad Halsten earned the $1,000 grand prize in the TigerChef Video Contest with his California BBQ Burger recipe, a mouthwatering and creative twist on the California burger that he serves at his restaurant, The Burger Dive. His expert combination of spices and meats sets his invention far above conventional barbecue recipes. Halsten’s video stood out from those of many talented professional chefs, whose submissions included restaurant equipment demonstrations, signature recipes, and cooking techniques. The runner-up, the Houston Zoo’s Executive Chef Shane Miller, receives a $250 TigerChef gift certificate for his Southwest Blackened Tenderloin.

The Winning California BBQ Recipe

The California BBQ Burger holds a place of honor on the menu at Chef Brad’s Billings, Montana restaurant, The Burger Dive. Halsten’s recipe contains an impressive array of ingredients, from coffee to Cabernet Sauvignon. His personality and obvious natural talent shine in his video, which features him performing each step of the burger-making process. Using a truly original combination of wine, spices, vegetables, and even ketchup, Chef Brad concocts a sauce that packs in a maximum of flavor while maintaining a natural feel. He crowns his burgers with thin slices of beef rubbed with coffee and a fascinating variety of spices. Halsten clearly devotes a great deal of attention to the quality of his ingredients, right down to the burger buns. The result is a recipe that the restaurant owner can be ...continue reading

An exceptional way to get creative and earn customers, marinating holds a special place in the hearts of professional chefs. Ensure that your meat marinade recipes moisten and tenderize your meats while properly emphasizing their natural flavors. Meat brining techniques perform even better than marinades on turkey and other meats that toughen easily. These pointers will prove especially useful when the meats are then cooked with high quality professional grills, barbeques, and other restaurant equipment.

Marvelous Meat Marinade

Your creativity and better-than-average knowledge of the marinating process are your greatest assets when inventing marinades. The ideal marinade tenderizes the meat while retaining its texture. It should also lend extra flavor that complements and draws out the taste of the meat itself. Citrus juices and wine contain acid that breaks down the meat’s protein and essentially begins the cooking process. An added benefit of these marinade bases is that the acid possesses bacteria-destroying properties. For simplicity’s sake and a distinct flavor, include just a few particularly fascinating ingredients in your marinades rather than using extremely complex recipes. For example, experiment with varieties of honey from a range of flowers until you find one that goes best with the meat you are marinating. An unusual combination of just two or three spices paired with the perfect amount of oil results in flavorful, moist dishes. ...continue reading

Pull out your pastry tools, cake pans, dessert dishes, and other bakery supplies: the top ten desserts for 2012 are here. Every year the world seems to get smaller, and multiculturalism becomes trendier and trendier. With that in mind, professional bakeries and chefs everywhere are incorporating dessert recipes from all over the world into their menus. Take a glimpse at some of the freshest twists on classic favorites and best-sellers from around the globe.

Mouthwatering Cakes, Pies, and Pastries

1. Mille Feuilles

This year, serve this delightful French pastry a little bit differently. Instead of the classic cream-filled Napoleon, fill your layers with various flavors of jam. Cut the pastries into more memorable shapes than the same old rectangle with a pastry cutter such as Dexter Russell’s Dough Cutter/Scraper. Coax out the delicate beauty of this dessert with a tasteful presentation, complete with light icing and berries in a variety of colors, which you should choose to complement the particular flavors of filling that you use. ...continue reading

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An eternal favorite among clients, the classic chocolate truffles recipe can be adapted to many different tastes. Since these high-class desserts actually cost very little to make and can be created rather quickly, it is to your advantage to present your customers with a broad range of varieties. Most chefs already know how to make chocolate truffles, so if you delegate the task to a staff member, a quick review and some fresh ideas are probably all that you need. The key to booming sales is ensuring that you use the best quality ingredients, especially the chocolate, and top rated professional restaurant equipment.

A Symphony of Flavors

If one of the reasons you chose a profession that requires such dedication of your time and energy was to exercise your creativity, chocolate truffles are the project for you. Once you start brainstorming, it will become evident that you can fill an entire section of your menu just with different flavors of truffles if you wish. Strawberry, raspberry, orange, and chocolates of various intensities ...continue reading

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The quality of your sauce can make or break a dish. As a professional chef, you need to set your sauces apart by performing each step in the sauce-making process better than anyone else. Follow these guidelines, using the finest restaurant equipment, and your hollandaise sauce, béchamel sauce, and pesto sauce will have people ordering in no time.

Hollandaise and Bechamel Sauce

The secret to a perfect, classic hollandaise sauce is using a professional grade double boiler to clarify your butter. Add the clarified butter as soon as you take the sauce off of the flame. Use white pepper instead of black to maintain the sauce’s pure color, and add it at the same time as the salt and lemon juice. To spice things up, add the egg yolks to a reduction of white wine with shallots, tarragon, and chervil instead of water. This combination results in an impressive béarnaise sauce. ...continue reading

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It’s no secret that the French take their food seriously, and nowhere is this more evident than with the French baguette. The French government has codified the baguette recipe, meaning that it is actually illegal to call any variation a baguette. The bread must contain no preservatives or other additives and, until fairly recently, French bakeries were not allowed to charge over a certain amount for a baguette. Forget everyday bread recipes: making a genuine French baguette can be complicated even for professionals, but adhering to the following techniques and using high quality restaurant equipment will produce such excellent results that your customers will think they have stepped into a Parisian café.

How to Make Poolish – Perfectly

The first step to a baguette of the perfect consistency is a fine poolish, or pre-ferment. It is essential to weigh your ingredients on a professional chef’s scale for exact proportions. If possible, use Type 55 flour, a kind of French flour with very specific ash content. As this variety of flour can be hard to obtain, you may want to speak with your flour supplier about which artisan flour comes closest to Type 55. You will need just over 3.5 ounces (100 grams) of flour and an equal amount of water. First, mix a teaspoon of dry yeast into the water. Add the flour and leave the mixture, which should be quite liquid, for 24 – 48 hours. ...continue reading

If you want to gain bigger sales, get out the french fry cutter and spice up your side dish recipes. Side dishes, though often treated as an afterthought by restaurant owners, can augment your sales like nothing else. Most side dish menu items are relatively inexpensive to produce and require only very simple restaurant equipment, meaning that you can sell them separately at a nice profit and also make your platter offerings more attractive to customers without affecting your prices too much. This year, healthy side dishes and creative twists on old classics are big hits with customers.

Vegetable Side Dishes

Considering the fact that the trend of eating healthfully grows more popular each year, it makes sense to pack your menu with vegetable options. Set your restaurant apart by using unusual mixtures and roasting instead of frying or grilling. Appealing color combinations will catch the attention of diners at other tables and encourage them to order the same thing. Think bright, vivacious colors like in a roasted red pepper salad.

It is essential to include French fries on your menu – they remain a customer favorite and a fabulous opportunity for culinary experimentation. Try offering a variety of choices, such as sweet potato fries, spicy fries, and fries of different shapes and sizes. ...continue reading

Who do you predict to win the Super Bowl this year- Giants? Patriots? Honestly, I find that this year is a bit hard to predict since fans didn’t believe that they would have to choose between the Giants and the Patriots as the winning team. Super Bowl Sunday is a time for partying. The fans will be yelling at the screen while the non-fans will find reason to party with pals. Everyone loves to have football parties and food and drink play an immense role in the success of the party.

Most menus include the super bowl regulars such as chicken fingers, Buffalo wings, nachos ’n cheese, dips, mini sandwiches, etc. You want to add things to your menu that will give your patrons reason to choose your place to party at over your competitors.

What’s any party without beer? How about adding beer into your finger foods? After all, football= meat and beer. These beer battered dipped meatballs are guaranteed to disappear quite quickly and give die hard football fans and non-fans reason to head to your place over your competitor for the next football party, not to mention all the days in between. ...continue reading