Tag Archives: Video

Blue Apron is now on video! Every week, we’re posting a new video on our YouTube channel and over here on the blog.

We’ve already shared the secrets to the best bok choy and showed you the best way to wash your greens. 

Today, we’re approaching a vegetable that’s simultaneously fancy and terrifying: the artichoke. When your artichoke arrives, the green vegetable is wearing a suit of armor. Spiky and tough, the leaves hide something even worse: a “choke” of fine follicles you don’t want getting stuck in your throat. But beneath all that protective gear is the artichoke heart, a delicious, nutritious vegetable we can’t resist. Plus, isn’t eating more fun when you’re living on the edge?

To help defeat both the artichoke and its intimidating reputation, we created this video. Watch all the steps for prepping your artichokes for dinner. In the end it’s not hard at all!

 If you like what you see, subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Blue Apron is now on video! Every Thursday, we’re posting a new video on our YouTube channel and over here on the blog.

We’ve already helped you cut down your prep time in the kitchen by finessing your knife skills and making short work of onions, garlic, and carrots.

Today, we’re talking about one delicious use for the garlic you now know how to peel and mince really fast: garlic paste. We turn cloves of garlic into paste in at least half of our recipes. Most of the time, that garlic paste goes into salad dressings, giving them extra body and flavor. Anytime you’re going to eat garlic raw, you always want to make it into a paste so that the taste dissolves evenly into the dressing or marinade. If you leave garlic minced, you risk biting straight into a little cube of raw garlic, not a pleasant sensation at all.

Here’s how it’s done:

You’ll need to turn garlic into paste to make the marinade for our Sweet Miso Cod and the dressing for our Chopped Napa Cabbage Salad. Watch the video again and again, until you’ve mastered the motions of our Chef Matthew Wadiak and pulverize your garlic, no mortar and pestle needed. Go!

Blue Apron is now on video! Every Thursday, we’re posting a new video on our YouTube channel and over here on the blog.

We’ve already helped you cut down your prep time in the kitchen by finessing your knife skills and making short work of onions, garlic, and carrots.

Today, we’re talking about a skill every good cook needs to have in his or her arsenal: the ability to season food to taste. But what does that even mean? Basically, to make food taste its absolute best, it’s key to add just the right amount of salt. In this video, featuring our own Chef Matt Wadiak, we show you how to add salt to your food little by little, tasting as you go, so that you achieve taste perfection. Under-salted food is bland and over-salted food is, well, salty. Avoid both fates by following along as we prepare a special soup on which to test our salting theories.

Watch the video, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and then get salting!

Almost all of our favorite recipes start with the same step: sautéing garlic. If you cook frequently, you should always have a head of garlic on hand. This fragrant allium creates an aromatic base that’s the perfect launching pad for building sauces, soups, stews, or roasts. Learning how to peel and mince garlic properly will make all of your cooking projects easier.

Your local supermarket probably has a few garlicky options waiting for you. Our advice is to steer clear of the aisles selling jars and tubes of pre-peeled and minced cloves. Stick to the outer walls, where grocery stores typically stock fresh produce, whole onions, and, of course, whole heads of garlic. If you’re a Blue Apron subscriber, you’ll receive a whole head of fresh garlic in your box.

Once you get your garlic home, it’s time to peel. Start by breaking the head apart into cloves. The next step depends on how you plan to use your garlic. If you’re looking for perfect whole cloves, you can use your fingers to carefully peel the papery skin off of each segment. If you’re planning to mince the garlic after it’s peeled, use the flat side of a chef’s knife to flatten the clove. This will loosen the skin and start breaking the garlic apart. Watch our chef demonstrate this technique in the video below.

Once you’ve removed the skin, the hardest part of your job is done. To mince garlic, start by using a chef’s knife to create thin slices. If any slices stick to your knife, just scrape them off and place them back on the cutting board. Once you have a small pile of slices, use a rocking motion to run your knife back and forth between the slices to chop them into smaller pieces, as our chef does below.

These two simple skills are the key to hundreds (or thousands? millions?) of recipes. If you’re looking for an excuse to get chopping, try making our favorite garlic bread.