(article, Culinate staff)
Last summer, the San Francisco Chronicle started a Kitchen Essentials series, and the collection is now a handy guide to tools, techniques, and shopping suggestions. Biggest is a top-10 list of basic kitchen techniques, complete with how-to demo videos; the techniques include breading, searing, folding, tempering, making pan sauce, making a vinaigrette, making a roux, dicing an onion, rolling out pie dough, and segmenting citrus. What else? An illustrated guide to knife cuts, a list of top-10 tools (it also includes a bare-essentials list of kitchen tools), and a top-10 list of pantry items.