Welcome to your portal to great food and food chat

Hello and welcome to My Blog. I'm Chef Scotty, one of the founders of LasagnaAndMoreByMail.com

and I will be blogging away in hopes of sharing with you, the reader, some fun facts and knowledge about food cooking and perhaps more. I hope you enjoy this source of information and glean a bit of understanding that will help you cook up some tasty delights in your kitchen.

First, a bit about me. I have many passions in this fine life, two of which are cooking and writing.

The cooking part I've been doing since I started working in the restaurant business back when my I was 14 and my mom had to drive me to down town Phoenix where I bussed tables at 'Newtons Prime Rib'. It was there that I was thrust into the kitchen and became an instant 'Fry Cook' when the guy who had that job was...as we say in the business...a no-call no-show. Since then I have worked in numerous eating establishments, owned five of my own, and been Exec chef in a couple more. I am presently Corporate Executive Chef for the Vero Amore Restaurants, in Tucson, Arizona. Vero Amore is one of the few Certified Neopolitan Pizzaria's in the world and the U.S. A visit to Vero Amore, to enjoy our authentic wood fired pizza or any of the Italian 'fusion' dishes I've created, will bring a smile to your face should you live around, or be visiting, Tucson or Southern Arizona. Try veroamorepizza.com to check it out. Writing, on the other hand, has become a more recent passion for me discovered over the past seven years. With one novel finished and a couple more projects in the works, I trust I will be writing for the rest of my days...as well as cooking, as good food and conversation are, I think, a great match.

Enough about me for now. Let's talk cooking!

Salt! One of the basic ingredients in cooking but perhaps one of the most overused and most misunderstood. If you check your cook books you will find that almost all of them instruct us to 'salt the water' when cooking pasta or potatoes...But why? For many it is to increase the temperature of the water for faster cooking. It is said that Salt releases heat when it dissolves.

Truth is that one tablespoon of salt...(20grams)...added to 5 quarts of boiling water will only raise the boiling point temperature by several hundredths of a degree. If you hope your pasta will finish about a half second faster, then salt is the way to do this.

For others, when to add the salt is very important. Until recently, I was under the impression that the water should be 'vigorously boiling' before adding the salt, then add the pasta.

Truth here is; It doesn't matter when the salt is added, as salt dissolves easily in luke warm to boiling water and has no 'molecular memory' of when dissolution happens.

The reason for use of salt when cooking pasta, or potatoes, is because salt enhances the flavor of both. So salt away whenever you want and enjoy the fruits of your labors.

Thanks to Robert L. Wolke and his book 'What Einstein Told His Cook'.