If you tried out the technique we shared earlier this week for easy homemade bread and want to bolster your baking chops, you’ll definitely want to check out this detailed guide to homemade sourdough bread.
Laura and Barb, the two sisters behind the culinary blog My Sister’s Kitchen, post an excellent and detailed tutorial on homemade sourdough. It isn’t as simple as some of the other bread recipes and bread baking techniques we’ve shared in the past, like the aforementioned easy homemade bread, or five-minute quickbread, but based on the rave reviews their technique has received, we think you’ll find it worth the extra effort. While it’s a bit more intensive than some of the other methods we’ve covered, it’s still quite economical:
A very important detail to note is that this method makes extra large loaves that are approximately 4.5 pounds each. Each loaf costs only $0.68 to make. That is sixty-eight cents. I buy flour and yeast in bulk, so it’s possible that if you buy your ingredients at a regular grocery store, your loaf might cost twice that….a whopping $1.36! As you’ll see, that’s for a loaf that’s about 3 times the size of a loaf of grocery store bread.
They have a step by step tutorial on Instructables, linked below, and then a companion post on their blog with additional information about sourdough, creating your own sourdough starter, and various recipes. If you bake your own sourdough bread, due either to thrift or refined taste, we want to hear about it in the comments below.
If you’d like to get hands-on and make your own bread, but need a little more guidance than a recipe, this simple bread recipe with step-by-step photos is a good place to start out.
It's all too easy to get seriously excited about expanding your kitchen repertoire—and seriously in debt buying for that kitchen. Here are five kitchen-related things you really need and how to use them efficiently.
If we were crazed minimalists, we’d say you only truly need an eight-inch, plastic-handled stainless alloy chef’s knife, one you can find at a restaurant supply store for $10 (more on that later). You should test out any chef’s knife you’re looking at, and consider santoku-shaped blades if you do a lot of mincing or fine chopping. The key is making sure any knife feels right in your hand. The handle and weight in your hand are just as important as the blade, since proper use and sharpening should take care of that. Other than that, a sharp, sturdy paring knife and a cheap-as-you-can-get serrated bread knife have you covered for everything else. Skip the boning/fileting and utility knives, because you definitely don’t filet fish or slice giant mozzarella wheels that often.
How do you keep your knife sharp? Popular Mechanics has a good 
How you save money here depends on how you cook. Unless you make a lot of meat dishes with reduction sauces containing browned bits, you really need just one cheap medium-sized nonstick skillet for your day-to-day cooking, small and larger-sized metal saucepan, a pasta-sized pot with a lid, and one serious, large (12- or 14-inch) steel pan with steep sides for your grander culinary ambitions, stir-frys, and bigger meat meals. We’re serious on the nonstick skillet being cheap, if safe-looking, because even the most expensive kind inevitably flake off, chip, and lose their egg-repelling properties over time.
If you’re thinking about buying your cookware from a store in a mall, strip or otherwise, don’t do it. Similarly, don’t buy multi-pot sets, especially the kind signed by a chef you’ve seen on television. The best value for your dollar is found at your local or regional restaurant supply store. That’s where the restaurants you recommend to friends buy their stuff, and they make their money on volume. For certain kinds of cooking hardware, Asian food markets and “trading companies” often stock a lot of really cheap goods. For recipes that require random equipment you’re not sure you might use again, they’re often the smart buy.
You don’t have to spend a lot on this, but it’s crucial to buy quality instead of cheap. That’s spoken as someone who loves to grill, and whose wife does not like to eat on the bleeding edge of food safety. Cook’s Illustrated, the magazine that takes no advertising and tests things out to a kind of ridiculous degree, rates 
When you're new to stove-top cooking, you'll want to get precise with your meat, vegetable, and starch measurements to ensure everything stays flavored in proportion. When you start dipping your toes into baking, that's when you'll really be glad you have a scale. The way you pack flour, the moisture in the air, and the random sizes of ingredients like eggs or fruits can seriously impact the outcome of a baking recipe—unless you're weighing things in proportion. You don't have to spend a lot, but you do want something digital, that holds up to 10 pounds, and which can "tare," or set itself to zero, when you've got a container on it that doesn't count in the measurement. Photo by 
If you’re short a proper citrus juicer but have a large water bottle handy, you can use the bottom of the water bottle as a simple juicer.
For many, it’s a common sense thing, based on the name of the appliance itself. But those who do scrub down dishes before loading them in the dishwasher waste water, electricity, and may harm their more delicate items.
If you’ve ever bought fruits and vegetables on a healthy whim, only to end up pitching them because they ended up looking quite busted in your fridge, this informative list is for you.
You may own a freezer, but do you really use it? If your freezer is just a temporary bin for food that’s getting trashed, Mark Bittman wants to help you with a money-saving, food-preserving audit.
Crock pot cooking is dead simple and has the capability of turning basic ingredients into delicious meals with little time actually spent in the kitchen. These simple five-ingredient recipes will help you get started.