Innholdsfortegnelse for February - March 2017 i Cook's Country

I EXPECT A LOT from lasagna. I want a crusty-topped, towering stack of noodles that tastes meaty, creamy, and cheesy all at once. I want there to be a lot more meat than tomatoes. And I don’t want it to take all day or require every dish in the cupboard. With these clear goals in mind, I hit the kitchen. At first I thought that sausage packed with Italian spices was the key to a flavorful lasagna. But after my initial tests, I found that sausage flavors varied widely from one package to the next, and I wanted more control over the spice. I tried a few combinations of ground pork and veal but ultimately committed to an all-beef lasagna. We all loved the bold and familiar flavor as well…

I NEXPENSIVE, quick-cooking, and lean, pork tenderloin is a fine choice for a weeknight supper, but it doesn’t have a lot of pizzazz. I wanted to add a flavorful crust to make this cut a little more filling and a lot more exciting. It’s easy to create a crumb crust, but more difficult to make it stick. I started with an assortment of crumbs, each with a different texture: fresh bread, panko, and saltines. After trying all of them and using a variety of cooking methods, our least favorite option was saltine crumbs, which turned gray and greasy. Fresh bread crumbs took second place, but they tended to turn soggy. But crunchy-crisp panko bread crumbs were excellent, proving why they’re a longtime test kitchen favorite. Panko has a strong structure…

SCAN THE MENU at your favorite American Chinese restaurant and you’re likely to find Mongolian Beef. Though essentially unknown in Mongolia, this dish—bite-size strips of beef fried until crispy and tossed with scallions and spicy dried red chiles in a sweet-salty sauce—has become so popular stateside that you can now find packages of it in the frozen-food section of the grocery store. But I prefer cooking from scratch to dining out or reheating prefab entrées in the microwave, so I resolved to create a recipe. To help set my course, I ordered take-out from several Boston-area Chinese restaurants, from mom-and-pop shops to well-known national chains. The results were underwhelming: soggy beef (to be fair, all the samples had traveled across town), slippery scallions, and rubbery red chiles in a drastically…

I T TOOK ME a few years of living in North Carolina before I fully understood the ubiquitous phrase “Bless her heart.” While the saying can, on occasion, be heartfelt, it’s just as often a roundabout way to soften an otherwise devastating blow: “Bless her heart, she’s no beauty queen.” It’s a colloquialism I tend to avoid for fear of sending an unintended message, but I found myself leaning on a version of it recently when describing comforting chicken and pastry to non-Southern friends. To them, the recipe’s name, “chicken and pastry,” conjured elegance and formality: lofty images of golden, flaky puff pastry surrounding carefully, fussily cooked chicken. But, bless its heart, true Southern chicken and pastry—tender shreds of chicken and slightly chewy pastry wading in a thickened, chicken-infused broth—is…

Roux FLOUR AND FAT Roux is a mixture of fat and flour. While lard may have been the most common fat choice a generation ago, modern Creole cooks are more apt to use butter, while their Cajun cousins are more likely to reach for vegetable oil. Roux can be cooked to white, blond, and brown stages, each of which imparts a different flavor and thickening power to the finished dish. Dark roux (pictured at left and used in most gumbos) can take hours of constant stirring to make. Try our Gumbo recipe (CooksCountry.com/gumbo), which uses a cool technique to cut down on the stirring and mess. Crayfish HANDS-ON These freshwater crustaceans—also called crawfish, crawdads, or mudbugs— look like mini lobsters. Most recipes, including the iconic crawfish étouffée, call for just…

I REMEMBER THE disappointment I felt upon eating my first crumb cake outside my native Garden State. “Where’s the topping?” I asked, surveying what seemed like a measly sprinkling of streusel over a thick layer of coffee cake. Where I grew up, we stacked a mountain of crumbs over a thin sheet of yeasted cake and called it a crumb bun. Bringing this favorite breakfast pastry into the test kitchen took a little explaining. Strangers to New Jersey crumb buns (also called crumb cake) guffawed when I told them about the traditional 3:1 ratio of topping to cake. They were certain it would be too sweet, too crumbly—a mess. Though my first batch wasn’t perfect, my coworkers started to see the Jersey light. This pastry unapologetically magnifies the best part…

We prefer rolled oats for baked goods, since their thin, flat shape gives cookies, bars, and toppings just the right amount of chew. In addition, they make good oatmeal relatively quickly. To find the best rolled oats, we rounded up five contenders and sampled each product as oatmeal (prepared according to package instructions) and in our recipe for Chewy Oatmeal Cookies (where we weighed the oats to ensure consistency). In the oatmeal test, three products were nutty and hearty, but two were borderline unpalatable: one was too clumpy and dry, and the other was a gluey mass of goop. Worse, some tasters noticed a metallic, chemical taste in the gluey oats. Products that were mushy or parched in oatmeal made cookies that were a tad dense or dry. We were…

BREAKFAST IS GREAT any time of day. But even greater is tucking into the works—crispy potatoes, juicy sausage links, runny egg yolks, and buttery toast—with only one pan to clean. To make it all work, I knew I’d need a baking sheet. But even with the extra surface area, would all that food fit? I could cook components in groups and remove them to make space for the eggs at the end, but those first-cooked items would get cold and the eggs would run all over the sheet and cook unevenly. I needed a plan. A test kitchen recipe for eggs-in-ahole gave me a clue as to how to pull this off: I’d preheat a baking sheet, toast bread and cut holes in it, and then crack eggs into the…

Boiling with Curiosity Why do recipes call for water to be at a rolling boil before dropping in the pasta? Why can’t I just start it in cold water? Elizabeth McCarthy, Albany, N.Y. Most pasta aficionados believe there is only one way to properly cook pasta—in a large pot of boiling salted water. But is that really true? To find out, we cooked spaghetti, penne, and elbow macaroni, starting them all in cold water, and tasted them alongside batches cooked the traditional way. When drained, the pastas weighed the same, meaning that they had absorbed the same amount of water during cooking. Also, tasters could not detect a textural difference between the pastas. We then made two batches of our Spaghetti with Pecorino Romano and Black Pepper (Cacio e Pepe),…

WHITE BUTTON MUSHROOMS are the also-rans of the mushroom world, often ignored in favor of more-exotic specimens. I wanted to give them a chance at sophistication. As I flipped through cookbooks from esteemed chefs such as Alice Waters and Thomas Keller, I tagged any promising recipe, even those that starred pricey oyster or chanterelle mushrooms. I cooked my way through six, substituting humble white button mushrooms in all. Our favorite recipe called for sautéing the mushrooms in butter with garlic and shallots before adding chicken broth and braising them, covered, until tender. It also called for removing the lid for the final minutes of cooking to let the flavorful braising liquid reduce and coat the mushrooms. Button mushrooms are about 90 percent water. As they cook, much of this liquid…

K ILLED SALAD (ALSO called “kilt” salad, wilted salad, or smothered lettuce) is a traditional Appalachian side dish (see “Appalachian Salad”). At its simplest, it’s made by pouring hot bacon grease over torn fresh lettuce and chopped onions to warm and barely wilt the greens. I tested this bare-bones approach alongside several more-elaborate recipes that called for mixing vinegar, lemon juice, or sugar into the dressing. While the combination of fresh lettuce and smoky, crispy bacon was a solid one, many of these recipes called for as much as a pound of bacon. I learned that too much of a good thing (bacon) can be, well, too much. It’s not called bacon salad, after all. I wanted the presence of bacon to enhance the lettuce—not destroy it. I eventually ended…

Southern Cooking, with Style Until Edna Lewis broke her ankle in the 1970s, she didn’t have the time to write the cookbook her editor wanted—one infused with her personal story, giving texture, urgency, and humanity to the recipes she hoped to share. A descendant of freed slaves, Lewis grew up on a subsistence farm in rural Virginia and had made a life as a farmer, a seamstress, and a celebrated New York City chef before legendary cookbook editor Judith Jones convinced her to compile her recipes and share her wisdom. After all, what else would she do with herself while her ankle was in a cast? That book, The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), became a cornerstone of the American cookbook shelf; Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Craig Claiborne praised…

L OCAL COOKS AND writers refer to sour orange pie as Northern Florida’s answer to South Florida’s Key lime pie: a prebaked crust and a custard-like interior made with sweetened condensed milk and the juice of wild sour oranges, which are otherwise thrown away since they are far too tart to eat straight from the branch. I imagined transforming this much-maligned citrus into a lush and fruity dessert, the tart tang balanced by sweetness and floral orange notes. I started with a simple crust of crushed graham crackers and melted butter but later swapped out graham for animal crackers; the slightly sweeter cookies highlighted the sour citrus filling. But the interior was more difficult— mostly because sour oranges aren’t easy to come by in much of the country. I finally…

Chocolate Cake 101 KEY INGREDIENTS Chocolate This cake calls for three types of chocolate. Here’s what each one brings to the table. UNSWEETENED CHOCOLATE Typically, unsweetened chocolate is pure chocolate liquor that has been formed into bars. Test Kitchen Favorite: Hershey’s Unsweetened Baking Bar DUTCH-PROCESSED COCOA POWDER Cocoa powder is chocolate liquor that has been pressed to remove most of the cocoa butter, leaving behind cocoa solids that are then finely ground. Test Kitchen Favorite: Droste Cocoa MILK CHOCOLATE With only 10 percent cacao required, milk chocolate has a mild flavor. Milk fat and cocoa butter add creaminess— perfect for frosting. Test Kitchen Favorite: Dove Silky Smooth Milk Chocolate Two Layers or Three? You Decide. For a two-layer cake, bake the batter in two 9-inch pans. To make a three-layer…

WHOLE-WHEAT BREAD has a flavor and nutrient profile many times more complex than that of white bread. But supermarket bakery aisles display multitudes of “whole-wheat” breads that list refined flour—regular white flour used to make white bread—as their primary ingredient. What’s the deal? Wheat kernels consist of three parts: germ, bran, and endosperm. White flour is made by grinding only the starchy endosperm; whole-wheat flour is made from all three parts. Because it includes the bran and germ, whole-wheat flour contains proteins, fats, fiber, vitamins, and minerals that refined flour lacks. But there’s more to the story. “Whole wheat” isn’t a term strictly regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but “100 percent whole wheat” is, and this is what you should seek out if you want bread with…

C HICKEN FRICASSEE IS an oldfashioned country dish of chicken stewed in a creamy sauce; adding vibrant apples to the mix creates a complex and delicate sweetness that enhances the savory chicken. I wanted all the parts to work in harmony: juicy chicken, tender but not mushy pieces of apple, and a balanced sauce that bridged the two. I tested many existing recipes, and the results varied widely. One recipe contained only a few apples and was so savory it was mistaken for chicken pot pie filling; another included multiple apple products (hard cider, brandy, and apples), but tasters could barely make out any apple flavor. One had a hefty 2 cups of apple cider in it, making it too sweet overall. With this last version in mind, I tried…

P AN-FRIED POTATOES—tender on the inside, with slightly crispy exteriors—are always welcome on my dinner table. One version, Lyonnaise potatoes (named for Lyon, France), originated as a way to use up leftover boiled potatoes from dinner the night before; they’re peeled, sliced, and pan-fried with copious amounts of butter and thin slices of onion that turn delicately brown. But who wants to wait around for leftover boiled potatoes? I started by testing five existing recipes. Most called for precooked spuds, so I boiled and baked piles of potatoes. Then, following the recipes, I sliced some of them paper-thin and others as much as an inch thick before finishing them in a skillet with butter. I quickly nixed using baked russet potatoes, whose exteriors dried out. Boiled red potatoes were fine,…

A large gentleman wearing a “Roll Tide” cap sidles up to my table and interrupts me midsentence. “You know how I know you’re not from around here? ‘Cause you’re eating your fried chicken with a fork and knife,” he says. I smile because he’s right, and I happily drop the utensils. We had driven a good way into the country before reaching the crimson clapboard Red’s Little Schoolhouse in Grady, Alabama. The food there is pure Southern comfort, as is the reincarnated schoolhouse, a relic that functioned as a oneroom schoolhouse from 1910 to 1960 only to be reborn as a restaurant in 1985. Inside are wide-plank floors, some with old-fashioned square-cut nails; the planks creaked beneath our feet. A dusty chalkboard, framed by portraits of ex-presidents, lists the day’s…

A CLAY-COLORED DISH holding hot, bubbling cheese topped with strips of smoky poblano peppers and crumbles of meaty, spicy chorizo sausage—what could be better? In northern Mexico queso fundido (literally “molten cheese”) is appetizer fare often served in rolled tortillas. It’s since become a mainstay in Mexican American restaurants as a dip; more than a few of us have finished a crockful on our own—washed down with a Mexican beer, of course. To get started, I armed myself with a box grater and five existing queso fundido recipes I’d found in our massive cookbook library. While the queso fundido I’d eaten while in Texas was cohesive, most of the versions I made separated, leaving a plasticky ball of cheese bobbing in a pool of grease. But this test at least…

Campaign Cookies It sounds like a throwback, but the potential-First-Lady bake-off sponsored by Family Circle magazine every four years is a relatively new tradition. In 1992, Hillary Clinton took on Barbara Bush; after a reader vote, Clinton’s oatmeal chocolate chip cookies beat out Bush’s classic chocolate chip cookies, accurately forecasting the eventual election. In 1996, Clinton again prevailed; the same oatmeal chocolate chip recipe won handily over Elizabeth Dole’s pecan roll sugar cookies. But in 2000, Laura Bush avenged her mother-in-law’s 1992 loss, sending her Texas cowboy cookies into the ring against Tipper Gore’s gingersnaps. Her cowboy cookies won, just like her husband George. The only year that Family Circle readers failed to pick the eventual winner? 2008, when Cindy McCain’s butterscotch oatmeal cookies defeated Michelle Obama’s shortbread cookies. Obama,…

We’re looking for recipes that you treasure—the ones that have been handed down in your family for a generation or more, that always come out for the holidays, and that have earned a place at your table and in your heart through many years of meals. Send us the recipes that spell home to you. Visit CooksCountry.com/recipe_submission (or_write to Heirloom Recipes, Cook’s_ Country, P.O. Box 470739, Brookline, MA 02447) and tell us a little about the recipe. Include your_ name and mailing address. If we print your recipe, you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to Cook’s Country. THREE-INGREDIENT BREAD Makes 1 loaf “I learned about this bread at a small restaurant in rural Maine. I love it slathered with lots of butter or dunked into a hearty beef stew.” –Alice Henderson,…