Innholdsfortegnelse for June - July 2017 i Cook's Country

OFTEN, LUNCH AT barbecue spots around Texas includes a scoop of brown pinto beans on your plate. different from mashed or refried versions, these beans are long-simmered with pork in a velvety, savory broth and are tender, flavorful, and creamy. Dried pinto beans are the traditional choice for this dish. They are speckled, Jackson Pollock–style, until you cook them, and then the speckles disappear. They were ideal for a home on the range in the days before refrigeration: light enough to transport, packed with protein, shelf-stable for long chuck wagon journeys, and perfectly happy to bubble away unattended while homesteaders took care of other tasks. To bring this tasty side dish to the test kitchen, I armed myself with heavy pots and several pounds of pinto beans and got to…

WHEN THE DELIVERY driver’s peeling out of our driveway and we’re prying open the paper boxes from the Chinese restaurant a few blocks away, pork fried rice is always in one of them. And for good reason. Fried white rice makes a simple, texture-rich backdrop for flavorful pork and scrambled egg; the savory sauce brings it all together. But can it be better—fresher, hotter, more delicious—at home? If you follow the traditional rule prohibiting the use of freshly cooked rice, then the answer is no. But I get ornery waiting for rice to cool down and dry out, so I took to the kitchen to see if I could test my way to a better, faster pork fried rice. It was easy to choose a cut of pork. After rejecting…

YOU MAY HAVE heard of Hasselback potatoes, the accordion-like, sliced-yet-still-in-one-piece potatoes covered in butter, topped with cheesy bread crumbs, and baked. You may have seen Hasselback squash or even eggplant. But what about tomatoes? “Hasselbacking” is nothing new. Back in the 1950s, cooks at the Hasselbacken Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, were peeling and partially slicing large potatoes, brushing them with butter, sprinkling them with bread crumbs, and baking them. Customers took to them for their striking look but also for the range of textures this process creates. They are still on the hotel’s menu today. But I was focused on tomatoes, not potatoes. I wondered if a similar technique would have an equally big impact. After consulting with my test kitchen coworkers, I decided to double down on summery flavors,…

EAT I N G A B ATCH of three-layer cookie bars can be a joy. But making a batch? Intimidating. Because really, does a baked good with triple the components yield a final product that is truly three times better than a standard dump-and-stir option? And would it take three times the work? After tasting a three-layer cherry streusel bar—featuring a crisp cookie base, a jammy filling, and a delicious streusel topping—I was determined to find out. I started in the middle, with the cherry filling. I can imagine a similar three-layer bar with raspberry, apricot, or nearly any other kind of fruit, but I picked cherries for their multidimensional, sweet-tart flavor. The filling needed to be juicy but not runny; it needed to stay put in the bar. To…

THE BEST SUMMERTIME meals are on the lighter side, but all too often “lighter” means no starch. This sounds fine in theory—a piece of chicken served alongside a bunch of vegetables can be gorgeous—but without a starchy component to round out the meal, I’m often left wanting more. I set out to create a simple skillet chicken supper that cut a bright flavor profile but was filling and complete, too. I grabbed a skillet and got to work. After searing eight chicken thighs on both sides to maximize the flavorful browned bits in my skillet (my tasters preferred the richer flavor of chicken thighs to that of breasts), I moved them to a plate and discarded the excess fat. Then I added an onion and a few handfuls of sliced…

TO MAKE THIS CAKE, YOU WILL NEED: 1 (15-ounce) can mandarin oranges in light syrup, drained 1 recipe yellow cake batter* 2 tablespoons cake flour 1 teaspoon orange extract 1 (20-ounce) can pineapple rings in syrup, drained 3 cups lightly sweetened whipped cream* 1 cup store-bought vanilla pudding (about 3 snack cups) FOR THE CAKE: Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9-inch round cake pans and line with parchment paper. Set aside 19 orange segments for topping. Using stand mixer fitted with paddle, beat cake batter, flour, orange extract, and remaining oranges on medium-high speed until oranges have broken down, about 1 minute. Divide batter evenly between prepared pans. Bake until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, 25 to…

THE PULLED PORK, brisket, and chicken legs offered at any given barbecue joint are only part of the story. Sides matter, too—think macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, baked beans, and fried okra. Everyone’s got a favorite side dish for barbecue, and mine is smothered cabbage. This dish features roughly chopped cabbage leaves braised with onions and potatoes. When done right, the cabbage is buttery and tender, a mild counterpoint to the flavorful, spicy meat it’s served with. For the perfect texture—soft and tender, with just a hint of bite—I chose green cabbage over the savoy and napa varieties, cutting the large leaves into 1-inch pieces. And I learned that cooking the cabbage for 12 to 15 minutes in a Dutch oven with just 1½ cups of liquid gave me the perfect…

PIMENTO CHEESE LIVES in the hearts and the kitchens of many Americans, mostly in the South, but it’s far too often relegated to sandwiches or crackers. There’s nothing wrong with pimento cheese sandwiches, but why limit its range? I wanted to use this concoction—a mixture of sharp cheddar cheese, creamy mayonnaise, and tangy pimentos—in a warm, comforting macaroni and cheese casserole. After a bit of research, I found a few recipes to try out. The worst were gloppy, chalky, greasy failures. One recipe stood out for its creamy cheese and punchy note of tanginess, but it was a bit too complicated, calling for homemade mayonnaise and a slew of different cheeses. I wanted a more straightforward route. Many recipes for macaroni and cheese rely on a béchamel sauce for a…

PERFECTLY C R I S P E D strips of salty bacon teeter atop a meaty burger piled high with your favorite toppings. You circle it, strategizing the perfect bite. Sound familiar? Topping a burger with crispy strips of bacon is nothing new, but what about incorporating bacon into a burger? Now there’s a wacky idea. Changing the bacon from an add-on to an add-in promised savory, bacony bliss in every bite, no plan of attack required. Now, how to execute it? I found a few recipes that called for mixing chopped-up strips of bacon (raw in some recipes, cooked in others) with ground beef, shaping the mixture into patties, and grilling the patties. It sounded simple enough, so I got to work. Assembling batches of patties with different amounts…

Making Smoke Work for You Most of our recipes for smoking call for food to stay on the grill for anywhere from 2 to 6 hours—so why do we use smoke only at the start? It’s because the flavor compounds in smoke are water-soluble, and meat contains more water when it is cooler and uncooked. Since smoke doesn’t penetrate much beyond the surface of meat, it is mostly the meat’s exterior that absorbs smoke flavor. The cleanest, easiest way to smoke food on a backyard grill is to use wood chips (soaked in water to make them burn slower and smoke longer) wrapped in aluminum foil. The foil packet further ensures a slower burn and thus more smoke. Key to a Slow Burn To make a foil packet, place soaked…

CUCUMBER AND CORN, two iconic farmstand ingredients, can be refreshing and lovely on their own. But exciting? Well, let’s just say their charms are understated. Subtle. I wanted to create a salad that gave these two ubiquitous midsummer stalwarts a chance to be surprising. A handful of existing recipes for corn and cucumber salad gave me poor results—some were tossed (or doused) in creamy dressings, others in tangy, vinegary ones. A few came off more like salsa than salad, with long lists of add-ins. None allowed the corn or the cukes to shine. I took a step back and looked at the two primary components. First, corn. Should it be cooked? Raw? I nixed blanching the loose kernels cut from four ears of corn—corralling those kernels in simmering water took…

WHEN I WA S growing up, snack cake was a one-layer affair cut into squares and packed into my lunchbox or ready to eat when I got home from school. It was simple to make, it didn’t require decoration (aside from perhaps a smear of frosting), and—most important—I didn’t need a special occasion to enjoy it. It was approachable and welcome anytime, whenever hunger struck. I hadn’t thought about snack cake in a while, but then a friend shared a recipe for banana snack cake from her trove of family recipes. Banana cake? Wasn’t that just banana bread? Easy answer: No. The ingredients are nearly the same, but the outcome is entirely different. A slice of banana bread has a dense, heavy crumb and a crusty exterior. Banana cake, on…

ON A RECENT steamy summer afternoon at a local restaurant, a friend ordered a fruity salsa. Tangy, slightly spicy, a bit sweet, and totally refreshing— it contained pineapple, jalapeño, red onion, lime juice, and cilantro—the salsa collected perfectly in the curve of a tortilla chip, a refreshing bite that cooled me down even as it pricked my tongue with mild peppery heat. I decided to make my own at home. I started with a few existing recipes. Most used sturdy pineapple as a base, a flavorful choice that I loved, so I started by dicing pineapple into ¼-inch pieces. I’m pretty handy with a chef’s knife, but by the time I’d chopped the pineapple, red onion, and other salsa ingredients, my hand hurt. So for my next round I ditched…

HIT THE BUFFET at any given fund-raiser or corporate function and you’ll likely run into chicken Florentine. A rifion cordon bleu or other chicken breast dishes, this one features spinach in a mild cream-and-Parmesan sauce—sometimes stuffed inside, sometimes stacked on top. But for all its potential, chicken Florentine so often disappoints: dry chicken, soggy spinach, and a stodgy sauce. I love each of these three components individually, so I knew I could make this dish better and do it faster—and scale it back to serve just two people. My first decision was to nix stuffing the breasts: too much work for a weeknight supper. I started with spinach, which, as anyone who’s recently shopped for spinach knows, isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. After sampling curly-leaf spinach, frozen spinach, and…

THE BIRTHPLACE OF barbecue sauce is shrouded in mystery—one theory is that Christopher Columbus discovered a version in the Caribbean during his travels. Regardless of its origin, this centuries-old condiment is now an American staple. Today there are many styles of barbecue sauce, each with its own regional rise , but the most ubiquitous of the bunch hails from Kansas City. Most supermarket sauces are modeled after this thick, sweet, and tangy tomato-based style. Since we last tasted supermarket barbecue sauces, our former favorite product, Bull’s-Eye Original BBQ Sauce, changed its recipe to include high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) instead of sugar. So we rounded up the seven top-selling national barbecue sauces, including the new version of Bull’s-Eye, and tasted again to see how the supermarket sauces stacked up. We like…

BEEF SHOULDER CLOD, a large boneless cut taken from the shoulder, delivers supremely beefy flavor underneath a dark crust spicy with black pepper and cayenne and well seasoned with salt. But shoulder clod can range from 13 to 21 pounds of meat. Twenty-one pounds! I’m strong, but 21 pounds is a bit much for me, and besides, I couldn’t find a local butcher with clod on hand. I looked instead for a more manageable cut of meat with similar characteristics. I considered top and bottom blade roasts, both cut from the shoulder, but soon settled on chuck-eye roast, a versatile piece of meat cut from a portion of the shoulder clod. I rubbed my first roast (weighing in at 5 pounds, enough for a small crowd plus leftovers for sandwiches)…

IT DOESN’T GET better than sitting at the stadium watching your favorite team with the sun shining on your face, an ice-cold beverage at your feet, and a plump, juicy grilled sausage, nestled in a soft roll and covered with slightly sweet onions and peppers, in your hand. But why should I have to wait for game day to have a grilled sausage sandwich in my hand? I set out to make this ballpark favorite at home. Sausages need to be grilled over moderate heat—if the heat’s too high, the casings can burst, dripping flavorful juices and causing flare-ups before the sausages are cooked through. The result: Dry, chewy sausages. I needed to find a balanced approach to achieve juicy sausages with just enough char from the grill. After I’d…

D E S P I T E I T S N A M E , chicken Francese is neither French nor Italian in origin. Yet this beloved egg-dipped, pan-fried chicken cutlet dressed in a tangy lemon-butter sauce—reportedly a 1970s invention from Rochester, New York—is still found on scores of Italian American restaurant menus across the United States. Typically, when breading a cutlet (think chicken Parmesan), you use a three-step process: Dredge the cutlet in flour, dip it in eggs, and coat it in bread crumbs. For Francese you stop at the second step, sliding the egg-dipped cutlet into the skillet to cook. At its best, this creates a silky, delicate coating that absorbs the flavorful butter sauce. At its worst, you end up with an omelet-coated chicken breast. For such…

PRODUCT TASTING FOR MANY KITCHEN tasks—dips, dressings, salads, sauces—crumbled blue cheese is an easier alternative to the stinky, sticky task of crumbling a wedge yourself. In search of the best crumbled blue cheese, we chose five products carried in national supermarkets and tasted them in a series of blind taste tests: plain, in blue cheese dressing, and toasted on crostini. The goal was a rich, creamy cheese with an unmistakably pungent (but balanced) blue-cheese funk. We noticed right away that tasters preferred the amplified funk of cheeses that were bluer in color to whiter cheeses, which they thought tasted more like “feta” or “cheddar.” The trend held for dressing, too; those made with whiter cheeses lacked blue cheese’s signature “blue” flavor and thus tasted more like ranch or mayonnaise. Not…

YOU CAN’T ESCAPE zucchini at the height of summer. The little green squashes (and some not so little) are piled high at the farmers’ markets and supermarkets. If you haven’t got it growing in your backyard, you’ve got a neighbor trying to unload the extra zukes as a “gift.” Unfortunately, more often than not, after dutiful prepping and cooking, zucchini shows up at the table slimy and dull. I wanted to rewrite this script so that the final scene featured a fresh and summery but still warm side dish of gently cooked zucchini that was filled with vibrant vegetable flavor—hold the slime. After cooking through several recipes, I learned a few things. Lesson number one: Always choose small to medium zucchini (less than 8 ounces each) for the best flavor.…

Prepping Vegetables and Herbs TEST KITCHEN TIPS FOR PRODUCE Bell Peppers: Use Steam to Remove Skins To make their skins easier to remove, place grilled bell peppers in a bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and let the bell peppers sit for 5 minutes. The steam created by the heat in the sealed bowl loosens the skins from the flesh, making them easier to separate. Slip the loosened skins off and discard. Eggplant: Brush with Oil Last Eggplants are filled with both air pockets and water, which means they can absorb large amounts of oil, resulting in a greasy mess. For this reason, we brush all the other vegetables with oil first and use only what is left to oil the eggplants. Herbs: Chop Them Like a Pro To chop…

ROPA V I E J A , C U B A’ S national dish and a favorite in Cuban neighborhoods throughout the United States, is elemental and beautifully simple—a beefy braise of flank steak in a sauce that balances tomato and white wine with sweet peppers, onions, and garlic. Cumin and oregano add warmth while briny olives and bright vinegar cut the richness of the meat and make the flavors pop. Served over rice, it’s a comforting meal. The backstory goes like this: A man, too broke to afford meat for his family, stirred some old clothes (“ropa vieja” in Spanish) into a pot of broth. He then prayed over the pot and later, after some divine assistance, ladled out a rich stew of beef and vegetables. It’s a fitting…

8 Knives 8 Tests 1. Test initial sharpness by slicing copy paper 2. Slice cheddar cheese 3. Peel and slice fresh ginger 4. Peel, quarter, and core apples 5. Section oranges 6. Hull strawberries 7. Have multiple users test and evaluate 8. Test final sharpness by slicing copy paper A GOOD PARING knife is a small but mighty addition to any knife collection. We choose this diminutive blade over a chef’s knife for three primary tasks where control is paramount. One: poking things without stabbing too widely or deeply, as when scoring chicken skin to help the fat render, piercing boiled potatoes to gauge doneness, or nipping into salmon fillets to see if they’re cooked through. Two: incisions, such as splitting open dates to fill with blue cheese for our…

Dessert is never a tough sell for my kids. Fresh fruit, on the other hand, can be hit or miss. Luckily we’ve reached a compromise with this fresh blueberry “cobbler,” passed on from a family friend. -BRYAN ROOF Executive food editor and Cook’s Country TV presenter EASY BLUEBERRY COBBLER Serves 8 to 10 Serve with vanilla ice cream. 1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk 1¼ cups (6 ounces) self-rising flour ½ cup whole milk 8 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 10 ounces (2 cups) blueberries ¼ cup (1_⁄_ ounces) sugar 1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease 13 by 9-inch baking dish. Whisk condensed milk, flour, milk, and melted butter together in bowl. Pour batter into prepared baking dish. Sprinkle blueberries and sugar evenly…