Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 - January 2018 i Cook's Country

THE HOLIDAY SEASON represents the best opportunity all year for a home cook to show off. The guest lists are long and the stakes high. Roasts are grand, side dishes are special, desserts are exciting. It’s a wonderful time to surprise and delight family and friends with a festive feast. But let’s face it: It’s also the best opportunity all year for a home cook to fall flat. Get distracted for a moment and that roast can overcook, that side dish can go south, that cake can collapse. It’s a high-wire act, wobbly and uncertain. At Cook’s Country, we believe the answer is balance. Construct your holiday menu not just with an eye to how the food will taste but with a strict eye to how you’ll achieve it. Be…

I often have leftover white rice in the refrigerator. What’s the best way to reheat it? Sylvia Ahmet, Alpharetta, Ga. Reheating white rice can be a tricky proposition—especially if you want it to be as light and fluffy as freshly cooked rice. To find the best method, we made a batch of white rice and also ordered in rice from a local take-out spot. We let both rices cool completely and then tried reviving them using a few different techniques. Reheating the rice in a covered baking dish in the oven for 25 minutes or in a saucepan on the stovetop for nearly 15 minutes took too long. And both methods required adding significant amounts of water to avoid burning the grains, which caused some of them to become soggy.…

Use It For: • Eggs: Fried and scrambled eggs and omelets can stick and tear in regular skillets. • Stir-fries: Most stir-fries start with searing protein, but we don’t want to lose any flavorful browning; with nonstick, the browning sticks to the meat, not to the skillet. • Pan-frying breaded foods: We want the breading to stick only to the food. • Pancakes: Batter can stick to traditional skillets and burn, but it easily releases from nonstick models. Don’t Use It For: • Pan sauces: Nonstick skillets discourage the development of fond. • Browning butter and toasting nuts: The dark nonstick surface makes it hard to see important visual cues that signal when the food is done. • Searing foods over very high heat: Steel or cast-iron skillets give better…

THE FOUNDATION OF most great jerk recipes is the combination of fiery Scotch bonnet chiles, warm allspice, and fragrant thyme; these elements combine to create a flavor that’s bold, yes, but also deeply complex—hot, sweet, savory, herbal, and fruity. Although Americans may know jerk best as a spicy coating for grilled chicken, in Jamaica it was originally used to season pork. As a nod to this history—and, to be honest, because I love ribs—I set out to develop a recipe for oven-cooked jerk ribs that could brighten up any table with big flavors and a little Jamaican heat. The first order of business was to determine what type of ribs to use. I tried coating St. Louis–style spareribs, baby back ribs, and country-style pork ribs with store-bought jerk paste and…

BROCCOLI RABE HAS a big personality. Once cooked, it looks beautiful, yes—it features brilliant jade stalks, spiky leaves, and baby florets— but what makes this vegetable really stand out is its bright, faintly bitter flavor that shocks the palate awake. Italian cookbooks often pair broccoli rabe with cannellini beans; the mellow, creamy beans and the pleasantly sharp greens complement each other incredibly well. I decided to develop my own version of this pairing. Almost all the recipes I found for this combination of beans and greens called for blanching the broccoli rabe to remove some of its bite before sautéing it. One recipe called for microwaving it, which turned it an unfortunate shade of army green and gave it a dulled, grassy flavor. But I didn’t want to take the…

BLAME IT ON bad luck, but for most of my life I didn’t understand the appeal of blintzes. I’d only known them as eggy crêpes stuffed with gritty, sweetened cheese and topped with a cloying fruit sauce. But after a recent trip to New York City, our executive food editor Bryan Roof couldn’t stop talking about the beautiful blintzes he’d eaten (see “Blintz Blitz”). The reasons so few people make blintzes were revealed by the existing recipes I found. They called for hard-to-find specialty pans and for flipping the giant crêpes halfway through cooking, which I found really tricky. And each recipe produced a gritty, not creamy, filling. I had work to do. First I’d tackle the filling. I wanted it smooth, creamy, and just sweet enough. While blintzes are…

What Is Chocolate? To make chocolate, the seeds of the tropically grown cacao bean are fermented, dried, roasted, and ground into a paste. The paste is called chocolate liquor, and it’s the base of all the chocolate we eat. Chocolate liquor contains about 55 percent cocoa butter (which provides silky texture) and 45 percent cocoa solids (the source of chocolate flavor). The combination of cocoa butter and cocoa solids makes up the cocoa percentage in processed chocolate (ingredients such as sugar and milk make up the remaining percentage). Here are the types of chocolate we use most in the test kitchen, along with our carefully vetted taste test winners. BITTERSWEET/SEMISWEET Two words for the same thing: Federal regulations mandate that chocolates with these labels must contain at least 35 percent…

IT’S EASY TO get passable roasted potatoes on the table with a minimum of effort: Just cut your potatoes into chunks, toss them in a roasting pan with some oil and salt and pepper, and slide the pan into a preheated oven. But there’s a big difference between simply passable roasted potatoes and truly great ones. I had the latter in my sights, but I didn’t want to jump through hoops for a simple side dish. The best part of a roasted potato is its flavorful browned exterior, but cranking up the oven to achieve good browning often leaves the insides of the potatoes dry and grainy. I tried a few recipes that got around this problem by boiling the potatoes until they were almost done before quickly roasting them,…

TINGA IS A Mexican dish of spicy shredded meat (in most cases, the meat of choice is pork). The meat is often served atop crisp tostada shells or is sometimes spooned into tacos. Imagine pork shoulder that’s been gently braised with tomatoes and smoky chipotle chiles and then shredded and showered with all the fixings—chopped avocado, a squeeze of lime, crumbled cheese. So good. But each time I make my favorite recipe for pork tinga in a Dutch oven, I start to lose steam halfway through the process. Sure, the recipe yields rich, spicy shredded pork balanced with concentrated sweet and savory tomato flavor. But it requires browning the pork pieces in batches, simmering them in water and aromatics for hours to make a pork broth, sautéing more aromatics for…

CHOW MEIN IS an adaptable concept. Translating roughly as “fried noodles,” it consists of—you guessed it—noodles cooked quickly together with lightly browned vegetables, sometimes seared meat, and a flavorful sauce. Its flexibility means that over the years, cooks have made it with whatever ingredients are fresh and at hand; we’ve created many versions in the test kitchen. This time I wanted a simple version for two using ingredients available year-round. I started by using quick-cooking Chinese egg noodles, which are found near the wonton wrappers in the produce section at my supermarket. Because they bring quite a bit of starchiness to the dish, I found that rinsing them after cooking them in boiling water (for just a few minutes to soften them) was a must to keep the resulting sauce…

Chestnut Soup We’re celebrating the tenth season of Cook’s Country from America’s Test Kitchen on PBS. Join hosts Julia Collin Davison and Bridget Lancaster, along with cast members Adam Ried (above), Bryan Roof, Christie Morrison, Ashley Moore, and Jack Bishop. Check your local listings or visit CooksCountry.com for more info. CREAMY CHESTNUT SOUP Serves 6 If the soup seems too thick, add extra half-and-half to reach the desired consistency. We prefer homemade chicken stock here. If you use store-bought, choose a low-sodium chicken broth. 1 tablespoon unsalted butter 12 ounces leeks, white and light green parts only, halved lengthwise, sliced thin, and washed thoroughly 1 ripe Bartlett or Bosc pear, peeled, halved, cored, and chopped 1 celery rib, chopped 1 teaspoon minced fresh thyme 1 bay leaf Salt and pepper 4…

Are curly- and flat-leaf parsleys interchangeable in recipes? Carina Sorenson, Ada, Mich. In the test kitchen, we almost always call for flat-leaf parsley because we prefer its flavor to that of curly-leaf parsley. A bonus is that it’s easier to chop than its curly-leafed cousin. But we’re never content to rest on our laurels, so we decided to revisit this preference with a series of blind taste tests. We bought multiple bunches of both flat-leaf and curly-leaf parsley, chopped them fine so there was no visual difference, and used both in three of our recipes: Real Tabbouleh, Salsa Verde, and Herbed Croutons. Tasters were asked to try both versions of each side by side. The crouton recipe calls for just a small amount of parsley, and tasters couldn’t tell a…

Ricotta spoils quickly. Can I freeze it if I don’t use the whole tub? Amy Carrera, Springfield, Mo. To see how fresh ricotta cheese would fare once frozen and thawed, we bought a couple of tubs and froze the cheese two ways: directly in the tub and in a zipper-lock bag with the air pressed out. A week later, we thawed the samples and tried both, along with a sample of fresh ricotta, plain and in our recipes for Simple Lasagna with Hearty Tomato Meat Sauce and Ricotta Crostini with Cherry Tomatoes and Basil. Tasters noticed visual differences in the plain samples right away. The frozen batches looked separated, with a pool of milky liquid surrounding gritty cheese specks (freezing ruptures cell walls in the cheese, causing the liquid and…

IF IT WEREN’ T for the line of people snaking through the parking lot to the front door of Phil’s Fish Market & Eatery in Moss Landing, California, you could easily drive right by it. The tin-sided combination of seafood market and restaurant blends into its industrial port surroundings, camouflaged by stacks of wooden pallets, rusted shipping containers, and dry-docked boats. The building was once a squid processing plant, one of many now-defunct fish processing facilities in the area (John Steinbeck’s famous novel Cannery Row was set in Monterey, just a short drive down the coast from Phil’s). Crowds from a rodeo and a motorcycle rally taking place in nearby Salinas mix with local sightseers fresh from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. DiGirolamo expected to feed 3,500 customers on the day…

A BIG PART of a roast chicken’s appeal is the high reward—beautiful presentation, juicy meat, and tasty skin—for minimal effort. Adding a flavorful glaze to the mix sounded like a worthwhile goal that wouldn’t take much extra work. My end goal was a straightforward recipe with a simple stir-together, no-cook glaze. The recipes I found that met these criteria employed a range of oven temperatures, a variety of timings for applying the glaze, and an assortment of flavors—soy sauce, molasses, jams and jellies, hoisin sauce, honey, citrus, and even bacon fat. After sampling a half-dozen glazed chickens, my tasters and I arrived at a starting point of a 400-degree oven for efficient roasting and a jelly-based glaze: Jelly brings flavor, sweetness (which helps in browning), and a sticky texture that…

THE STOUT LITTLE pies from Hartley’s Original Pork Pies (see “Pies by the Million”) cut charming figures with their straight, sturdy sides and golden crimped crowns. The crumbly crusts contain a deeply seasoned, savory, juicy filling of ground pork and gravy. Translating the pies to a home kitchen, though, was a tall order. First, I needed a baking vessel to mimic Hartley’s 100-year-old individual cast-iron pie tins. Muffin tins were too small and the wrong shape. Larger 6-ounce ceramic ramekins proved perfect in both size and shape, yielding evenly golden-brown sides and bottoms. For the dough, I processed flour with melted butter to create the crumbly crust I wanted. Sour cream added richness and flavor without compromising texture, and an egg provided structure. Simply pressing portions of dough into the…

SAUCE PIQUANT IS a beloved Cajun dish featuring meat braised in a cayenne-spiked, brown roux–thickened tomato sauce and served over white rice. The dish is most commonly made with chicken, although native cooks are likely to employ wild game or even alligator tail. It’s bold, satisfying, and economical, yet sauce piquant isn’t often made outside Louisiana. I think that’s a culinary crime, so I got to work developing a bulletproof recipe to help spread the word. To see how other cooks put this dish together, I gathered and prepared a handful of cookbook recipes, most of them from Louisiana natives. The least impressive versions offered up dry, overcooked chicken suspended in a stodgy, muted tomato gravy. More promising recipes produced either juicy, tender chicken or a bright, full-bodied tomato sauce…

ON THE ROAD Veselka At Veselka, a diner-style restaurant situated in New York City’s East Village, the fare reflects the neighborhood’s deeply rooted Ukrainian community—stuffed cabbage, goulash, and borscht are staples, along with blintzes. Here, the crepes are folded into quarters, dusted with confectioners’ sugar, and eaten with a bright berry compote. When it was founded in 1954, Veselka (the name means “rainbow” in Ukrainian) was simply a newsstand serving takeaway lunches; today, early-lunching old timers and late-night club kids keep the tables crowded 24 hours a day. B&H Dairy Just down the street from Veselka, B&H Dairy is a kosher storefront that seems to be made for skinny people, because I can barely squeeze myself and my appetite through the room to a table that claims to seat four.…

BEEF TENDERLOIN’S MANY virtues are well-known: It looks impressive on the table, is luxuriously tender, and cooks relatively quickly. Plus, with its uniform shape and no bones, it’s a breeze to carve. But it’s an expensive cut, and there’s not much leeway between just right and overcooked. I set out to create a foolproof recipe that takes the anxiety and guesswork out of cooking this showstopping, crowd-pleasing roast. You can buy a whole beef tenderloin either trimmed or untrimmed; untrimmed tenderloins are cheaper per pound, but the fatty side muscle called the chain, any exterior fat, and the silverskin must all be removed before roasting it (see “Six Steps to Prep a Tenderloin”). I started with a 5- to 6-pound trimmed whole beef tenderloin, which provides enough meat to feed…

MY BIGGEST FAN, my mom, called to ask what I was working on in the test kitchen. When I told her “Panettone,” the line went eerily quiet. Then my ever-honest mother responded, “Oh, that dry, boring Italian fruitcake? Good luck with that.” Why such disdain? Panettone is a beautiful sweetened and enriched bread (not a fruitcake) studded with dried and candied fruit or sometimes nuts. Traditionally, bakers let the dough rise for days, and it languidly develops its signature yeasty flavor and light, airy crumb. Rich with egg yolks and butter, fresh loaves of this large, domed bread have served as a favorite holiday gift for centuries in Italy. But as with most breads, fresher is better. Panettone loaves can voyage hundreds or thousands of miles to specialty grocery stores…

IT’S COMFORT FOOD at its very best: a pot of creamy, cheesy rice emerging from the oven studded with emerald-green broccoli florets and topped with golden-brown, juicy chicken. Often baked in a casserole dish, it’s a homey, happy supper. Over the years, condensed soup has been the backbone of this classic casserole combo as a convenient base to flavor and bind the dish. The recipe is a breeze: You just stir the soup together with rice, cheese, and broccoli and perhaps some water; place boneless, skinless chicken breasts on top; and bake until the rice and chicken are done. But the one-note flavor and the saltiness of many condensed soups can overwhelm the dish. My goal was a refreshed one-pot recipe that maintained all the comfort but canned the can.…

7 Blenders 11 Tests • Blend kale and pineapple smoothies • Blend frozen strawberry margaritas • Emulsify mayonnaise • Puree tomato soup • Crush ice • Process chipotle peppers and garlic to check for odor retention and staining • Make almond butter • Wash 10 times by hand or in dishwasher • Measure noise levels on lowest and highest speeds with decibel meter • Measure lowest speed of each blender with tachometer • Weigh and measure each blender’s jar, base, and blade OUR WINNING MID-RANGE and high-end blenders, The Breville Hemisphere Control ($199.95) and the Vitamix 5200 ($449.00), respectively, are capable and durable—and expensive. Could we find a good blender for less than $100.00 for those not wanting to spend more? To find out, we selected seven top sellers priced…

CIOPPINO IS AN Italian American fish stew from San Francisco featuring an abundance of seafood in a garlicky broth of tomatoes, stock, and wine. It’s a treasured dish, a staple in Bay Area restaurants. But on a recent visit to Phil’s Fish Market in Moss Landing, a 90-minute drive away, we were inspired by a slightly sweeter, more herby version that locals and visitors alike line up for (see “Phil’s Fish Story”). Phil DiGirolamo’s cioppino is built on a tomato-based broth, which is traditional. But then DiGirolamo sets his cioppino apart from others: He makes a basil pesto and sautés mussels and clams in that pesto, along with a few other surprising ingredients—Worcestershire sauce, saffron, cinnamon, brown sugar for sweetness, and a healthy dose of Sauternes, a white dessert wine.…

RICOTTA GNOCCHI ARE light, flavorful dumplings that taste even better than they look. Not to be confused with finicky potato gnocchi (which can turn dense and rubbery in even the most careful hands), these luscious clouds are more forgiving, light, and tender; they far surpass any fresh pasta you can buy at the supermarket. I wanted a stress-free, foolproof home recipe that turned out impressive dumplings every time. Traditional recipes call for hand-rolling long ropes of dough on a floured counter and cutting the ropes at 1-inch intervals. It’s a time-honored method, but it’s not infallible: Rolling neat ropes of soft, sticky dough isn’t an easy task, especially on the first try. But how could I achieve the classic shape without the rope-rolling method? After fiddling with fragile ropes, clumsily…

ON THE ROAD AS YOU APPROACH the counter of Hartley’s Original Pork Pies in Somerset, Massachusetts, you notice a faint, rhythmic squeaking coming from deep inside the building. Owner Don Setters tells me he’s caught kids peeking into the kitchen to uncover the source of the noise. I’m curious, too, so he waves me back, conspiratorially. “Usually, no one is allowed to see the kitchen.” The source of the squeaking is a cast-iron pie press forcing dough into miniature steel ramekins that Setters tells me are 100 years old. The candy apple–red machine isn’t alone—the kitchen is full of antiques, including a 1920s-era belt-driven mixer, a meat grinder with an oversize switch, and an old coal-fired oven that now houses the cash drawer. The relics make Setters’ flip phone seem…

MANY UPSCALE VERSIONS of beef Stroganoff call for slices of pricey beef tenderloin. On the other end of the spectrum sits the weeknight version of this recipe, featuring ground beef with canned cream of mushroom soup and served over egg noodles. While the test kitchen has developed great beef Stroganoff recipes that call for tenderloin and steak tips, I was surprised to find that we’ve never tackled the ground beef version. I set out to change that by creating a ground beef version—minus the canned soup—that was inexpensive and came together quickly. Since I was kicking the can to the curb, I’d use fresh mushrooms in my homemade sauce. I began by sautéing thinly sliced button mushrooms (we’ve found that they have plenty of flavor in dishes like this) in…

BOOZY, SWEET, A N D a little mysterious—just what is a rum ball, anyway?—rum balls were originally made (or so the story goes) as a way for Depression-era bakeries to use up their leftover cake and cookie scraps. The bakers would mix their sweet debris with lots of rum and a binder (jam, corn syrup, or honey), roll it into balls, coat the balls with sugar, and sell them as adults-only trifles. These delectable, no-bake confections soon became popular dinner-party treats (typically made with ground cookies) as people realized how easy they were to make. The appeal of rum balls is clear. They are direct delivery systems for two things many of us crave at holiday time: sugar and booze. Wanting to breathe new life into this retro favorite, I…

BUTTERNUT SQUASH IS a versatile underappreciated vegetable; its earthy sweetness is great when it’s cut into cubes and roasted on its own, but it is also adept at taking on a variety of other flavors. I wanted to get out of my personal rut of roasting the squash with just salt, pepper, and oil and see how I could accent its flavor in a new way. The spice cabinet was a natural starting point. I tried a handful of recipes for spice-roasted butternut squash and found a range of approaches, from composed salads featuring delicately spiced cubes to chile-coated wedges to simple preparations that looked a lot like home fries. While all were sprinkled with spices and roasted, some were dressed with vinaigrettes, others were sprinkled with chopped herbs, and…

Texture Tips for Chewy Cookies Three Fats Lead to a Chewy—Not Crumbly—Texture Why do we need three different kinds of fat for these simple sugar cookies? To optimize chewy texture without sacrificing flavor. You’re likely familiar with the two basic types of fats, saturated and unsaturated. Saturated fats (such as butter) are solid at room temperature, while unsaturated fats (such as oil) are liquid at room temperature. When fats bake together, they reorganize themselves chemically. Once cooled, the fats form new crystal structures that ultimately determine the cookie’s texture (chewy, crisp, crumbly, etc.). To create the specific chewy texture we wanted in these cookies, we learned that we needed a combination of saturated and unsaturated fats. That meant including vegetable oil, which doesn’t add any flavor. To compensate for the…

PICTURE YOURSELF AT a holiday party. You’ve got your hands full: a long-stemmed wine glass in one and a tiny plastic plate in the other. You stack one on the other, grab a delicate cracker, and reach for the cheese log, hoping to scoop out a bite. No such luck: Your cracker shatters, and you get no cheese. We’ve all been there. I set out to change this scenario by creating a cheese log that was firm enough to hold its shape but creamy enough to forestall broken crackers. And I wanted it to be easily adaptable into a suite of cheese logs that had surprising flavors and were suitable for any occasion. For a reliable base, I settled on a simple ratio of half semisoft cheese (think cheddar or…

CHEDDAR COMES IN many styles—mild, sharp, extra-sharp, and more. These terms aren’t regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but they usually indicate how long a cheese has been aged. Typically, older cheeses are bolder, which is why we choose extra-sharp cheddar when we want stronger, punchier flavor. Knowing that extra-sharp cheddars are never going to be top-notch melters, we sought a cheese that was fantastic to eat plain but that also held up decently in recipes where melting is required. We selected seven top-selling nationally available cheddars that were either labeled “extra-sharp” or were aged for 12 to 24 months, which most experts agree is typical for extra-sharp cheddars. We tried them plain, in grilled cheese, and in macaroni and cheese. It was no surprise that some of…