Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2018 i Cook's Country

12 Pitters 6 Tests • Elimination round: Pit 10 cherries, timing process and disqualifying models that fail to pit 3 or more cherries or take longer than 1 minute • Wash 5 times: once by hand and 4 times in dishwasher • Pit 1½ pounds cherries, timing process • Pit 10 olives, timing process • Pit additional 8 pounds cherries (top 2 models only) • Pit soft, delicate sour cherries (top 2 models only) YOU CAN PIT cherries by hand, but a cherry-pitting tool can save lots of time, quickly removing pits from fruit so that it can be used for preserves, pies, and more. These gadgets can also be used to pit olives. Models generally come in two styles: single pitters and multipitters, which pit multiple cherries at once.…

MOST TACO SALADS fall into one of two categories: a crisp tortilla bowl filled with spiced ground beef, lettuce, cheese, salsa, and sour cream, or a fresher take with similar fixings heaped over lettuce, drizzled with dressing, and topped with seasoned steak. I don’t turn up my nose at either version, but when I decided to take on this recipe, I had to pick a lane. I put out a vote to Cook’s Country readers, and the responses were almost 2 to 1 in favor of the fresher version with grilled steak. (We’ll save the crispy tortilla bowl for another day.) But even with a narrower focus, I found that recipes for this version were incredibly varied. I made five recipes that covered many of the variables and then enlisted…

CAULIFLOWER IS TOO often served raw on a crudité platter (bland and forgettable) or steamed as a side dish (sulfuric and mushy). But cauliflower deserves better. When carefully roasted in the oven, its lacy florets caramelize, turning buttery, nutty, and slightly sweet in the process. However, on big occasions such as Easter, my oven is spoken for. I wanted a stovetop take. And I didn’t want to have to add a bunch of extra ingredients to make cauliflower special. The first order of business: Break down the head of cauliflower into florets. After removing the outer leaves and trimming the stem flush with the bottom of the head, I found that kitchen shears made quick work of snipping the tight branches of florets away from the core, making it easier…

AT THE PURITAN Backroom Restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire, the owners know what the people want: chicken tenders. In fact, the restaurant, located in the biggest city in a political battleground state, is so popular for its tenders that the Backroom is now considered a must-stop spot for presidential nominees seeking to press some flesh. To see why, a couple of colleagues and I paid the Backroom a visit (see “On the Road”). Frankly, I was worried about making a special trip for chicken tenders, which are so often an underwhelming afterthought for restaurants. It’s as if they assume chicken fingers are just kids’-menu food and refuse to waste their time making them well. This was decidedly not the case at the Puritan Backroom. The tenders we tried were crunchy…

CREAMY CHEESECAKE TOPPED with glistening red strawberries is a popular sweet treat and for good reason: The bright, floral strawberries, with just a hint of acidity, help balance the cheesecake’s richness. Given the components’ natural kinship, I thought turning strawberry cheesecake into handheld bars would be a breeze. I was mistaken. I started with a favorite test kitchen cheesecake crust: graham cracker crumbs mixed with flour and butter to help them stay crisp and dry. I hand-packed the crumb mixture into a 13 by 9-inch baking pan and prebaked it. I then spread a filling of cream cheese, eggs, sugar, and vanilla over the prebaked crust. I knew to keep the oven at a relatively low temperature to ensure that the filling baked evenly. These bars tasted good, but there…

EACH AMERICAN EATS an average of just 1 pound of lamb per year (compared with about 50 pounds of pork). But it wasn’t always this way, as lamb (and mutton) was once an essential component of the American diet; it was readily available, and its robust, sometimes gamy, flavor was considered a positive, not a negative. I’ve been wanting to develop a recipe for rack of lamb for some time. This cut is not only handsome enough to shine as a festive centerpiece but is also easy to cook and, because of its size, doesn’t take long. More important, though, is lamb’s intriguing and wholly satisfying flavor, which adds a celebratory note to the holiday table. To begin my testing, I gathered five recipes for rack of lamb, knowing from…

ONE LEGEND SAYS that if you hang a hot cross bun from your kitchen rafter, it will expel bad spirits. Another promises protection from shipwrecks if you carry a bun on your boat. While these ends sound nice, I wasn’t looking for magical intervention; I just wanted a warm, slightly sweet, dried fruit–studded bun for Easter or any time. The trick with hot cross buns, as with so many breads, is achieving the right structure. The light, airy buns are richer than most breads but not buttery like a brioche. And the lean icing cross often found on top of the buns whets my sweet tooth, but only just. I used a stand mixer to knead together a basic dough from the usual suspects—flour, water, yeast, sugar, and salt. I…

I’VE NEVER THOUGHT twice about investing the amounts of time and effort it takes to cook up a big Italian meal—long-simmered sauce, homemade pasta, antipasti, the works. But adding homemade breadsticks to the mix has somehow always seemed a bridge too far. Recently, however, a coworker mentioned that she sometimes makes breadsticks from store-bought pizza dough and that they’re really good—warm, pleasantly chewy, and easy to customize with different flavors. Mind blown. I set out to develop an easy recipe for homemade breadsticks. For my initial test, I ordered some supermarket pizza dough, divided it into 12 pieces, rolled each piece into a rope, and baked. The good: The ropes emerged golden brown. The bad: They shrunk dramatically, becoming small, compact sticks that didn’t taste like much. Fixing the shrinking…

WE LIKE OUR meatloaf here in the test kitchen and have a wealth of recipes to prove it. But after a big meatloaf dinner and a few days of leftovers, even meatloaf lovers can find it hard to polish off the last few portions. I set out to make a meaty, flavor-packed loaf that served two hungry diners with few or no leftovers. The first decision when making meatloaf is always which meat(s) to use; we have recipes that call for beef, pork, veal, turkey, and many combinations thereof. While most markets sell a combination of ground beef, pork, and veal labeled “meatloaf mix,” it’s inconsistent from store to store. Instead, I opted for the straightforward convenience of 90 percent lean ground beef. To increase its savory complexity, I added…

AMERICANS GO NUTS for peanut butter—not just spread on PB&Js but also baked into cookies, pies, and cakes; swirled into brownies and frostings; and even stirred into soups and sauces. There are a ton of options: creamy and crunchy styles, of course, but also flavored, organic, “no-stir,” and “natural” peanut butters. The last category has expanded significantly, with major brands, including Skippy and Jif, offering natural options, too. For this tasting, we focused on creamy peanut butter; it’s more popular than crunchy peanut butter, and it’s the type we use most often in recipes. We tried nine top-selling creamy peanut butters—three traditional and six natural, priced from $2.69 to $6.01 per jar—plain, in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and in peanut butter cookies. At its most basic, peanut butter is…

YOU’RE LIKELY FAMILIAR with the deeply comforting flavors of the one-pot Latin American dish arroz con pollo (rice with chicken)—perhaps you’re even among the many fans of our Cook’s Country version. But you may not know that, especially in Cuban and Puerto Rican cuisines (both on those islands and in places such as Florida, where those cultures thrive), there is a similar comfort-food dish—arroz con puerco—that is made with pork. I set out to master this ultrasavory porcine version. The existing recipes I found called for browning the pork (either chunks of well-marbled shoulder or cubes of lean tenderloin) in a Dutch oven; adding onion, bell pepper, and seasonings (collectively known as a sofrito in Latin cooking); stirring in rice and liquid; and covering and cooking until the rice is…

ONIONS ARE OFTEN relegated to a supporting role helping other ingredients shine. But down in Georgia, cooks have made a local onion the leading lady in a creamy party appetizer: Vidalia onion dip. The specific area of Georgia where Vidalia onions are grown has soil and weather ideal for raising an onion so mild that it can be eaten raw, like an apple. In years past, it was tough to find these onions outside Georgia, but today markets across the country carry them. To develop my own recipe for Vidalia onion dip, I chose five existing recipes to try. Some called for caramelizing the onions first to bolster flavor. These dips were good, but our favorite recipes took a simpler approach. The basic formula: Mix Swiss or cheddar cheese with…

“CAN YOU BRING me 3 quarts of seawater?” This is one of the top five strangest texts I’ve ever sent (don’t ask about the other four). But I needed the seawater, and my coworker was at the seashore. It was for the sake of research. Stick with me. In the United States, salt-crusted potatoes first became famous in Syracuse, New York, where creamy new potatoes coated in a crystallized sheath of salt were a cheap snack for thirsty barflies, many of whom worked in the local salt-producing industry. But as I dug into the history behind this treat, I learned that Syracuse was late to the game. Cooks from Colombia to the Canary Islands have been boiling fresh waxy potatoes in seawater since at least the early 17th century. The…

CLASSIC QUICHE LORRAINE Serves 8 To prevent the crust from sagging during prebaking, make sure the protruding crimped edge overhangs the edge of the pie plate slightly. Also, use plenty of pie weights (3 to 4 cups). The quiche can be served warm or at room temperature. The test kitchen’s favorite supermarket bacons are Farmland Thick Sliced Bacon and Plumrose Premium Thick Sliced Bacon. CRUST ¼ cup ice water4 teaspoons sour cream1¼ cups (6¼ ounces) all-purpose flour1½ teaspoons sugar½ teaspoon salt8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into ¼-inch pieces and frozen for 15 minutes FILLING 6 slices bacon, cut crosswiseinto ¼-inch pieces1 onion, chopped fine1¼ cups heavy cream1 tablespoon cornstarch5 large eggs¼ teaspoon salt¼ teaspoon pepper4 ounces Gruyere cheese, shredded (1 cup) 1. FOR THE CRUST: Combine ice water and sour…

Quick Crumb Cleanup Sally Payton, Corvallis, Ore. I keep a tablecloth on my dining room table, but I hate to have to throw it in the washing machine when there are only crumbs on it. For quick crumb cleanup, I found that a few swipes of a lint roller work wonders. A Fishy Solution Pam Kentley, Salem, Mass. I recently made a recipe that called for a single anchovy fillet. After opening a new tin, I didn’t know how to store the rest (I wanted to get them out of the tin, which is impossible to reseal once opened). To avoid stinking up a plastic storage container, I put the anchovies and their oil in an empty and clean glass spice jar with a screw-top lid. The jar is the…

A BOOGALOO WONDERLAND sandwich bears a passing resemblance to the classic Sloppy Joe, but that comparison doesn’t really do it justice. It’s bigger and bolder, spicier and tangier. It’s just as simple to make, but if you ask me, this Detroit original, little known outside the city, has more punch, personality, and oomph. And no one can deny that it has a much, much cooler name. The Boogaloo’s base ingredients aren’t surprising; they include ground beef, melted American cheese, and sautéed onions on a sub roll. But what ties this sandwich together (and sets it apart) is its bold, brassy sauce, a glazy mix of sweet and savory flavors that soaks into the bread and makes the Boogaloo a beautiful mess to eat. Unfortunately, the original sauce recipe is top…

WHEN ASPARAGUS SEASON hits, it hits hard. I never tire of this ubiquitous-in-spring vegetable, but I am always looking for new ways to prepare it. When I tried an order of breaded and fried asparagus—crunchy on the outside, tender within—at a restaurant recently, I knew I wanted to create my own recipe. My first step was to sort through the breading options. After several tests, I landed on a classic three-step process: dipping the spears in flour, then beaten eggs, and finally bread crumbs. We tested store-bought crumbs (both regular and crunchier panko) alongside fresh crumbs made by grinding bread in a food processor; the fresh crumbs won for their clean flavor and softer texture when fried. Adding a little flour to the crumbs while processing them made the coating…

CUMIN ADDS DEPTH and warmth to dishes from Mexican, Latin, Middle Eastern, Caribbean, and Asian cuisines—all favorites in the United States. In the test kitchen, we use ground cumin in everything from spice rubs for meats and seafood to chili, tacos, and pasta dishes. To find out whether it matters which ground cumin you cook with, we rounded up five widely available products and tasted them raw in a carrot and chickpea salad, bloomed in olive oil and tossed with white rice, and in a rub for pan-seared chicken breasts. While all the products tasted similar in the salad, their differences became much more pronounced when we cooked with them. We weren’t surprised that their flavors became bolder—this is typical of blooming, or heating spices in fat. However, heat exaggerates…

VANILLA PUDDING IS the gray flannel suit of the dessert world: clean, classic, and, if not flashy, elegant and confident in its simplicity. I wanted to create a recipe so enticing—easy and delicious—that always having a batch in the refrigerator would be mandatory. Most of the existing recipes I experimented with followed a simple method: Heat milk, half-and-half, or cream with sugar in a saucepan. Add cornstarch or flour and (sometimes) egg yolks. Simmer the mixture to thicken it before straining and chilling. A few recipes called for cooking a vanilla bean with the dairy to infuse it with flavor, but most instructed the cook to stir in vanilla extract at the end. I made five different recipes and, to cover all my bases, even whisked up a box of…

1. Prep Fried foods often have coatings, and in most cases, letting the coated food rest before frying helps the coating stick. A wire rack set in a rimmed baking sheet elevates the food so the bottom coating doesn’t stick to the sheet. Our favorites are the Nordic Ware Baker’s Half Sheet ($14.97) and the Libertyware Half Size Sheet Pan Cooling Rack ($15.99 for a set of two). 2. Fry To avoid splashing, carefully add food to the oil using tongs, a spider skimmer, or a slotted spoon. To keep coated foods from sticking together, hold each piece in the oil for a few seconds to let the coating set before releasing. When frying uncoated foods, pat them dry before adding them to the oil to minimize splatter. Follow recipe…

CRISP, REFRESHING SUGAR snap peas are one of spring’s sweetest pleasures, particularly if you’re fortunate enough to have them growing in a vegetable garden out back. And while these crunchy lovelies are delicious on their own, they’re even more fetching in a simple, refreshing salad. So I set out to create one. I wanted my salad to have a variety of fresh seasonal flavors all in balance with one another, with the sugar snap peas at the fore. And I wanted it to be easy enough for a last-minute snack but beautiful enough for a holiday dinner. After trying recipes with both blanched and raw snap peas, I decided that the peas were tastiest, crispest, and prettiest when left raw and simply sliced diagonally. I looked around the garden and…

CHICKEN TIKKA MASALA, the dish of yogurt-and-spice-marinated chicken chunks in a sweet, mildly spiced, creamy tomato curry, is wildly popular in Indian restaurants in America and abroad. The traditional method involves skewering and searing the chicken in a live-fire tandoor oven; most recipes for homemade tikka masala (including ours) call for cooking the chicken under the broiler. I wondered if I could forgo both the tandoor and the broiler and find tikka masala success in the slow cooker. For my first test, I marinated chicken breasts in plain yogurt with salt and pepper. Then I stirred the sauce ingredients—crushed tomatoes, chopped onion, garlic, ginger, garam masala (a common Indian spice blend), minced serrano chile, a little sugar, and cream—into the cooker, dropped the seasoned raw chicken on top, covered it,…

PART OF THE appeal of rich, hearty, long-cooked winter braises is that they’re made in just one pot. But with the slow turn from winter to spring comes a gradual change in how most of us want to eat; our cravings for substantial braises lessen as we yearn for brighter, vegetable-laden dishes. I set out to create a quicker-cooking, vegetable-packed one-pot braise that would add complexity and interest to fresher, lighter ingredients. To start, I used a favorite test kitchen recipe for Braised Spring Vegetables— radishes, asparagus, and peas. Braised radishes might sound surprising, but the gentle cooking removes their sharp, sulfurous edge and turns them tender and sweet. The whole dish is infused with the bright, expressive flavors of garlic, orange zest, and lemon zest, and it really does…

5 Multicookers 12 Tests • Pressure-Cooked Beef Stew • Slow-Cooked Beef Stew • Pressure-Cooked Braised Chicken Breasts with Tomato and Capers • Slow-Cooked Braised Chicken Breasts with Tomato and Capers • Pressure-Cooked Baked Beans • Slow-Cooked Baked Beans • White rice • Brown rice • Track the temperature of water under low and high pressure • Track the temperature of water while slow-cooking on low and high AMERICAN COOKS ARE downright fanatical about Instant Pot, a brand of multipurpose electric pressure cookers. There are countless blogs dedicated to these appliances. They sell like hotcakes online. People love them. But when we tested the Instant Pot and other multicookers last year, we weren’t impressed. While these machines promise to replace a pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, and more, we found…

Associate Editor BOILED PEANUTS Makes about 16 cups If you’re using fresh green peanuts, which are available in late summer and early fall, reduce the cooking time to about 2 hours. 2 pounds raw, shell-on peanuts2 gallons water1 cup salt Combine peanuts, water, and salt in 12-quart stockpot. Bring to boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer until peanuts are tender, about 6 hours, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and let peanuts cool completely in water, about 2 hours. Strain and serve. 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…

TO MAKE THIS CAKE, YOU WILL NEED: 1½ pounds rhubarb, trimmed1 cup (7 ounces) granulated sugar1 recipe yellow layer cake batter*1 pound (4 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 32 pieces and softened½ teaspoon salt4 cups (1 pound) confectioners’ sugar FOR THE CAKE: Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease three 8-inch round cake pans, line with parchment paper, and grease parchment. Using vegetable peeler, peel 1 ribbon from each side of each rhubarb stalk. Toss ribbons and ¼ cup granulated sugar together in bowl. Slice remaining peeled rhubarb thin (you should have 4 cups) and toss with ¼ cup granulated sugar in second bowl. Arrange half of rhubarb ribbons in 1 prepared pan in neat single layer to cover entire pan bottom, cutting edges…