Innholdsfortegnelse for October - November 2015 i Cook's Country

Make-Ahead Mashed Potatoes Can I make mashed potatoes ahead of time, freeze them, and then defrost and reheat them right before a big dinner? Selma Clark, Detroit, Mich. In order to find the answer to your question, we made five batches of our Creamy Mashed Potatoes (find the recipe at CooksCountry.com/creamymashedpotatoes), which are made with Yukon Gold potatoes, butter, heavy cream, and salt. We froze them and tried reheating them in a water bath, on the stovetop, and in the microwave at different power levels. The most consistently successful technique was to freeze the mashed potatoes, covered with plastic wrap, in a microwave-safe bowl. When you’re ready to reheat them, remove the plastic, cover the bowl with an overturned plate, and microwave the potatoes at 50 percent power, stirring occasionally.…

WHAT’S NOT TO love about meatballs? They are staples in cuisines around the world. And the variations—meats, seasonings, binders—are endless. During a recent perusal of Italian cookbooks, I was reminded of an old trick for extra-tender meatballs: adding ricotta cheese. Most meatball recipes include a mixture of milk and bread. Called a panade, this combination adds moisture to the mix and helps the meatballs stay tender. So why not ricotta cheese instead of milk? And why not all pork instead of a mix of meats? The combination of sweet, mild ground pork and fluffy, creamy ricotta suggested a meatball delicate in flavor and texture. I couldn’t wait to give it a try. I quickly discovered a wealth of existing recipes to use for inspiration. I gathered a handful of these…

WITH ITS SATISFYING flavors and hearty, stick-to-your-ribs feel, chicken-corn soup is typical of Pennsylvania Dutch recipes. The soup is traditionally made by simmering a whole chicken for hours to create a rich broth in which to showcase the sweet, tender bite of local corn kernels. But what really makes it special are its tiny rivels, a cross between dumplings and German spaetzle, which add an unexpected chewy component. As a girl, I spent many a Saturday afternoon watching my grandmother make this soup in her central Pennsylvania home. I wanted to capture all the slowcooked flavor and texture I remembered without devoting an entire day to the process. Re-creating the soup with an eye toward efficiency meant starting with chicken parts instead of a whole bird. I decided to go…

SHRIMP CREOLE, ONCE an elegant New Orleans dish of sweet-savory shrimp poached in a tomato-based sauce, has evolved over the years into an unbridled spice cabinet raid. Recipes call for a dozen or more different dried herbs and spices to achieve an “authentic” Creole flavor. Why? Does this dish have to be a riot of flavor? Isn’t there room for subtlety? A thorough search of our vintage cookbook library gave me hope. While some of the old recipes I found were too bare-bones, and others plain reckless (including a 1959 gem that had me boiling shrimp for 90 minutes), I found some that promised what I wanted: a complex but refined sauce that would highlight the tender, savory shrimp without an epic ingredient list. A middle ground. Following New Orleans…

Baking Soda ACID REQUIRED Sodium bicarbonate—baking soda— produces carbon dioxide when activated with moist, acidic ingredients like buttermilk, lemon juice, or sour cream. This gas physically causes batters to rise, and the heat of the oven sets the risen batter. Use too little and you don’t get enough lift; use too much and the bubbles will burst, leaving your baked goods flat. Baking soda also makes doughs more alkaline, which encourages browning. Instant Yeast RAPID RISER Also known as rapid-rise yeast, instant yeast is dehydrated to the same concentration as active dry, but by a gentler, less-damaging method. As a result, rapidrise yeast can be mixed directly into other ingredients, and you can use less without a reduction in leavening. We prefer rapid-rise yeast in the test kitchen for its…

ORDINARY WHITE SANDWICH bread gets its yearly brush with greatness in holiday dressing, coming to life when toasted and tossed with a savory mix of melted butter, onion, celery, and herbs. But what if we ditched the white bread in favor of complex, tangy sourdough? I wasn’t surprised to find several recipes for sourdough dressing in cookbooks from sourdough’s home turf, California. What was unexpected, though, was their use of extra-flavorful vegetables like turnips and kale, presumably to stand up to the sourdough. I was inspired. The usual process for dressing is to first dry out cubed bread in the oven so the cubes can soak up the liquid. Next, you sauté onion and garlic with herbs and butter on the stovetop. Finally, you combine it all with a binder—broth,…

IN MY HOUSE, biscuits are usually for the weekends—when I have time to carefully mix, knead, roll, and stamp them out. But drop biscuits, which are as easy as stirring together the ingredients and portioning them on the baking sheet, come together so quickly that they are a staple on weeknights and perfect for holidays when there’s so much more to concentrate on. But as easy as they are to make, they still deliver homemade flavor, something unattainable in every store-bought biscuit I’ve ever tried. Our dependable buttermilk drop biscuit recipe produces tender, tasty biscuits and uses the cool trick of stirring together cold buttermilk and melted (and cooled) butter until the butter clumps. These clumps of butter create steam during baking, and that steam helps make the biscuits light…

MILD-FLAVORED, LEAN PORK tenderloin makes a great weeknight meal because it is relatively inexpensive, cooks quickly, and takes well to a wide variety of flavors. I set out to make an easy-butflavorful dinner of two pork tenderloins and a few vegetables on a single baking sheet—easy cooking, easy cleanup. To start my testing, I looked for two vegetables that would cook at a similar rate to the pork. Since pork tenderloins can reach their optimal temperature of 140 degrees in as little as 20 minutes at 450 degrees, most root vegetables, which take much longer to cook, were out. Thin fingerling potatoes (halved lengthwise), however, worked well, cooking through in the same time it took to cook the pork. Now I needed a green vegetable to complete the meal. Green…

THERE YOU ARE at the head of the table, with family and friends arrayed expectantly on either side. You’ve got a carving fork in one hand and a chef’s knife in the other. It doesn’t end well: Before long, the rosy roast is reduced to a pitiful pile of slabs and shaggy slivers. If you’re spending time and money on a special meal, it’s worth getting the right tool to serve it. Unlike shorter chef’s knives and pointed, flexible carving knives, slicing knives are long and straight for smooth, even slicing. They have rounded tips so as to be less threatening for tableside serving. For years, when we wanted perfect slices, we turned to a nearly $55 12-inch slicing knife from Victorinox. To see if it’s still the best, we…

SMART TRICK More Juice Scott Sullivan, Charlestown, Mass. I have one of those hinged lime juicers—the kind where you open it, put in a halved lime, and squeeze it closed—that is a staple of my home bar. I’ve found I get more juice out of each fruit if I quarter, not halve, the limes. This trick is a lifesaver when I’m making margaritas for a crowd. DOUBLE DUTY Chimney Starter Hack Larry Webster, Plano, Texas A few weeks ago I was helping my friend break in his new charcoal grill—turns out he forgot to buy a chimney starter. I spotted one of those big rectangular olive oil cans in his recycling bin and cut out the top and bottom panels of the tin. I made a few vent holes on…

SPINACH SALAD IS an appealing idea: a deep green, fresh-tasting toss. But often the dressing is too aggressive, overwhelming the delicate, fresh flavor of the spinach—or too wimpy, leaving you with nothing but a mouthful of spinach. I was determined to create a balanced, vibrant salad suitable for the holiday table. Walnuts, blue cheese, and pears were the ingredients I set out, hoping that they’d elevate these humble baby leaves (which we prefer to less-tender curly leaves) into a holiday-worthy dish. The first two ingredients needed very little help: Lightly toasting the walnuts would bring out their flavor, and a nice wedge of Gorgonzola would add creaminess, savoriness, and tang. So I turned my focus to the pears. If your pears aren’t quite ripe, they’ll be mealy. If they are…

I’M SOMEWHAT OF a pound cake purist: no tangerine rind, maplebourbon glaze, or butterscotch in my pound cake, please. To me, the beauty of pound cake is in its simplicity: a velvety, tender, fine crumb and straightforward vanilla flavor. But I recently enjoyed a slice of cranberry– sour cream pound cake at my local coffee shop; it was good enough to get me rethinking my purist bias. While the cake was a little gummy and too sour, the bright combination had great potential. I set out to develop a recipe for cranberry–sour cream pound cake that had the cake’s signature tight and sturdy crumb, sported a crisp and golden top crust, and was enriched—but not overwhelmed—with sour cream and tart cranberries. I combed through baking books in the test kitchen’s…

VISIT THE ITALIAN neighborhood known as “The Hill” in St. Louis, Missouri, and you’ll find steak modiga on many restaurant menus. What is it? A steak (usually strip or filet mignon) that’s piled with seasoned bread crumbs and grilled or broiled until juicy inside and crunchy on top. It’s served with a buttery, white wine–and-mushroom sauce enriched with a local specialty: salty, smoky Provel cheese. I searched regional cookbooks and found a handful of recipes for this unusual steak treatment, all of which were grilled outdoors, and decided to give them a try. The results were disappointing. In almost every version, most of the breading either stuck to the grate or fell off and burned in the fire, and the sauces were too thin and oily. I wanted breading that…

CANDIED SWEET POTATOES are a classic holiday side dish, but too often they border on dessert territory, clobbering you with sweetness (hello, marshmallows) and totally shortchanging the sweet potato’s deep, earthy flavor. I set out to reclaim the pure flavors in this dish with a simple, balanced take in which the “candy” would provide a sweetly delicate counterpoint to the stalwart sweet potatoes. I started with a handful of recipes found in our cookbook library, many of which called for baking or boiling whole sweet potatoes before slicing and glazing them—and then baking them again. And for all the work involved, too many of these recipes yielded mushy sweet potatoes cloaked in sticky, tooth-rattling syrups. Where was the subtle flavor of the potatoes themselves? But these initial tests did make…

Pick Two Kinds of Apples For a perfectly balanced apple pie filling, choose one variety from each group. Add Acid A tablespoon of lemon juice (added after the apples cook) adds a sharp, bright note to contrast and balance the sweetness of the sugar and fruit. Don’t Make This Mistake Using raw apples may seem like less work, but you risk a soupy pie with a giant air pocket between the top crust and the fruit. That’s because apples shrink as they cook, oozing liquid. By cooking the apples before we put them in the pie, we can pack in more apples, control the amount of juice in the mix, and eliminate the crust gap. But don’t rush the cooking or crank up the heat: The apples must be cooked…

THIS TRADITIONAL FRENCH recipe consists of bone-in chicken pieces and garlic cloves braised in broth until tender. It’s typically served with crusty bread, which is the perfect thing to smear with softened garlic cloves and use to mop up the sauce. The garlic in this dish mellows and turns sweet with the long cooking—surprisingly, it’s not an excessively garlicky dish. I did find some slow-cooker recipes for this dish in our cookbook library, but come tasting time, none of them turned out to be very good. The most glaring problem was garlic cloves that kept too much of their dragon-like bite. The next concern was that the sauces tasted wan and washed out; they were also either sludgy and too thick, or too brothy and thin. I knew I could…

NOTHING BEATS THE savory saltiness of real Parmigiano-Reggiano, the nameprotected aged cheese made in Parma, Italy, according to strict traditional standards. Cheese made in the same style anywhere else or by less exacting standards is just called “Parmesan.” The distinction can bring a drop in flavor but also a big drop in cost: Parmigiano-Reggiano often costs twice as much as domestic Parmesan. We’ve recommended a number of domestic Parmesan wedges in the past, but when we polled our readers we learned that more than half use preshredded or grated Parmesan for topping weeknight pasta dinners or in cheeseheavy dishes like polenta or risotto. As Parm purists, we were skeptical—but if there was a good shortcut out there, we wanted to know about it. So we gathered seven nationally available preshredded…

ARE YOU REALLY putting butter on a burger?” Questions like this came at me every time I made a batch of Wisconsin butter burgers in the test kitchen. But the minute the skeptics tried a bite, they were persuaded that the folks over at Solly’s Grille in Glendale (a suburb of Milwaukee) were doing something right. Since 1936, when Kenneth “Solly” Salmon opened the joint, they’ve been serving these burgers at all three meals every day—yep, some patrons even eat these for breakfast (see “On the Road”). The small restaurant consists of two yellow U-shaped counters, an open kitchen, and most important, a wellseasoned flattop grill. Grab a stool and watch the cooks pull the well-done, crispy-edged burgers from the griddle; stack them onto bun bottoms; and top each with…

RESIDENTS OF SAN Antonio, Texas, have strong feelings about puffy tacos—deep-fried, light, crisp, emphatically cornflavored shells that encase savory meat fillings. They’re a regional take on tacos that deserves a spot on menus, and in home kitchens, everywhere. Many San Antonio fans of the dish cite Diana Barrios-Trevino’s restaurant, Los Barrios, as having the best in the city. So when our executive food editor, Bryan Roof, was in San Antonio last year, he visited Barrios-Trevino to see her technique firsthand. As you might expect, Barrios-Trevino starts with fresh masa de maíz, finely ground hominy, to create a moist masa dough. She uses a tortilla press to stamp portions of masa dough into 6-inch tortillas and then drops them one at a time into the deep-fryer. The tortillas puff up with…

TALK ABOUT AN appealing supper: chicken, infused with sharp mustard flavor and baked in a crunchy crust. Who wouldn’t love that? Well, me, at least not after pulling what felt like the millionth sheet of chicken parts out of the oven and digging in only to find them completely lacking in mustard flavor, with breading sliding off like sand down a dune. But I knew there had to be a way. After all, I’d researched thoroughly and found dozens of existing recipes for baked mustard chicken, many of which seemed straightforward and simple: Dunk chicken in mustard, press on some bread crumbs, and bake until done. But while some held promise, none produced the deep mustard flavor and perfectly crunchy crust that I wanted. I realized that to achieve my…

CHOCOLATE AND CHERRIES are a common pairing—think Black Forest cake or chocolate-covered cherries. The richness of chocolate is a perfect match for the sweet-tart fruitiness of cherries. I wanted to find the best way to add bright cherry flavor to chewy chocolate brownies. To start, I baked six existing recipes for chocolate-cherry brownies. As my colleagues and I tasted them, it became apparent that incorporating the cherries without ruining the texture of the brownies was going to be my biggest challenge. A few of the recipes called for simply spooning cherry pie filling or cherry preserves on top of brownies: It was easy, sure, but way too sweet. Recipes that used chopped fresh or frozen cherries were too wet, and the pieces of fruit were gummy inside the brownies. Those…

HERE IN THE test kitchen, we’ve cooked turkey in dozens of ways: We’ve brined, glazed, smoked, spatchcocked, and even fired up the deep-fryer. And we’ve cooked some marvelous turkeys. But this year, we wanted a recipe that many home cooks, particularly those who cook turkey just once a year, might find helpful during the busy holiday season. Besides juicy, flavorful meat and crisp skin, we also wanted ease, with a side of speed. In a perfect world, all you’d do is tie on an apron, slide a whole turkey into the oven, and a couple of hours (and a glass of sherry) later, pull out a beautiful, golden-brown, Norman Rockwell–esque centerpiece. And since it’d be done so quickly, you’d set it aside to rest—a necessary step for juicy meat—and fill…

ASK A BRUSSELS sprouts–hater why sprouts are so bad and you’ll hear some colorful language: “Slimy, stinky, and sulfurous,” they’ll say, and that’s just the complaints beginning with s. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with Brussels sprouts themselves; it’s just the way they’ve been cooked over the years. I wanted to develop a recipe that would convert even the most ardent anti-sprouter—not by covering up their flavor but by casting them in a new light. My plan: a gratin. After cooking a half-dozen Brussels sprout gratins from existing recipes, I knew I had my work cut out for me. None was great, but each had something going for it: One had sprouts that held their shape, one had a nicely balanced cream sauce, and one had a successfully crunchy topping.…

CHICKEN TETRAZZINI IS named for Luisa Tetrazzini, a celebrated Italian opera star. When critics questioned her fading talents during a United States tour in the early 1900s, she proclaimed, “I am old, I am fat, but I am still Tetrazzini.” We wanted the same captivating but defiant grandeur, even in a simple weeknight dish for two. Over the years, this cheesy, comforting suppertime casserole has deteriorated from an elegant dish of torn roasted chicken, broken strands of spaghetti, and flavorful shreds of cheese built on a velvety, sherry-spiked cream sauce into a sloppy mash-up of leftover poultry and canned cream of mushroom soup—an afterthought dish that mostly serves as a fridge clean-out supper. Filling, yes, but without much personality. Luisa deserves better, so I set out to revitalize this dish…

WHEN MY COLLEAGUES and chef friends are making themselves breakfast, more often than not they are making scrambled eggs with a bunch of, well, stuff in them. And why not? Breakfast scrambles are less fussy than omelets (no fancy folding or rolling to potentially botch), and they happily serve as a blank canvas for just about anything you have around: leftover vegetables, herbs, cheeses, leftover meats, and so on. I set out to come up with a basic method and five hearty, great-tasting versions of breakfast scrambles. First off, because we’re adding other flavorful ingredients, there is no need to add milk, cream, half-and-half, extra egg yolks, or any other fatty, rich ingredient to the beaten eggs. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a correct way to make a breakfast…

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; 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/magazines/home (or write to Heirloom Recipes, Cook’s Country, P.O. Box 470739, Brookline, MA 02447); click on Heirloom Recipes 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. BOURBON BALLS Makes about 24 balls Kent Burnet of Phoenix, Ariz., writes: “My parents always served these at holiday parties when I was a kid in Asheville, North Carolina.…