Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2020 i Cook's Country

–Devon Starhill, Plano, Texas Around my house, bacon is a pantry staple, and I like to have it at the ready at all times. So when I get it from the store, I’ll buy 2 pounds—1 pound to cook into strips for BLTs or breakfast and 1 pound to cut up into roughly ½-inch pieces and freeze (I freeze it on a plate first so that it doesn’t stick together, and then I transfer it to a zipper-lock bag). Then I have cut-up bacon ready to cook straight from the freezer for salads, pastas, baked potatoes, etc. It’s easier than trying to peel off a couple of strips from the frozen mass and cutting them up every time I need just a little bit.…

SUCCOTASH, A SAVORY medley of sweet corn, beans, and zucchini or summer squash, should taste clean and fresh. But all too often it is underseasoned, overloaded with dairy, or muddy—not good. When seasonal produce is at its best, it should shine. To begin my testing, I made five recipes for succotash that either omitted or restrained the cream and butter. Most tasted like lackluster sautéed mixed vegetables. Our favorite tasted the freshest and featured raw corn, butter beans, zucchini, and tomatoes tossed in a vinegar-based dressing. Inspired by this, I auditioned a variety of dressings and landed on an ultrasimple, refreshing white wine vinaigrette. I found that if I let the zucchini and tomatoes soak in this dressing for a few minutes before I added the rest of the ingredients,…

IN JAPANESE, TERIYAKI roughly translates as “shiny grilled” and describes a cooking style in which meats are marinated in a thin but potent mixture of soy sauce, sugar, and mirin (a sweet Japanese wine) or sometimes sake and then quickly grilled or broiled. The sugar and sweet wine reduce and caramelize to produce the dish’s signature luster and complex flavor. Chef Toshi Kasahara employs this traditional method for his chicken teriyaki at his restaurant outside of Seattle, Washington (see “The Titan of Teriyaki”). It’s a simple but sophisticated dish, with its success lying in the quality of a few ingredients and the nuanced balance between them. When developing my own take, I knew I’d use the hot fire of a grill and choose boneless, skinless chicken thighs so that they’d…

THERE IS NO more iconic summertime treat than a s’more—toasty marshmallow and snappy-soft milk chocolate sandwiched between graham cracker squares—enjoyed around a campfire. I wanted to translate the best parts of a s’more into a portable bar cookie that could be made anytime. I knew I’d need a crunchy graham cracker base that was thick enough to support a heavy filling. I started with a recipe for a shortbread-like cookie, swapping out two-thirds of the flour for graham cracker crumbs (made in the food processor). I added sugar and salt and cut in cold butter to ensure a tender yet sturdy cookie. I pressed the dough into an 8-inch square baking pan and baked it until it was browned. The cookie texture was just right, but the flavor was a…

IN THE 1940s, the Campbell Soup Company introduced Americans to chicken noodle casserole. The recipe, printed on the back of cream of mushroom soup cans, called for the condensed soup plus milk, precooked chicken and egg noodles, and some canned or frozen vegetables to be stirred together and baked, maybe with some crackers crushed over the top. I wanted a homemade version totally from scratch that was still easy and that was scaled down to make a cozy dinner for two. To emulate the base flavors of mushroom soup, I began by cooking sliced mushrooms and chopped shallots. Once they started to brown, I turned to the chicken. Rotisserie chicken worked fine, but it tends to be overcooked and dry; in a side-by-side test, my tasters preferred the juicier chicken…

AMERICANS SPENT MORE than $1 billion on pickles last year, according to data from IRI, a Chicago-based market research firm. We set out to find the best whole dill pickles to enjoy alongside a meal or as a snack. We rounded up eight top-selling, nationally available products and sampled them plain—served chilled at a blind tasting—rating their flavor and texture. Our lineup included a mix of styles. Seven products were vinegar pickles. Of those, four were shelf-stable and three were refrigerated. We also included one lacto-fermented pickle (cucumber immersed in a salt brine and allowed to ferment for days or weeks). When we reviewed dill pickle spears, all the shelf-stable products were soft and soggy, while the refrigerated pickles were crisp and crunchy. That’s because the heat applied to shelf-stable…

Can I use unseasoned rice vinegar in a recipe that calls for seasoned rice vinegar? –Morgan Affleck, Arvada, Colo. Rice vinegar is made from steamed rice. Also called rice wine vinegar (not to be confused with rice wine), it has a mild acidity and gentle sweetness. It is available both seasoned and unseasoned. Because the seasoned version contains added salt and sugar, we usually call for the unseasoned kind so that we can control the seasoning in a dish. That said, through testing we came up with a way to add “seasoning” to convert plain rice vinegar into a facsimile of the seasoned version. HOMEMADE SEASONED RICE VINEGAR Makes ½ cup Table salt dissolves most readily here, but if all you have is kosher salt, increase the amount to 2…

DUE TO THE demand driven by diverse culinary restrictions, chickpeas, lentils, and dried beans have been popping up in everything from chips and burgers to bread crumbs. Another food category they’ve entered? Pasta. To find out if gluten-free legume pasta was worth the hype, we tasted eight nationally available products, including two chickpea pastas, four lentil pastas, one mung bean pasta, and one pasta made with both chickpeas and lentils. The pastas were available in an assortment of shapes, but for the sakeof consistency, we settled on widely available rotini or spiral shapes. We tasted the pastas plain; with our Quick Tomato Sauce; and in our recipe for Pasta with Pesto, Potatoes, and Green Beans. We can fully recommend three of the products in our lineup, but Modern Table Rotini,…

COME SUMMER, I crave lighter, fresher, grain-and-vegetable-based dishes such as tabbouleh, a salad from the eastern Mediterranean that’s become a refrigerated supermarket staple in the United States. Tabbouleh is usually made from lightly steamed (or soaked) bulgur (though other grains are often substituted), lots of parsley, and a mix of aromatics including onion and garlic. A simple dressing of extra-virgin olive oil and fresh lemon juice keeps it light, flavorful, and uncomplicated. The dish is bright and refreshing but substantial enough to satisfy. When researching and testing existing tabbouleh recipes, I found wide variance in ingredients, seasonings, and proportions. Through experimentation and some thoughtful debate and discussion among my colleagues, I decided to follow the couscous trail. The tiny balls of pasta cook quickly, which fits my weeknight schedule. To…

MY CURRENT FAVORITE side dish is the roasted Greek potatoes served at a restaurant near my apartment. The spuds arrive at the table doused in enough olive oil and lemon juice to give them a balanced mix of brightness and richness. I wanted to create my own recipe so that I could make this spunky dish at home. So I read up on Greek potatoes and made half a dozen existing recipes. The two basic camps were those that called for boiling the potatoes and those that went the roasting route. My tasters had a strong preference for the roasted version; they loved the contrasting textures of the creamy insides and the crisp, roasted edges. So I halved 2 pounds of small Yukon Gold potatoes (a favorite variety for their…

THEY MAY NOT be the image you conjure when you think of cinnamon rolls, but the rolls served at Stroud’s Oak Ridge Manor (see “Kansas City’s Sweet Surprise”) use a similar buttery cinnamon sugar mixture as well as just enough salt to be noticeable. Instead of being swirled up inside, however, the mixture coats the outside of the rolls. And unlike traditional cinnamon rolls, these are not covered in frosting—they’re served with lunch or dinner alongside fried chicken. In the test kitchen, I started with a yeasted dough from our archives. It produces a pillowy and lightly sweet roll that’s enriched with butter, milk, and eggs—perfect for this application. I mixed the dough in a stand mixer and let it rise for an hour before portioning and rolling it into…

A BUCKLE—COUSIN to crumble, crisp, and coffee cake—consists of a thick cake batter mixed with chopped fruit or berries and baked under a crunchy streusel topping. Friendly and rustic, it’s been a favorite of New England home cooks for hundreds of years. But when I tested five existing recipes for buckles, the results were all over the place. Some versions were on the dry side and too cake-like, while others called for more liquid and had fruit that sank to the bottom, reminding me of cobblers. I wanted to find that sweet spot with the perfect amount of fruit suspended in a buttery, supermoist (almost creamy) cake. The berries were a vexing variable. I tested several different methods of pretreating the fresh berries so that, when baked, they were luscious…

FOR ME, THE most comforting weeknight meals start with a bowl of perfectly cooked rice. Add coconut milk and vegetables to the rice and top it with savory meatballs packed with deep, rich flavors, and that comforting meal gets a lot more enticing. But do you know what’s not very enticing? A sinkful of dirty dishes on a weeknight. I’d aim to cook everything together using a single skillet. I tackled the meatballs first, adding cilantro, scallions, ginger, fish sauce, and chili-garlic sauce to a mixture of ground beef and pork for a fresh, savory, and spicy flavor profile. But both the beef and pork tasted a little heavy here, so I switched to ground turkey: Its mild taste was the perfect backdrop for the aromatic mix-ins. Some panko bread…

ADOBO-BRAISED BEEF—WITH its intensely flavored, glossy, mahogany sauce and its hunks of tender, juicy meat—may stand at the pinnacle of Tex-Mex cooking. When I first tried a version of this a few years ago (Cook’s Country readers and TV viewers might recall our popular recipe for Flank Steak in Adobo), I was stunned by how good it was. Spicy, garlicky, sweet, sour, meaty, fruity, rich—the complex sauce, at once comforting and invigorating, had me wanting more. I set out to make a great slow-cooker version that was almost as easy as it was flavorful. The secret to adobo’s otherworldly appeal (or at least a big part of it) is the dried chiles. Even if you haven’t cooked much with dried chiles, don’t let their presence here dissuade you from making…

Boar’s Head Kosher Dill Pickles Price: $4.79 for 26 oz ($0.18 per oz) Style: Vinegar Refrigerated: Yes Ingredients: Cucumbers, water, vinegar, carrots, salt, fresh dill, garlic, spices, 1⁄10 of one percent sodium benzoate (asa preservative), calcium chloride, natural flavors, EDTA (topreserve freshness), turmeric (for color) Comments: These refrigerated pickles were perfectly crisp and “extra-crunchy.” They also earned top marks for flavor:Due to the strong presence of garlic and dill, tasters said carjar. Mt. Olive Kosher Dills Price: $5.19 for 46 oz ($0.11 per oz) Style: Vinegar Refrigerated: No Ingredients: Cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, calcium chloride, 0.1% sodium benzoate (preservative), natural flavors, polysorbate 80, and yellow 5 Comments: These shelf-stable pickles were crisp and crunchy. They had “the right amount of tang” and tasted “veryfamiliar,” with a hint of garlic and…

Some of your recipes call for slicing foods such as carrots and scallions on the bias. What does that mean? –Ted Bachmann, St. Augustine, Fla. Foods cut on the bias are cut on the diagonal. Picture yourself slicing a peeled carrot into rounds. Instead of cutting perpendicularly to the length of the carrot to create rounds, or “coins,” you rotate either the knife or the carrot about 45 degrees to cut on the diagonal, producing elongated ovals with more surface area. This type of cut is typical with longer foods such as carrots, baguettes, scallions, cucumbers, asparagus, zucchini, and summer squash. You can take this concept even further by angling the plane of your knife so that your cutting strokes hit the cutting board on the diagonal. THE BOTTOM LINE:…

–John Dutton, Dover, N.H. I recently saw an ad for a silicone garlic peeler and realized I might already own something that could do the job just as well: my silicone baking mat. I grabbed a handful of unpeeled garlic cloves; rolled them up inside the mat; and then, using both of my hands, pressed and rolled them back and forth. To my delight, the silicone baking mat peeled the garlic just like the garlic peeler had in the commercial. Maybe now I’ll get some more use out of the baking mat.…

BASIL PESTO Serves 4 to 6 (Makes 1¾ cups) This recipe yields enough to sauce 1 pound of pasta. We prefer the flavor of Italian pine nuts here; the container should indicate where they’re grown. Use a good-quality, relatively mild extra-virgin olive oil for the best results. When shopping for basil, look for a 4-ounce plastic container of leaves with stems; after stemming, you should have 4 cups of leaves (3 ounces by weight). If you don’t have a scale to measure the Parmesan, the amount of processed Parmesan should be about ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons. This pesto is also good on crostini, in sandwiches, on fish, or stirred into soup. ½ cup pine nuts¾ cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided4 ounces fresh basil leaves and stems¾ teaspoon table salt,…

SWEET PICKLE RELISH, my favorite style of relish, is a must-have topping for hot dogs. It’s also irreplaceable in every mayo-based salad from potato to egg to tuna, and if it’s not in my tartar sauce or rémoulade when I’m eating fried seafood, then I’m in shambles. Simply put, I need a jar of it in my fridge door at all times. But why make my own sweet pickle relish when there’s a dozen perfectly good products at the store? It’s a cliché to criticize store‑bought condiments for their mysterious ingredients, but the sentiment has merit. Take a look at the ingredient list of one of the top-selling relishes and you’ll see that high-fructose corn syrup is high up on the list, followed by a litany of preservatives, “natural flavors,”…

A tiny version of this rooster has been hidden in a photo in the pages of this issue. Write to us with its location, and we’ll enter you in a random drawing. The first correct entry drawn will win a copy of The Complete Cook’s Country TV Show Cookbook, and each of the next five will receive a free one-year subscription to our website. To enter, visit CooksCountry.com/rooster by June 30, 2020, or write to Rooster JJ20, Cook’s Country, 21 Drydock Avenue, Suite 210E, Boston, MA 02210. Include your name and address. Dorothy Girardi of Sun City Center, Florida, found the rooster in the February/March 2020 issue on page 12. WEB EXTRAS Free for four months online at CooksCountry.com/jul20 Carolina Red Slaw Creamy Buttermilk Coleslaw…