Indholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2018 i Cook's Illustrated

Imagine you’re standing on the edge of a giant tri-ply, heavy-bottomed, stainless-steel skillet, gazing into the vast, shiny basin before you. The foam soles of your shoes, like a good kitchen towel, are packed with tiny air pockets that insulate your feet from the searing-hot metal. Waves of radiant heat bathe your face. But you can’t turn away. You are witnessing the death of an emulsion: A knob of butter lands with a slide, collapses into a puddle, and then reanimates as a noisy nest of bubbles. As the bubbles burst and subside you smell hazelnuts, toffee, maybe popcorn. That close. I dream about being that close to food and cooking. As a little kid at my grandmother’s kitchen table in rural Maine, that meant removing my shirt before taking…

Chinese barbecued spareribs are typically associated with Cantonese buffets and pupu platters, those medleys of vaguely authentic finger food that have been fixtures in Chinese American and Polynesian restaurants for decades. But unlike the questionable provenance of plattermates such as crab rangoons and chicken fingers, spareribs have real roots in Chinese cuisine. Their lurid red glow, lacquered sheen, and flavors redolent of hoisin and soy sauces, ginger, garlic, and five-spice powder indicate they are a form of char siu, the Cantonese–style barbecued pork you can find hanging in the windows of meat shops in any Chinatown. Their appeal is obvious—the meat is salty and sweet, with a deeply caramelized exterior and a satisfying resilient chew— and recipes for them have appeared in American newspapers, magazines, and cookbooks since the mid-20th…

I was skeptical when I first heard of paniscia, a specialty from the city of Novara in Piedmont, northern Italy. It is essentially a merger of two dishes: risotto—flavored with cured meats and red wine—and a minestrone-like bean and vegetable soup. Bean, meat, and red wine risotto? Figuring that paniscia must be experienced to be understood, I headed into the kitchen. I first made a minestrone, simmering dried soaked cranberry beans in chicken broth along with mirepoix (chopped carrot, celery, and onion), cabbage, and pancetta. Meanwhile, I started a risotto, first browning Genoa salami (my sub for the traditional but hard-tofind lard-cured salami called salam d’la duja) and then toasting Arborio rice in the fat before pouring in red wine. Adhering to the established risotto method, I stirred liquid (here,…

Outside the kitchen I’m sometimes a bit of a klutz, but give me a rolling pin and a lump of traditional all-butter pie dough—the kind that’s dry and brittle and exhibits an alarming tendency to crack—and I’ll dazzle you with my proficiency and grace as I roll it into a flawless circle. It’s a skill that’s taken me decades to acquire, and practicing it makes me feel like some sort of high priestess of pastry. Happily, that feeling of accomplishment became accessible to even the most inexperienced bakers in 2010 when we developed our Foolproof Pie Dough, which is soft and moist and a dream to roll out and bakes up flaky and tender. But as great as that recipe is, I’ve never been 100 percent converted from my traditional…

Chocolate chip cookies are America’s favorites, according to The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book (2013) by Carolyn Wyman. Invented in the 1930s, the recipe called for semisweet chocolate. Today, chocolate chip choices abound, and dark chocolate—which includes “semisweet” and “bittersweet” since there’s no legal distinction— has come a long way. Even Nestlé, which in 1940 launched chocolate morsels, now sells four styles of dark chocolate chips (plus quirky varieties including peanut butter, mint, and pumpkin spice). We bought 14 products labeled dark, special dark, bittersweet, or semisweet and sold as chips, oversize “super” chips, morsels, or chunks. In blind tastings, we sampled them plain and in our Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies (May/June 2009). Changing Chips A few years ago, when dark chocolate bars got fancy with cacao percentages and…

Improvised Lame for Bread Baking Ben Sobel of Cambridge, Mass., doesn’t own a lame, a French tool with a fine blade used to slash the tops of rustic bread loaves before baking, so he devised a homemade alternative. He carefully holds a standard safety razor blade by the tabs on the short sides, bends the blade slightly, and then threads the narrow end of a chopstick through the holes on either side of the blade. The curved blade mimics the shape and function of a lame, and the chopstick is easy to grip. Keeping Cookbooks Open for Cooking John Sauve of Toronto, Ontario, figured out a way to keep cookbooks open while he’s cooking from them: He straps an elastic band to each side of the book on the page he…

Peel, cut, fry, let cool, fry again, drain. Repeat with remaining batches. Let oil cool and, finally, discard oil. I think I speak for French fry lovers everywhere when I say that the tawny, crispy crusts and velvety interiors you get from a proper fry job are worth all the grease— elbow and otherwise. But given what the process entails, I make real fries about as often as I make croissants or pasta from scratch, which is to say almost never. Most people’s alternative to deep-fried fries is oven fries, which are usually less fussy to make, often less greasy—and always a disappointment. OK, that might be a bit harsh, but I think you’ll agree that oven fries frequently fall short. The most basic methods call for simply tossing cut…

I’d spent days scraping pounds of carrots—and my knuckles—against a box grater, but I still wasn’t any closer to improving upon the classic shredded carrot salad, which is usually damp and clumpy. Using the shredding disk on my food processor wasn’t any help; it produced long, overly thick shreds that were unpleasant to eat. In fact, it wasn’t until I stumbled upon an unusual recipe from cookbook author Joan Nathan that I realized I’d been approaching my revamp of this dish all wrong. It wasn’t so much the flavors or the ratio of dressing to carrots or even my shredding technique that needed to change. It was the method itself: The grater had to go. Nathan’s recipe, based on an Israeli technique, calls for finely chopping the carrots in a…

The custom of sipping a hot beverage while enjoying a sweet cake or bread goes back to 17th-century Europe when German, Dutch, and Scandinavian cooks were habitual pastry makers and coffee was fast becoming part of the daily routine. Eventually, the practice spread to the United States, and today, three types of coffee cake are common: the yeasted kind, featuring a sweet cheese and/or fruit filling; the rich sour cream Bundt version that shows off elegant bands of crumb filling when sliced; and the streusel-topped type, with a nutty crunch highlighting a moist cake. It is this last cake that appeals to me the most. Instead of drawing attention with graceful swirls of filling or the dramatic curves of a Bundt shape, its focus is on the contrasting textures and…

There’s no better match for our tender, flaky pie crust than a chocolate cream filling. For a deeply chocolaty mixture that is not too heavy, we make a milk-based cocoa pudding and then whisk in bittersweet chocolate, along with vanilla for extra depth. A few tablespoons of butter help the filling set up with a silky consistency once it is poured into the prebaked pie shell and refrigerated. Finally, we finish off the pie with a complementary topping of lightly sweetened whipped cream. –A.G. CHOCOLATE CREAM PIE SERVES 8 TO 10 We developed this recipe with whole milk, but you can use 2 percent low-fat milk, if desired. Avoid using 1 percent low-fat or skim milk, as the filling will be too thin. Ghirardelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate Premium Baking…

Subbing Meyer Lemons Meyer lemons were first introduced to the United States from Beijing, China, in the early 20th century by Frank Meyer, a United States Department of Agriculture employee. Typically available from December through May, they are thought to be a natural cross between a standard lemon (Eureka or Lisbon variety) and a mandarin orange. Meyer lemons are smaller and rounder than standard lemons and boast smooth, thin, deep-yellow skin and pale orange pulp. They are also less acidic and sweeter—in a pH test, we found standard lemon juice to be 1.3 times more acidic than Meyer lemon juice (their pH values are 2.23 and 2.33, respectively) —and their rind is more fragrant when zested. To see how Meyer lemons compare with standard lemons in cooking, we used both…

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED KITCHENAID Cookie/Pastry Lifter MODEL: KC038OHOBA PRICE: $8.00 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED LE CREUSET Table Model Corkpull MODEL: TM100L-31 PRICE: $19.95 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED SIMPLEHUMAN Sensor Pump MODEL: ST1023 PRICE: $39.99 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED OXO Good Grips Utility Cutting Board MODEL: 1063790 PRICE: $14.95 Compact Spatulas Compact spatulas, or cookie spatulas, are designed to deftly navigate tight baking pans and cookie sheets, but they are also handy when cooking food in a skillet, so we set out to find one that was useful for both of those tasks. We selected seven models made from plastic, silicone, or stainless steel and priced from $6.77 to $14.44, including our previous winner, the OXO Good Grips Silicone Cookie Spatula. To test them, we made cookies, brownies, over-easy eggs, and pancakes. The plastic and silicone spatulas prevented…

In Mexico, if a cook swaps out the cheese or chicken that is typically used as an enchilada filling for beef, there are no shortcuts. Fresh corn tortillas are lightly fried and rolled around a filling of tender, slow-braised shredded beef, and then smothered with a sauce made from dried chiles and topped with crumbled cheese. It’s not hard to imagine the resulting enchiladas—they’re deeply flavorful, complex, and entirely satisfying. There’s only one downside, and it’s a big one: The recipe can take quite a while to prepare, given its reliance on slow-cooked meat and a long-simmered sauce. Then, of course, there are speedier Tex-Mex versions more familiar with Americans using ground beef, store-bought tortillas, loads of shredded cheese, and chili powder–infused tomato sauce. When I tried a few recipes…

Chicken piccata needs little introduction, for better or for worse. A good version— chicken breasts pounded thin, lightly dusted with flour, pan-seared, and bathed in a rich lemon-butter pan sauce, perhaps with scatterings of capers, garlic, shallot, and parsley—deserves nothing but praise. Yet piccata can also be punishingly bad, featuring dry, tough chicken drowning in sauce that’s either boring or brash. I looked first at the preparation of the cutlets themselves. A common approach is to flatten a whole breast with a meat pounder, which can tear the flesh. In the test kitchen, we have a better way: Halve the breast crosswise and then split the thick side horizontally to create three similar-size pieces that require only minimal pounding. To season the meat and help it retain moisture, I tossed…

While some French classics can feel stodgy and old-fashioned (think Mornay sauce or chicken fricassee), I’m willing to bet that gougères (and their sweet cousins, profiteroles) will never go out of style. It’s not just that their crisp, browned exteriors and airy, popover-like interiors flavored with nutty Gruyère cheese give them huge appeal. These two-bite puffs also look impressive and can be made in advance and reheated. The foundation for gougères (and profiteroles) is pâte à choux, or choux pastry. The most classic versions involve cooking butter, water, and flour in a saucepan until the loose batter stiffens and turns into a dough—this ensures that it’s pipeable rather than a runny mess. Eggs then get beaten in, one at a time, for structure and flavor. To make the choux into…

American-style scrambled eggs are the speediest of home-cooked breakfasts: Heat butter or oil in a skillet; add eggs beaten with water or milk; stir, stir, stir; and you’re done. The process takes less than 3 minutes and can produce eggs sturdy enough to be tucked inside an English muffin and eaten on the go. But French cooks, and often British ones, too, employ a more leisurely approach. They cook their eggs slowly over low heat with plenty of butter, stirring constantly until the mixture forms small, delicate curds bound in a velvety sauce. This technique can take five times as long as the American version, but the reward is eggs that are so extravagantly creamy and rich that they linger on the palate, allowing you time to thoroughly appreciate the…

We’re longtime fans of the Vitamix 5200 ($449.00). Given its price, this commercial-turned-consumer luxury item is not for everyone. But for those who want a blender that can pulverize anything and will likely outlast its 7-year warranty, this has been our top recommended model for years. The Vitamix 5200 is admittedly a stripped-down machine. It has three features on its control panel: a speed dial, an on/off switch, and a switch that ramps up the power to a higher level. But recently, Vitamix and other major manufacturers have released new models with more power and extra bells and whistles. One major difference: preset buttons that run for a fixed amount of time, so you can start your blender, walk away, and trust that it will shut itself off when the…

Chickpeas are incredibly versatile, showing up in Italian pasta dishes and vegetable soups, Indian curries, and Middle Eastern hummus. We also use the starchy bean liquid, known as aquafaba, to add flavor and body to soups and stews; in recent years, this liquid has become a popular vegan egg replacement in foods such as muffins and meringues. We decided to reexamine this pantry staple, tasting six nationally available products plain, in hummus, and in our recipe for Pasta e Ceci. We evaluated the chickpeas’ flavor, texture, and overall appeal. Salt played a crucial role in determining our favorite products. Those with lower sodium levels (less than 125 milligrams per ½-cup serving including bean liquid) had a hint of “nutty,” slightly “sweet” chickpea flavor but were easily overwhelmed by other ingredients.…