Indholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2016 i Cook's Illustrated

When I make lasagna, I usually turn to the Bolognese kind, layered with plenty of ground meats, or perhaps a vegetarian version bulked up with things like eggplant, zucchini, or mushrooms. But I recently decided to try my hand at a simpler classic enjoyed in southern Italy. Called lasagne di magro (“lasagna without meat”), it strips the dish down to its most basic elements: noodles, cheese (usually a trio of ricotta, mozzarella, and Parmesan), and tomato sauce. I was excited when I found this dish, and trying a few recipes confirmed that it was considerably faster to make than the more familiar kind. But these tests also revealed a shortcoming—namely, that a lasagna with only cheese and tomato can be plain old boring. Without meat and vegetables to add complex…

In the past I rarely, if ever, cooked broccoli rabe. (Rabe, or rapini, as it’s known in Italy where the vegetable is a mainstay in the cuisine, is actually more closely related to spicy turnips than to regular, more-mellow broccoli.) While I’m a fan of this green’s bitter, mustardy bite, I seem to be in the minority on this. As a result, the majority of recipes you find jump through hoops to subdue its characteristic flavor. One of the most popular approaches calls for chopping, blanching, shocking, draining, and sautéing the pieces with strong-flavored aromatics—a lengthy ordeal that wipes out just about any trace of the green’s pungency and leaves you with a sink full of dirty dishes. At that point, why bother? I’ve always thought that if you could…

Too often, appliances promising convenience wind up as clutter. Decades of testing have taught us which pieces of equipment are the most useful and which models are the highest quality and most durable. Here’s our guide to the best options for key appliances that can improve how you bake and cook. FOOD PROCESSOR CUISINART Custom 14 Food Processor ($199.99) A food processor is essential for kneading dough, cutting butter into pastry, and grinding meat. With a powerful motor, responsive pulsing action, and sharp blades, this model effortlessly handles these tasks. It also chops, slices, and shreds neatly and with ease. SMALL FOOD PROCESSOR CUISINART Elite Collection 4-Cup Chopper/Grinder ($59.95) Smaller processors can’t handle doughs or large-quantity prep, but the powerful motor on this model makes it superconvenient for zipping through…

Why does the man on the Quaker oatmeal package look so smug? Maybe it’s because he’s the cunning perpetrator of a wildly successful cookie con. The evidence is anecdotal but persuasive: When I asked several friends to share their favorite family recipe for oatmeal cookies, many produced (often unbeknownst to them) the recipe from the Quaker Oatmeal website, Quaker’s Best Oatmeal Cookies. The guy on the canister has apparently cornered the market, but do his cookies really deserve all the love? The recipe goes like this: Use a mixer to cream the butter and sugar and then add an egg and some vanilla. Stir in some flour, leavening, salt (oddly optional in this recipe), spices (a generous amount), and old-fashioned rolled oats, and then spoon the mixture onto baking sheets.…

Tasting Anchovies These little fish deserve a spot in your pantry. When minced and stirred into pasta sauce, stew, or dressing, they amplify savory flavor without making the dish taste fishy. At more than $6.00 per ounce, our old winner is expensive. Could we find great anchovies that wouldn’t break the bank? We limited our lineup to whole fillets found in grocery stores (priced from $0.68 to $1.40 per ounce). In all, we had five products to pit against our old favorite. Although most supermarket anchovies have been cured in salt for several months and then packed in oil, we included one widely available product that’s not cured. We evaluated the anchovies plain and in Caesar dressing. In the plain tasting, most samples received high marks; the one exception was…

Baste Away Excess Water from a Coffee Maker Anne Marie Draganowski of Saint Paul, Minn., occasionally adds too much water to her drip coffee maker’s reservoir. Rather than precariously tip the entire machine over to empty just the right amount into the sink, she uses a turkey baster to remove the water, checking against the machine’s water gauge until there is just the right amount of water left. A New Way to Crush Garlic and Ginger Smashing garlic or ginger with the flat side of a knife blade can feel unsteady, so Doug Schifter of Thornhurst, Pa., uses a meat pounder to quickly and safely do the job instead. A Simple Squash Cleaning Tool To clean out the seeds and fibers from a squash, you can use a seeding tool…

Even if you’ve never tasted mole poblano, you might know of its prominent place in Mexican cuisine. The legends associated with its origin all seem to agree on one thing: This rich, velvety, deeply complex sauce, the hallmark of the Puebla region and widely considered the country’s national dish, was conceived centuries ago to serve to dignitaries. To make it, cooks spent days gathering, frying or roasting, and then grinding nuts and seeds, dried chiles, herbs and warm spices, dried fruit, aromatics such as garlic and onion, and tomatoes into a paste thickened with stale bread or tortillas. The earthy, faintly bitter, fruity-sweet, smoky, and subtly spicy mixture (the term mole stems from the Nahuatl word molli, which means “sauce” or “concoction”) was then fried to deepen its flavor; enriched…

Forget casinos and racetracks: I do my gambling at Chinese restaurants when I order scallion pancakes. Hitting the jackpot means digging into deep golden-brown flatbread wedges with crispy exteriors that break away in flaky shards to reveal paper-thin, scallion-studded layers within. But as luck more often has it, I usually end up with floppy, pallid triangles with doughy inner leaves that fuse to form a single dense, gummy layer. I decided it was time to stop leaving good scallion pancakes to chance and develop my own recipe. A quick look at a few recipes was encouraging. Their ingredient lists included just flour, water, oil, scallions, and salt. And the way the layers were formed seemed clever and interesting: You coat the rolledout dough with oil and sliced scallions and then…

Some people call them bread knives, but we think serrated knives are more versatile than that. We use them to cut everything from crusty baguettes and buttery brioche to tender cakes and squishy tomatoes. We last tested serrated knives in 2008; with new options on the market, we decided it was time to revisit the category. We selected nine serrated knives, priced from $19.99 to $199.99, and ran them through a series of tests to find one capable of handling all our usual tasks. We focused on knives with blades around 10 inches long—in past tests, shorter blades couldn’t cut through wide loaves or split cake layers horizontally, while longer blades simply got in the way. We included the all-around winner and the Best Buy from our 2008 testing in…

WHAT IS IT? This clever little object is a Wesson Oil Mayonnaise Maker, first produced in the 1930s when it sold for about $0.98. We picked up ours on eBay for considerably more than that: $40.00. The tool consists of a tall glass jar; a “dasher,” or plunger, with a mesh screen attached to its bottom; and a screwtop lid. The lid has a hole in the center where the dasher runs through and can be pumped up and down. To try it out, we followed Wesson’s recipe for mayonnaise, which is embossed on the outside of the jar: We placed an egg, vinegar, mustard, and salt and pepper in the jar; screwed on the lid; and then slowly poured 2 cups of oil through the lid’s center hole while…

I haven’t met many people who can resist a plateful of smoky, tender barbecue like pork butt or ribs, but I also haven’t met many who can regularly commit to the half-day required to make them. So what can you do to create a meaty, smoky pork roast fit for a crowd in less time? After some thinking, I settled on using a pork loin. Because it isn’t loaded with collagen, a pork loin doesn’t require nearly as much cooking time as ribs or a pork butt—maybe a couple of hours, tops. It has a drawback, though—namely, a very mild flavor. But smoking seemed like a great way to give this mild cut a big flavor boost. The challenge? I’d need to be careful with the smoke. I’d want enough…

Shrimp and vegetable kebabs have a sad but well-earned reputation. When the shrimp are perfectly cooked, the vegetables come off the skewer almost raw; when the vegetables are properly done, the shrimp are so overcooked that they’re rubbery and tough. One obvious solution is to cook the shrimp on one skewer and the vegetables on another. But the ability to deliver a variety of flavors, colors, and textures to the plate in one attractive package seemed like a goal worth achieving. My first decision was to use jumbo shrimp, since their larger size would translate into a longer cooking time. I also found that submerging the peeled shrimp in a quick pregrill brine plumped and seasoned them and allowed them to stay on the grill a touch longer without drying…

I can see the appeal of using ground turkey in place of beef or pork in a meatball, since many folks these days want to eat less red meat. But when I swapped ground turkey into my usual meatball recipe (an Italian red-sauce version), I got something that was altogether disappointing. The meat mixture was so wet that it was difficult to shape, and the meatballs slumped during the frying step, leaving them more pyramidshaped than spherical. Once cooked, they were mushy overall yet grainy inside. And their flavor was entirely uninspiring. I wanted an easy-to-form turkey meatball with the same traits as a knockout beef or pork version: a moist, tender, slightly springy texture and rich, savory flavor. My standard meatball recipe (like most) goes like this: Combine ground…

My foray into sourdough baking wasn’t as romantic as some. I wasn’t bequeathed an heirloom starter from my grandmother. Nor did I acquire one that’s ripe with exotic flora while traveling abroad. I was a hobbyist baker when I made my first homegrown batch, and I was tempted to do so not only because I love the tang, complexity, and chew of a good sourdough loaf but also because I was intrigued by the idea of making bread entirely from scratch. Making a sourdough starter is actually dead simple: All you have to do is stir together some flour and water and let it ferment for a couple of days at room temperature. As the mixture sits, yeast and bacteria already present in the flour wake up and start to…

Packed with flavor-enhancing umami, soy sauce is one of the oldest food products in the world. It originated in China about 2,500 years ago and made the leap to Japan around the seventh century. Over time, it’s been produced in a variety of styles and become a pantry staple worldwide; in fact, it’s the third bestselling condiment in this country after ketchup and mayonnaise. We feature it in all kinds of Asian dishes, but we also harness its savory flavor in recipes as diverse as barbecue, burgers, fried chicken, corn on the cob, vegetable soup, and lamb chops. That said, we’ve learned over the years that not every bottle delivers the kind of nuance and balance that good soy sauce should, so we rounded up 10 top-selling nationally available products…

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED OXO On Clarity Cordless Glass Electric Kettle MODEL: 8710300 PRICE: $89.95 RECOMMENDED CUISINART Stainless Steel Slotted Spoon MODEL: CTG-08-SLS PRICE: $9.12 RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS CHEF’N ScoopSaw Squash and Melon Tool MODEL: 102-804-062 PRICE: $9.99 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED EXCALIBUR Food Dehydrator MODEL: 3926T PRICE: $241.50 RECOMMENDED RSVP Classic Rotary Food Mill MODEL: VEG-3 PRICE: $24.95 Electric Kettles Electric kettles are handy for making coffee and tea but are also great for any cooking task that requires boiling water: rehydrating dried mushrooms, softening lasagna noodles, or reconstituting stock base. To find out if our 2008 winner from Capresso ($55.69) was still the best kettle on the market, we rounded up five stainless-steel and four glass models, priced from $32.89 to $99.95, to pit against it. After days of testing—including a taste…