Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2018 i Cook's Illustrated

Twenty-five years ago, the premier issue of this magazine hit newsstands and mailboxes. From day one, Cook’s Illustrated stood out as a unique publication that, quite frankly, shouldn’t have worked. Launched at a time when food magazines were glossy and laser-focused on the food of chefs and restaurants, Cook’s Illustrated proclaimed—through hand-drawn illustrations, exhaustively tested recipes, and detailed explanations—that the home cook was king. The magazine’s success and growth over the last quarter century is, to me, proof positive that Americans, now more than ever, care deeply about cooking, spending time in the kitchen, and feeding family and friends. Our mission over the past 25 years hasn’t been to make foolproof recipes; to perform rigorous, unbiased equipment reviews; or to explain the underlying science of everyday cooking. While these tenets…

Roasting beef with potatoes, a hallowed British tradition, sounds like it will produce the ideal holiday spread. While the meat cooks, the spuds sitting underneath or around it soak up the drippings and transform into a flavor-saturated side dish that impresses just as much as (if not more than) the roast itself. But as smart and serendipitous as that sounds, it’s folklore. In my experience, cooking the meat and potatoes together rarely produces the best version of either one; in fact, it pits the two components against one another. The problem is partly due to a lack of space. Most roasting pans can’t accommodate a piece of meat large enough to feed a crowd plus enough potatoes to go alongside. So the options are to cram the potatoes into the…

A few years ago, this magazine ran a tip on how to break down a large, dense winter squash such as Hubbard: Place it in a zipper-lock bag and drop it onto asphalt from chest height, smashing it to pieces. It sounds severe, but taking a knife to a giant rock-hard squash (even a modest-size butternut can be a struggle) isn’t for the faint of heart, never mind that peeling its tough skin is a real chore. Allow me to suggest an alternative: crenellated, creamy yellow delicata squash. These beauties, which are available from late summer through early winter, boast thin, edible striped skin that softens when cooked. Their small size means they are relatively easy to cut and seed, which makes preparation a snap. What’s more, they offer a…

1 BEST PRETREATMENT FOR MEAT: SALT THERAPY You may have missed our Roast Brined Turkey in 1993—the recipe that put brining on the map. But you can’t have missed that brining and salting poultry and meat are two of our core techniques. Here’s a refresher on why. BRINING adds moisture, which makes it a particularly good choice for lean proteins. The salt in the brine not only seasons the meat but also promotes a change in its protein structure, reducing its overall toughness and creating gaps that fill up with water and keep the meat juicy. SALTING helps proteins retain their natural juices and is the best choice for ensuring crisp skin or a crusty exterior. When salt is applied to raw meat, moisture inside the meat is drawn to…

Italian chocolate-almond cake (torta caprese) has a storied past—though it’s not clear which (if any) story is true. One legend has it that the cake came to be when an Austrian princess visiting the island of Capri longed for the Sachertorte of her homeland. Not knowing how to make the dense Viennese chocolate layer cake, a local pastry chef added chocolate to his popular almond torte and hoped for the best. According to another tale, it was the accidental invention of an absent-minded baker who forgot to add flour to a chocolate-almond cake he made for a trio of Italian mobsters. And a third story tells of a sleep-deprived cook who confused cocoa powder for flour when he was mixing up almond cake batter. What is certain: This torte, a…

Pouring Boxed Broth Boxed broth sometimes glugs and splashes out of the container, which can cause a bit of a mess. Dan Messier of Beacon, N.Y., found that by simply rotating the box so the spout is at the top of the container instead of the bottom, he can pour the broth without any splashing. Cleaning Crevices Cookware with tight crevices, such as panini presses and grill pans, can be hard to clean. Karen Pizzuto-Sharp of Seattle, Wash., found a solution in a compressed air duster. Designed to clean between the keys on a keyboard, the can’s fine blast of air also lifts off crumbs in narrow cooking spaces. Thermometer Holder for the Grill Avid griller Neil Macmillan of Nanaimo, British Columbia, came up with a convenient holder for the…

When there are pies to bake, potatoes to mash, and a turkey to carve, the gravy can become an afterthought, often thrown together at the last minute amid the chaos of getting all the food to the table. At that point, there’s no time to eke out a flavorful stock for the base, and the roasted bird may or may not have generated the drippings you were counting on to infuse the gravy with rich turkey flavor. The result—whether gloppy, runny, greasy, or just plain dull—is a shame, since many of us drizzle gravy over the entire plate. After spending weeks reimagining the gravy-making process from start to finish, I came away with an approach that produces a full-bodied gravy that truly tastes like turkey and can be almost entirely…

If you haven’t eaten kung pao chicken in the past 10 years, there’s a good chance you’ve never had the real thing. I hadn’t, until recently. In the ’90s, the dish was my go-to Chinese restaurant order. The diced chicken and vegetables, peanuts, and vaguely sweet and sour sauce were cozily familiar, while the fiery dried chiles scattered throughout supplied an appealing undercurrent of danger. But eventually the novelty wore off, as did any urge to make it myself. Then, a few months ago, I ordered kung pao in a restaurant and was delighted by the addition of Sichuan peppercorns, which imbued the dish with a woodsy fragrance and citrusy tang and created an intriguing tingling sensation on my lips and tongue, a perfect complement to the chiles’ heat. In…

Anyone who thinks that meatless bean dishes don’t offer the heartiness of a meat-based meal should give the category another chance. As for those who think that meatless bean dishes tend to lack complexity and savory depth, I’m with you—and I have a recipe that will change your mind. It’s a bean-based gratin, and it’s not loaded up with esoteric ingredients; in fact, you might have most of what you need on hand. Start to finish, you should be able to get this gratin on the table in just under 2 hours and have plenty of downtime to make a salad or green vegetable while it cooks. I built the dish around creamy, nutty canned great Northern white beans. Canned beans are a real timesaver, and we’ve found that their…

In the test kitchen, we go through 30 to 40 pounds of butter a week, relying almost exclusively on the unsalted type because we prefer to control the seasoning of our food. But which unsalted butter is best? A few years ago, we decided it was Plugrá, a high-fat product with a luscious texture. At almost $12 per pound, though, it’s expensive. Although Plugrá is sometimes worth the splurge, we wanted a butter that was affordable and convenient for everyday use. We assembled seven national top sellers, priced from $4.49 to $7.58 per pound. Two were cultured, which means that flavor-creating bacterial cultures had been added during production, and one of these butters was imported from Europe. The rest were domestic “sweet cream” butters, meaning no cultures are added. All…

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED WÜSTHOF GOURMET 12" Fish Spatula MODEL: 4433 PRICE: $49.95 HEAD SURFACE AREA: 12.1 sq in HEAD THICKNESS: 0.9 mm PERFORMANCE:⋆ ⋆ ⋆ HEAD DESIGN:⋆ ⋆ ⋆ HANDLE DESIGN: ⋆ ½ COMMENTS: Our favorite model’s perfectly proportioned head supported foods of all shapes and sizes and maneuvered nimbly even in tight spaces. The head’s pronounced curve provided extra leverage for prying up food and kept our hands higher above hot pans. Users found its handle easy to hold, but some wished it were grippier. RECOMMENDED MIU FRANCE Flexible Fish Turner–Slotted MODEL: 90011 PRICE: $16.57 HEAD SURFACE AREA: 12.1 sq in HEAD THICKNESS: 0.8 mm PERFORMANCE: ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ HEAD DESIGN:⋆ ⋆ ½ HANDLE DESIGN:⋆ ⋆ ½ COMMENTS: This spatula was nearly identical to our winner, but its head was…

WHAT IS IT? This tool is a vintage cookie press from Denmark, where pressed (and piped) butter cookies have long been a holiday tradition. Manufactured in the early 1900s from rolled steel and wood, this simple manual press calls for filling the hollow tube with cookie dough, screwing a shaping disk onto the end, and then pressing the wooden plunger through the tube to extrude dough onto a baking sheet. How well does it work? To be fair, perfectly pressed cookies can be tricky to make even with the latest gun-style presses. If the dough is too cold, it can jam up the press; too warm or loose and the dough won’t hold its shape when extruded. Nevertheless, using this manual-plunge press was especially challenging. Modern versions call for placing…

Rome has four iconic—and outrageously good—pasta dishes: cacio e pepe, amatriciana, carbonara, and gricia. I’ve long been a huge fan of the more well-known first three but had never tried gricia, which features guanciale (cured hog jowls), ground black pepper, and tangy, salty Pecorino Romano. So when my colleague Sasha Marx, who grew up in Rome, offered to make it for lunch on a quiet day in the test kitchen, I couldn’t refuse. Sasha put a pot of rigatoni on to boil while he sautéed chopped guanciale in a skillet. When the pork was deeply browned but still retained a tender chew, he removed it, leaving behind its rendered fat. In went the drained rigatoni, which was only halfway cooked (also known as al chiodo, or “to the nail”), along…

Last year, the test kitchen published a vegan cookbook (Vegan for Everybody), so for a while there was a lot of dairy- and egg-free food around here. It’s not a diet I’ve ever subscribed to, but watching (and tasting) the development process gave me a healthy respect for how flavorful and satisfying vegan cooking can be. In fact, it prompted me to retool a recipe category that typically relies heavily on dairy and eggs: creamy dressings and dips. Vegan recipe authors tout all sorts of supposedly stealthy dairy alternatives, such as beans, tofu, avocado, and coconut milk. But if you ask me, most of them don’t live up to their promise. I tried dressings with avocado, which was conveniently bland but visually obvious. Tofu and coconut milk worked aesthetically, but…

Anna Pavlova was known as the “incomparable” ballerina, captivating audiences not just in her homeland of Russia but across the entire world at the turn of the 20th century. It’s no wonder, then, that chefs at the time immortalized her in recipes, including frogs’ legs à la Pavlova in France, Pavlova ice cream in the United States, and most famously, the glamorous meringue, whipped cream, and fruit confection that’s simply called pavlova. Unlike meringue cookies, which are uniformly dry and crunchy throughout, the meringue for pavlova (which can be baked in a single large round or smaller individual disks) offers a range of textures: a crisp outer shell; a tender, marshmallowy interior; and a pleasant chew where the two textures meet. The meringue’s sweetness is balanced by softly whipped cream…

We tasted seven top-selling unsalted butters, all sold in packages with individually wrapped ¼-pound sticks, priced from $4.49 to $7.58 per pound. Panels of 21 tasters sampled them in three blind tastings: plain, in pound cake, and in sugar cookies. Information on wrappers, ingredients, and the cows’ diets was obtained from manufacturers and/or product packaging. Fat is reported per 1-tablespoon serving. Prices were paid in Boston-area supermarkets. Scores from the tastings were averaged, and products appear below in order of preference. RECOMMENDED CHALLENGE Unsalted Butter PRICE: $4.49 per lb INGREDIENTS: Pasteurized cream (milk), natural flavoring FAT: 11 g WRAPPER: Foil STYLE: Sweet cream KATE’S CREAMERY 100% Pure Butter, Unsalted PRICE: $5.99 per lb INGREDIENTS: Grade A cream, natural flavors developed by healthy dairy cultures FAT: 11 g WRAPPER: Foil STYLE:…

Tasting Crunchy Peanut Butter Every major brand that makes a creamy peanut butter also manufactures a crunchy version. We wondered if the maker of our favorite creamy peanut butter would also produce our favorite crunchy one. To find out, we tasted nine crunchy peanut butters, priced from $2.69 to $6.91 per jar, plain, in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and in peanut butter cookies. Crunchy peanut butters come in three styles: those made with hydrogenated vegetable oil and sugar, those that trade hydrogenated oil for palm oil (and are typically labeled “natural” since palm oil is naturally solid at room temperature), and those that are just peanuts and salt. Overall, tasters preferred peanut butters with added oil for their thick, uniform textures. Tasters also liked extra crunch. When we separated…

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