Indholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2021 i Cook's Illustrated

Most food television shows would have us believe that the best professional cooks are explosive and erratic, speeding through tasks with squirrel-like energy. That’s simply not true. Peer into any kitchen, find the calmest cook, and you’ve likely spotted the most experienced. Their steady, deliberate motions signify confidence born out of muscle memory. That term of art is often applied to everyday tasks such as typing on a keyboard or driving a car, but the concept is just as relevant in the kitchen. It’s the ability to shape a boule or chop an onion while focusing on the next few steps of a recipe. But it’s also the collective habits each of us builds around cooking that, quite simply, make time in the kitchen more efficient and enjoyable. Omelet making…

Pate a choux has been a workhorse of the French culinary canon since the 1500s, serving as the foundation for a number of airy pastries, including gougeres, profiteroles, eclairs, and beignets. But my favorite use for the eggy dough is as the base of a somewhat lesser-known puffed delicacy: gnocchi a la Parisienne. It’s a real game changer for gnocchi lovers. Mixing a light dough for Italian potato gnocchi and individually shaping each dumpling requires practice—an artist’s touch, even—for airy results, but replacing the dough with pate a choux promises tender, ethereal puffs, even if you’re a newbie. That’s because instead of crafting each of the gnocchi by hand from potato-rich dough, you just pipe pate a choux—which is naturally light—directly into simmering water while cutting off short lengths with…

For a year and a half during my early 30s, I worked the brunch shift at Craigie on Main, a French-inspired restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My charge was the egg station, where I turned out the kitchen’s variant of a classic French omelet featuring tender, butter-yellow curds cushioned around substantial fillings such as mushrooms, crabmeat, and asparagus. Early on, it was a trial-by-fire gig: As I acquainted myself with the stove’s heat zones, I would shuffle the skillets—three to five at a time—around the broad steel cooktop, trying to pinpoint just the right spot to preheat the pan, and also gauge how to quickly compensate if I added the eggs when the skillet was too hot or too cold. At the same time, I was learning when to stop cooking…

In his classic 1944 cookbook, Dinner at Omar Khayyam’s, Armenian American chef and restaurateur George Mardikian explains step one for making yogurt at home in the United States: “Just open any telephone book and find a name ending with ‘ian.’ Go to that person’s address, knock on the door, and ask the Armenian who opens it for a cup of madzoon [yogurt].” The fact that you could count on just about any “-ian” to have a batch of yogurt in the fridge—in the 1940s, no less, when many Americans were unfamiliar with the ingredient—explains just how important a food it is in my culture. One of our most beloved uses for yogurt is in the grain-enriched soup known as tanabour, or spas. (“Tan” is a yogurt drink, and “abour” means…

Chris Smith, gardener and author of The Whole Okra (2019), thinks his muse deserves more recognition: “[Okra has] all these benefits that no one is currently recognizing on any kind of scale.” For one thing, he told me, most parts of the lush plant—not just the seed pods—can be consumed: The eye-catching flowers can be enjoyed straight from the garden or dried and steeped to make tea; the nutritious young leaves are wonderful braised; and the protein-rich mature seeds are “so, so delicious” when roasted and ground into a flour that “is nutty and smells like coffee.” Even the stalks, he said, can be used as a fiber crop.…

Elaine Khosrova, author of Butter: A Rich History (2016), says Breton butter, like a fine wine, exhibits strong “terroir.” “Great soil, good water, clean air, the right animals, beautiful salt—Brittany just has the perfect combination,” she says. Thanks to the region’s coastal climate and rare breeds of cattle, Breton butter is golden and sweet, with a long, creamy finish. It is also distinctively saline. Salt became part of Brittany’s butter-making tradition because the area boasts abundant deposits of natural sea salt beds; plus, the region was never subject to France’s infamous harsh salt tax. Today, Breton butter is sold in three styles: doux (unsalted), demi-sel (containing 0.5–3 percent salt), and sel (containing 3 percent or more salt, about double the salt content of American supermarket salted butter).…

When I found myself nearing the end of an autumn cycling vacation with too many apples to cram into my saddlebags, Betty came to my rescue. I was only vaguely familiar with the retro apple dessert—my aunt Kathy may have served me one once—but I had a sense that it was simply fruit baked with buttered, lightly sweetened bread crumbs and that it offered all the coziness of pie, crisp, and crumble with only a fraction of the effort. Just the thing to cobble together in my tiny rental kitchen. I chopped a partial loaf of sourdough into crumbs; mixed the crumbs with melted butter; and tossed most of them in a baking dish with chunks of apples (a mix of sweet and tart heirloom varieties) that I’d sweetened with…

Making the Greek dish briam feels like a magic trick. A rainbow of summer produce—tomatoes, zucchini, bell peppers, onions, potatoes—enters the oven simply sliced, seasoned, and bathed in olive oil and emerges a meltingly soft and velvety melange, each vegetable an amplified version of itself. Heaped onto a plate alongside a hunk of crusty bread and a crumbly slice of feta, it’s a dish that makes an inarguable case for vegetables as a main course. “Natural sweetness and good fat—there’s something very crave-able about that,” Greek chef and cookbook author Diane Kochilas told me over a call from her home in Athens. In speaking with Kochilas and other Greek chefs about briam, I quickly learned that, while there are few hard-and-fast rules when it comes to the dish (some recipes…

We should all be making more pickles. They’re the ultimate pick-me-up for a sleepy sandwich or braise, and the quick kind can be dashed off on a whim while you’re cooking something else. Unlike lacto-fermented pickles, which require carefully calibrated salinity and temperature and days or weeks for wild bacteria to develop the acidity that fends off harmful microbes for long-term storage and supplies their complex tang, quick versions are preserved and flavored by a vinegar brine and refrigeration. They’re also a thrifty, low-lift way to get extra mileage out of surplus produce; a bulb of fennel or bunch of radishes will net a small jar’s worth of pickles, so you don’t have to pickle in bulk to make it worth the effort. THREE CLASSICS Nothing completes a burger, a…

Vegetables get most of the glory, but pickled fruits are a pleasure all their own. The fragrant sweetness of peaches and mangos; wine-like nuances of plums and cherries; and complex aroma and crunch of apples, pears, and quince naturally complement vinegar’s vibrant acidity, and together the fruit and brine nail that sweet-savory interplay. Dried fruits (such as apricots, cherries, currants, and golden raisins) make great pickles, too, plumping up in the brine so that their soft chew gives way to bursts of tangy sweetness. And just as with pickled vegetables, adding citrus zest, warm spices, and herbs to the mix can weave in subtle background notes. Any of these can upgrade a seared pork chop, green salad, or bowl of yogurt, not to mention turn your cheese or charcuterie board…

1 BUCHERON PRICE: $23.00 per lb AGED: 1 to 2 months TASTING NOTES: Bucheron is initially fairly dense and uniform. With time, the edges become delightfully gooey and creep toward the snowy-white center, which remains firmer and crumbly. It’s salty, with lemony acidity. BACKGROUND: One of the first French aged goat cheeses exported to the United States, Bucheron remains one of the easiest to find. When it’s young, it can be used in place of fresh goat cheese. 2 SAINTE-MAURE DE TOURAINE PRICE: $23.00 for 8-oz log ($46.00 per lb) AGED: 3 to 5 weeks TASTING NOTES: Always buttery smooth, this petite log can be dense and firm or fairly moist. At its ripest, the exterior becomes almost melty. It’s piquant and nutty. BACKGROUND: Named for the French city of…

The provenance of gnocchi à la Parisienne is not well documented, but Maryann Tebben, professor of French and head of the Center for Food Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, said that’s likely because the dish came about gradually as the French adapted the Italian version to make it their own. One of the earliest published recipes, she said, is a Franco-Italian hybrid from Manuel Pratique de Cuisine Provençale (1920) called “Gnocchis à la Française” that specifies mixing some potato into a classic pate a choux. Later, in a 1924 issue of La Toque Blanche (a weekly professional journal for chefs) another gnocchi recipe was published, this time without any potato at all.…

Whether you know it as pan con tomate, as many Spaniards do, or by its native Catalan name, pa amb tomaquet (“pam two-MAH-cat”), the dish is bread with tomato, and it’s as simple as cooking gets. “If you have a piece of bread, you have a piece of bread with tomato,” said Alex Montiel, a native of Catalonia and chef/owner of La Cuchara de San Telmo in San Sebastian who grew up eating pa amb tomaquet daily. The crunchy yet tender toasted bread and brilliantly ripe tomato pulp make for an unbeatable combination, he explained, especially when the tomato-topped toast is seasoned with coarse salt and lavished with great olive oil. Once you’ve had it, the appeal is obvious. In addition to the contrasting flavors and textures of the elements,…

VINEGAR Vinegar is the main source of flavor in quick pickles, and it also provides acidity that helps preserve them. Distilled white and cider vinegars are the most common types for pickling; both usually contain moderate acid levels (about 5 percent). Wine and unseasoned rice vinegars are great options, too, though their acid levels vary more widely from brand to brand (from 4 to 8 percent). If your vinegar’s acidity level is on the low or high end of the spectrum, you may want to add less or more sugar to the brine, respectively. (Do not confuse unseasoned and seasoned rice vinegars; the latter contains added sugar and salt.) UNSEASONED RICEACIDITY: 4–5% Mellow, sweet DISTILLED WHITEACIDITY: about 5% Clean, neutral, sharp CIDERACIDITY: about 5% Sharp with round, pronounced fruitiness WHITE…

According to legend, about 160 years ago in Douarnenez, a small seaside town in the northwest corner of France, Yves Rene Scordia ran out of goods to sell in his bakery. The resourceful baker looked around his shop and spotted lean bread dough, sugar, and sea-salty Breton butter. He tucked a slab of the butter and a hefty amount of sugar inside the dough, rolled it out, folded it, and repeated the process before plopping the mass into a round pan, scoring the top, and sliding it into the oven. As it baked, some of the butter and sugar leaked out of the dough and pooled at the bottom of the pan, where it cooked down into a subtly salty caramel. The butter that remained in the folds created steam…

1 CYPRESS GROVE HUMBOLDT FOG PRICE: $40.00 per lb AGED: About 2 weeks TASTING NOTES: This American original is instantly recognizable due to the thin layer of ash that runs through the cheese’s bright-white center. As it ages, the outer edges become lush and satiny, while the center remains firm and crumbly. It’s bright, floral, and creamy. BACKGROUND: Mary Keehn founded her now-iconic creamery in 1983. Almost a decade later, while she was flying back from a trip to France, the idea of Humboldt Fog appeared to her in a dream. Keehn envisioned the thin layer of ash feathering when the wheels were sliced, resembling the fog in Humboldt County, California, where Cypress Grove is located. 2 GOAT LADY DAIRY PROVIDENCE PRICE: $46.00 per lb AGED: At least 5 months…

Electric Can Openers Electric can openers are meant to make opening cans simple. There are two styles: small countertop appliances and petite, battery-powered models that sit on top of cans. We assembled a lineup of nine models, ranging in price from about $15 to about $50. Testers, including one with arthritis, used them to open more than 100 cans of varying sizes. We evaluated how easy the openers were to operate, their cutting styles, and their durability. We preferred openers that latched on to cans easily and were stable while either holding up cans (countertop models) or spinning around their tops (battery-powered models). We also liked two openers that cut directly into the side of each can’s rim, separating the lid from the can’s body at the seal and leaving…