Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2019 från Cook's Illustrated

You can’t talk about Korean food without talking about jangs,” Seong shouted over his shoulder at me as he carefully diced a carrot into ¼-inch cubes. I was a couple of weeks into culinary school, and Seong, a student from Seoul, South Korea, had taken it upon himself to teach me about the food he grew up eating. Between precision knife cuts, he explained that jangs—intensely savory fermented sauces and pastes made from soybeans and chiles—were the backbone of the cuisine. I had little experience with Korean food. I peppered him with questions. One night after class, Seong cooked his grandmother’s recipes for a group of us at my apartment. Along with many other dishes, he made bulgogi, thinly sliced marinated rib eye that he stir-fried in a hot skillet.…

In our ragu bianco, two rounds of fond development ensure plenty of rich flavor. First, we simmer pancetta to extract its juices and fat and let that liquid turn into a deeply savory fond. Then, as the pork shoulder simmers in the oven, juices and fat spatter onto the sides of the pot, creating a second layer of fond. To loosen the fond on the sides, we simply cover the pot for a few minutes so that steam can soften it.…

Until recently, tilapia was not a fish that ever came up in our weekly discussion of potential recipes to develop. We had a vague idea of it as being a second-rate, predominantly farm-raised fish with a muddy taste, so why even go there? Then we learned that tilapia is now the fourth-most-consumed seafood in the United States (after shrimp, tuna, and salmon) and decided that it was time to take a closer look. A tilapia fact-finding mission ensued: We scoured the internet for information and started experimenting in the test kitchen. Boy, were we ever wrong about this fish. Tilapia has a whole lot going for it, including a strong recommendation from a leading consumer watchdog group (see “Three Reasons to Love Tilapia”). The flesh of tilapia, a freshwater fish,…

Archaeological evidence suggests that humans have been eating from bowls for at least 20,000 years. But never have bowls been as trendy as they are now. Noodle bowls, breakfast bowls, veggie bowls, taco bowls, and more (what’s a Buddha bowl?) are all big sellers in the fast-casual dining scene, and I can see why: In a single vessel, you get a healthful, vibrant mix of complementary flavors and textures. Everything mingles as you eat, creating a uniquely satisfying experience. I particularly enjoy bowls built around grains: Heaped onto a base of earthy, nubby kernels, you’ll typically find some cooked vegetables, a protein, a potent dressing, a pickled element, and a crunchy garnish. I knew that creating a grain bowl from scratch would be a project. After all, what makes a…

If you aren’t cooking beets, you should be. They’re cheap, widely available, and nutritious. When properly cooked, they feature velvety texture, earthy sweetness, and vibrant color that make them the focus of salads and sides. If only they cooked faster. While roasting—the most common method—is easy (just wrap whole unpeeled beets in foil and throw them in the oven), even average-size beets need more than an hour to turn truly tender. Plus, you have to wait for the oven to preheat and then for the roasted specimens to cool before peeling. Also, beets cooked this way can’t be seasoned; the salt merely sits on the skins. I brainstormed ways to speed things up. Since water transfers heat more efficiently than air does, I tried boiling whole beets. This saved only…

A fresh, warm biscuit instantly doubles the coziness quotient of practically anything you serve it with: chicken stew, vegetable soup, fried eggs, or—my favorite accompaniment—another fresh, warm biscuit. But mastering the traditional biscuit-making technique takes some practice. First, you combine flour with salt, baking powder, and maybe a bit of sugar (a highly contentious addition—more about that later) and then toss in cubes of cold butter, which you crumble and flatten until precisely the right amount of tiny butter flakes are strewn evenly throughout the flour. Next, you stir in cold milk or buttermilk—masters of the art emphasize that everything must remain frigid—until the mixture forms a shaggy dough. Finally, you transfer the mass of dough to the counter, gently roll or pat it out, and cut out rounds with…

Do blondes have more fun? Compared with brownies, which get far more attention than their fairer counterpart, I’m not so sure. While you have to look hard to find a truly bad brownie, pale, cloying blondies seem more the rule than the exception. Add the fact that they’re often overloaded with bland white chocolate chips or artificially flavored butterscotch morsels and it’s a wonder they have any fun at all. That’s too bad, because those times I’ve run across a blondie that’s moist, chewy, slightly dense, and full of complex butterscotch goodness, I’ve always thought that it could hold its own next to any baked treat, let alone a brownie. I wanted to perfect this bar and give it the respect it deserves. Mistaken Identities Before I got down to…

BROWNED BUTTER: Melted butter contributes to chewy texture. Browning it darkens the milk solids to create toasty, nutty depth. BROWN SUGAR + CORN SYRUP: Brown sugar contributes toffee notes, and both sweeteners enhance chewy texture. Corn syrup is also less sweet than other sugars. LOTS OF VANILLA: Two full tablespoons of vanilla enhance caramel-like flavors. PLENTY OF SALT: More than the usual amount of salt in the batter (plus more on top) brings all the flavors into focus. COMPLEMENTARY MIX-INS: Pecans add buttery richness; milk (versus dark) chocolate chips don’t overwhelm the butterscotch notes.…

If you want the freshest, most full-flavored cup of coffee, we always recommend grinding your own coffee beans. It’s best to do this right before you brew, as our testing has shown that the beans begin to lose flavor and aroma within an hour of being ground. Home grinders come in two styles: blade and burr. A blade grinder works like a tiny food processor, with a rapidly spinning blade that chops coffee beans into smaller and smaller fragments. You have to hold the grind button down, time the grind, shake the grinder periodically to distribute the beans, and inspect the ground coffee to see if it’s reached the desired consistency. While a blade grinder has one chamber where you load, grind, and dispense the beans, a burr grinder consists…

Unsweetened chocolate is typically made from 100 percent fermented and roasted cacao nibs that have been ground into a paste, melted, and solidified into a bar. We rely on this kind of chocolate to pack in rich chocolate flavor without added sweetness. We’ve long stocked Hershey’s Kitchens Unsweetened Chocolate Baking Bar in the test kitchen, but in the years since we named it our favorite, it has become difficult to find—according to the manufacturer, it is now sold in only 20 states. We wondered if there was another option that would be just as good (or better) and more widely available, so we rounded up five unsweetened chocolates priced from $0.62 to $1.35 per ounce, including Hershey’s. We tasted them blind in our One-Minute Hot Fudge Sauce—a simple recipe of…

“Exfoliate” Root Veggies Dawn Provenncher of Questa, N.M., has a new way to speedily clean the grime from root vegetables such as potatoes and carrots: She soaks the vegetables briefly in warm water and then dons a clean bath exfoliating glove and rubs away the dirt with her gloved hand. Make a Plastic Wrap Pull Tab To make a plastic-wrapped sandwich easy to unwrap, Anne Hender–son of Blenheim, Ontario, places the sandwich at a slight angle on a piece of plastic wrap and then rolls up the sandwich until she’s left with a little piece of extra plastic that can be twisted to form a tab. When she’s ready to eat, she can quickly find the tab and pull it to unwrap the food. Traveling Tool Kit Noreen McGovern of…

KIMCHI: In Korea, this accompaniment is on the table at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There are hundreds of variations, but the best-known type, which is tangy and spicy, is made of salted fermented napa cabbage and seasoned with chili powder, garlic, ginger, and scallions. Add it to grain bowls, stir-fries, scrambled eggs, burgers, hot dogs, or grilled cheese. GOCHUJANG: This thick, sweet, savory, and spicy paste is made from gochugaru (Korean chile flakes), dried fermented soybean powder, sweet rice powder, salt, and sometimes sugar. Use it in Korean Fried Chicken, marinades, or dipping sauces or to pep up soups, stews, and even deviled eggs. DOENJANG: Fermented soybeans give this coarse-textured, miso-like, salty, rich paste a slight sourness. Use as a replacement for miso in soups, stews, and dressings or as…

By the time we’d finished developing our tilapia recipe, we were converts: Its mild taste and moist, firm flesh are hard to beat. Even so, we were intrigued by a blind tasting the Washington Post staged in its offices a couple of years back comparing tilapia to seven other varieties of fish. The tasting panel included renowned D.C. chef Scott Drewno, Post food critic Tom Sietsema, and a fisheries expert, among others. Not only did tilapia come in second, but Chef Drewno, formerly a tilapia detractor, declared it his favorite. We decided to conduct our own blind tasting, comparing tilapia to four other common white fish: flounder, branzino, haddock, and snapper. The fish arrived ultrafresh from our seafood purveyor in a single delivery, and we prepared all the fillets according…

When you roast bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts in a skillet, fat renders from the skin, juices seep from the flesh, and bits of meat stick to the pan. These tidbits crackle and brown, creating a concentrated, chicken-y infusion. Tradition dictates that you use these drippings to whip up a pan sauce. But that’s wasting an opportunity to make a one-pan meal. Why not cook a vegetable in them to create a rich, savory side? Add crusty bread and a bottle of wine and you’re done—with just one pan to wash. I started by peeling back the chicken skin so I could season the flesh with salt; I then repositioned the skin. To ensure that the skin would end up fully rendered, I wanted to kick-start that process by searing the…

Years ago, we weighed white mushrooms before and after submerging them in water and found that the fungi soaked up very little water during their wash. That’s because mushrooms are built to repel water—if they didn’t, they’d turn to mush in the first rain. They use several methods to keep dry, including secreting specialized proteins called hydrophobins. To find out if other types of mushrooms are just as water-resistant, we expanded our original test, first weighing batches of white, cremini, portobello, shiitake, oyster, and maitake mushrooms and then submerging each batch in water for 1 minute. We removed the mushrooms and blotted them dry before weighing them again. It turns out that mushroom gills hold a lot of water in their folds. Portobello and shiitake mushrooms, which have lots of…

Roasted, salted chickpeas have long been popular in the Middle East. In 1875 they were so well-liked that Armenian composer Dikran Tchouhadjian named his operetta after a peddler of the snack: Leblebici Horhor Aga (Master Hor-Hor, the Chickpea Vendor). Roasted chickpeas have become trendy in the United States, too. It’s easy to see why: They boast the crunch and saltiness of chips and pretzels, but they’re protein-packed and lighter on oil. Recipes are straightforward: Just drain canned chickpeas and oven-roast (temperatures and times vary widely) until crisp. Some add oil from the get-go, others wait. Ditto for spices, salt, and sugar. I found that the oil (1½ tablespoons per can of beans) needed to go on early to help crisp the chickpeas, lest they simply dry out. Spices, on the…

Though the origins of both bars are murky, evidence suggests that the first brownie was actually (drum roll, please) a blondie. One of the first recipes for a confection dubbed a “brownie” appears in the 1896 edition of Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in reference to individual cakes flavored with molasses and baked in shallow tins; this was followed in the 1906 edition by a new version of the same recipe calling for chocolate. Over time, the name for the molasses brownies morphed into “blonde brownies,” then “butterscotch brownies,” and finally, decades later (some suggest as late as the 1980s), simply “blondies,” conferring upon this confection an identity all its own.…

We purchased 10 burr grinders priced from $29.86 to $199.99 and used each to grind coffee beans of different densities on fine, medium, and coarse settings. We also ground and sifted 10-gram batches of coffee in each model until we found the grind setting on each that produced the highest percentage of medium-size pieces. Six users tried the top four coffee grinders and gave feedback about grind size and ease of use. A panel of 21 tasters sampled coffee made from beans ground in the least even and most even coffee grinders; we standardized the weight of the ground coffee, the brew method, and the type of beans. We repeated the test three times to confirm the results. Finally, we removed the burrs from all the grinders, inspecting their shape…

Making nut butters at home couldn’t be simpler—just grind the nuts to a paste in a food processor. Plus, you can customize the nut butters to your taste and make varieties that aren’t readily available in stores. Be aware that hard, dense nuts such as almonds can take as long as 20 minutes to process to a smooth paste—but don’t worry, it will happen eventually. We found that toasting the nuts before grinding them not only boosts their flavor but also warms their oils, allowing for faster breakdown during processing. (We also warm preroasted nuts for this reason.) Certain nuts require thinning with oil or thickening with water to create a spreadable consistency (see “Thicken Homemade Nut Butter with … Water?” on page 30 for more information). HOMEMADE NUT BUTTER…

Anyone who has sautéed mushrooms knows that they’re veritable sponges, seeming to absorb as much oil as you put in the pan. But while developing our new method for sautéing these fungi (page 15)—which calls for steaming them in water before adding any oil to the pan—we noticed that, once cooked, the mushrooms barely absorbed any oil at all. To demonstrate this phenomenon, we carried out the following experiment. EXPERIMENT We tossed 100 grams of raw halved, trimmed white mushrooms with ¼ cup of vegetable oil. After 5 minutes, we drained the mushrooms and weighed them again. We repeated this treatment with another 100 grams of mushrooms that we first microwaved until they were just cooked through and then thoroughly dried. RESULTS The raw mushrooms absorbed 42 grams of oil…

Mention the word “ragu,” and a rich, meaty, tomato-laced sauce typically comes to mind. But sauces containing tomato are a relatively recent addition to the Italian culinary repertoire, not appearing until the early 1800s. Long before then, ragu bianco (a simple, not-too-saucy mixture of any number of chopped or shredded meats, aromatics, and often white wine—but never tomato) was on the menu. Ragu bianco started out as fare for nobility. Beef, pork, or game was stewed, and the deeply savory cooking liquid was used to dress pasta as one course. Meanwhile, the meat was carved and arranged on a platter for a subsequent course. Eventually, this style of eating was copied by the gentry, who used smaller, less expensive cuts. By the late 17th century, the practice had trickled down…

Many bulgogi marinade recipes include pear or kiwi—fruits that contain enzymes that supposedly tenderize the meat. To test their tenderizing effects for ourselves, we added ½ cup each of crushed pear and crushed kiwi to separate batches of our marinade and soaked slices of rib-eye steak in each for 30 minutes. We also tossed more sliced steak in our go-to tenderizer—a solution of baking soda and water—for 5 minutes (since baking soda works on contact, longer isn’t necessary) and then stir-fried all three samples per our recipe. While the baking soda–treated batch cooked up perfectly moist and tender, the pear- and kiwi-marinated meat cooked up mushy on the surface. That’s because the tenderizers work differently: Whereas baking soda tenderizes by unraveling and separating the meat’s protein strands, the powerful fruit…

IT TASTES GREAT: Modern aquaculture systems produce meaty tilapia with a mild flavor. IT’S NUTRITIOUS: Tilapia fillets are low in fat and high in protein. IT’S SUSTAINABLE: The sustainable seafood adviser Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch lists tilapia as a Best Choice.…

You don’t have to be a professional chef to know that “saute” means to sear food in a small amount of hot fat so that it browns deeply and develops savory flavor. So you might wonder how I—a professional chef—came to conclude that the most important step when sauteing mushrooms is to first simmer them in water. To explain, let me start by recounting what typically happens when you saute mushrooms. You heat a little oil in a skillet, throw in the sliced fungi, and toss them around. Pretty soon, there’s no oil left in the skillet, so you add a little more to lubricate the pan and encourage the browning that creates loads of new, rich-tasting flavor compounds. But mushrooms suck up oil like crazy, and you find yourself…

We found that the chickpeas at the edges of a rimmed baking sheet tended to scorch toward the end of the roasting time. We could prevent this with frequent stirring, but that let heat escape from the oven, so the chickpeas took longer to finish. Instead, we switched to a 13 by 9-inch metal baking pan: Its high sides deflect some of the oven’s heat. We also crowd the chickpeas toward the center of the pan and away from the hotter sides.…

Fridge-cold cream looks like it’s 100 percent liquid, but it’s actually a combination of water, protein, and sugar, with tiny particles of solid butterfat suspended throughout. By warming the cream just enough to melt the fat particles (but not enough to activate the baking powder when the cream is mixed into the dry ingredients), we turn it into a pure liquid. This means we can use less cream to create a dough that is still loose enough to scoop and drop but that doesn’t spread too much or bake up too greasy. To demonstrate this effect, we made two doughs using 2 cups of cream. In one batch, the cream was fridge-cold; in the other, we warmed it. The dough made with the warmed cream was noticeably loose and easy…

Test: Eliminate the chocolate in brownie batter Results: Without the starch from cocoa powder to absorb liquid, the bars baked up greasy and gummy. They were also horribly sweet. Test: Bake chocolate chip cookie dough in a 13 by 9-inch baking pan Results: Without the browning that individually baked cookies achieve, the bars lacked butterscotch flavor; they were also dry and tough.…

We tested 10 top-selling vanillas, including seven pure vanilla extracts and three imitation vanilla products, priced from $0.12 to $6.19 per fluid ounce. Tasters tried each one in our Classic Vanilla Pudding and Quick and Rich Vanilla Frosting. Then we tried the top extract and top imitation product in our Vanilla Icebox Cookies and Fluff y Yellow Layer Cake. An independent lab measured vanillin levels in grams per 100 milliliters; ingredient and bean origin information was taken from product packaging or confirmed by company representatives. Prices were paid in Boston-area supermarkets and online. We averaged the tasting scores, and products appear below in order of preference. RECOMMENDED BAKER’S Imitation Vanilla Flavor PRICE: $0.98 for 8 fl oz ($0.12 per fl oz) STYLE: Imitation VANILLIN: 0.58 g INGREDIENTS: Water, propylene glycol,…

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED CLICK AND GROW Smart Garden 9 MODEL: 9 PRICE: $199.95 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MONBENTO MB Square—Litchi MODEL: 120003066 PRICE: $27.99 RECOMMENDED NORDIC WARE Half Sheet Cover MODEL: 43119 PRICE: $10.13 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED WEBER Spirit II E-310 Gas Grill MODEL: 45030001 PRICE: $499.00 Indoor Gardens Indoor gardens promise to make it easy to harvest herbs, lettuce, and other types of small produce at home, even if you lack outdoor space or sunlight. We tested four models priced from $189.99 to $199.95, all equipped with full-spectrum grow lights and more or less self-watering systems. Three were “smart” gardens with apps that helped us monitor and care for the plants. In four and a half months of testing, two of the gardens grew just a few harvestable herbs. However, the other two…