Innehållsförteckning för September - October 2015 från Cook's Illustrated

I recently visited my 19-year-old son, Charlie, in Utah where he was part of an Outward Bound–style adventure. The day I visited was rock-climbing day, replete with harnesses, carabiners, ropes, helmets, belay devices, and special climbing shoes. The group took more than an hour to set up the ropes as I sat around watching ripe-smelling twentysomethings crab their way up the cliff, legs akimbo. Then the inevitable happened—it was my turn. When you are a tad over 60 and, while you are standing at the bottom of a cliff, someone shouts out “your turn,” three things happen. First, you are transported back to third-grade physical education class—the one with the rope hanging from the gym ceiling—and it is now “your turn” to humiliate yourself in front of the jocks, the…

A SHAGGY DOUGH STORY What’s up with this scraggly looking dough? It allows the slivers of butter to be pressed and stretched into thinner and thinner sheets among the wet and dry clumps, ultimately creating more layers. Trust us: By the last fold, it will smooth out.…

What’s What? Sherry, a wine fortified with brandy, can be confusing to buy because it comes in a wide range of styles such as dry, sweet, cream, and “cooking.” But for savory cooking purposes, stick with the dry kind. Sweet and cream sherries will taste overwhelmingly sweet when reduced in sauces, and cooking sherry, which has been treated with salt and preservatives to make it shelf-stable, can render a dish too salty. Which Can I Use? Dry sherries come in a variety of sub-classifications that represent degrees of aging and fortification—from drier, lighter-bodied, and less expensive fino to nuttier, heavier, and pricier oloroso. We’ve found that it’s fine to cook with an inexpensive fino, such as Taylor Dry Sherry ($5.99 for 750 milliliters), but if you want a bottle that’s…

When we started testing, our sausage meatballs were dense and springy. We made close to 400 meatballs before landing on just the right combination of ingredients and mixing methods that produced the savory, juicy, fork-tender meatballs we wanted. FIRST WE TRIED hand-mixing sausage with standard panade (bread-milk mixture) BUT: meatballs dense, with mushy pockets of bread THEN WE TRIED subbing less-dense ground pork for sausage GOOD: meatballs less dense BUT: lacking sausage’s rich juiciness NEXT WE TRIED combining sausage and ground pork GOOD: richer meatballs BUT: meat and panade not homogeneous SO WE TRIED mixing with food processor GOOD: smooth, homogeneous BUT: meatballs not truly tender and juicy AFTER THAT WE TRIED mixing in portion of pork mixture by hand GOOD: more tenderness BUT: still not juicy SO WE TRIED…

It took a few tries to figure out an easy way to produce pita chips that would maintain most of their crunch even when mixed with vinaigrette and juicy vegetables.…

Everyone knows that summer squash has a lot going for it: It’s inexpensive and abundant, its mild flesh pairs nicely with a variety of flavors, and it cooks quickly. But it’s also 95 percent water and full of meddlesome seeds. That means that unless you do some finagling, you’re inevitably in for soggy, steamy, seedy results. Excess moisture is commonly addressed by cutting or shredding the vegetable, salting it, and then waiting at least 30 minutes for the liquid to drain off—a nonstarter when I’m racing to churn out dinner. Some recipes skip salting to economize on time and call for simply sautéing the squash quickly over high heat. The goal is to tenderize the flesh before it completely breaks down and sheds liquid, but the technique doesn’t work very…

Bay Leaves Stored in the freezer for three months, bay leaves were far more flavorful than those stored at room temperature for the same amount of time. Extra Butter If kept in the fridge longer than a month, even unopened sticks of butter can pick up off-flavors. Freeze extra sticks sealed in a zipper-lock bag. Extra Coffee Beans Unless coffee beans are sealed in unopened, airtight containers, their flavor deteriorates noticeably after 10 days at room temperature. Before freezing, portion extra beans in one-day allotments to minimize exposure to air and moisture. Nuts The high fat content of nuts means that they can turn rancid surprisingly fast at room temperature. There’s no need to thaw them before use. Whole-Grain Flours, Oats, and Cornmeal Freezing prevents fats in whole grains from…

I love making layer cakes. Tall, imposing ones that make a splash at parties and serve a crowd. The components should be pitch-perfect and strike that balance between kid birthday nostalgia and adult sophistication—a moist, tender crumb; distinct, spreadable filling that’s just thick enough to glue the layers together; and frosting that’s silky and full-bodied but not so sweet or rich that a forkful is overwhelming. Chocolate cake is my favorite, and I’ve made plenty layered with buttercream, ganache, and mousse. But this time I wanted to home in on chocolate and caramel—a combination that has a kind of visceral appeal. A quick search turned up plenty of recipes with a wide range of profiles. Maybe all I had to do was bake off a few and find one I…

Even if you’ve never heard of a carbon-steel skillet, you’ve almost certainly eaten a meal made in one. Restaurant chefs use these pans for all kinds of tasks, from searing steak to sautéing onions to cooking eggs. French omelet and crêpe pans are made of carbon steel, as are the woks used in Chinese restaurants. Even Julia Child had a few carbon-steel pieces alongside her familiar rows of copper cookware. In European home kitchens, these pans are hugely popular. Somehow, though, despite their prevalence in restaurants, they’ve never really caught on with home cooks in the United States. Given their reputation for being as great at browning as they are at keeping delicate foods from sticking, we wondered if it was time that changed. We bought seven carbon-steel skillets, all…

It’s early March, and a team of editors and I are driving along a winding dirt road in Vermont on our way to visit a sugar shack tucked against a mountain covered with thousands of maples. At first glance, the passing forest scape is a canvas of barren trees and snowy fields, but a closer look brings into focus a web of silver taps and clear plastic tubing weaving among the trees— the sign that it’s sugaring season. We’ve timed our trip carefully because sugaring season is both short and temperamental. Not only is the majority of the world’s maple syrup produced on relatively small-scale farms, like this one, throughout Canada and the northern United States over a period of just two months each year, but the sap production is…

While most maple syrup producers sell their products to large packagers who blend and sell them commercially, there are also some who sell their own unblended syrups directly from their farms (or through local specialty stores). Curious if these single-origin syrups would have more distinct, nuanced flavors—and if they would be worth mail-ordering—we tasted five (priced from $0.48 to $1.33 per ounce) alongside one of the supermarket brands. We liked them all, but none had distinct enough nuances to warrant the shipping charges—a result that maple syrup expert Michael Farrell said isn’t surprising. “Most people,” he noted, “aren’t going to be able to tell the difference.”…

Although it’s in the same family as applesauce, apple butter goes a step further, requiring cooking down apples to concentrate their flavor, drive off water, and caramelize their sugars. The result is a dark, complex-tasting spread that is ideal for serving with baked goods or cheese or as a sandwich spread. Most storebought versions overwhelm the apple flavor with an abundance of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. To keep the apple flavor up front in our homemade butter, we skip all the spices and instead add apple brandy, apple cider, and some lemon juice for brightness. Since firm texture wasn’t an issue, we picked two types of apples for flavor complexity—Fuji for its sweet, honey-like notes and McIntosh for classic apple taste. Because softer McIntosh apples break down more quickly than…

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED SIMPLEHUMAN Tension Arm Paper Towel Holder MODEL: KT1161 PRICE: $24.99 RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS RIBALIZER Rib Rack MODEL: N/A PRICE: $29.95 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED VINNIBAG Wine Travel Bag MODEL: VB01 PRICE: $28.00 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED OXO Good Grips Bent Icing Knife MODEL: 73591V1 PRICE: $9.99 RECOMMENDED COLE & MASON Derwent Gourmet Precision Pepper Mill MODEL: H59401G PM PRICE: $40.00 TESTING Paper Towel Holders A paper towel holder aids with tearing and protects the roll from wet spots and spills. Determined to find a sturdy holder that would make tearing quick, precise, and tidy, we purchased six models (priced from $13.00 to $24.99). All consisted of a center pole set on a metal base, sometimes with an arm to provide resistance for tearing. We tore off sheets in small and large increments…

A Grate Idea for Almond Paste Pat Wood of Broomfield, Colo., has found that stiff almond paste is difficult to incorporate into other ingredients, even if you crumble it. To break it up even more, she shreds it into fine pieces on a box grater. Removing Eggshell Bits Bits of broken eggshell can be hard to remove from a bowl of cracked eggs. Franklin English of Atlanta, Ga., suggests wetting two fingers. Because the water molecules naturally cling to the fingers and the shells, the water acts as a weak glue that makes it easy to pick out the pieces. Pulling Up the Tab The metal tab of a salt container lies flat against the top, which makes it hard to grab when it’s time to refill the saltshaker. Miriam…

Our usual method for cooking steaks is to preheat them in a 275-degree oven and then transfer them to the stovetop to sear their outsides. But when we adapted this technique to flank steak, we ran into a problem: By the time the thick end of the steak reached the target temperature of 120 degrees, the thin end overcooked. The solution? Turn down the oven: At 225 degrees, both the thick and thin ends stay within an acceptable temperature range. Here’s why: The increase in the internal temperature of the steaks is not constant over the course of their time in the oven. Initially, the steaks heat up pretty rapidly, and then they slow as their internal temperature approaches that of the oven. But here’s the interesting thing: The rate…

At a Spanish restaurant not long ago, a chicken dish called pollo en pepitoria caught my attention. The meat, which had been braised until it was incredibly tender, arrived covered in a creamy, fragrant, subtly coarse sauce that featured three of the cuisine’s star ingredients: sherry, saffron, and almonds. Scattered over the chicken were chopped egg whites and fresh parsley. The flavors and lush consistency were so appealing that I sopped up the extra sauce on the plate with pieces of crusty bread. I then hurried home to find recipes so that I could make the dish myself. I quickly learned that the dish, which some sources note is a great specialty of the saffron-producing Castilla–La Mancha region of Spain, gets its creamy-but-notquite-smooth consistency from a picada. This nut-based paste…

To ensure that meatballs hold their shape, retain moisture, and stay tender during cooking, we typically combine the ground meat with a panade, a paste made of milk and bread. The starches and liquid form a gel that coats and lubricates the meat proteins, preventing them from linking together into a tough matrix. The problem: It’s hard to thoroughly incorporate a panade into the meat when blending by hand, so we use a food processor. Its sharp blade literally cuts the paste into the meat so that the mixture is homogeneous.…

Gone are the days when a kitchen trash can was nothing more than a simple plastic bin with a lid. These days, your choices include sleek models in fingerprint-proof stainless steel with motion sensors that can set you back close to $200.00. To find out what our money would buy, we purchased five tall kitchen trash cans, including both bargain bins and luxury models, priced from $17.99 to $180.00. To evaluate design, user-friendliness, and odor control, we started by stuffing the cans with identical assortments of garbage, docking points if the bags slipped down or were hard to fill or remove. We then loaded the cans with odoriferous ingredients, left them for a weekend, and sniffed around for smells on Monday. Our final consideration was the way the user opens…

When cut, garlic and onions each release the same enzyme that reacts with their sulfur compounds to produce their characteristic pungent flavors. Because freezing reduces the activity of this enzyme, it needs to be able to do its job and produce the compounds before the garlic and onions go into the freezer, where the flavors will be preserved. There is one notable difference in how we freeze them: We coat garlic in oil to protect its pungent flavor compounds from oxidation. Onions contain an extra enzyme that does this job, so there’s no need for the oil.…

Caramel is simply sugar (sucrose) that’s been heated until it melts, browns, and develops complex flavor. You can use it to make a fluid caramel sauce or chewy or hard candy by adding cream, butter, and other flavorings. The longer the mixture cooks, the more water will evaporate and the stiffer the caramel will become. Though caramel gets a bad rap for being finicky to make, with the right recipe, it’s easy to overcome its two main pitfalls: The sugar can melt unevenly and burn, or it can seize up and crystallize. The latter happens when some of the sucrose molecules are not hot enough to melt and break down into glucose and fructose and instead bond, creating a grainy texture. Here’s what we do to make a caramel that…

Unless it comes preseasoned, a carbon-steel pan requires seasoning just as a cast-iron pan does. This process bonds oil to the surface, providing protection against rust and making the pan nonstick. The instructions that come with our winning pan, from Matfer Bourgeat, suggest an unusual method, but we found that it really works. INITIAL SEASONING First you’ll need to remove the new pan’s wax or grease coating (used to protect the metal from rusting in transit). Use very hot water, dish soap, and vigorous scrubbing with a bristle brush. Dry the pan and then put it on low heat to finish drying. Add 1/3 cup oil, 2/3 cup salt, and peels from two potatoes (these help to pull any remaining wax or grease from the pan surface). Cook over medium…

The color of maple syrup ranges dramatically over the course of the two-month sugaring season due to natural chemical changes in the sap. As the tree becomes more biologically active, phenolic compounds develop that infuse the sap, imparting color (and flavor). First-ofthe-season sap is almost clear because it contains few of these compounds. As the season progresses and the tree prepares to bloom, more compounds deepen the color of the sap.…

Getting the Most out of Leeks Since just the white and light green parts of a leek are tender— the tough dark green parts are suitable only for making stock—it pays to select specimens that have a higher proportion of the desirable light-colored base. How you prep them makes a difference, too: The traditional method is to simply chop off the leek at the point where light gives way to dark, but the usable pale, tender portion actually extends above this line in the interior of the vegetable. To preserve that part, we’ve adopted a new trimming method that results in a roughly 15 percent greater yield. –A.G. Ribs That Aren’t We’re not sure how country-style ribs, which we call for in our Sweet and Tangy Grilled Country-Style Pork Ribs…

What Is It? A perfectly poached egg is compact, saucer-shaped, and free of feathery whites. Could the tin Egg Poacher, a late-19th-century invention that we purchased on eBay for $25, help us achieve that goal? Its four circular molds contain the eggs as they sit on a perforated plate, which allows water to circulate during cooking and drain away afterward. When the eggs are done cooking, you remove the poacher from the water with the handle, which features a thumb-operated spring-loaded lever that lifts the molds away from the plate so the poached eggs can slide off. A cookery book of the era, Miss Parloa’s Kitchen Companion: A Guide for All Who Would Be Good Housekeepers (1887), proclaimed the Egg Poacher “so convenient that one could hardly do without it…

In a perfect world, cooking a flank steak would be as simple as throwing it into a hot pan and searing it on each side. The outside would be crusty and brown by the time the inside was cooked to a rosy, even medium. But in the real world, flank steak can be too long to squeeze into a 12-inch skillet, so its ends reach up the sloped sides, making it awkward to cook. Plus, it’s made up of long muscle fibers that contract when heated, causing the steak to buckle and therefore brown unevenly. The long muscle fibers also shrink unevenly as the meat cooks, so one end becomes thicker than the other. This means that the steak can turn out rare at the thick end and medium-well at…

From the enormous soft and fluffy Southern cat head to the simple drop, I love biscuits of all kinds. But my current obsession is a specimen I’ve recently found in several restaurants. It’s crisp and crunchy on the outside but tender and light as air inside, with flaky strata that peel apart like sheets of buttery paper in a way that rivals a croissant. No, this is not an everyday biscuit; it’s an ethereal, once-in-a-while treat rich enough that there’s no need to spread on any extra butter, just a slathering of jam, if that. But when I tried recipes billed as “rich and tender flaky biscuits,” very few lived up to the promise, and those that did required a lengthy process of folding the dough and letting it rest…

Like lots of Italian American families, mine always gathered on Sundays at my grandmother’s for a big spaghetti dinner. She made her version especially hearty by serving the pasta with meatballs as well as links of sweet Italian sausage, which were my favorite part. Their rich, ultrasavory flavor and distinct seasonings—fennel, oregano, and red pepper flakes—made the dish particularly satisfying. It’d be nice, I thought, to make meatballs with sausage, merging the links’ savory flavor and the meatballs’ tenderness into one package. The problem is that while meatballs are tender—a good one cleaves easily with the side of a fork—sausages are exactly the opposite: inherently dense and springy, which makes them awkward to cut and eat with spaghetti. This seemed like a problem worth solving. Break It Up Sausage is…

Middle Eastern cooks have a knack for making the most of leftovers. Take flatbreads, a mainstay of their tables. These thin breads stale quickly, so leftovers—and dishes designed to use them up—abound. Such recipes are called fatteh, derived from the Arabic word fatta, meaning “to crumble.” Pita bread salad, or fattoush, is a prime example. The vibrant mix traditionally combines toasted, fried, or dayold bread with ripe tomatoes, cucumber, romaine lettuce, parsley, mint, scallions, and a potent green like watercress, all simply dressed with fresh lemon juice and extra-virgin olive oil. Some cooks don’t mind (or even prefer) if the pita softens in the vegetable juices and vinaigrette, but I like the bread to have some crunch. My goal: a refreshing, easyto-make salad boasting plenty of textural contrast. Picking Produce…

Country-style pork ribs are a favorite in the test kitchen—we’ve sliced them into small pieces for stir-fries and braised and shredded them for hearty ragus. But this cut is rarely prepared on its own, perhaps because the name causes confusion. Countrystyle ribs actually aren’t anything like baby back ribs or St. Louis–style spareribs, which are sold as racks of bones joined by collagen-rich meat that takes hours to turn tender. Instead, they are more like well-marbled pork chops: They’re a knife-and-fork cut, sold either boneless or with a portion of bone attached, containing both light, lean loin meat and a section from the dark, richly pork-flavored shoulder. And because they contain much less collagen, they cook quickly. So why not treat them like pork chops and feature them front and…

Bread stales when starches crystallize and incorporate water into the crystalline structure, causing the loaf to harden. But the storage temperature dramatically affects how quickly this happens. We found that refrigerated bread staled in just a day and bread stored at room temperature staled in just two days—but frozen bread held up well for a month. Why? Staling, or retrogradation, occurs about six times faster at refrigerator temperatures (36 to 40 degrees) than at room temperature, but at below-freezing temps, it slows down significantly. Bottom line: Store bread at room temperature for no more than two days; otherwise, freeze it.…

When it comes to vegetarian recipes, veggie burgers have never been high on my list. Most rely on such a hodgepodge of ingredients, with multiple grains and vegetables that need to be individually prepared before they go into the burger, that they are a lot of work to put together. Black bean burgers seem more approachable. The earthy beans promise a hearty, satisfying meal, and because the beans themselves provide plenty of substance, ideally the process wouldn’t be much more complicated than making an everyday beef burger—just mash up a couple of cans of beans, add a few complementary ingredients, shape into patties, and cook. When I reviewed recipes, I found that there were a couple of approaches to handling the beans: They could be coarsely chopped, lightly mashed with…

It may sound like overkill, but the most effective way to ensure that a cake releases cleanly from a baking pan is to grease the pan, line it with parchment paper, and then grease and flour the parchment and pan sides. The parchment guarantees that the cake pulls away from the pan bottom completely, and a coat of grease and flour on the parchment and up the pan sides helps the batter cling and rise and ensures that the parchment pulls away from the cake bottom without removing large crumbs.…

We tested eight carbonsteel skillets, all close to 12 inches in diameter, rating them on their cooking performance, sticking, and ease of use, including directions for seasoning. (Two pans were preseasoned; we seasoned the rest according to manufacturer instructions.) All pans were purchased online and appear in order of preference. COOKING SURFACE Official pan sizes are based on rim-to-rim measurements; we measured across the flat portion of the inside of each pan to assess the actual available cooking surface. COOKING We fried eggs, made omelets, pan-seared steaks, and baked tartes Tatin. Pans that performed well across the board earned higher ratings. NONSTICK Pans received high marks for consistently releasing food without sticking. EASE OF USE We considered design factors such as shape; weight; thickness; and handle angle, length, and comfort.…

At first blush, fish sauce might seem like an odd concept. Like soy sauce, it’s both a condiment and an ingredient, and it’s full of glutamates that enhance flavor. But while soy sauce is made from comparatively mild-tasting fermented soybeans and grains, fish sauce gets its flavor from something far more potent: fermented anchovies. Manufacturing methods vary, but the basic process is the same: Fresh, whole anchovies are layered with sea salt and left to ferment for at least 12 months. Over time, the fish breaks down and the salty liquid that forms is collected and filtered before bottling. It’s strong stuff with an intense aroma. But there’s a reason this pungent sauce is a critical component of many Asian cuisines and is becoming increasingly common in American kitchens: Its…