Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2022 från Cook's Illustrated

In my third-grade classroom, a tin bucket filled with dried beans sat in the corner. Most days my teacher would walk between the rows of students and place a small pile of beans on each desk. I always liked to line up mine in the pencil trough at the top of my desk and pick them up one at a time for examination. Many had chipped skins from years of being dropped on the floor, launched across the classroom at enemies, and rattled together as they were poured by the handful back into the tin. We were supposed to learn math from the beans. Twenty beans plus four equals 24. Four piles of three beans is 12. But it always bothered me that these beans were consigned to perform math,…

The way Brits describe their fish pie is a lot like the way Texans talk about brisket or New Yorkers explain a properly chewy bagel—which is to say, with great conviction and affection. The Guardian columnist Felicity Cloake has compared the beloved casserole to a cozy pair of slippers or a Sunday-afternoon film with a mug of tea, and Manchester-based journalist Tony Naylor dubbed it “elbows-on-the-table, fork-in-one-hand, glass-in-the-other eating.” “Fish pie,” he wrote in his own Guardian account, “should be a dish of seamless comfort-troffing.” Unequivocally snug, substantive fare that likely evolved as a Lenten dish made with seafood scraps (see “From Meatless Fridays to Fish Pie”), the dish is the surf equivalent of shepherd’s or cottage pie. It’s typically a mixture of fresh and smoked finfish such as cod,…

When I left oceanside Montego Bay to attend cooking school in the hills of New York’s Hudson Valley, making a warming batch of my grandmother’s stew peas always soothed my homesick heart. And whenever I returned to visit, Grandma invariably welcomed me with a pot bubbling with rich coconut milk; perfumed with fresh thyme, scallions, a fiery Scotch bonnet chile, and allspice berries (known as pimento in the Caribbean); and brimming with red peas, salted pig tails, and the simple dumplings known as spinners. hese days, I am again living on the island, and the homey dish is still woven into our routine: After making a batch, Grandma always packs extra in a food storage container for my lunch—a sweet, silent signal that I was on her mind as she…

Despite its name, an air fryer doesn’t fry your food. These countertop appliances are essentially small convection ovens with powerful fans that circulate hot air around food to approximate the crisp and juicy results of deep frying. Much like toaster ovens, air fryers are also marketed as smaller and more convenient alternatives to conventional ovens; they generally cook food quicker, shaving off 5 to 10 minutes from most recipes. They need to be preheated for only a few minutes, if at all, and they won’t heat up your entire kitchen. We tested our lineup by making recipes we’ve developed specifically for air frying, including french fries, chicken Parmesan, and pork tenderloin. A few things set our favorite models apart from the others. First, the amount of available cooking space. Since…

A Good(!) Vegan Cheese Plate With a growing number of people interested in eating plant-based foods, more varieties of vegan cheese are emerging than ever before. We thought it was time to take a closer look at one especially exciting emerging category: vegan cheeses that would be appropriate for serving plain, on a vegan cheese plate. So we tasted nine of the most well-regarded products, including Brie-style, blue cheese–style, and spreadable vegan cheeses. Textures ran the gamut from smooth and spreadable to firm and relatively dry, though many of our favorite cheeses leaned toward the creamy side. We generally preferred cheeses with shorter ingredient lists. Cheeses that included onion powder, mustard powder, or other “natural flavors” were either dominated by these flavors or head-scratchingly insipid. Most cheeses were pleasantly tangy…

There’s lots to love when it comes to pasta cacio e uova (“CAH-chee-oh eh WOE-va”). The cheese and egg pasta, called cas ’e ov in its native Naples, doesn’t dirty many dishes, calls for just a handful of ingredients, and makes its way to the table in a flash. The method is simple: Cooked and drained pasta is returned to the pot and tossed with a garlic-infused fat, such as lard, olive oil, or butter. The magic happens when a mixture of Pecorino Romano, Parmesan, and beaten eggs is poured into the pot—as the egg, cheese, and still-hot pasta are stirred together, the cheese melts, the egg cooks, and a smooth and glossy sauce forms to complete the dish. With such a straightforward cooking method, the keys to success lay…

One of the best ways I know to enjoy the butterscotch-y goodness of the caramelized milk jam dulce de leche (page 15) is between a pair of buttery, citrus-scented cookies in the Latin American confection called alfajores de maicena. Named for the cornstarch (maicena) in the dough, the cookies are so delicate that they crumble as you eat them, their buttery flavor melding with the rich toffee notes of the dulce de leche. I fell hard for these treats when I first encountered them at Uruguayan American Valery Ketenjian’s bakery Alfa Alfajores in San Diego. Now I can’t get enough of them. The name “alfajor” comes from a Hispano-Arabic word for “stuffed” and is an umbrella term for a wide variety of sandwich cookies hugely popular across Latin America and…

Confession: I was an air-fryer skeptic. As appealing as it sounds to rapidly crisp foods with little oil—the machine’s most touted claim to fame—I avoid cluttering my kitchen with equipment that seems single purpose. But when I recently had the opportunity to test a range of air-fryer recipes that my colleagues developed, I realized I’d greatly underestimated this appliance. I discovered that with the right techniques, an air fryer can also ably roast meats, perfectly cook delicate foods such as eggs and fish, and even bake muffins or boil breakfast porridge. In fact, once I started cooking with the appliance (see our new winner on page 23), I could readily see how nothing else in my kitchen offers its same combination of speed, ease, and convenience. First, its convection heat…

A bustling, global metropolis, Shanghai is teeming with international cuisine—but the region’s traditional fare persists in the steamer baskets, bubbling fryers, and massive griddles of its street markets and casual restaurants. For breakfast on the go, commuters stop by street carts to buy plush, pillowy pork or vegetable BAOZI. Nestled together in large cast-iron pans, juicy pork-filled SHENGJIANBAO are simultaneously pan-fried and steamed, resulting in golden bottoms and puffed, fluffy tops. The secret to the magical soupy filling of NANXIANG XIAOLONG MANTOU? Gelatin-rich stock that turns to liquid when heated. Variations on this open-faced dumpling abound in China, but Shanghai’s NUOMI SHAOMAI is unique for its sticky rice–based filling. Families celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival by sharing mooncakes, circular treats such as XIANROU YUEBING, before going outside to view the full…

Prolonged, steady heat is responsible for some really spectacular culinary alchemy, not the least of which is the glossy, coffee-colored milk jam made throughout Latin America. In Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where it’s referred to as dulce de leche (similar preparations go by different names in other countries), cooks reduce sweetened milk (and often baking soda) until the dairy’s proteins and sugars react and transform the mixture into a gooey, butterscotch-y jam that finds its way into almost every kitchen pantry. “It really is everywhere,” said Josephine Caminos Oría, Argentine American author of Dulce de Leche: Recipes, Stories, and Sweet Traditions (2017). These days, tubs of commercial dulce de leche line supermarket shelves throughout Latin America like peanut butter does in the United States—but the milk jam is arguably more…