BY
Tina Ujlaki
| POSTED MAY 10, 2013 AT 9:00AM EDT
Courtesy of Scrumptious Pantry
F&W food editors apply their incredible cooking knowledge to explaining what to do with a variety of interesting ingredients.
In the Food Department here, many of the products we try every week are condiments—jams and jellies, oils and vinegars, sauces, pickles and relishes, spice blends and flavoring salts. It’s actually a huge field, and a hard one to stand out in because there are so many good products. I normally wouldn’t use a seasoning salt, as I have a huge arsenal of herbs and spices at home, but there is one exception that I’ve bought again and again. It’s made by a company called the Scrumptious Pantry that’s based in Chicago, but sources its products from family farms in Italy in addition to the Midwest and California, where the owner used to manage a biodynamic winery.
Of course, it makes me feel good to know that the salt comes from a good place, but what I really love is the fresh, vibrant flavor that gets Italy just right. Whether you’re seasoning porchetta or bistecca, or just sprinkling the Herbed All-Purpose Salt on olive oil-roasted carrots and potatoes, its balance of salt, sage, rosemary, bay, lemon and garlic is just right; there's nothing musty about it. The salts are available at specialty food shops or by mail order from thescrumptiouspantry.com.
Smart videos (demos, progress reports and the like) are often essential to securing crowdfunding on sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. But the owners of The Market Restaurant in Gloucester, Massachusetts, went for all-out charming in this pitch for donations to their new pizzeria, Short & Main. Newlywed chefs and Chez Panisse alumni Nico and Amelia Monday, with friends Matt Cawley and Howie Correa, created a short narrative featuring baby and wedding photos, plywood shots and pizza porn—and secured more than $20,000. (Incentives didn’t hurt, such as a copy of F&W’s America’s Greatest New Cooks cookbook, which features the Mondays' recipe for smoked fish chowder.) While the donation period has ended, the video, above, offers a great preview of Short & Main, as well a lesson on how to attract a following before a project is even off the ground.
Despite the deluge of amazing treats coming out of the Food & Wine test kitchen every afternoon, we’ve been known to give in to street food cravings. We’re super-excited about the Friendship cottage cheese truck, a healthy option hitting the streets of NYC on Tuesday, May 7. READ MORE>
Congrats to F&W contributing editor Andrew Zimmern, who just won the 2013 James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding TV Host!
Boiling Water 101 was a class I taught for 10 years at a local school in Minnesota. This recipe was one I designed to teach a basic skill but also deliver complex flavors and serve as a touchstone for family meals or entertaining. You really need to practice braising/poaching/blanching as often as you can because wet-heat cooking is much more subtle than dry-heat cooking but so much easier. Recipes like this will change your outlook on cooking for sure. Get wet! SEE RECIPE »
Food & Wine's senior recipe developer, Grace Parisi, is a Test Kitchen superstar. In this series, she shares some of her favorite recipes to make right now.
Crispy glazed wings, hot off the grill are unsurpassed in their deliciousness. My favorites are ones that combine opposing flavors and textures: sweet/spicy and crispy/sticky.
The trick to getting there is to grill (or fry or roast) your wings naked—with nothing more than salt and pepper and maybe a touch of oil on them until they’re supercrispy, then quickly coating them with a sugary glaze that gets caramelized at the last minute. That’s for texture. For flavor, I like to combine something sweet like jam (sour cherry preserves) with fresh aromatics—habanero and sautéed onion, in this case. The habanero makes them a little dangerous and the sweet cherry tames the heat. Like an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, you need both to enjoy it all. SEE RECIPE »
Horchata, the delicious Mexican drink of cinnamon-flecked rice milk is getting an adult makeover from bartenders across the country, making it the ideal cocktail for this Cinco de Mayo. MORE >
F&W food editors apply their incredible cooking knowledge to explaining what to do with a variety of interesting ingredients.
A big part of the pleasure of eating pistachios is getting them out of the shell. It slows you down, of course, and spares you from mindlessly grabbing a handful, which is good. Plus, every pistachio presents its own little challenge of how to get the nut out in one piece without hurting your fingers or your teeth, or cracking a nail. Now the folks at Blue Diamond have jumped into the game with dry-roasted thin-shell almonds, which come salted and unsalted. I can’t tell you how they make the shells thinner, because they weren’t willing to share their secret. But the almonds we tried were superfresh and crisp, with great almond flavor, and they definitely made mindful snacking on almonds a lot more fun.
OK, so I was with Hot and Hot Fish Club’s amazing chef Chris Hastings, standing in his Birmingham, Alabama, restaurant kitchen and eating my way through his mise en place about an hour before service. He hated me. But before I left, he fed me some shrimp and grits, and the shrimp were some of the most miraculous I have ever had. So I started quizzing him. He freely told me that while fresh Gulf shrimp, just hours out of water, help immensely, it’s the cooking technique that results in their perfect flavor and sinful texture. I can’t even begin to tell you how good these are. Anyway, I adapted his trick and, inspired by some local cress I had eaten in a salad dish earlier that day with him, I created this riff on his dish. That man is a genius, truly. SEE RECIPE »
Food & Wine's senior recipe developer, Grace Parisi, is a Test Kitchen superstar. In this series, she shares some of her favorite recipes to make right now.
At a recent trip to a great new restaurant in my neighborhood, 606 R&D, I had a most intriguing dessert called Shaker Lemon Pie—a double-crusted pie with a flaky crust and almost lemon-marmalade–like filling. It was quite good, but not flawless—the crust was a bit soggy and the filling was dry, but the flavor was intoxicating. I knew if I did a bit of work it could be even better. I asked my husband, Chris, from Shaker Heights, Ohio, the resident expert (at least in our house) on Shaker culture, but he’d never heard of it.
I was obsessed and had to know more, so I read a number of recipes online and found a few books about Shaker/Mennonite cooking. Obviously, lemons don’t grow in the Midwest, so it’s a relatively modern recipe (last century). Whole lemons are shaved superthin with skin (pick out the seeds) and macerated with sugar for a day or longer, then mixed with eggs, flour and butter and layered between two crusts. The rind softens and cooks like marmalade but with all of the other ingredients, it has more of a cakey/lemon curd/marmalade texture. I opted for something a little different. I made a shortbread-type bottom crust, which I topped with the lemon filling and a lattice of more shortbread. The result is a delicate, yet pick-up-able lemon bar that is tangy, sweet and buttery. It’s totally perfect to take to a Shaker church social or in my case, my back deck with a hot cup of milky, sweet coffee. SEE RECIPE »
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