From scientific deep dives and culinary musings to excessively practical supper strategies—these are our best online-only articles from this year.
I don’t know what marketing team decided tuna was the “chicken of the sea,” but I think that title should go to shrimp. Not because because shrimp looks or tastes anything like poultry—it doesn’t—but they both function as veritable blank canvases, and take well to a wide range of seasonings and sauces.
After milking the coconut shreds for all they were worth, I took a sip of the milk. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic, but it was incredible. Rich, but not so fatty it left a film on my tongue; lightly sweet, but not cloying. It tasted fresh, with a warm nuttiness that lingered on my palate for just a moment, making me crave the next sip almost immediately. I would have chugged down the whole batch right then had I not had an intense craving for Thai soup. (I plan to make another batch for blending into smoothies and chugging.)
You’d think such a fluffy, tender crumb would require a lot of coddling, but this recipe, which we learned in Mexico City, turned our notions of cake-baking on their heads. No creaming butter and sugar, no whipping egg whites, no fussy folding here. All you need is a blender—trust me—and you’ll be tucking into cake in no time.
Minestra maritata, directly translated from Italian as “married soup,” or “wedding soup” is a staple throughout Italy, but the name is slightly deceiving. Despite what comes to mind, you would be hard-pressed to find it served at any weddings outside of Campania, where it is considered the celebratory dish for marital unions. Instead, “married” in this context refers to the melding or “marriage” of meats and greens cooked low and slow until they’ve unified into a symphony of flavors ranging from fresh and herbaceous to rich and savory.
Without a crackling layer of hard, caramelized sugar, crème brûlée is nothing more than vanilla pudding. (Really good vanilla pudding, but still.) The torched top should be thin, brittle and easy to crack with your spoon. It should not bend, and it should be a deep, even golden brown, never burnt black. This all hinges on the sugar and heat, so we grabbed our torches to determine which one brûlées the best.
Starch has two primary uses in the kitchen—thickening and crisping. Cornstarch can help you accomplish both, as it contains two types of starch molecules, amylose and amylopectin. Amylose is a straight, linear chain; amylopectin is highly branched. This makes them good at different things. When thickening a sauce or gravy, you want a tangly, bushy molecule like amylopectin that gets caught on itself, slowing down the flow of the liquid and upping the viscosity. Amylose, on the other hand, is great at building a hard, crunchy coating, thanks to its ordered, stackable structure.
About 20% of the protein found in milk comes from whey. Whey protein inhibits gluten formation, which you need to help the cake rise to its full height and produce a tender interior crumb, rather than a dense one. But whey protein is heat-sensitive—it’ll break down when exposed to enough heat (roughly 181 degrees Fahrenheit, if you want to whip your thermometer out). Scalding milk denatures some of the protein in the dairy, allowing the gluten to do its job and giving your cake the right texture.
Another factor that may contribute to a dislike of MSG is the idea that it flattens or oversimplifies—it’s a shortcut, a way for fast food slingers and snack food makers to add a cheap hit of one-note savory flavor without taking the time to develop it. As English food writer Fuchsia Dunlop lamented in her book on Sichuan cooking “Land of Plenty,” “It is a bitter irony that in China of all places, where chefs have spent centuries developing the most sophisticated culinary techniques, this mass-produced white powder should have been given the name wei jing, ‘the essence of flavor.’”
This is cornbread, not corn and wheat bread, and it was that lack of all-purpose flour that got me excited about this recipe in the first place. A cornmeal-only approach gives it a truer flavor and texture. Unlike cakier, Northern-style cornbreads, it’s devoid of gluten. It gets its structure from a couple of eggs, and its tangy flavor and moist, crumbly crumb from 2 cups of buttermilk.
Let me save you some time: If you don’t have a stand mixer, this is not the recipe for you. While there isn’t any complicated lamination, à la Danish or croissants, or intricate shaping, the recipe instructs us to knead to a certain texture. After combining the ingredients for the dough, you have to knead it on medium-high in a stand mixer with the dough hook attachment for about 10 minutes until you’re left with a shiny, elastic “rope” that falls from the hook. I would not attempt this by hand; my arms hurt just thinking about it. Plus, the dough is intentionally a bit sticky, therefore trickier to manage without machinery.
Bean pedants insist that dried beans are tastier than their canned counterparts, but that—in my opinion—is a skill issue. The kitchen team has never had any problems building tons of flavor in our bean dishes, canned or otherwise. (And if you’re worried about “too much sodium,” just rinse them! It’s not a big deal!)
This may seem like an unnecessary detour, but hang in there with me for a bit: Mayonnaise can teach us a lot about cake batter. Like the liquid ingredients in cake batter, mayo is an emulsion, traditionally made by slowly introducing oil to a mixture of eggs, acid (lemon juice or vinegar), and seasonings, just like we slowly add eggs to butter and sugar when making cake. It’s tedious, but it’s a problem that’s solved in the manner I like to solve all of my problems—with (surprisingly elegant) brute force.
A cup of heavy cream may seem like a lot, but it’s the key to this frosting’s supple, cloud-like texture and sweet, but not cloying, flavor. Like butter itself, this frosting is an emulsion, a mixture of two immiscible substances made by suspending one in the other. (“Immiscible” is just chemist slang for two things that don’t want to hang out together, in this case water and fat.) By forcing water-heavy cream into fat-heavy butter, you create a stable, cohesive mixture; whipping it further introduces air, rendering it light and fluffy.
Sodium citrate is a common processed cheese additive, a near-magical ingredient that can turn any cheese, no matter how hard or sharp, into a creamy sauce that won’t grease out or turn grainy. And while it may sound super synthetic, it’s nothing more than a simple salt—one you can synthesize in your kitchen with lemon juice and baking soda. (It’s also commonly used in restaurant kitchens, but don’t tell them I told you.)
You can corn pretty much anything, including—or perhaps especially—vegetables. Corning a head of cauliflower results in a vegetable that isn’t just seasoned on the outside, but down to its core. Salt also weakens the cellular walls of the vegetable by drawing moisture out of them, rendering the vegetable more tender. It’s not quite pickled cauliflower, at least not in the true, fermented sense.
Torrijas are usually flavored with cinnamon and citrus, typically orange, but Milk Street’s version is a nod to another classic Spanish ingredient: sherry. A brief dip in the fortified wine imparts a warm, nutty flavor and mellow sweetness into slices of challah. Each slice is then dunked in an eggy custard—with a surprise crisping agent—before being browned in a pan then finished in the oven.
It all comes down to ratios. There are roughly 25 millimeters in an inch, and most marinades can only penetrate as far as two or three. In a 1-inch thick piece of meat, that’s translates to 12% of your meat flavored. Slice it down to 1/4 of an inch, and that number increases to 48%. Slice it even thinner—let’s say 1/8 of an inch—and the marinade can almost fully permeate the meat. It also increases the amount of available surface area for browning, adding even more flavor and lovely textural contrast.
Descended from French financiers, Australian friands also get their signature nutty taste and light texture from a combination of almond flour and whipped egg whites. Browned butter underscores the flour’s rich, toasty flavor, but a berry or two—we use raspberries, but blueberries would also be wonderful—and citrus zest provide a bright pop of fresh flavor in a cake that otherwise might be one-note.
The best thing I ate traveling in Nice, France? Socca. A simple flatbread, socca cooks up crispy from chickpea flour, a nutty, toasty, gluten-free flour made from garbanzo beans. I’ve made other versions over the years, but the recipe in “Milk Street 365”, our new reference book for fresh, global cooking year-round, is my favorite. The flatbreads cook up thin and beautifully golden-brown in a skillet, with crispy edges and a tender interior.
Sha cha sauce is difficult to source in the States, so we had to get creative. To replicate the deep umami brought by brill fish and dried shrimp, we use a trio of fermented ingredients: Worcestershire sauce (famous for its funky anchovies), oyster sauce (for its oceanic savoriness), and gochujang (a Korean fermented chili paste that brings a complex savoriness and chili heat). We rounded it out with a hit of tangy rice vinegar, rich, toasted sesame oil, and a few tablespoons of fresh cilantro to give it a fleeting, but intoxicating, herbal aroma. It truly is the savory, vegetal counterpart to the candy apple. Sticky and enticingly red on the outside; crisp, sweet and juicy on the inside.
In this macroeconomic climate, you can’t oversell me on getting this pantry staple for almost half the cost. Shop your grocery store bulk bins or pick up pre-portioned bags—on the whole, if you’re adding beans to recipes on a weekly basis at least, you’ll come out ahead. Case in point: A 15-ounce can of small red beans costs me $1.39, while a bag that yields twice the volume once cooked is $1.99. And dried beans give me the flexibility to buy or use only what I need.
It’s more involved than those no-knead recipes that have proliferated on the web during the last decade, but that’s a good thing. It’s much faster. Instead of 20 hours of waiting for the dough to ferment, pide breads can be made over the course of a leisurely afternoon. And, frankly, they taste far better than any no-knead boule I’ve ever baked or eaten.
The best gift I ever received was a whole, bone-in unsmoked country ham. I did not soak it and cook it, as is traditional with country hams. Instead, I bought a ham stand and a long, sharp knife, and cut off little slices just like you would with prosciutto. Don’t let anyone tell you that this is not allowed; country ham may not have the nuanced notes of acorns or whatever they feed the fancier pigs in Europe, but it tastes of superbly cured, salty pork, and that is good enough for me. (I may have a bit of a prosciutto problem. The very first fight my ex-husband and I ever had was over the stuff—he called it “overpriced ham”—you can hear me tell the tale on Milk Street Radio.)
I’ve always accused zucchini of lacking a point of view, of a watery filler vegetable responsible for mushy dishes or swampy wraps. Trust cucina povera, the Italian tradition of cooking with what’s available, to refute that notion. Zucchini Carbonara is a veggie-infused riff on one of Rome’s four classic pasta dishes that we learned from Italian cookbook author Claudia Rinaldi. Here, seared zucchini stands in for the guanciale, or cured pork cheek, that gives classic carbonara its rich, salty porkiness, and it’s proof positive that even recipes made to center meat are superb—maybe better—without it.
Like tomato season itself, this sandwich is an immediate, fleeting pleasure. It’s messy and best consumed over the sink. Toasting the bread can delay some of the sog, but sog is inevitable with juicy in-season tomatoes—and really, how long do you need to eat a sandwich?
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