Food & Nutrition

In early 2019, I interviewed Genevieve Gergis and Ori Menashe while seated in preservice placidity in the airy dining room of their immensely popular and perpetually packed Los Angeles restaurant Bavel. The partners in business and life, who are the Los Angeles food world’s most low-key power couple and also behind Italian powerhouse Bestia—were humble, at moments equally hilarious and adorable, and dead serious about the California-inspired, laser-focused Middle Eastern cooking they were putting out night after night. Bavel may have captured LA’s imagination with its outrageously delicious and crowd-pleasing lamb neck shawarma, but it also rewrote the script with more adventurous cooking like foie gras halva and outstanding pastries laced with po...

These instant pot chipotle chicken tacos pack a ton of smoky and bold flavors good enough to rival your favorite street tacos or taco trucks. Today we’re making some taco truck-worthy instant pot chipotle chicken tacos. These are honestly the BEST homemade tacos I’ve had so far, surpassing my old favorite of slow cooker chicken tacos and the super popular slow cooker beef tacos. We’ve made it three times now and this is a new staple in our household for taco nights. Its flavor packs a punch with just the right amount of heat. There’s just something about some juicy, pulled chipotle chicken in a charred corn tortilla with some crunchy diced red onions, maybe some crumbled queso fresco cheese, fresh cilantro, and some drizzled zesty lime juice. Sounds perfect?...

Most people know fish sauce as a quintessential Southeast Asian ingredient—a core element in stir-fries, pad thais, and briny dressings like nuoc cham. The condiment’s deeply savory flavor tastes like the essence of the sea, but not explicitly and bracingly fishy, which makes it a powerful source of salinity in many recipes. Like a hint of anchovy, the inky liquid can bring out the flavor of fresh seafood. It can round out sweet tomato sauces. (Try it!) And in a vinaigrette, it can add that umami backbone that shines through equally in high-heat roasts and crunchy fresh salads. At a Vietnamese pop-up I cooked for seven years ago, we used a fish sauce vinaigrette to aggressively dress salads like our cabbage-based goi ga: a chicken salad with fre...

When Reem Kassis published her first book, The Palestinian Table, in 2017, she realized, time after time, that people are often temped to look at a country’s or region’s cuisine through a very narrow lens. They want to understand that cuisine through its “national” dishes, often stuck in a vacuum, on a concrete timeline with a beginning and an end, and without any of the nuances and intricacies that fuse elements of different cultures over time. Kassis’s rebuttle to this notion is The Arabesque Table, which spans the geographic area that now comprises 22 countries stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. The “Arabesque” in the book’s title refers to the ubiquitous ornamental design that appears in Arab and Islamic art (and on the b...

I may not always know how I’ll spend the weekends with my sister at our father’s apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, but one thing is certain: we’ll make time to enjoy some pupusas together. For our family, there’s a sense of tranquility and innocence in that ritual—our only worry is whether we’ll encounter one that doesn’t have enough shredded cheese (anything from queso fresco to mozzarella) to for our liking, or one that’s filled with way too many refried beans. Even though my dad never actually cooks the pupusas himself, he always knows exactly where to find them: a humble pupuseria just a train ride away in Ridgewood, Queens. You know it’s a good spot when it’s not too flashy and it’s about the size of a small child’s room. Taking that first w...

Anas Atassi didn’t set out to be a cookbook writer, but his Syrian heritage made the feat an inevitable part of his life. The Amsterdam-based engineer-by-training is an equally talented home cook and storyteller, and his first cookbook, Sumac: Recipes and Stories from Syria, named for the bold red Syrian spice, illuminates these gifts. Though Atassi hasn’t traveled to Syria in more than ten years, memories of eating eggplant jam with his sister, spooning rich soups during Ramadan, and the smells of khebzeh harra (flatbread with spicy tomato sauce) cooked at local street stalls permeate his mind as well as his kitchen. When he started university in Europe, he missed the flavors and spices of his culture, like Aleppo pepper, za’atar, and, yes—suma...

Try hibachi steak at home with a buttery sirloin steak in a rich Asian-inspired sauce that only takes 10 minutes from start to finish. Today we’ll be continuing the hibachi experience at home with some hibachi steak. Pair it with easy-to-make hibachi rice or noodles, hibachi veggies and some yum yum sauce and you have a well-balanced meal. These delicious bite-sized pieces of steak are so easy to make in about 5 minutes of stir-frying to get that gorgeous sear. It has that signature creamy buttery taste mingling with a soy-teriyaki base you’ll find in most Japanese Steakhouses. So let’s get started. HIBACHI STEAK TIPS AND TRICKS Meat: Use boneless steak cuts like sirloin or fillet and cut it into 1” bite sized pieces. Soy sauce...

Here’s a PSA for all the chickpea fans out there: If you haven’t been cooking with chickpea flour, you’re missing out. The flour, which is made from dried, ground garbanzo beans, has a distinctly nutty flavor, with a light, powdery texture and a golden hue that’s accentuated in all types of cooking. And, like the versatile chickpea itself, chickpea flour has many uses. It can tightly bind ingredients, thicken soups and stews, and make batters that are perfect for frying to a satisfyingly golden result. Chickpea flour, which is also known as cici, gram, and besan flour around the globe, is a boon in today’s world filled with gluten allergies and curious cooks looking to expand their repertoire of flours. Some savory pancakes, like socca in France...

So, I don’t want this to sound like a strained stand-up bit, but let me just put it out there into the universe—what is up with all of these chocolate chip cookie opinions floating around? This is not a bad thing, writes the guy at TASTE, which published two deep dives in the past year: Putting the Chips Back in Chocolate Chip Cookies and Did Instagram Ruin the Chocolate Chip Cookie? But what is it about the CCC that gets people to @-reply and light up the comments section with strong opinions about chewiness, cakiness, and chocolate ratios? You aren’t seeing this kind of urgency with oatmeal raisin cookies. “I feel like they are equivalent to pizza,” says my colleague Kaitlin Bray (who’s a close follower of baking trends). “There’s nostalgia, a...

“Obviously, I love lemons,” Molly Baz asserts when I ask her about cooking through the winter blues. She’s transmitting from her new home on the Eastside of Los Angeles, and we’re talking about her recipe development process and some of the ideas she’s drawn to when writing her weekly newsletter and “recipe drops” for her Patreon-backed Recipe Club. The club is part of the ebullient and, honestly, quite edgy Molly Baz experience, which is informed not only by her time working in the Bon Appétit test kitchen but through her formative experiences cooking professionally at the Beacon Hill Bistro in Boston and at New York’s Picholine. “I got my ass kicked, and I feel like I learned how to be a pretty badass line cook,” she recalls of her time working ...