Food & Nutrition

Rodney Scott started cooking whole hog barbecue at the age of 11 at his family’s South Carolina pit Scott’s Bar-B-Que—learning the art of butterflying, salting, and smoking whole hog (among many other idiosyncratic steps) from his parents and a crew of longtime employees who had been operating in the tiny town of Hemingway since the 1970s. As Scott writes in his new cookbook, a memoir with recipes, Rodney Scott’s World of BBQ, the journey from those early days helping out in the pits to running one of the most celebrated barbecue outfits in America is filled with hard work, a little luck, and plenty of Duke’s Mayonnaise. Scott worked with Los Angeles–based journalist and filmmaker Lolis Eric Elie (credits include Treme and Hell on Wheels) to craf...

While some people wax nostalgic about the hot chocolate or freshly baked cookies they ate as an afternoon snack as a kid, my memories go straight to warm, sugary cups of mung beans. It’s a recipe my mother brought with her to the dusty roads of Fresno, California, from her childhood home of Mariveles, a fishing town on the tip of the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula. While my brothers and I grew up catching dragonflies and wrestling our rowboat from the tangles of water lilies, my mother would tell us stories of growing up in the rainforest, showing us photos of her smiling on rocks slick from waterfalls or clutching a guitar under the shade of palm trees. When she came to the United States and settled in Fresno in the early ’90s, my stepdad, who is...

A while back I posted an article by my friend Chef David Nelson on How to Make Restaurant Quality French Fries. Chef David, now retired, is a wonderful cooks and teacher so I wanted to post his follow up to his follow up article on how to take your French fries over the top. How to Take Your French Fries “Over the Top” by Chef David Nelson and The Reluctant Gourmet Once you have mastered the perfect French fry, you will want them all the time. You will want to cook them for your friends. You may wonder…can I make these even better? The good news is…Yes, you can! Let’s look at some simple ways to make your fries even more flavorful and unique. Seasoning and Flavoring French Fries (Suggestions are for two russet potatoes cooked) White Truffle French Fries ...

The yearlong pandemic closed down many restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, but one of the most heavily mourned of these closings was Cafe Ohlone, the world’s only restaurant serving the cuisine of the Ohlone people native to Northern California. Thankfully, the closure of the restaurant’s operating space in Berkeley didn’t stop the founders, Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone of the East Bay area) and Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone of the Monterey area), from continuing their work, as they shifted their focus into curated dinner boxes that allow diners to enjoy the cultural experience of Cafe Ohlone at home. I had the pleasure of enjoying one of these meals last November, arranged in a wooden box with meticulously packed ingredients and detail...

When Betty Liu first learned how to cook, it started with an intent to record family recipes like her mother’s red-braised pork belly—made with inexact handfuls of ingredients and abstract visual cues—and transform them into something with step-by-step instructions she could follow. Since carefully documenting her mother’s dishes on her blog, a collection of deeply personal recipes have found a home in her debut cookbook, My Shanghai. Liu’s cookbook is aptly named for her familial roots in the city and the wider province of Jiangsu. While many books portray Shanghai according to its postcard-worthy skyline and cosmopolitan lifestyle, Liu’s lens looks at the city through a blend of everyday street food stalls, countless plates of hairy crab and se...

As a Jewish, food-obsessed New Yorker, it almost goes without saying that I’m emotionally invested in bagels. When I was a kid, my dad would wake up early on Saturday mornings and go buy a dozen of them, plus two half-pints of cream cheese (regular and scallion) and a gallon of orange juice to bring home. My family was always partial to Murray’s and Ess-a-Bagel in Manhattan and Goldberg’s out on Long Island, but in recent years, I’ve been loyal to Utopia in Whitestone, Queens. These bagels were the holy grail: giant and squishy, best freshly baked but still fabulous the next day after being toasted and slathered with a schmear. When you’re accustomed to the ritual of eating New York–style bagels, pride can translate to a purist perspective. But a...

The $70 billion diet industry suffers many fools, including journalist Barry Estabrook, who found himself approaching the age of 60 with the alarming doctor’s orders that he needed to lose 40 pounds. “I went on the Whole30 for precisely the wrong reason,” he says of the popular diet that eliminates “psychologically unhealthy, hormone-unbalanced, gut-disrupting, inflammatory food groups” (read: no sugar, grains, dairy, alcohol, or most legumes). “I suffered for a month, lost some weight, and promptly gained back every ounce, so I said to myself that there had to be a better way—and realized at about the same time that I should heed my own advice and thoroughly understand what I was eating,” he says.  The result is the deeply reported, page-turning...

How to Make a New Mexico Red Chili Sauce (Enchilada Sauce) This all-purpose Mexican chili sauce, also commonly called enchilada sauce, can be used in almost any Mexican-inspired dish requiring red sauce, from enchiladas to tacos. Yes, you can purchase this at most supermarkets or Mexican markets or order on line, but what fun is that. Homemade Mexican Red Chili Sauce Is Better Than Canned Just like most sauce you make at home, they are going to be more tasty, more authentic and complement a meal better than a commercial sauce from a jar or can. I’m not saying you shouldn’t serve commercial sauces if you don’t want to make them from scratch, but the differences are vastly noticeable. Best Served With: Beef Pork Chicken Fish Beans Red New Mexico Chilies Image from S...

More than two years ago, the journalist, recipe writer, and longtime friend of TASTE G. Daniela Galarza came to us with the idea to write about cheesecake: one that was dense like the iconic New York style but aesthetically antithetical to Diddy’s favorite slice from Junior’s. The Basque-style cheesecake that Galarza covered in her story, “Spain’s Burnt Cheesecake Breaks All the Rules,” most certainly makes good on that promise. In contrast to the porcelain-white, fruit-topped cheesecakes you may know from Manhattan diners, this one is instead crowned with a layer of burn (and sometimes surrounded by a fan of charred parchment paper). The browned exterior tastes like salted caramel, but inside, you’ll find a supersoft center that “puddles on the pl...

The Grey has always been more than just a good restaurant. It’s also a good story. The James Beard Award–winning establishment has shown up on Chef’s Table, in travel guides, and in the pages of dozens of magazines. It’s a tale of two creative minds serendipitously meeting in New York a decade ago and deciding to meld Italian and American Southern cuisines together in a formerly segregated 1930s Greyhound terminal in Savannah, Georgia. Now, in Black, White, and the Grey, Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano are setting out to tell that story in their own words. The result is a candid memoir about their partnership and friendship, told from alternating perspectives. The nontraditional cookbook unfolds through honest conversations about race and pai...