Food & Nutrition

Given the choice between a freshly baked cake—say, a Meyer lemon and poppyseed loaf—still warm from the oven and a three-day-old Russian honey cake that’s been lingering on the countertop, you’d be forgiven if you thought the former would always be the superior choice. There’s a holistic belief that, when it comes to baked goods, fresh is best. But that logic doesn’t always hold up, especially when you peer into the kitchens of experienced and professional bakers.  While some golden-domed beauties, like a galette des rois, seem to wilt the moment they come out of the oven, others get better with time. Much like the sauces and stews that taste better on day two, an overnight rest can allow a cake to relax, giving ingredients time to mingle and tightly baked crumbs a chance to unwind...

How to Make Mango Chutney at Home A chutney is a sauce that usually contains fruits and spices. They can be sweet or hot, can be made out of many combinations of fruits and spices, and are widely used in Middle Eastern, Indian and Pakistani cuisine. The British fell in love with the sweet and sour mango chutney during colonial days, and now it is a staple condiment with beef in the UK. History of Chutney Did you know the term “chutney” comes from the Hindi word “catni” which means to lick? So we now know chutney originated in India and goes back to 500BC. This Indian technique of preserving food was adopted by the Romans and then in the 1600s were used in England and France who eventually introduced them to their colonies in America and Australia. You’ll also find chu...

If you’ve started to notice more and more handmade clay donabe pots making their way into your Instagram feed, holding carefully composed assemblages of dashi, rippled leaves of cabbage, and silvery slices of fresh fish, cookbook author Naoko Takei Moore may have something to do with it. Moore (who also goes by Mrs. Donabe), has been evangelizing the benefits of cooking in these lidded Japanese pots since starting her business, TOIRO Kitchen, in Los Angeles in 2008. Today, she ships donabes worldwide, from Minnesota to Saudi Arabia, and thousands of first-time donabe experimenters have turned to her 2015 cookbook, Donabe, for guidance. The book paints the picture of donabe cooking as not just another way to cook rice or a centuries-old tradition ...

They were the type of burners whose “low” setting meant high and “high” meant crazy blue flaming tentacles creeping all the way up the side of the wok. At Rice Paper Scissors, the Vietnamese-Californian restaurant where I worked for more than a year in San Francisco, we’d turn those perilous burners on high after lunch service to char whole mounds of ginger claws and spheres of onions right on top of the range for the restaurant’s popular pho broth. I’d use 18-inch metal tongs to flip the ginger over and over until it was blackened, almost ashy, and to turn the onions until they’d become crisp and begin to ooze their juices. We’d remove most of the ash with a kitchen towel, but we’d still leave the essence of burn before chopping them up and adding...

Nine years ago, the chef and TV personality Maneet Chauhan met former Art Culinaire editor Jody Eddy when the two teamed up on a story at Chauhan’s New York City restaurant Vermilion. “We came up with this crazy idea right then,” Chauhan recalls while chatting from her home in Nashville, Tennessee, where she operates four restaurants while squeezing in a very active television production schedule, including frequent appearances on Chopped and the Food Network.  The plan was to visit Chauhan’s home in Ranchi, a million-person metropolis in the eastern state of Jharkand, but also to hit the rails and visit parts of India that were personal to the chef. Indian food, in Chauhan’s estimation — then and even more so now — had come a long way since its ...

Potato chips have seen me through a lot of high points and low points in life. They were a guest of honor at the last big party I hosted before the pandemic, on New Year’s Eve, where the Kettle Brand chips were nestled into the snack spread among some of the most economical caviars the markets of Brighton Beach had to offer. Snack-size bags of Herr’s and Zapp’s have been a faithfully upbeat road trip companion over the decades. I still think wistfully about a bowl of house-made chips I ate at a vermouth bar in Barcelona a few years ago, which arrived at the table draped with boquerones, piparras, and big green olives, and sprinkled with fiery paprika. With or without these adornments, potato chips are pretty much a perfect snack food, in my eyes....

Last week, I ate a wonderful croissant. Shaped in a familiar crescent, with the points fused in the center, this croissant was buttery but not oily, light but still substantial, and its layers peeled and flaked off without reducing the whole thing to a pile of sharp shards and crumbs. The first bite was pleasantly sweet, all the better to complement its savory filling: a sausage patty and a slab of too-yellow egg, just warmed through in its greasy wax paper packaging. I was at a rest stop off the New Jersey Turnpike, and the Burger King Croissan’wich, which has been in rotation on BK’s menu for longer than I’ve been alive, was the obvious and best choice for a meal on the road. A breakfast sandwich made between two halves of a croissant? Say no mor...

Chances are, if you’ve ever taken to Google in a search for the perfect technique for cooking at-home birria or tlacoyos filled with black beans, you’ve probably found yourself paying a visit to Mexico in My Kitchen. The beloved blog was launched in 2008 by Mely Martínez, a former teacher from Tampico, Mexico, who found herself living in Dallas, Texas, homeschooling her son, and wondering why so many of the so-called authentic Mexican recipes on the internet were written by people who had never even set foot in the country. Determined to set the record straight (and to create a cooking resource for her teenage son to consult when he got older), she started writing her way through some of the recipes that were most important to her, from the torta...

Not Your Mother’s Thanksgiving   By Meg Jones - wife, mother,professional, contributor When I was a little girl, the period from Halloween through New Year’s was always the most exciting because it meant that I would see more of my siblings, all of whom are older and had gone off to college by the time I was 10, and that there would be a lot of great food and reasons to celebrate.  And of course my birthday falls in that period, so just ANOTHER excuse for a party.  Turns out I never grew out of this excitement and just to make it a little crazier, both of our daughters were born between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Yippee!  A swarm of Sagittarians.  Like me, our daughters treasure the holidays and for sure Thanksgiving is at the top of the list.  So we have estab...

What Is the Best Way to Freeze Foods? Whether you’re freezing foods in your kitchen refrigerator or in a stand alone freezer in the basement or garage, how you prepare and actually freeze foods can make a huge difference. Nothing worse than storing some expensive Filet Mignon, only to find out after a few months you have freezer burn because you didn’t freeze it properly. Years ago, when I purchased some steaks or a leg of lamb for future cooking, I might have just placed the food in the freezer in the packaging it came in. I’ve learned since, there are much better ways to freeze foods and I’m going to share these tips with you. Why Freeze Food We freeze food to preserve it for recommended periods of time. Here are some reasons I freeze food: I love buying in bulk at bo...