Food & Nutrition

Yotam Ottolenghi has never been shy about his love of vegetables. In fact, the first lines in his latest vegetable-centric cookbook say as much. “I have never been shy about my love of vegetables,” writes the London-based chef and author in the opening lines of Flavor, the detailed and enthralling new book he wrote with collaborator Ixta Belfrage. Ottolenghi contends later in the introduction that while his crack recipe development—mainly through popular books Plenty (2010) and Plenty More (2014)—was successful in demystifying produce as a main ingredient, how many more ways can you write about frying an eggplant? Instead of answering this question, Flavor turns it on its head, asking readers to think of cooking in terms of three fundamental ideas:...

Yogurt is ubiquitous in Indian culture, often swirled into a fiery chicken curry, mixed with spices for a marinade to coat paneer, or eaten alongside dal, rice, and achaar (pickle). But a lesser-known application, and one of my favorites, is shrikhand—a cold, no-cook yogurt dessert commonly found in Gujarati and Maharashtrian cuisine. Sugar and spices are combined into whipped, strained yogurt for a creamy, pudding-like dessert that is served at weddings or festive occasions, such as the springtime festival Gudi Padwa, scooped into small bowls or thali plates. Some restaurants and sweet shops in India offer it as a specialty, and commercial varieties are even available in select Indian grocery stores in the United States. Incredibly, Indians have...

Ina Garten is in the first-name class of cookbook authors, and she’s has been one of the most consistent voices—and classiest—for more than two decades, since she first dropped The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook on us in 1999. In a fast-moving world of changing tastes, and with the pandemic altering the way we cook and think about food in general, Ina has been a steady and soothing figure. In early March, when the walls began closing in for many, she took to Instagram and started cooking immediately. It wasn’t a move aimed to pick up more followers and increase social media engagement, but rather to legitimately help her nearly 3 million followers figure out what the hell they were going to cook that night. “I never worked so hard in my life,” she tell...

All About Cumin, Cumin Seeds and How To Use Them In Your Recipes? Cumin, pronounced (kyoo·muhn) is a flowering plant from the Middle East. What we are interested in are the aromatic cumin seeds from this plant and also call cumin.  Did you know that cumin is in the same family (Apiaceae) as parsley, caraway and dill. What Does a Cumin Plant and Seed Look Like? To me, the cumin plant or Cuminum cyminum looks a lot like a dill plant that you may be more familiar with. It grows between 1 foot and 20 inches in height and has a smooth stem that grows to about 12 inches and height. Each stem is branched and those branches have 2 to 3 sub-branches that form a uniform canopy. The leaves are “thread-like” and grow to about 4 inches long as you can see from the photo below. The ...

Boost Your Butter Cake With Chai Sri Lankan butter cake is known for its buttery richness while yielding a fluffy crumb. And when infused with the warming spices of traditional Ceylon tea, it makes for a great afternoon snack or dessert. Creaming the butter and sugar for an extended time is an essential step. This creates a light, delicate inner texture, while the crust of this cake will be crunchy and dark golden brown. Butter cake was a colonial addition to the Sri Lankan dessert collection. It has always been called “butter cake” and is pronounced baṭar kēk (and written as බටර් කේක්). This cake became so popular that it is now a staple of Sri Lankan households and local bakeries. Similar to ...

An hour into our multi-hour telephone conversation, Dale DeGroff pauses mid-sentence with a declaration: “It’s been the most serendipitous career,” he sighed into the receiver from his home in Connecticut, several blocks from the Rhode Island border. It’s a statement that reveals a profound modesty for a bartender with a James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award under his belt, and who’s better known by the moniker “King Cocktail” after more than 30 years in the business. Throughout our talk last week, DeGroff is quick to credit his success to individuals and circumstances outside of his control, almost as if it were all a matter of luck. These include collaborating with Joe Baum, the famed restaurateur and DeGroff’s mentor with whom he worked at Ch...

How to Make an Indian-Style Sauce Base We love Indian food in our house although we don’t have it often because I don’t know really how to make good Indian cuisine. When we want Indian food, we typically order out from one of several good Indian restaurants in the neighboring towns. This is changing since my youngest daughter picked up the Indian-Ish cookbook that’s filled with recipes for people new to this cooking style. India, like most countries, have different styles of foods and sauces depending on what part of the country you in. There are cookbooks for every style of cooking in India and one of these days, I’ll write about each one, how they compare and how they are different. I’m also hoping one of our good friends who is an excellent Indian cook will give me som...

There are few things as great as a recipe that merges two elements you never thought to unite. Repeat after me: Kimchi. Gazpacho. She may not be the first to combine the fermented emblem of Korean cooking with southern Spain’s snappy tomato invigorator, but Anita Lo’s version in her 2011 book Cooking Without Borders was my first encounter with the inspired alliance. Lo, who was the chef-owner of New York’s Annisa for nearly two decades, has long espoused cross-cultural mergings. Her most iconic dish is foie gras soup dumplings, flat pierogi-like pockets filled with gelatinous broth and overlaid with seared fingers of foie gras. Her methodology is a sage one, because most of the world’s food, after all, is cross-cultural. People emigrate and immig...

Petra Paredez grew up in a pie family. As she writes in a new cookbook, Pie for Everyone, her parents started Mom’s Apple Pie Company in 1981, as “two destitute hippies” living in Virginia on a struggling farm. To make ends meet, the solution was pie. Lots of pie. And to their surprise, Mom’s Apple Pie became a statewide success and a thriving business. When kids came along, the whole family would use vacations as opportunities to rank and dissect other pies, from piemakers far and wide. These would become formative experiences for Petra, and before long, her standards for what really constituted a good pie—a rich, flaky crust and fresh ingredients that don’t need heaps of sugar added to taste good—were ingrained. Instead of joining her mom and d...

Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha had full-time jobs working in restaurant kitchens when they started a Vietnamese street food project on the side. It was the summer of 2018, and Ha had found a paleta cart attached to a bicycle for $1,200 on Craigslist, which he purchased using funds raised on Kickstarter. The cart’s doors were removed to fit a hotel pan inside—where they’d pack their quart containers of fish sauce and fried shallots—and a Japanese-style charcoal grill was installed. After debuting at the Hester Street Fair that July under the moniker Mr. Fish Sauce and later rebranding to Ha’s Đậc Biệt, Burns and Ha began holding periodic pop-ups in Brooklyn, serving classic Vietnamese street food and other regional dishes such as bún thịt nướn...