Food & Nutrition

Sign up for our newsletter    It’s Your Corn, and You Can Cobbler If You Want To By: The TASTE Editors Photos: Emily Ferretti The best stage of summer for cooking might arguably be the moment when the weather has just gotten cool enough to turn the oven on. The farmers’ market is still flush with green beans, tomatoes, and plums, and it’s prime time for apricot galettes, warm gingerbread to eat with fresh peaches, and tarts full of feta and figs. It also happens to be the best time of the year for savory cobblers. Don’t get us wrong—cobblers and crisps full of juicy stone fruits are a staple of the ...

Our Virtual Wine Tasting with Sting and Trudy With all that’s going on these days, my wife has been looking for fun things to do while at home. This weekend she signed us up for a live-streamed virtual wine tasting with Sting and his wife Trudie Styler. A big fan of The Police and Sting’s music, I thought it would be fun to hear what he knew about wines and the making of wines. I had no idea that he purchased the sixteenth-century estate in the Tuscan town of Figline Valdarno, just south of Florence and started rebuilding the vineyards over 20 years ago. Not only do Sting and Trudie grow grapes for wine, they also have olive trees and produce their own honey. And their farm is fully organic. You can read more about their estate at Il Palagio and learn how you can host your o...

Postcard From Phnom Penh: Getting Out for Curry Puffs Like most Muslims across the world, Chams, a predominantly Muslim ethnic community residing throughout Cambodia, had a sober Ramadan this year. The mosques were closed, following government restrictions on religious gatherings in the country due to the pandemic. The markets, however, were still open. “The Chrang Chamres market is busy right now,” my friend Sayana told me at the start of the monthlong observation. “It’s always very festive during Ramadan!” Sayana, part Cham, part Javanese, lives close to the market in the broader Chrang Chamres neighborhood, about 30 minutes north of the center of Phnom Penh. The market has a lively mix of Cham...

San Francisco–based chef Deuki Hong has been in constant motion since we started writing together almost a decade ago, first on a guidebook naming the top 60 Korean restaurants in New York City (2013), and then on a cookbook—Koreatown: A Cookbook (2016)—that took us around the United States to Korean communities in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Koreatown documents the stories of chefs and home cooks in these locales, as well as the booming interest in Korean food and culture that today, in an era of BTS fandom and Parasite-inspired bowls of ram-don, has shifted into a whole new gear. That said, we still think that Korean food has exciting new highs to reach in America, and Deuki’s journey as a chef and spokesman of all things K...

Is Gnudi the New Trend?   By Meg Jones - wife, mother,professional, contributor You know a food is trendy when you start to see it everywhere – on menus, in cooking magazines, at dinner parties.  Sun-dried tomatoes, quinoa, and kale come to mind as foods that have hit the spotlight for their 15 minutes of fame. Well, we think we’ve uncovered the next trend:  gnudi.  If you haven’t heard of it, no surprise, we hadn’t either until it showed up for us three times in the past week!  No doubt gnudi has been around forever;  Wikipedia describes it as “gnocchi-like dumplings made with ricotta cheese instead of potato, with semolina.  The result is often a lighter, “pillowy” dish, unlike the often denser, chewier gnocchi.”  But it’s new to us.  We first saw it in the S...

If there’s a silver lining to spending the better part of 2020 trudging through the cooking of three meals a day with limited groceries and brainpower, it may be the realization that you don’t need an industrial deep fryer to turn a chicken breast into an absurdly crispy, plate-size masterpiece—so perfectly golden that it seems to actually be glowing. You don’t even need some kind of top-secret Popeyes-grade batter recipe. You just need a frying pan, some crumbs, and a bit of cutlet know-how. The basic premise behind a cutlet, Milanese, schnitzel, katsu—however you choose to call it—is pounding a piece of meat very thin, breading it, and frying it for a couple minutes per side in a shallow pan of butter or oil. It’s a conceit so simple, with such...

A few years ago, in an attempt to get a little bit closer to my heritage and its cuisine, I planned a visit to the kitchen of Contramar, the famed Mexico City restaurant known for cooking sustainable seafood caught in Mexican waters in an ever popular “urban beach club” setting. Unexpectedly, after a day spent working in the restaurant’s kitchen, one of my most revelatory takeaways was a new method for preparing a vegetable I had eaten countless times: the nopal. Nopales (plural) are the edible paddles of the prickly pear cactus. Harvested young, they are meaty, thorny, and widely used in Mexican cuisine. To me, they taste like green beans or asparagus with a hint of citrus. They’re found growing wild all over Mexico: along highways, in the corne...

Since opening their 475-square-foot Los Angeles cookbook and kitchen wares store Now Serving in September 2017, Ken Concepcion and Michelle Mungcal have been climbing the mountain all small-business owners hope to summit, eventually planting the flag of sustained profitability. When COVID-19 hit earlier this year and safety ropes started to snap, the couple endured by hastily pivoting their Chinatown business, located in the heart of LA’s Far East Plaza, to an online-only operation, with local pickups on select days. The pivot has paid off, and Now Serving’s online orders have been building. Ken has launched a robust author interview series, featuring Zoom conversations with the likes of Lisa Donovan, Gaby Dalkin, Esteban Castillo, Alexander Smal...

It is paramount, when New Orleans’ summer doldrums drape their gravity-blanket selves over the city as they now have, to possess a mindless cucumber recipe. Mine is a tumble of salted sliced cucumbers mixed with red onion, mint, vinegar, and olive oil. As Elaine Stritch once said, perhaps apocryphally when brought to a club late one night in the 1960s, “Just give me a bottle of vodka and a floor plan.” I feel you, Stritchy. What I need for cooking in July and August are the essential ingredients and a road map. Zero thinking, please. Well, I need watermelon slabs and juice, too, but I digress. The heat warps the brain. I hit a cucumber wall a few weeks ago. I discovered I can only eat so many raw cucumbers while the seeded fruit propagate unabate...

When the Weather’s Bad, Cook Comfort Food   By Meg Jones - wife, mother,professional, contributor We were lucky to have both of our daughters home this week, and as always, the most time we spent together was in the kitchen and at the dinner table.  Tuesday was a miserable day weather-wise since the residuals of Hurricane Isaias were upon us, so everyone was in the mood for “healthy” comfort food. How about chicken, mushroom and spinach? When I think of comfort food I think of dishes like macaroni and cheese, or chicken pot pie, or any kind of stew.  And because of the nasty weather, I wanted to make do with what we had on hand, starting with the giant bag of fresh spinach that had been sorely neglected.  I decided to draw on one of my favorites, Chicken Thighs w...