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  • How to Make Shoyu Ramen at Home

  • Authentic Carnitas and Three Pounds of Lard

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  • How to Make a 3 Dollar Pizza Stone
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    If you're not down with pizza stones, it's time. Bread-bakers and home pizza afficionados praise them for their heat-retaining, moisture-wicking ability to imitate the floor of a brick oven. You put it in your oven and it not only provides a rustic surface to bake the bread on, but it also keeps the heat of the oven steady.

  • Giardiniera

    By Nick Kindelsperger My first attempt at giardiniera was so...

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    My first attempt at giardiniera was so bad I couldn't even talk about it, let alone write about it.  It was oily, bland, and just plain unappetizing.  It was supposed to go with my Italian beef post, but I just dumped the containers in the trash and bought a jar from the store.  To my surprise I kind of fell in love with the jar.  It started appearing on all kinds of dishes, whether they were necessarily Italian-American or not.  Its pickled punch accentuated other foods, instead of covering them all up. 

    When that jar quickly ran out, I decided to give this very Chicagoan condiment a second chance.  Perhaps there were was a recipe out there that could actually work.  Part of the problem is that giardiniera is kind of a generic Italian term for "woman gardener" and in its home country you can find any kind of vegetable in it.  It's fine stuff, but it's not Chicago giardiniera, which is a little more fiery and a little less wholesome.  The latter is what I wanted.  I didn't want a nice antipasto, I wanted something crass for dressing an Italian beef.

  • Homemade Ginger Beer and the Dark 'n' Stormy

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    File this one under projects that seem a lot harder than they actually are.

  • The Smash Technique and Skinny Burger Perfection

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  • Pan-Seared Salmon with Pasta and Spinach Cream Sauce

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  • When Cheaper is Better: How to Season a Wok
    By Blake Royer Usually, when you're buying cookware, the rule...
  • A Guide to Bacon Styles, and How to Make Proper British Rashers
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    British Bacon vs American bacon

    If you've been reading the site lately, you may have been following Nick on his rather strange quest to recreate a full English breakfast from scratch (his first project was the British banger sausage). Why, I don't know. But when Nick proposed that I take over the homemade bacon portion of the project, I leapt at the opportunity to contribute. Homemade meat curing has long been a hobby of mine, despite the protests of my wife when I hung a pork jowl in our living room. For me, the bacon is the most interesting part on the plate when it comes to proper English breakfast.

    The only problem is that the British have got bacon all backwards. They don't traditionally use the familiar bacon cut we know and love in the U.S., and there is a ton of conflicting information out there on the subject.

    Vocabulary was my first problem: their bacon is "grilled," which actually means broiled; they refer to pieces of bacon as "rashers," but only if it's a certain type of bacon; the cut that actually looks like American bacon is called "streaky," and whether you choose rashers or streaky says things not only about your tastes, but your economic standing. It's even the subject of a nursery rhyme involving someone named Jack Sprat.

    But I managed to make my way through the muck and have emerged with a firm grasp on what seems to be a confounding set of opinions and methods attached to the word "bacon." So I feel a culinary duty to set the record straight, as far as my ability can take me, and in the meantime will be demonstrating how to make yourself a proper hunk of British-style bacon.

  • The Five Dishes that Surprised Me In Mexico
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    The Al Pastor was way better...

    We travel to be surprised, right? While picking my favorite five dishes took some deliberation, coming up with five different foods or dishes that surprised me on a trip to Mexico should have taken me all of five minutes. But for some reason I wasn't expecting this. I have a vertiable library of Mexican cuisine in my condo courtesy of Rick Bayless, Diana Kennedy, and Susana Trilling, and have researched and cooked as many authentic dishes as I possibly could in the past three years. So how come I was wrong about so many things? Almost everywhere I turned in Mexico I was bewildered by some detail I’d never thought about, and which shattered my expectations. Luckily, they all turned out to be those good kind of surprises--cases where my preconceived notions actually hid something more intriguing and delicious.

    1. The Tacos

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    Carnita Tacos at Mi Mercado in Coyoacan

    I expected to find some kind of insight about the taco during my two weeks in Mexico. By seeing it in its homeland, I’d formulate some kind of hypothesis on the correct proportion, contents, and preparation to create some kind of Grand Taco Manifesto. But I can’t. While I ate tacos nearly every single day on my two week trip through Mexico City and Oaxaca, I left more confused than when I came.

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    Goat, Al Pastor, Chorizo and Potato, and Chicken Tinga Tacos

    I found them tiny and rolled, like the petite little al pastor tacos found at El Huequito. But I also encountered huge, generously filled ones from Tacos Gus in Condesa, where dozens of great cazuelas of stewing meats and vegetables were open for examination. Some were fried like taquitos, and others were housed in unnaturally soft and pillowy corn tortillas.

    The fillings were just as diverse. I ate thinly shaved versions of Al Pastor, juicy hunks of carnitas, and tongue so tender it nearly disintegrated in my mouth. But I also ate rajas with queso, mushroom with crema, and vegetable guisados stuffed with squash and corn. The possibilities for tacos are endless.