Review Archives - Food And Recipe

April 21, 2023

Abra Berens’ Strawberry Sundae Recipe Review

This easy yet elegant sundae features vanilla ice cream, in-season strawberries, and homemade meringue.

Makes4 sundaes

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I have a major sweet tooth, and I love to bake year-round. But my favorite time to enjoy sweet treats is, hands-down, spring and summer. With the influx of seasonal goodies like strawberries, rhubarb, and peaches, my desserts become bright, vibrant, sweet, and juicy. This affinity for fruit-based sweets led me straight to author and chef Abra Berens’ newest cookbook, Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit.

Pulp explores fruit’s place in both sweet and savory cooking, with recipes like Roast Chicken over Blueberries, Cornbread + Lemon and Rum-Plum Clafoutis. But the one that immediately caught my eye was the Strawberry Sundae recipe. With creamy vanilla ice cream, crunchy meringues, sweet strawberry sauce, and flaky salt, this dessert seemed both impressive and approachable.

Why I Love This Strawberry Sundae

The first thing I noticed is that this recipe meets you where you are. While there are instructions for making all three components — ice cream, strawberry sauce, and meringue — from scratch, it’s the combination of ingredients that makes this recipe so special. So if you’re not really a baker, but you love making homemade ice cream, you could buy some vanilla meringues from your local grocery store or bakery. If you don’t have an ice cream maker, like me, then you can buy your favorite vanilla ice cream. I love that if you have a pint of ice cream in the freezer, some meringues in your pantry, and the strawberry sauce in your fridge, you can assemble this showstopping dessert in a matter of minutes — it’s perfect for dinner parties, or for the guest who stops by on short notice.

I grabbed my favorite Van Leeuwen vanilla ice cream, then set out to make my meringues. The meringue “batter” came together quickly and easily in my stand mixer. After the two-hour bake time at 250°F, my meringues were crunchy on the outside and slightly marshmallowy on the inside, albeit a little darker than I prefer.

The strawberry sauce was also so simple to put together. After hulling two pounds of strawberries, I dumped them in the food processor with a tablespoon of sugar and blitzed it until “coarsely chopped,” as instructed. Mine came out looking a little bit like strawberry salsa, but the flavor was spot-on — even with grocery-store strawberries. I can’t wait to try this with tender, fragrant farmers market strawberries in the coming months.

When it was time to assemble, I scooped some of the ice cream into a bowl, drizzled over some strawberry sauce, and topped with some crushed meringue and a pinch of flaky salt. When I took a bite, the salt hit my tongue first and then quickly gave way to the ice cream and strawberries, which evoked memories of my favorite childhood drink, Nesquik Strawberry Milk, in the best way possible. The crunchy meringues gave the perfect textural contrast, and lended a bit more sweetness to balance the salt. This is a truly impressive dessert that just so happens to be gluten-free.

In the headnotes, Abra shares the inspiration behind the recipe: “Through most of June, my favorite dessert is a bowl full of hulled strawberries, splashed with heavy cream, a spoonful of sugar, and a sprinkle of the coarsest salt.” I would say her ode to this combination more than lived up to its inspiration.

If You’re Making This Strawberry Sundae, a Few Tips

March 17, 2023

Material Kitchen Review 2023 – Best Things to Buy at Material

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We take our kitchen gear seriously here at Kitchn (I mean, what else would you expect?), and it’s particularly hard not to take Material Kitchen as seriously as its name suggests. In fact, the direct-to-consumer kitchenware brand is behind some of our favorite pans, glassware, and spatulas with superior quality, beautiful form, impressive function, and reasonable prices, to boot. Keep reading to learn more about Material, including our favorite essentials.

What Is Material Kitchen?

Material Kitchen was born out of necessity. The brand’s founders, Eunice Byun and David Nguyen, didn’t have any experience in the culinary world, but what they did have was experience with kitchen clutter (don’t we all?). Clunky knife blocks and an abundance of unnecessary kitchen tools not only took up precious counter space, but also created the lightbulb moment so many great brands start with. The two saw a lack of affordable, innovative, and good-looking solutions, so they set out to create a line of pared-down, sleek kitchenware.

Material sells beautifully crafted cookware, prepware, and bakeware essentials that don’t sacrifice performance. The brand has high standards when it comes to their products, so you can always expect best-in-class materials, design, and user experience.

Like you would with a hearty boeuf bourguignon or a savory roast chicken, Material takes things low and slow when it comes to developing new products. Each new addition is researched extensively to make sure it’s a value-add, because the last thing we all need is more cabinet clutter. And the result? A small, well-curated selection of thoughtfully designed kitchen essentials any home cook would need.

Where Can You Shop Material Kitchen?

Shopping directly on Material’s site is our preferred way to explore the brand, as it naturally has the biggest selection. You can find some Material products at other retailers including West Elm and Nordstrom, although the offerings will be more limited.

Material products are priced reasonably, especially if you value performance and great design. Prices are not cheap, but are accessible when compared to similar direct-to-consumer brands. With prices ranging from $20 for small kitchen accessories to $295 for cookware sets, there’s something for every budget.

The brand does have sales, so you’ll find great deals. Currently, Material is celebrating its birthday with discounts up to 25 percent now through March 19. The discount depends on your order total, so the more you shop, the more you’ll save. It’s the steepest discount that the brand has offered, making its reasonable prices even more wallet-friendly. There’s no code necessary, and prices already reflect the sale price.

Whether you’re looking to swap in some new knives or are starting to outfit your kitchen from square one, Material is certainly worth a peek. To help you get started, check out eight editor-favorites and best-sellers, below.

March 6, 2023

Richard Saxton’s Chocolate Cloud Cake (Recipe Review)

They say great love is known to happen upon you when you’re not looking for it. Such is the case the first time I discovered the late Richard Sax’s Chocolate Cloud Cake.

My father is a restaurant chef who didn’t pay much mind to cookbooks. For him, cookbooks were mostly for flipping through and getting inspiration — a source from which to always improvise and never follow. In learning how to cook as a kid with my dad, I was trained on thin air, depending on improvisation and instinct, not any particular tome, Julia Child’s or otherwise.

Even though I had been raised around food and in restaurant kitchens my whole life, I became deeply immersed in cookbooks on my own terms after graduating college. I moved to New York, started working in a professional test kitchen, and was mentored by former magazine editors who referenced cookbooks and their recipes with impressive, encyclopedic recall. Now, I curate my library with the intentionality of someone living in a New York-sized apartment (not huge), and as someone who buys a cookbook because she actively wants to read it cover to cover and follow its recipes. It’s an experience that ironically feels refreshing and new — like hearing a different person’s voice for the first time, when you’ve ever only listened to your own.

About a year ago, deep within one of my epic cookbook research tunnels, I found this beautiful piece that iconic cookbook editor Rux Martin had written about Richard Sax, one of her authors who later became her friend. Sax penned the Odyssean and now canon Classic Home Desserts, which won a James Beard Award and an IACP Award mere months before Sax died of AIDS at the age of 46. Immediately after reading Rux’s piece and seeing the book, Classic Home Desserts was in my shopping cart. They were smart to choose the photo of his Cloud Cake as the image for the cover.

What Makes Cloud Cake So Amazing

I’m not known to be discriminatory when it comes to dessert, but I am preferential to chocolate. Fudgy, dense, and intense, a flourless chocolate cake is probably the pinnacle of all chocolate confections, in my opinion. But Sax’s recipe upended all my flourless chocolate cake views with a cake that truly lives up to its name: a cloud.

I love this recipe for so many reasons, but mostly because it’s surprising and fun to eat. Close in identity to a soufflé, the top has a shatteringly crisp meringue-like layer, which breaks up into shards when you release it from its springform pan, and the base of the cake collapses in the center. That’s meant to happen, and you’re grateful for it, because it takes all pressure off of finessing a certain kind of presentation, and ends up organically beautiful all on its own. A giant, billowing pile of whipped cream in the center doesn’t hurt, either. I like adding vanilla beans and a pinch of salt to mine.

The cake is light and delicate, but still deeply chocolatey. When chocolate dessert recipes confusingly use only cocoa powder, I always find myself feeling a little hollow, missing that true chocolate flavor that only solid bar chocolate can provide. Sax seems to know this, not asking you to use expensive, high-quality chocolate, but chocolate nonetheless. Seeing as the rest of the ingredients are cheap pantry staples, I splurge a bit on good chocolate. If you’re going to do it, do it, you know?

If You’re Going to Make Cloud Cake, a Few Tips

February 17, 2023

Emile Henry Mixing Bowl Review 2023

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I am not a “kitchen gadget” sort of individual. I’m a little previous-college in the kitchen — I even now chop garlic with a knife (no garlic crusher below!), and I really don’t have a mandoline, but somewhat count on my often-questionable self-taught knife expertise to thinly slice all my vegetables. Even nevertheless I never splurge on enjoyable kitchen devices, I do love investing in long lasting, trustworthy gear that I can use for yrs — namely, the humble mixing bowl.

When I initial commenced cooking with my mother as a teen, I remember her telling me that I should really have a various bowl for uncooked meat and not use the salad bowl for offal, for example, for dread of cross-contamination. I guess my mom’s adore for mixing bowls has finally been handed on to me since I have a first rate quantity of them in my very little condominium kitchen area. Normally on the lookout for the elusive and perfect mixing bowl for every single situation (of course, it’s a factor!), I assume I’ve inadvertently stumbled on my most loved mixing bowl of all time: the Emile Henry Mixing Bowl.

What’s So Good About Emile Henry’s Mixing Bowls?

I am a large supporter of Emile Henry. Their items are long lasting, reliable, and thoughtfully made, so I’m not astonished that the French brand also tends to make the mixing bowl of my desires.

The Emile Henry mixing bowl is much extra practical than all the other mixing bowls I have experienced and utilized. It is manufactured with the identical material utilised in most signature Emile Henry products — ceramic — so it is tremendous sturdy and can go into the oven. The ceramic can make it scratch-resistant, so you can use a metallic whisk and toss it into the dishwasher, too. The bodyweight of the bowl also makes it possible for it to sit firmly and securely on your kitchen area bench, which means you can simply whisk with a person hand and change the website page of your preferred cookbook with the other without having owning to hold the bowl down.

How Several Dimensions Are There?

The Emile Henry mixing bowl comes in 3 sizes. The substantial just one that I have is rather major and significant. I acquired this one simply because I thought it’d be a excellent bowl for proofing bread. I are inclined to increase a whole lot of yeast to my bread, and I hate when the dough rises so higher that it sticks to my plastic wrap (which can hinder the growth of the bread). In this bowl, the dough hardly ever reaches the plastic wrap, resulting in near-great bakes (most of the time!).

The medium- and tiny-sized mixing bowls are my most-utilized items in the kitchen area. I use the medium mixing bowl for anything involving raw meat, specially when I make Chinese dumplings. It has more than enough home for me to blend and marinate my dumpling filling there is lots of space to hold the total head of shredded Chinese cabbage way too (I make a massive batch of dumplings at a time and freeze them). The more compact-sized mixing bowl is especially valuable for whipping up salad dressings or even beating an effortless egg omelet collectively.

Following getting all a few sizes of Emile Henry’s ceramic mixing bowl, I’m tempted to stock up on a several a lot more specified how handy they’ve been in my kitchen area. But even if I did not, I hope this places an finish to my mixing bowl purchases — except, of system, the French model releases a further one particular that is superior, but I’m not absolutely sure they can best this one particular — c’est parfait.

February 1, 2023

Oven-Safe Silicone Sheet Trays Review 2023

I’m a substantial lover of any recipe that can be cooked on a sheet pan. Being ready to cook a protein and greens at the identical time (and on the exact same pan) constantly helps me get dinner completely ready in significantly less time — and with considerably less work. As well as, I like that when my food stuff roasts in the oven I can clean up my prep station and have fewer dishes to offer with when we’re carried out eating. No speculate our editors have so many beloved sheet-pan recipes, most loved sheet pans, and even a guidebook for turning any evening meal into a sheet-pan evening meal.

Nevertheless, my one gripe about sheet-pan cooking is the cleanup. My sink is not significant plenty of for even my smallest sheet pan to lie down flat, and I really don’t enjoy the match of attempting to prevent spraying water all above the counter when I clean it. As a result, I consider to thoroughly clean them much less usually by masking my sheet pans in aluminum foil when cooking, but that’s not the greatest remedy. A considerably better (and much less wasteful) just one is this set of oven-safe and sound sheet pan trays that gives you the flexibility of a sheet pan with substantially simpler cleanup.

Each tray is built of silicone and can hang out in your oven at up to 500 levels Fahrenheit for as extensive as it can take your food stuff to become crispy (or past crispy, if which is how you like it). You can also pop them in the microwave to prepare dinner or reheat dishes, and when you’re performed, they go proper in the dishwasher. If you do not have a dishwasher, they’re continue to more manageable to thoroughly clean in your sink than a substantial sheet pan. Effectively, you can handle Cheat Sheets like a modular sheet-pan technique: Each individual one is a separate cooking vessel that operates on its have, but alongside one another, they in shape neatly on to a fifty percent sheet pan to generate an overall meal.

Just one of the most significant advantages these mini sheet pans give is the capability to prep and cook points in the exact container. You can fill all 4 trays with distinctive substances — one particular with broccoli florets, one particular with potatoes, 1 with carrots, and just one with salmon filets — and keep them refrigerated until you’re completely ready to prepare dinner. Then, you can select to possibly put them all in the oven at the exact same time or set them in at staggered intervals to account for different cook dinner times. Conventional sheet-pan cooking also lets you insert ingredients at different periods, but only these trays give you the option to retain food items individual, which comes in useful with meats that give off a great deal of moisture or dishes with various flavors that you really do not want to combine.

I could absolutely see myself making use of these to get a head start out on weeknight dinners by slicing up further veggies one particular night and tossing them in a tray to roast the next. But, they would seriously aid out when I’m producing a huge supper with loads of dishes by allowing me finish most of my prep work a day forward and have items ready to pop into the oven as shortly as it is heated. And, if I want to, say, simmer a rooster breast in a several San Marzano tomatoes, I can do that on the exact same pan in which I’m crisping up broccolini with no tomato juices working everywhere.

All set to unlock a new level of sheet-pan cooking? Consider these flexible trays and see how considerably time and effort and hard work they conserve you in the kitchen.

January 31, 2023

‘Gran Cocina Latina’ Review: An Homage to Food in Latin Life | Arts

“When you go through this e book, you will take in my existence.”

“Gran Cocina Latina” is chef, historian, and writer Maricel E. Presilla’s magnum opus. Guiding her viewers as a result of 20 Latin American nations and hundreds of places to eat, chefs, house-cooks, vendors, and marketplaces, Presilla offers more than 500 recipes that encapsulate the flavors and approaches of Latin American cuisine. As chef and operator of restaurants Cucharamama, Zafra, and Ultramarinos in New Jersey, Presilla has stored a foot in the culinary earth while also publishing four previous collections of histories, life, and recipes of the Caribbean. Winner of the James Beard Awards for Cookbook of the Yr and International Cooking, “Gran Cocina Latina” is a testomony to Presilla’s thorough selection of Latin American food stuff, historical past, and existence as a result of cuisine.

Presilla’s recipes are immediate as she’s in a position to fulfill viewers of various ranges of knowledge in Latin American gastronomy. She guides visitors by recipes as fundamental as planning rice although highlighting its misleading simplicity. No matter if to get ready it as fluffy and al dente (like in Colombia), with raspa or cucayo crust (from Cuba and Colombia), or devoid of a gummy texture (disapprovingly known as api in Ecuador), the easy rice is as variable as the areas that use it.

The winner of the James Beard Award for Greatest Chef Mid-Atlantic Location in 2012 also demonstrates her culinary prowess as she distills some of Latin America’s most elaborate recipes into webpage-extended summaries. She steers the complex entire world of Mexican moles, walks curious viewers by way of fermenting Chilean chicha beer or Costa Rican vino de flor de Jamaica (or hibiscus wine), and dissects the infamously tricky dessert flan into digestible ways. The elements and measurements are explicitly very clear, and her instructions are elegantly concise as they maintain a constant syntactical flow throughout the ebook.

Presilla’s blend of literary design and style in “Gran Cocina” is as substantially a memoir of her everyday living in Cuba and travels by Latin The us as it is an informative cookbook. In the introduction to the assortment, Presilla confesses, “Writing this reserve is a way of acknowledging my expanding own id and the way I prepare dinner now.” She explores the complex identity that Latin People in america within the United States have — a duality of at the same time keeping two identities of currently being American and also Latin American that is only identified in the U.S. As a Cuban immigrant, she became obsessed with piecing alongside one another the “seductive smells and flavors of a dwelling, boiling cooking pot, its concealed possible to expose the earlier, existing, and future.” But, Presilla’s mission is to uncover the unifying features of Latin American cooking and the underlying unifying pieces, and honor the distinctions among respective cultures’ regular substances and methods of cooking.

“Gran Cocina Latina” is a testament to food’s ability to floor visitors in tradition and make connections throughout continents by sharing a meal at a dinner table. Presilla “honors her incredibly own account of how Latin American food stuff turned a core of my existence,” and navigates audience by a complicated historical and geographical knowledge of the unity and uniqueness of Latin delicacies.

“Two inspirations lie at the heart of this guide,” Priscilla clarifies: “To rejoice the amazing present instant of mixing that is developing a Latin American identity without boundaries in the United States, and to research diligently for what can be preserved of common and at times even historical methods […] My aim is to adapt and remodel the elemental natural beauty and tastes of Latin American cooking to the contemporary kitchen whilst respecting the food’s most important flavors, and to generate earthy, intensely flavored dishes that keep you achieving for additional.”

As a trained cultural anthropologist and holder of a PhD in Spanish Medieval History from New York University, Presilla’s broad know-how and tutorial analysis shines by means of her ethnographic narrative. Immediately after leaving Cuba in 1970, Presilla located curiosity in “understanding how Arabs, Jews, and Christians each contributed to the development of the Spanish character, society, and cuisine.” As her analysis became rooted in the liminality of the Latin American identity in the United States, Presilla “began to see what experienced built Latin The us the world’s very first and best laboratory of intercontinental culinary ‘fusion’.” As a result of “Gran Cocina Latina,” Presilla gives an encyclopedic assortment of flavors, elements, and cooking solutions. Her small glossary on the employs of a selection of peppers analyzes the evolution of Old and New World spices and she intentionally catalogs the array of cooking tools that populate classic Latin kitchens. Her recipes thoughtfully incorporate the origins of the dish — like her highlighting the Mayan importance of cohinita pibil — with her very own knowledge tasting and finding out about the recipes she provides.

Interwoven all through the reserve are fantastic visuals. Pictures couple Gentl and Hyers honor Presilla’s dishes in Vermeer-design and style portraiture. The images are clear, pure, and elegantly advanced, that includes innovative utilizes of mild and colour, since quite a few of Presilla’s dishes are accompanied by in depth illustrations. Presilla’s diction supplies an additional component of visualization as she gives vignettes about the dishes she shares. Her phase “Latin American Thanksgiving,” transports audience to evening meal with her spouse and children during her 1st Thanksgiving in the U.S., and her recipe for “Salt Cod Season” demonstrates the communal melancholy and exuberance of Holy 7 days.

As a piece of own narrative, continental memory, and almanac of elements and tactics, the size and depth of “Gran Cocina Latina” will make it a dense and thorough selection of practical experience. Nevertheless, this quantity of details could demonstrate to be tough for visitors to have interaction with. Though the recipes are complete and wide, merely skipping by way of the web pages to uncover what to make for evening meal loses sight of the text’s importance. Still, its 900 page depth is a complicated option for a everyday study.

Alternatively, “Gran Cocina” is a e book you return to during your life time, a staple for any kitchen area, and a sentimental tribute to Latine cultural id. If you’re looking for a simple cookbook with straightforward recipes, this might not be the read for you. But if you’d like to understand the Latin American food items scene and the origins of some of the most effectively-regarded worldwide flavors, this book can become a lighthouse.

—Staff author Julia Yanez can be arrived at at julia.yanez@thecrimson.com.