There is much to love about sweet, nutty pecan pie, but it's easy for this simple dessert to turn out tooth achingly sugary and void of pecan flavor, with a curdled filling sogging a leathery crust. We wanted to create the ideal recipe for a not-too-sweet pie with a smooth-textured filling and ...
So, what do you say, dressing or stuffing? Technically, it's dressing if it's cooked in a pan and stuffing if it's cooked inside the bird. However, which word you choose seems to have more to do with where you come from: Midwestern or Southern folks often call it dressing, regardless of where ...
Delivering bright apple flavor and a temptingly moist crumb, this simple yet stunning Bundt cake demands a prominent place in your brunch spread. We maximized this cake's apple taste by shredding 1 1/2 pounds of tart Granny Smiths and bolstering their flavor with an intense reduction of apple ...
Unless you have access to multiple ovens, only a very large turkey will do when you've got a crowd coming to dinner. But finding a container large enough to brine a gargantuan bird can be tricky, and turning the bird in the oven (our usual method for evenly cooked meat) can be tricky. We ...
The essence of crumb cake is the balance between the buttery cake and the thick, lightly spiced topping. Starting with our favorite yellow cake recipe, we realized we needed to reduce the amount of butter or the richness would be overwhelming. We also wanted our crumb topping to be soft and ...
We had our hearts set on a one-pot pasta loaded with tender bites of browned sausage, hearty kale, and creamy cannellini beans. To streamline the recipe, rather than boil the pasta separately or remove the sausage from the pot once it had browned, we built flavor in layers, allowing the ...
In our opinion, gingerbread is only worth eating if its flavor is unmistakably bold and spicy. For our gingerbread bundt cake, the standard liquid combination of mild molasses and water seemed lackluster. Robust molasses had more presence in our scaled-up cake, and we replaced the water with ...
Grilled cheese has a kids' menu reputation, but just a few tweaks make it a sophisticated dinner option. To create a sandwich with more robust flavor and personality without going overboard on toppings and additions, we focused on the cheese. Our recipe began by mixing flavorful aged cheddar ...
A stack of fluffy, golden pancakes is the perfect starting place for a standout brunch, delivering piping hot cakes with distinct sweet tang and an open, airy texture. Buttermilk was a must_it contributed to the pancakes' flavor and, with some leavening help from small amounts of baking powder ...
Mexican hot chocolate is a beloved beverage made from chocolate (yup, got it) and often cinnamon and another spice or two to bring up the heat. The combination of spicy and chocolate just plain works, and I wanted to see how it would translate into another beloved treat, the good old American ...
Puttanesca, a classic Italian sauce made with tomatoes, garlic, anchovies, capers, and olives, offers bold flavor and comes together fairly quickly_perfect for a Sunday supper. Cooking the tomato sauce in a skillet and then cooking the pasta directly in the sauce made things even speedier. For ...
A few weeks ago, a new friend of mine asked me to make beer-can chicken. He had never had it before and had always wanted to try it. At first, I was surprised because_to me_beer-can chicken is as common as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But then, I posed the question to the other people ...
Beef usually hogs the spotlight when it comes to stews, but there are plenty of other meats that can star in this quintessential, cold-weather comfort food. Pork, chicken and here, lamb, a big favorite of my younger son, Charlie. This rich meat also takes well to many flavor combos, and in ...
Authentic lasagna Bolognese is all about the meaty, luxurious ragu. Typically, the rich sauce is bound between thin sheets of pasta along with a creamy bechamel sauce and Parmesan cheese. To simplify the process and keep our Ragu alla Bolognese in the spotlight, we decided to replace the ...
Store-bought raspberry jam can be a disappointment, tasting more like gummy candy than raspberries. We wanted a jam bursting with fresh fruit flavor, and we started by finding the perfect balance of fruit and sugar. For intense fruit flavor, we added a grated Granny Smith apple. Traditionally, ...
Our spicy beef taco bake packs all the great texture and flavor of taco night into an easy one-dish meal that could easily be prepped ahead of time. We used 93 percent lean ground beef instead of the usual 90 percent because we found that excess grease pooled on the bottom of the dish if ...
For our Shredded Barbecued Beef, we cut a chuck roast into quarters. The smaller pieces of beef absorbed more smoke flavor and cooked much faster. After cooking the meat in a disposable roasting pan on the cooler side of the grill for a few hours, we flipped all four pieces, wrapped the pan in ...
The appeal of ice cream cake is obvious: These two beloved desserts belong together, and a cold, creamy slice of ice cream cake is far more satisfying than a scoop of ice cream haphazardly dolloped onto a slice of cake. We wanted to develop a basic ice cream cake that would be a hit at any ...
Most turkey burgers are dry, bland, or loaded up with flavor-blunting fillers. To create juicy, well-textured turkey burgers, we ditched store-bought ground turkey in favor of a home-ground turkey thigh, which boasts more fat and flavor. To ensure that our turkey burger recipe delivered ...
Multicolored popsicles are fun and festive, but store-bought versions are loaded with sugar, corn syrup, and artificial colorings_and their lackluster flavor leaves something to be desired. To make an ultra-flavorful, naturally sweetened version that would please kids and adults alike, we ...