It's hard to find anyone who doesn't love a bowl of spaghetti topped with meatballs and marinara, but stovetop versions are often messy (between the spattering oil from frying the meatballs and the sputtering tomato sauce), and the sauce requires a long simmering time to develop rich, deep ...
Good gingerbread is dark and moist, with an intriguing hint of bitterness and a peppery finish. Usually it's a rustic square cake or maybe even an attractive Bundt, but it's never quite sophisticated enough to serve as the centerpiece holiday dessert. We wanted to transform homey gingerbread ...
This classic rendition of chicken soup starts the old- fashioned way, by making a from-scratch broth. But instead of using a whole chicken we turned to meaty chicken thighs, which kept things easier; they also added intense, meaty flavor to the broth. To cut down on greasiness, we removed the ...
Mixed fried seafood — or fritto misto di mare — can be found throughout Italy; however, the most iconic and evocative incarnation hails from Campania. Indeed, it's easy to imagine sitting in a Neapolitan trattoria eating crisp, piping hot tidbits of fried seafood while looking out on the ...
When the food processor was introduced in the 1970s, it suddenly made difficult or time-consuming recipes so much easier. The fast blades combine ingredients in just seconds. Hummus is a perfect example — this creamy spread is made with pureed chickpeas, tahini (which is like peanut butter ...
Beautifully braided, rich, and lightly sweet, freshly baked challah is delicious on its own or smeared with softened butter. After a few days, it’s great dunked in custard and made into French toast for a decadent breakfast. The best challah is rich with eggs, and it has a dark, shiny crust ...
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 ...