Under Pressure: How To Make Superb Chicken Stock In About An Hour

What if there was a method for making stock that not only dispensed with the time-consuming part, but also produced something that tasted better?

In practice, significantly more flavor is extracted from the meat. [...] When combined with good ingredients, these factors produce remarkable stocks in significantly less time.

-Heston Blumenthal, The Fat Duck Cookbook

I started making stock when I realized that you could stash the carcasses from roast chickens in the freezer and save them up for an empty Sunday and a few hour...

Turducken: Live Poultry to Culinary Grotesque to Epic Stock

My friend Matt's email arrived in my inbox, forthright and serious.

"This coming Saturday, March 22, a turducken will be assembled and cooked in my apartment...in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn.  Beginning at about 12 or 12:30, the birds will be deboned, the stuffing will be made, and the ingredients layered and sewn up...resulting in the creation of a delicious culinary grote...

The Gateway Stock: What to Do With Leftover Roast Chicken

As a cook, I've been rather reluctant to prepare homemade stock.  I give the usual litany of excuses: too much hassle, not enough time, not cost-effective.  I keep a little jar of Better than Bouillon in my fridge door (one chicken, one beef, one vegetable) and I've always got instant stock whenever I need it, in small quantities or large.   I don't have to worry about it going off, beca...

Localvore Short Ribs

As you may or may not remember, I’m attempting to go somewhat local. Click back to Week 1 to see how it got started.

We’ve written about short ribs twice before and I’ll be honest in saying this isn’t the master recipe.  Part of the problem is that both previous recipes were really Blake’s babies.  It was his pot and his enthusiasm that spurred the effort.  While I was ther...

Risotto-style Pasta: How to Make Dried Pasta Taste like Fresh

I’d venture a guess and say that there’s nothing I cook more than pasta.  For someone as devoted to simple cooking with simple ingredients as I’ve become, there’s no dish more fitting and open to invention, nor in possession of a learning curve that’s forgiving at first, but can take a lifetime to master.  It’s easy enough to make a tomato sauce and boil some pasta—college stud...

The Year of the Pig: Adventures in Cookbooks, River Cottage, and Chinatown

I’ve bought two cookbooks in the last week that teach you how to do funny things with pigs.  The first, which I haven’t had nearly enough time to explore, is Michael Ruhlman ’s Charcuterie , co-written with Brian Polcyn, a book about the wonders of salting, smoking, and curing meat, a tradition of which pork is the oinking mascot.  Much has been written of this book’s breakt...

The Duck Confit is Served

I was cleaning out my fridge, throwing away plastic bags full of blackened herbs and limp celery and muttering about how I felt wasteful, of course, but also uncreative.  Why does the ability to look into the fridge and dream up recipes with what’s there elude me?  I'm a failure and a hack.  Why even cook anymore?  I should just order takeout and go to sleep.

But in the midst of this crisis...

Short Ribs Finally Worth Writing About

The most well-documented failure on this website was the first time we cooked beef short ribs .  Tough, sinewy, and ugly--a big fibrous brick of protein fastened onto a sled of white bone by tendons and mysterious pieces of grizzle.  Short ribs are the beef equivalent to a Salman Rushdie novel: willfully difficult, at times indecent and gross, but after an extended period of histrionic o...

Melting Potatoes

Those on a diet should click away now

Those on a diet should click away now.  Those left will have their heart beat just a few ticks faster when these are finally removed from the oven, and even faster once the oil starts pumping through your system...

Barbara Kafka loves these, and we love her from creating them.  They are horrible for your health, use just a little less butter than a hollandaise, and look like burnt, mushy,...

White Risotto with Pesto

Trust this recipe, and never lose faith: it is actually quite simple, and can be used as a launching point for lots of other inspired ideas.

I remember vividly the first time I thumbed through a cookbook with a sense of purpose. I was home on a break during my freshman year of college, and my mom had been relating to me her excitement about a book my sister sent from London.  She excitedly exclaimed that “it had even been autographed.”  I smiled and nodded approvingly, unaffected.  It was a cookbook, after all.  My sister w...