"bobby flay" news and stories

Last year Slashfood launched the The 10 Hottest Men in the Food Industry and boy, did we hear about it! From commenters all over, everyone had an opinion. This year, we opened up the polls to our readers and let you decide who would make our final top 10 list.

Narrowing down 30 names to 10, after the jump, see who made the list again, and find out who, surprisingly, is our (possibly not-so-hot) hottest man of 2011.

Cookbooks from high-profile cooks and celebrity chefs -- including Giada De Laurentiis, Bobby Flay, Mark Bittman, David Chang, Martha Stewart and Alice Waters -- have gone digital.

Popular cookbook publishers Clarkson Potter and Ten Speed Press released 88 cookbooks as full-color e-books, optimized for color e-readers like the iPad and Nookcolor.

The titles will also be digitally available in black-and-white for Amazon's Kindle and other non-color digital readers. More than 2,600 e-cookbooks are available in Amazon.com's Kindle store. Barnes & Noble's Nook bookstore has more than 1,700 digital titles available.

While some, like Flay's Throwdown!, are from the fall 2010 list, 81 of the titles (such as Waters's The Art of Simple Food) are from the backlist.

Are you ready? Every week on Throwdown!, celebrity chef and restaurateur Bobby Flay goes head-to-head with cooks who have staked their claim as "masters" of an iconic dish -- buffalo wings, chicken cacciatore, or sticky buns, for example -- even though in some cases Flay has never have cooked these things before. The results are always entertaining, and always delicious.

In his first-ever cookbook collaboration with Food Network, Bobby shares the recipes and fun from his popular show in Bobby Flay's Throwdown! The book lets home cooks and fans in on the action, featuring favorite Throwdown! moments as well as sneak peeks behind the scenes. So if Flay ever strolls into your backyard asking "Are you ready for a Throwdown?," you definitely will be.

Find out how to win one out of five autographed copies after the jump.

The lines were huge at Friday Night's Blue Moon Burger Bash (part of the annual NYC Wine & Food Festival), held in DUMBO's Tobacco Warehouse, but none as long as the one twisting around and bunching up in front of Bobby Flay's Burger Palace. Flay himself manned the table, passing out hundreds of Santa Fe burgers and hamming it up for the crowds. The hand shaking, photo ops and his Santa Fe burger (topped with poblano chiles, queso and blue-corn tortilla chips) added up to a winning combination for fans -- Flay took home the People's Choice award.

Shake Shack was this year's winner (no big surprise there). Sure, their burgers are incredible, but can we give a shout-out to the shakes and those crinkle fries? The stars of every Burger Bash are the burgers, of course, but sometimes the supporting cast deserves attention too.

Check out our favorite sides of the evening.

Last night, The Next Food Network Star crowned its Season 6 winner: Los Angeles based food blogger Aarti Sequeira edged out world's greatest Dad candidate Herb Mesa and "Big Chef" Tom Pizzica. She now joins the ranks of Bobby Flay, Rachael Ray and Guy Fieri in the Food Network's stable of TV personalities, with the hopes of spicing things up with a little Indian flavors on her new show Aarti Party.

Although it wasn't necessarily made evident during the season, Sequeira is a former producer for CNN who over the last year developed her own YouTube cooking show that just so happened to be called -- yep, you guessed it -- "Aarti Paarti." So even before the season started taping, she was quite used to being around cameras, both from a technical standpoint and in developing an onscreen personality. Consistent throughout the season was her point of view -- the party seeks to fuse Indian flavors with recognizable American favorites, introducing a new way of using spices in the kitchen.

The first season of Aarti Party premieres this Sunday, August 22 at 12 noon, where she dives into Bombay sloppy joes and pistachio pops. Other first season highlights that look promising: a recipe for quick pickled cucumbers using rice vinegar and cilantro, shrimp and pineapple "not-so" po' boys and a pulled pork smothered in a mango barbecue sauce.

Slashfood spoke with Sequeria about the origins of "Aarti Paarti" and making Indian food more accessible in the United States. Read the full interview after the jump.