I spent some time yesterday afternoon talking with Tanya Steel, editor-in-chief of Epicurious, about everything from her weeknight dinners to the cookbook she's releasing this fall. It was an honor to speak with Ms. Steel, who has written for Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, the New York Times, and appeared on numerous TV programs, including the Today Show (the list goes on). After our conversation, I can absolutely see her energy and enthusiasm in the pages of Epicurious. Talk about a foodie! I've noticed a lot of changes on Epicurious in the past year or so – new blogs and features. What's the idea behind this new content? I came to Epicurious in July 2005, and I found a site that I loved with tremendous depth, but not a lot of breadth. We needed to broaden out the site to make it the go-to site for people who love to eat and love cooking and love food. I knew that we had a fantastic recipe database, so we added restaurant coverage, a huge thing on drinks. We added video, and a blog that I started – for a while I was the only one writing. We spent some time not only broadening our coverage and trying to get notable names on the site, but we also took a look at the site, which was over 12 years old, and we realized it was time to make it look as rich and interesting as the content. We spent a good part of last year looking at the inner plumbing of the site, and we launched [the redesign] last September. I've never worked so hard, and it was incredibly rewarding to create a food site from the ground up. I thought, "What would I like? What kind of site would I like and how would I create it? We are still rolling out features throughout this year. There are going to be upgrades and additions this year and next. Any chance you can give us some hints about these upcoming features? One of the things that we are going to be doing is expanding our community section. We have always had a vibrant, passionate community of people – up to six million unique [visitors] in December. They love to talk to each other. We have ten forums, and realize this is something to increase. We made a deal with Facebook, and realize that a lot of people would love to have more social networking on our site. We are blowing out something called "My Epicurious" – people will be able to upload a photo of themselves, they can already tag interests. They will be able to upload pictures so people can see what they are cooking now. They will be able to join interest groups. For example, if they are interested in it cuisines, they will be able to see everything having to do with that interest group, like new Italian recipes and posts, anything to do with Italy.
Molly Wizenberg, the Seattleite behind the lyrical food blog, Orangette, is now appearing in Bon Appétit. Wizenberg's first monthly "Cooking Life" column is in the March issue, on stands now. In it, she tackles fear of baking with yeast, providing readers with a yummy-looking recipe for cinnamon rolls with cream cheese glaze.
If you haven't read Orangette, you should start - it's like reading a novel. A novel that's mostly about food. While her posts can sometimes get a little too folksy with the "oh goshes" and "darns," others, like the one about cooking with her father, will make you cry with their brilliant, raw emotion.
Molly's also got one of the great foodie love stories of the modern era. Her now-husband, Brandon, was introduced to her blog by a friend, tried her recipe for lemon cake and was so inspired he emailed her offering to take her out to dinner. Problem was, he lived in New York, she in Seattle. Three weeks later he flew out and they fell in love over gelato and strolls through Pike Place Market. When they got engaged a year later Molly got nearly 200 well-wishing posts on Orangette. Sweet, no?
When I was in college, I had this party trick that I would trot out ever so often. I would ask people to show me their favorite pen, and then I would intuit facts about their personality based on their pen choice. It worked best when people were slightly intoxicated, as a few well placed guesses could really wow them when they were slightly incapacitated.
Yesterday, Julia Langbein wrote a post on Gourmet's Choptalk that made me think about this old trick of mine. She claims that the best way to learn about a person or family is to take a peek at their coffee mug cabinet. Apparently, you can tell a lot about the people who live in a particular space by the type of mugs they have. Thinking about my own cabinet, I realize that my mismatched hand thrown mugs (mostly thrift store purchases), the freebie blue NPR mug and the one with my sister's face printed on it do say certain things about me.
Ice isn't just ice. At least when it comes to your cocktails. If you're going to be using premium spirits and premium mixers, then you should think about your ice as well. Ice has become a topic of much discussion by top mixologists and cocktailians around the world. Designer ice is becoming the rage.
The first thing to consider is what type of water? Filtered, spring, mineral, etc. Many high end bars are using premium bottled water like Fiji water. Others are using filtered and triple distilled water.
The next is the size and shape of the cube. Crushed ice melts fast and is great for soda, but not in a cocktail. Hand chipped ice is great because you can control the size of the chips. Larger pieces melt slower and also can help with muddling citrus or mint into the drink. Also it looks great as it sparkles and reflects in the drink. Some places are trying different shapes such as large cubes and spheres. These have large surface area, but melt slow, so they chill the drink but don't water it down too fast.
So it all depends upon the purpose you plan to use the ice for. Small pieces for cooling fast and watering down the drink. Middle size pieces for tall drinks like a G&T or for shaking in cocktails. Large, regular sized and shaped pieces for a fine spirit on the rocks, so it chills it but doesn't water it down too much.
There are a lot of people who, as a general rule, eschew baking mixes. After all, why use a boxed mix when you can do it yourself and produce a better result? This standard may hold true when it comes to the average inexpensive store-bought cake mix, but there is a wide range of high quality, gourmet mixes available now that produced baked goods that will rival not only homemade things, but those from pro bakeries, as well. In fact, many of the mixes are coming from these pros to begin with. Jacques Torres has recently launched a line of baking mixes for several of his most popular chocolate treats: Pure Bliss Brownies, French Kiss Cookies, and Mudslide Cookies. The mixes are made in conjunction with King Arthur Flour and contain all the necessary basics for replicating the chocolatier's favorite treats at home, including a lot of chocolate. They retail for $12.95 each.
I sampled the end results all of the mixes at the SF Fancy Foods Show a few weeks ago, and while all three were excellent, the chocolate-filled chocolate chip French Kiss Cookies were probably my favorite. If you want to give one of them a try from scratch as a comparison, you can find the recipe for Jacques Torres's Mudslides here.
Russell Stover Chocolates started back in 1923 and leads the market in terms of the sales of boxed chocolates. It is the third larges chocolate manufacturer in the US, behind Hershey's and M&M Mars (Masterfoods). Although receiving consistently decent scores in taste tests, the brand has an image of affordability and none of the cache that more upscale brands - Godiva, Lindt, Vosges, to name but a few - do. Since chocolate is an ever-growing segment of the market, Russell Stover has decided to take action and reinvent the brand to appeal to new, younger consumers, consumers who are looking for more sophistication, trendier packaging and flavors that mimic those of upscale brands.
Several new lines will launch this spring, including Russell Stover Urban, Internationale and Origin Select, as well as a Private Reserve line designed to compete directly with bars from Lindt. There will be more organic chocolates, as well. The Whitman's brand, which is owned by the same company, will also launch a new line Whitman's Soho.
Consumers will make or break the new products, but industry insiders already see potential in Vanilla Bean Brûlée with 70% Dark Chocolate squares and other similar products, with Candy Industry magazine even giving Russell Stover the Manufacturer of the year award for 2006.
My three year old is in a cooking class learning to make artisanal breads.
Well, my two year old will only eat raw milk cheeses that have been smuggled into the country by our friends traveling abroad.
Oh yeah? My 7 month old will only eat sushi, foie gras and foods prepared by Ferran Adria.
It looks like having kids with gourmet palates is the newest status symbol for the "urban sophisticate." They want their kids to appreciate the finer things in life as soon as possible, so members of this food-forward group of parents - foodies, chowhounds and gourmets all - try to expose their kids to as many different foods as they can. They enroll them in kids-only cooking classes so that they can get some hands-on experience and take them to fine dining restaurants - many of which now offer smaller kid-sized portions - as well as cooking dishes from around the world at home.
Those outside of this adventurous eater movement are less enthralled with it than the parents of the children are, even if the "outsiders" are parents themselves. Not only do they feel that there is no reason to push so much so soon (even adults like mac and cheese!), but some foods like medium rare burgers and sushi seem like they might be opening children to heath risks. The biggest concern arises with restaurants, where many patrons feel that the experience is lessened when they have to sit next to a cranky child. Restaurateurs and chefs, on the other hand, don't seem to mind quite as much. "Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin, Zagat's highest-rated restaurant in New York, thinks his dress code helps keep children in line. 'They have a tie, so they are almost strangled already,' he said. 'They don't move much.'"
Chicken sausages are lower in fat and calories than most pork or beef sausages, but they aren't known for having as much flavor as the two meatier varieties. This isn't to say that they're bad, just that they tend not to be as crave-inducing as their counterparts. But because some chicken sausages aren't all that satisfying doesn't mean that none are. EatingWell magazine set out, in their most recent issue, to do a taste test of 27 different varieties of chicken sausages to find out which ones were the most worth-eating, both when it came to flavor and health.
After an exhaustive and filling trial, EW's tasting panel narrowed the field down to eight top picks from five manufacturers. They all had approximately half the calories and one third of the fat of the average pork sausage, but were still very tasty. The winners included:
Al Fresco: Buffalo Style, Sweet Italian Style, and Teriyaki Ginger
To be completely honest, I am not usually impressed too much by nuts, even those coated in sugar and spices. I can easily make my own. So with this in mind, it was a complete surprise to me that I liked the Nutorious Nuts I sampled at the Fancy Foods Show so much.
Nutorious Gourmet Nuts started out as an old family recipe. Deliciously flavored nuts were passed out as holiday gifts to family and friends until their popularity finally pushed the nut-makers into the business world. Using only nuts and a few ingredients, like butter, sugar and spices, every batch of nuts is handmade in one of several delicious flavors that are crazily addictive:
Oooo La La Original - classic buttery sweet combination
Cha Cha Chipotle - savory and a little spicy, an updated bar snack
Door County Cherry Vanilla Crunch (my favorite!)- a sweet nut mix with the addition of some dried cherries coated in the same sugar crust
Cranberry Orange Crunch - nuts mixed with cranberries and tossed in an orangey sugar coating
Chocolate Coconutty (updated!) - amazingly addictive, with chocolate and toasty coconut.
The recipes are great and there are plenty of comfort-food favorites to choose from, like Biscuits and Gravy, Lemon Pudding Cake, Macaroni and Cheese, Banana Bread, Buckwheat Pancakes and Chicken Pot Pie , all of which have had gluten-containing components eliminated. The most useful parts of the book are probably the sections that discuss the properties of different "exotic flours" and other supplies that are commonly used in gluten-free baking, many of which will not be familiar to someone who has relied on wheat flours before.
Most slow cooker cookbooks tend to focus on "home-style" foods, like chilis, stews and other dishes of the sort that your grandmother might have made at some point. The homey feel that slow cooked foods evoke is is one of the things that makes them so wonderful, but it also tends to make slow cooker recipes sound similar after a while. The Gourmet Slow Cooker: Simple and Sophisticated Meals from Around the World doesn't cover those same old recipes and, instead, aims for the more unusual recipes that are not often included in grandmothers' recipe collections. The chapters in the book are divided up by country and each section has sides, mains and even desserts. The American chapter will have some standards, but India includes Eggplant and Pea Curry, Neopolitan Truffle Risotto is from Italy and the Mexican chapter has lots of chilies and moles. As you might suspect from the names of the dishes, some are slightly more involved than the average slow cooker stew, but even the hardest will be easier than the recipe would be if prepared in another way. After all, the slow cooker does a lot of the work for you.
All of these recipes are great choices for winter entertaining, when you're looking for something hot, satisfying and elegant.
Let's face it: if you take a glace at the rapidly expanding chocolate section of almost any store, there is bound to be at least one product that needs a second (and much closer) look just to figure out the label. In this case, I'm not referring to products with unusual flavor combinations, but to those marked with a cacao percentage.
Consumers and manufacturers alike have gone crazy over chocolates labeled with their cacao percentage in the last year or so, and even though the numbers themselves are clear, not everyone understands what those numbers mean. Often, the percentages are equated with the quality of the chocolate, leading to the idea that the darker the chocolate, the better it will be in spite of the fact that the darkest chocolate - usually unsweetened, 99% cacao- is actually quite unpalatable.
The cacao percentage indicates how much of a given product, by weight, is made up of cocoa solids from the cocoa bean (cacao), like cocoa butter and cocoa powder. The rest of the bar is made up of sugar, vanilla and/or other ingredients, including milk and the occasional emulsifier. This basically means that a bar of chocolate with a higher cacao percentage will usually have more chocolate in it and a stronger cocoa flavor (i.e. it will be more bitter) than one with a lower percentage, but that doesn't necessarily mean that bars of equally high percentages will taste alike.
Shoppers in Atlanta, Georgia may want to take note that Trader Joe's is planning on opening a store within the next 12 months. Unfortunately, representatives from the company have been pretty tight-lipped about a location, but it does say that it will be "midtown" on the Trader Joe's website.
The California chain, as we all are probably well aware by now, is known for offering gourmet foods with a focus on quailty and convenience, at very low prices, often under its own label. Instead of producing all of the products themselves, they work closely with national or global brands that meet their quality standards to get lower prices for shoppers. One of the reasons that this strategy works so well is that the stores have a wide variety of items, but a very limited choice in each category, so once a product makes it into the store, it will not face much, if any, competition for sales. Many products are packaged to serve two or four, making them ideal for busy families or couples.
If rumors can be believed, the company is planning more than one Atlanta location to follow this first store, as well.
Every niche in the food world is going to see their share of trends in the new year, from fast food to the ultra-luxe havens of molecular gastronomy, and Epicurious has just put in their two cents as to what some of those trends will be. Although they don't come right out and say so, it is pretty easy to see that their trends don't apply directly to all diners/cooks. Based on their selections, it appears that their picks are for the gourmet food niche. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's good to keep some perspective when reading forcasts for trends like number one on their list:
An increase in the number of "foie gras speakeasies", "private clubs having secret dinners, feasting on the forbidden fattened duck liver."
Iberico ham from Spain will become wildly popular.
More people will shop at farmers' markets and start to grow their own produce.
There will be more ethnic fine dining restaurants.
Fair trade will become a buzzword in the same vein as "organic" was this year.
More quality bread will be baked in restaurants.
Spicy drinks and cocktails will be big in restaurant bars. Jalapeno margarita, anyone?
Hot dogs will be the new hamburgers.
Small coffee roasters will be the new coffee trend (or you could just roast at home).
Consumers will continue to care more about the quality of the food they are buying/eating, not just the quantity.
Thanks to the trickle down effect of trends, the more accessible ones will hit the mainstream quickly (more hot dogs (#8) by summer), but the others might take more time to gain widespread popularity.
This isn't exactly trailer-park cooking (not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that), but it's closer than you're going to come with books like the Chez Panisse Café or The Pleasures of Slow Food. White Trash Gatherings: From-scratch Cooking for Down-home Entertainingis about cooking with family and putting family first, although the book will help you put some good eats on the table while you're doing that. It is the very definition of unfussy, although it does include some craft-y ideas for napkin rings, tablesettings and such, like "Obscenely Large Fake Ice Cream Centerpieces". The recipes are homey and perfect for "potlucking" or just having fun, regardless of the fact that they are unlikely to show up on the menu at a four-star restaurant. Be sure to try Maw Maw's West Virginia Funeral Cake, Tater Tot Casserole and Porcupine Balls. There are full-color photos to liven up the book, as well.
Even if you don't end up cooking anything from White Trash Gatherings, it would make a funny gift for a gourmet friend that is hard to buy for because they already have all the "high class" cookbooks they could want.
I spent some time yesterday afternoon talking with Tanya Steel, editor-in-chief of Epicurious, about everything from her weeknight dinners to the cookbook she's releasing this fall. It was an honor to speak with Ms. Steel, who has written for Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, the New York Times, and appeared on numerous TV programs, including the Today Show (the list goes on). After our conversation, I can absolutely see her energy and enthusiasm in the pages of Epicurious. Talk about a foodie!
Ice isn't just ice. At least when it comes to your cocktails. If you're going to be using premium spirits and premium mixers, then you should think about your ice as well. Ice has become a topic of much discussion by top mixologists and cocktailians around the world. 
There are a lot of people who, as a general rule, eschew baking mixes. After all, why use a boxed mix when you can do it yourself and produce a better result? This standard may hold true when it comes to the average inexpensive 
Russell Stover Chocolates started back in 1923 and leads the market in terms of the sales of boxed chocolates. It is the third larges chocolate manufacturer in the US, behind Hershey's and M&M Mars (Masterfoods). Although receiving consistently decent scores in 
My three year old is in a cooking class learning to make artisanal breads.
Chicken sausages are lower in fat and calories than most pork or beef sausages, but they aren't known for having as much flavor as the two meatier varieties. This isn't to say that they're bad, just that they tend not to be as crave-inducing as their counterparts. But because some chicken sausages aren't all that satisfying doesn't mean that none are. 
To be completely honest, I am not usually impressed too much by nuts, even those coated in sugar and spices. I can easily 
Let's face it: if you take a glace at the rapidly expanding chocolate section of almost any store, there is bound to be at least one product that needs a second (and much closer) look just to figure out the label. In this case, I'm not referring to products with 
Shoppers in Atlanta, Georgia may want to take note that Trader Joe's is 
Every niche in the food world is going to see their share of trends in the new year, from fast food to the ultra-luxe havens of molecular gastronomy, and Epicurious has just put in their two cents as to what some of those trends will be. Although they don't come right out and say so, it is pretty easy to see that their trends don't apply directly to all diners/cooks. Based on their selections, it appears that 
Cheese Course: Brebis Pardou
A transcendent summer tomato salad
Sliced bread turns 80 today
