"zuni cafe" news and stories

I have always been intrigued by Zuni Cafe method of chicken roasting, in which you heavily salt the chicken and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of days. Yesterday over on the Epi Log Rick Rodgers wrote a post where he plays with this idea of dry brining and applies it to a Thanksgiving turkey.

He says, "How does this dry salt rub work? The salt draws a tiny bit of moisture from the bird and opens the skin pores. This moisture mingles with the salt and works its way into the turkey muscles, seasoning the bird throughout through osmosis. It is much less awkward than brining with gallons of salt water!"

Rick, you've got me pondering a dry brine, if not for this year, possibly for next. It sounds like a far easier and less messy way of imparting a whole lot of flavor into your bird. For full instructions on how to dry brine your turkey, make sure to read Rick's entire post because it is clear and well-written.

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Zuni Cafe, a San Francisco favorite, made Gourmet's list of the top 50 restaurants in the US for 2006. It's quite an honor for the restaurant, but seeing such lists can be disappointing for people who don't live near any of the winners. The solution is to pick up some of their cookbooks and try the dishes at home. The Zuni Cafe Cookbook provides everything you would need to know to make any of the many dishes from the restaurant in your own kitchen.

The book, written by Zuni's chef-owner Judy Rodgers, is as well put together as the dishes themselves are. It opens with some of Rodgers' thoughts about cooking and ingredients, so every reader will have a good idea of the philosophies behind the recipes before getting into the cooking. It puts your in the right frame of mind and actually makes you want to spend time, sometimes copious amounts of it, working the recipes.

Some recipes are more obscure than others, and some are perfectly good choices for the home cook, but the book as a whole should be interesting to any cook or foodie even if they only ever use it to make one dish. The one recipe you must try from the book, if you get it, is for the Zuni Roast Chicken with Bread Salad, which is one of the most popular and most well-known dishes at the restaurant.

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