A Pan Sauce for All Seasons

By Katie Barreira

What’s turkey without gravy? You would never chuck the succulent pan juices from a holiday roast, so why waste them any other time of year? A quick pan sauce is the easiest way to class-up a simple weeknight meal.

One of my biggest testing pet peeves is when a recipe calls for searing a protein (chicken, fish, steak…most especially steak) and then abandons the pan, never to be mentioned again. One can only assume that all those caramelized bits of flavor and schmaltzy fats are being fed to the kitchen sink.

Click to read more ...

Knife Sharpening 101

By Katie Barreira

Whether you’re a cooking newbie or a seasoned slicer, a sharp blade will instantly improve your knife skills, making faster, easier and more uniform work of everything that crosses your cutting board. Culinary knives should be sharpened two to three times a year to restore the blades’ original contour and angle. Whether you choose to hone at home or let the pros handle your steel, sharp knives are a must for every cook.

Click to read more ...

A Spa Day for Your Wok

By Katie Barreira

This week in the test kitchen, we were working on recipes that required a wok. Even in professional kitchens, less frequented equipment have a way of hiding best when you need it most. A fly on the wall that day would have heard,

“Do we have a wok?”
“Yeah, I know I’ve used it before, but I haven’t seen it recently.”
“Do you remember packing it? Maybe it got lost in the move.”
“How do you lose a wok?!”

Once unearthed and inspected for quality assurance we concluded that our carbon steel wok had received no love. But that was about to change. A bit of research in our cookbook library uncovered an excellent wok priming primer by Chinese cookbook author and wok connoisseur, Grace Young. Armed with good counsel and some steel wool, we undertook a transformation on par with Michael Caine’s makeover of Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality. Our wok has never looked, or cooked, better.

Click to read more ...

Sweet Bitters- Campari: A Love Story

By Katie Barreira

Picture it, Italy, 1860. Gaspare Campari comes home from a long day in the fields, feeling downright haggard. Good thing his wife has spent the afternoon steeping her secret recipe of herbs, spices and citrus peel.

Just a glug of the health tonic, sends the worn Gaspare straight to bed and in the morning he awakes, refreshed and fortified by the medicinal brew. Over the milk pails Gaspare extols the virtues of the Campari family restorative and the rest is history…Ok, so everything past Gaspare Campari is my fanciful and entirely concocted, version of Campari’s mysterious inception, but you get the idea!

Click to read more ...

That’s What Friends Are For

By Katie Barreira

In this burgeoning, melting pot of a nation, most of us have cross-cultural buddies who, if prompted, are at least conversant in a foreign cuisine. My friend Graciel, for example, spent only the first four years of her life in the Philippines, but as the granddaughter of an established Filipino restaurateur, her ancestral fare remained salient across the Pacific…lucky us!

Cooking an unfamiliar cuisine is like speaking a new language; the ingredients, a vocabulary of tastes that when strung, tossed or whipped together, create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. And, as with language, the best way to learn is immersion. So, enlist a pal who’s fluent in anything from a single heirloom recipe to an entire gastronomy and dive in.

Click to read more ...