Sara Kate Gillingham

Sara Kate is the founding editor of The Kitchn. She co-founded the site in 2005 and has since written three cookbooks. She is most recently the co-author of The Kitchn Cookbook, published in October 2014 by Clarkson Potter.
My Mom’s Italian Wedding Soup Is Comfort in a Bowl
When it comes to comforting soups, I can easily say I have a hands-down favorite: Italian wedding soup. My experience of it is neither particularly Italian, nor is it matrimonial, rather it was one of the first real meals my mother fed me when I was a baby. The legend is that I’d slurp it loudly, humming, and the broth would dribble down my neck, soaking the neck of my shirt.
Oct 3, 2024
16 Types of Potatoes (Plus When to Use Them)
A spud for every occasion.
Aug 29, 2024
The Simplest Margarita Is Also the Best
You only need three ingredients, including the tequila.
Apr 18, 2024
How to Naturally Dye Easter Eggs (Using Ingredients You Already Have at Home!)
How To
Skip the food coloring and drugstore kits — and do this instead.
Mar 13, 2024
Lizano-Style Costa Rican Salsa
There is a particular bottled salsa on every table in Costa Rica. It’s called Lizano and the first time you taste it you have to stop and think a minute. Do I like it or not?
Aug 13, 2023
Mango Colada
I once went to the Caribbean and actually got sick of piña coladas. It happens to the best of us. Midway through the vacation, I asked my bartender to switch it up a bit and it turns out that the same drink made with mango is just as good, if not better. The bartender kept the pineapple slice garnish as a nostalgic nod to our journey together through a week of seaside cocktails. If you don’t want to bother tracking down a ripe mango and slicing it, use frozen mango.
Aug 11, 2023
Lemon Sorbet
This may sound crass, but I have yet to find a lemon sorbet from the grocery store whose flavor doesn’t remind me of cleaning fluid. Luckily, lemon sorbet is an easy dessert to make at home, and it’s so worth it. You don’t even need an ice cream maker to get good results. As we know from Some Facts About Ice Cream, sorbet contains more sugar than ice cream, but has less fat. It’s also non-dairy and is usually flavored with fruit.
Jul 5, 2023
Iranian Jeweled Rice
I recently spent a few days with Najmieh Batmanglij — known to many as the “Queen of Persian Cooking” — who opened me up to the cooking of her native Iran, and in particular to a rice dish called jeweled rice, or Javaher Polow. When I took my first bite, I almost cried from a near overload in flavor, fragrance, balance and a notable infusion of love in the grains of rice, tart little barberries, and strands of candied orange peel.
Jul 2, 2023
6 Breads That Go Perfectly With Soup
We love a good soup or stew around here. But do you know what elevates soup into a whole cozy experience? Bread. Picture it: Spoon in one hand, a nice chunk of crusty bread in the other, ready to soak up all the flavors. We have so many warm and comforting soup recipes for chilly weather. And right here we have the absolute best breads to accompany those soups — like, soup soul mates. For real.
Jun 29, 2023
Authentic Spaghetti alla Carbonara
Spaghetti alla Carbonara: When it’s good, it can make your eyes roll back in your head with pleasure. It lurks there, beckoning, batting its eyelashes on Italian menus. When you don’t order it, you usually end up wishing you had. This pasta dish seems easy to make at home, requiring only few ingredients like bacon, eggs, and pasta.
Jun 6, 2023
15 Fresh Picnic Salads for Any Summer Celebrations
Salads at 4th of July cookouts and summer picnics tend to fall into a few worn-out categories. Mayo-laden potato salad. Greasy pasta salad. Maybe a tomato salad if you’re lucky. Salads and side dishes get short shrift next to the blazing grill and charcoal taste of those cheeseburgers, or the splendor of the blueberry flag cake. Well, that shouldn’t be so. Here are 15 summer salads that offer delicious summer taste, and something fresh, something new for your summer picnic table.
May 28, 2023
Recipe: Grilled Potato, Gorgonzola and Prosciutto Pizza
A version of this post was originally sent to our email subscribers on April 17th. To sign up for our weekly email (not daily as the box indicates) sign up in the column to the left or click here.Maybe I jumped the gun a bit, but a few weekends ago, I grilled pizza up on a bluff. We served it right there, in the damp April evening. It was only about fifty degrees, but green things are emerging from the ground, I thought. Let’s celebrate. It’s normal spring behavior for me.
May 3, 2023
How To Write A Recipe Like A Professional
I write recipes, among other things, for a living. It may seem easy, but it isn’t always. It takes practice and adherence to a few rules. Knowing how to write a recipe is something even an amateur cook can benefit from knowing. There are two main parts of a recipe, the Ingredient List and the Preparation Method. I’ll take you through some basic guidelines for writing both parts. This is our own style guide and loose list of rules.
Dec 10, 2022
Pie vs. Tart: What’s the Difference?
Our Pie Bakeoff is in full swing (have you entered your best pie yet?) For the next few weeks we are running posts each day with different types of pie recipes, tips and inspiration, and soon we will begin posting entries from the contest.The question has been posed, May I enter the bakeoff with a tart? The answer is yes. While pies and tarts are two distinct things, they are close enough cousins that we will accept them both. A galette is another cousin who is invited to party.
Nov 30, 2022
A Proper Giblet Gravy
Which traditional Thanksgiving foods can you not do without? Is it the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the mashed potatoes? Where I come from, it’s almost criminal if a Thanksgiving turkey doesn’t have a side of gravy. How else are you going to deal with Aunt Helen’s dry bird? This year, offer to make the gravy and learn a skill that can be utilized all year-round — make this gravy with chicken, too!
Oct 7, 2022
One Bowl Mung Bean Meal
It happens every year at this time and you know it. Whatever your normal — and hopefully healthy — eating pattern is, you lose it. Normally I have a very balanced dieteggnogroast beef Take Tuesday night for example: I went into a dinner party situation wanting to eat light and not drink alcohol. Two blinks of the eye later I found a margarita in one hand and a goat cheese-stuffed, bacon-wrapped date in the other. Pretty soon there were pork loin sandwiches and chile rellenos.
Sep 30, 2022
Eggless Caesar Dressing
If you’re just craving a classic Caesar, here’s a clean, refreshing style of Caesar dressing without egg, so it emphasizes the garlic, anchovy, and lemon instead of hiding them behind a mayonnaise mask. Make a batch and keep it for a week’s worth of homemade dressing. Leave the cheese out for a great meat marinade. It’s easy enough to throw together some vinegar and oil and call it dressing — I remember when I was in college and figured that one out.
Sep 22, 2022
20 Songs for Dancing in the Kitchen
Enough of this long, cold, winter; we’re having a Valentine’s party this weekend, and it’s going to involve a lot of cooking, which inevitably means a lot of dancing. I’m one to shake a tail feather while I cook. Are you? This is grounds for a playlist. As a Valentine gift to you, we’re sharing it. If it’s not cold where you live, that’s no excuse not to dance.
Sep 19, 2022
How to Grill Artichokes
I’ve been in Los Angeles for a week and we’ve already grilled artichokes three times. While the earth in my neck of the woods back east still snores through its winter slumber, agriculture is full-on here. Given the warm weather, we decided to grill as much as possible so we’ve been finishing off the ‘chokes on the grill.
Aug 13, 2022
What are Giblets and How Do I Use Them?
What are those things and what do you do with them anyway? Toss them in the trash? Please don’t. Before you reject the bird’s vital organs, learn a little about what they are. Giblets refers to the little bundle of parts sometimes found inside the cavity of a bird, such as chicken or turkey. Can you name all the parts in a giblets bundle? A labeled version of this photo appears below, along with some thoughts on what to do with giblets.
Aug 5, 2022
Recipe: Chimichurri Sauce
Just listen to the word. Chimichurri. It dances right out of your mouth. I bet you’ve already paused and said it in your head more times than I’ve written it. If the word alone feels this good in the mouth, wait until you taste it. Chimichurri is an Argentine sauce that is traditionally used on meats, although I can think of about fifty other ways to eat it. It’s used in Argentina the way we use ketchup in the U.S.
May 17, 2022
Recipe: Lemon Curd Ice Cream
What is it about lemons and summer? If you happen to live in a citrus-growing region, you know that it’s possible to find ripe lemons on trees year-round, but that they are actually in peak season in the dead of winter. I think it’s thanks to the summertime tradition of lemonade stands that makes me associate the tangy flavor with the hot months.
May 17, 2022
Recipe: 3-Ingredient Healthy Ice Cream
Come January, the hum and buzz of juicers everywhere builds and I hear of more and more people making resolutions to clean out their systems and drink more juice, at least temporarily. No judgement; in fact, last year at this time I was on a five-day juice cleanse so my juicer was working hard and I was feeling alive and clean. This year, though, I am more in the mood to make my ice cream machine hum rather than my juicer.
May 17, 2022
Recipe: Sourgrass Soup
As the leaves start to whiz around the streets of New York and I unpack my scarves and wool socks, I also start making a lot more soup. That makes me reach back into my treasure trove of food memories. Is it because soup is so comforting — spooned tenderly into our mouths as children, satisfying one-bowl meals as adults — that when I think of soup, I rarely turn to cookbooks and almost always reach way back into my family history for ideas?
May 17, 2022
D.I.Y. Recipe: Dulce de Leche
The DIY feature from Faith, our new Editor-At-Large, will offer options to that jar or packet at the grocery store by giving you recipes for foods you might not think to make yourself. Homemade bread, peanut butter and jam – they’re much easier than you think. Dulce de leche, cajeta, milk jam, confiture du lait – whatever you call it, it’s delicious.
May 12, 2022
Cooking By Feel: Baked Pastas
In this week’s Cure assignment, Cure-takers are planning a menu. All along I’ve been encouraging people to cook by feel a little more and use formal recipes a little less, so I hope these menus involve some cooking by feel. The way this is done is by arming oneself with skills, but you also need ideas. Here’s a great idea for making pasta: bake it. Baked pasta doesn’t need to conjure up memories of school cafeteria baked ziti.
May 12, 2022
Secrets From My Tuscan Kitchen by Judy Witts Francini
Earlier this summer, I spent a day in Florence with Judy Witts Francini, an American who moved to Italy in 1984, married an Italian, and stayed put. She leads tours, teaches hands-on cooking classes, blogs and is the author of a charming book called Secrets From My Tuscan Kitchen. Judy took us all around Florence, tucking into wine shops for sips, and going deep into the aisles of the San Lorenzo Mercato Centrale. It was my birthday, and she left me with a copy of her book.
May 12, 2022
Recipe: Seared Bitter Greens Salad with Roasted Beets, Spiced Pecans & Roquefort
One way of dealing with salads while speaking the language of winter is to cook them. I once had a fantastic grilled romaine salad with a super creamy vinaigrette, sort of a cooked take on the classic wedge salad. Then, last weekend I had another cooked salad; this one with big half-rounds of griddle-seared purple radicchio, chopped walnuts, and mushrooms. I liked the idea of a salad with a flash-cooked winter green like radicchio, but didn’t dig the walnuts and mushrooms.
May 12, 2022
How to Lunch, Parisian-Style
The attitude in France about food is so different from the way we approach the subject in the U.S. that the biggest culture shock when traveling there for many Americans isn’t the language or time zone, it’s the eating.I hesitate to say you have to go there to see, smell and taste it in order to understand it because I know not everyone can just hop on a plane and go for a meal in Paris. But those blessed enough to travel or live there know.
May 12, 2022
For the New Graduate: A Crash Course in Kitchen Basics
This is the time of year when college lets out, and new graduates gear up for “real life.”Thirteen years ago, that was me: armed with a lot of student-loan debt and a curious spirit but very little sophistication in the kitchen, I packed my bags for a new life in New York City. I thought cheap Spanish Cava was “good champagne” and overcooked my pasta because I didn’t know better.
May 12, 2022
Recipe: Roasted Goat Tacos
Last week, when Meat/Un-Meat month was covering lamb, pork and goat, I gave a quick Goat Meat 101 but getting a recipe up was a different matter. It took the better part of the week and weekend to find it, cook it, and serve it, let alone write about it. So here, a bit belated, is my goat taco post. I bought my 8-pound goat leg from Ottomanelli’s in the West Village. Frank, the butcher, cut the leg, bone-in, into 2-3″ chunks.
May 11, 2022
Day 7: Special Project
Day 7: Tuesday, October 8 Assignment: Special project This is where it gets really fun: it’s Special Project time! Your special project is about improving the functionality of your space, with a slight eye toward the aesthetic. I’ve seen people repaint their kitchens, strip wallpaper, replace faucets, and create new systems for storing knives or compost.
May 5, 2022
Where Do I Get Chianina Beef for Bistecca alla Fiorentina?
Dear Kitchn, A few years ago my husband and I traveled to Tuscany, and we have been trying to recreate the food experiences we had there ever since we got back. The one thing we have had a hard time finding are the amazing steaks used for the Bistecca alla Fiorentina. I know it comes from the Chianina breed, but are there any sources for that beef in the U.S.? If not that breed, is there maybe a heritage breed that could work in its place?
Apr 2, 2022
Recipe: Homemade Potato Chips with Rosemary
When I was little, my dad and I spent Sunday mornings on the Santa Monica beach. Before heading home we’d sometime hike up to the pier and buy a newspaper cone of freshly made potato chips from a little stand there and share them on the ride home. They were warm, and slightly soft in the middle, just out of the fryer.
Aug 25, 2021
10 Best Uses for Your Toaster Oven
We often get questions about cooking in small spaces. While recommending another appliance might not seem like the logical answer, a counter-top oven is actually a great solution for energy-conscious, small-space cooking. Let me count the ways… I’ve been playing with the Breville Smart Oven, which yes, makes toast, but is so much more than a toaster oven. It’s just big enough to bake a pie, even a 13″ round pizza.
Dec 31, 2020
Recipe: Spiced Mexican Wedding Cookies
When she was still with us, my grandmother baked Mexican wedding cookies every Christmas Eve. Today these nutty, powdered sugar-coated cookies take me back to her little house in San Fernando, where it was warm on most Southern Californian Christmases; I sensed these cookies were her way of giving us snow for Christmas.
Sep 17, 2020