Cooking Methods

Goodbye banana bread, hello sour cherry chocolate chunk bread!

This old-school method makes mouthwatering chicken and steak.

It helps enhance the flavors of nearly every kind of pie.

Try this for more flavorful, stay-soft-for-days Rice Krispies treats.

We compared the results by speed, flavor, and texture.

While it may seem like the slow cooker can do pretty much everything, there are certain instances when it really just isn’t the best one for the job. So before you dump anything and everything in it, read this first. Here are five items that are better left out of the slow cooker. If you take a look at slow-cooker recipes, you’ll see a trend — they call for hearty vegetables like onions, potatoes, carrots, and winter squash.

Do you cook with Italian flavors and ingredients? If so, how do you stock your pantry? Here are 10 pantry favorites for Italian cooking, with some no-brainers (uh, pasta) and other more exotic picks (ancient Roman fish sauce, anyone?), and with links back to some of our favorite brands. Pasta – Oh, pasta, where would we be without you? My (Calabrian, originally) husband would riot if we didn’t eat pasta at least once week.

This is *much* better than regular sugar.

Did your pasta turn into a giant sticky ball? We can help.

We compared the time, texture, and peel-ability of each method.

Who wants to wait around for 30 minutes just so your skewers can soak?

Keep it in your fridge and enjoy some whenever it's hot out.

It's not just for cucumbers — and it's not just for hot dogs or hamburgers.

Want to pickle? Do not start with cucumbers. Our week of Weeknight Preserving with Marisa McClellan kicks off.

I remember wandering through department stores and Christmas markets in Western Europe and marveling at the displays of marzipan goodies: amazingly realistic-looking little fruits or tiny animals, all neatly lined up in the windows. I loved how they cheerily stood out against the gloomy weather outside. Then I started baking and seeing recipes calling for almond paste and got a little confused. If marzipan is a paste made out of almonds, are they just the same thing?

This smart tip totally surprised me — and it 100% works.

Because you deserve better grilled chicken.

No need to buy any fancy equipment.

It's the secret to better baked goods.

Here's how to really master your air fryer.

We were shocked at how well this works.

This is a serious game-changer.

It works every time.

No, it's not macerating.

This trick is a total game-changer.

Just a single swipe is all you need.

It’s March 14, and we all know what that means, right? It’s Pi Day! (March 14 = 3.14. Get it?) Every year we like to use this as an excuse to pull up pi(e) recipes from our archives, but this year we’re forgoing the sweet in favor of the savory. Even better: all of these pies, quiches, and pasties would make great lunches. So here’s to infinite pie possibilities!

We make a lot of pies here at The Kitchn — which is great, because practice makes perfect when it comes to pie-making. Along the way, we’ve picked up quite a few tips and tricks for the perfect pie, from rolling it to freezing it to cutting that tricky first slice. Whether you’re an absolute beginner or a pie-baking pro, you’ll learn something new from these 15 tips.

Fresh udon noodles are thick, chewy, and delicious. Frozen udon noodles are very nearly as good. But dried udon noodles cooked like spaghetti in boiling water are notoriously sub-par. If dried is all you have access to, don’t give up hope! We recently learned of a different kind of cooking technique that might help!In How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman describes a way of cooking dried udon that we’d never heard of before.

We picked up this tip in a blurb at the end of a recipe in one our favorite cookbooks, A New Way to Cook by Sally Schneider:If you simmer beans in an uncovered pot, they will end up firmer and more intact. This perfect for dishes where you really want the beans to keep their shape without smooshing, like salads and pasta dishes.Beans simmered in a pot with the lid on but slightly ajar (which is how we normally do it) will end up much creamier, though more delicate and likely to break apart.

How many times have we delicately salted a dish…and salted a little more…and a wee bit more…and then, oops! Suddenly our dish has gone from under-seasoned to tasting like seawater. Can anything be done to save a dish once we’ve added too much salt?Unfortunately, once it’s in there, there’s no getting it back out again – no matter how long you stare at the pot and curse under your breath!

Tamarind is one of the not-so-secret ingredients in a lot of Asian cooking. Eating a bowl of pad thai or a spoonful of chutney with your roti, you might not necessarily realize it’s there. But if it’s left out, food just don’t taste quite right! What is this mystery ingredient?Until we started researching this post, we didn’t realize that the tamarind tree is actually native to Africa.

A nicely fried egg with crispy edges and a warm, runny yolk is one of life’s greatest simple pleasures. We realized long ago that fried eggs are just as delicious after 9am as they are before, and we’ve been sliding them onto our plates to round out a quick meal ever since. Here are a few of our favorite combos:A fried egg is our trick for turning an otherwise ho-hum meal into a great one.

Today, millet continues to be a staple for a third of the world’s population. Ground millet is used in flatbreads, such as Indian roti and Ethiopian and Eritrean injera (made from teff, a variety of millet). In Eastern Africa, millet is used to make beer. It is also an ingredient in Eastern European fermented drinks and porridges.In America and Western Europe, millet has mostly been relegated to bird and livestock feed.

And why you should do it ASAP.

Their name means “little beaks” and it’s easy to see why. This diminutive and sharply-tapered variety of chili pepper is one of the stars of the Spanish table. Have you ever tried them?These peppers are simultaneously sweet, spicy, and smoky thanks to some time spent over wood fires after harvesting. The slow-roasting also cooks away much of the water in the pepper, concentrating and intensifying the natural flavors.

We turned to a few barbecue experts to demystify grilling once and for all.

You've got questions, we've got answers.

Remember this rule as we head into grilling season.

This is the best summer grilling hack we know.

Here are the answers to your most burning grilling questions.

It's the secret behind the color of Oreos.

This is the one cookie technique that pops up over and over again.

A couple months ago, in the depths of holiday baking season, my friend Wendy sent me a message. “Faith,” she said. “I have a question about butter. Why do some recipes call for unsalted butter? I don’t always have unsalted butter on hand — is it a big deal or not?” Can you relate? Maybe you’ve wondered this too: why do baking recipes usually call for unsalted butter?

In these days of “fresh is better,” wouldn’t it seem like fresh pasta would be preferable to dried pasta? After all, fresh pasta is often locally-made and uses, well, fresh ingredients, while dried pasta is shipped over long distances and has been sitting on shelves for an unknown period of time.But not so–like red and white wine, like soft and hard cheeses, like the West Coast and the East Coast, neither kind of pasta is superior to the other.

Is the perfect chocolate chip cookie this year’s No-Knead Bread? And if so, are chocolate féves this year’s instant yeast? When the No-Knead Bread recipe came out there was a run on instant yeast and Dutch ovens as people raced to try this fabulous bread. Now these chocolate discs are in the baking spotlight, since the recipe promises they give much better results than plain old chocolate chips. So, where do you find these things?

We loved Nora’s post earlier today about the Dark and Stormy, largely because we’ve been drinking these quite a bit this summer.We lucked out and found the authentic ingredients — Gosling’s rum and Barritts ginger beer — conveniently stocked together in our local liquor store. But just in case some of you are thinking about Dark and Stormies for the first time this weekend, here’s a photo of that retro Barritts can you’ll be looking for.

Extra virgin, pure, light, cold-pressed, certified… Perusing the olive oil section at the market can be daunting. What do these labels mean?Olive oil labels can have so many phrases and seals that we’ve often felt dizzy trying to choose the “right” bottle. We’ve wondered which descriptors are meaningful, and which, if any, are just marketing.

We originally thought we’d post something this afternoon about traditional bruschetta — a simple, colorful way to showcase summer tomatoes. But that’s an easy one. Chopped tomatoes, maybe a bit of basil and onion, piled on crusty bread slices that have been toasted with olive oil and rubbed with garlic.

Bring a large pot of water to boil – you can use any size pot as long as it’s large. Salt the water as you would pasta water (ie, salty like the sea!), and add the rice. Turn the heat to low and let the rice simmer in the water until it is tender and chewy. Drain the rice, return it to a pot, and cover it with a lid or clean kitchen towel until you’re ready to serve the rice. Fluff before serving with a fork or wooden spoon.That’s it!

Sichuan peppercorns are a key ingredient in Chinese cooking. They have an unique, tangy taste and aroma. They are not pungent like black peppers, but have a lemony taste. They are spicy and can bring a numbing feel to the mouth and lips. Generally, they are added last when used in cooking. Only the husks are used, and are often toasted beforehand.They can be found at Asian markets or ordered online at places like Penzey’s or Import Food.

We certainly do love our pasta around here and we’re always on the lookout for new ways to jazz up our humble dishes. This pipette-shaped pasta recently appeared on our grocery store shelves, and we’ve quickly decided it’s our top choice for the coming cold season dishes!Their shape is somewhat similar to macaroni, but the tube is wider and actually dips down in the middle like the pipe it’s named after.

Al Dente; adjective, Italian: Literally, “to the tooth.” In practice, this means cooked just enough to still be firm, where the center still remains a bit under-cooked and the pasta still offers resistance when chewed.In medieval times, pasta was cooked for an hour or more until it was soft, mushy, and offered no resistance. This was typical of all cooking at the time (ie, cooking food to death!

While we’re talking about leaving things out on the counter, here’s another ingredient that sits on ours: Kosher salt and pepper in little dishes next to the stovetop. This is one of the first things we did when we started cooking regularly- a tip we learned from watching the Food Network many years ago…We tend to use up these little amounts quickly enough that they don’t get dirty or stale.

We have a big bag of buckwheat groats in our pantry, and we’re looking for a good way to use up those delicious grains. Buckwheat is one of the healthiest, nuttiest, most versatile whole grains. And despite its name, it’s really not related to wheat at all.All about buckwheatBuckwheat is actually the seed of a flowering fruit that is related to rhubarb and sorrel. It’s completely gluten-free and unrelated to wheat and all the grasses in the wheat family.

Nonstick cooking sprays like Pam and Mazola are convenient to use and boast fat-free cooking. But these products have also always seemed to us like one of those strange slightly-mystical products akin to Bac-Os bacon bits or pre-grated Parmesan cheese in a can. Just what the heck is nonstick cooking spray?!From what we can tell, most nonstick cooking sprays are simply an oil (usually canola) thinned out with water.

I visited Albuquerque last week and although I wasn’t in town at the right time for farmers’ markets or the annual chile harvest, I did get to experience some of the local cuisine. Just about every other meal I was served contained the famous New Mexico green chiles. These deliciously hot peppers made their way into everything from omelettes to biscuits to enchiladas.New Mexico green chiles are similar to Anaheim peppers, but they are a bit more pungent.

We fell in love with marmite during a college semester abroad in the UK, and have kept a jar of it in our kitchen ever since. But just as the brand’s “love it or hate it” ad campaign suggests, its strong, savory flavor isn’t for everyone. Where do you stand?Marmite is a yeast extract and was originally a by-product of the beer brewing process.

While reading the March issue of Martha Stewart Living, we came across a recipe for basic steamed edamame (familiar) sprinkled with gomashio (not so much). What is this crunchy condiment? We’ve also seen a container of it in this Kitchen Tour: Zachary and Family. But it’s easy to make your own.In fact, Faith posted a recipe a couple of years ago:• D.I.Y. Sesame SaltGomashio is simply toasted sesame seeds ground up with some coarse salt.

Awhile back, I wrote about the ubiquitous green chiles I discovered while visiting New Mexico. Although those were wonderful, I had little idea that months later it would be a different chile haunting my memory. The meal was enchiladas with red sauce – on the surface modest but so full of deep and complex flavor that I’ve dreamed of returning for the sole purpose of revisiting that dish. The key ingredient was Chimayó chile powder.

We recently received a question in our Kitchn inbox about substituting yolks for whole eggs in a cookie recipe. Baking is often more chemistry than anything else, so we thought we’d take a look at this question from a scientific perspective!We know from our own baking experience that eggs help make the finished product tender and moist, give it a golden color, and provide some richness of flavor. Along with flour, eggs also help set the structure of whatever it is you’re baking.

We grew up on bagels, and taking a bite of that warm, ultra-chewy bread is still one of our favorite food experiences. Ask any good bagel baker and they’ll tell you that the key to that chewy crust and slightly dense interior is boiling the bagels before baking. The question is, why?It feels very counter-intuitive to most of us to throw bread in boiling water. The point of most bread baking, after all, is to let water evaporate and dry out the interior to a certain extent.

Lately, we’ve been getting in the habit of buying an extra baguette or two when we’re at the store just to throw in the freezer for later. It’s extremely handy to have bread ready to thaw and use when we need it – baguettes in particular! Here’s why:Because they’re so skinny, baguettes thaw very quickly – which is a definite bonus when it’s dinner time and we realize that we just ran out of bread!

You’ve heard us say it again and again: always cook pasta in a large amount of well-salted boiling water until al dente. But when it comes to pasta salads that will be served cold or room temperature, we’ve actually started taking a slightly different approach.For pasta destined for a picnic salad, we like to do two things:1. Cook it in even more heavily salted water.2. Cook it just a little beyond al dente.

The first time we bought a bottle of rose water, we had no idea what we were going to do with it. It just sounded so lovely! Now the fragrant rose water is a staple in our pantry, infusing everything from cakes to rice.Made from the distillation of rose petals, rose water has a long culinary history, originating with the Persians and spreading across the medieval Islamic world.

Bagels with cream cheese are a weekend treat for us, and if we’re feeling particularly generous toward ourselves, we buy a baker’s dozen for munching all weekend long. This inevitably leads to a few slightly stale bagels left in the bottom of the bag come Monday morning. But not like that’s a bad thing! What do you do with leftover bagels during the week?Here are a few ideas for using up those few remaining bagels:1.

Please meet our newest ally in our on-going quest to find more ways to sneak smoky flavors into our dishes! Chipotle peppers are actually jalapeños that have been smoked and dried, giving them an intense flavor and rich smokiness. How do you use chipotles in your cooking?You can find chipotle peppers in three different forms: dried whole, ground into a spice, or packed in adobo sauce. For the purest flavor, stick with dried whole chipotles or chipotle powder.

For a long time, we were intimidated by that innocent little phrase at the end of the recipe: “Adjust seasonings to taste.” If we don’t know what the dish is supposed to taste like, how are we supposed to season it? Well, here’s what we’ve learned to do!When we are almost finished cooking and it comes time to check the seasonings, we always follow this checklist:1. Does It Need Salt? – Nine times out of ten, it does.

Have you ever had a batch of ice cream that stays soft and slushy no matter how long you leave it in the freezer? Or the other extreme, an ice cream that freezes so hard that you can hardly dig your spoon in for a taste? Sugar just might be the culprit behind both situations!As ice cream freezes, ice crystals separate from the liquid cream base. These crystals would normally join together into a solid mass (like a cream ice cube), but sugar molecules dissolved in the cream get in the way.

A mealy apple is no one’s favorite lunchtime surprise, we can all agree on that! So what do you do when you wind up with a bunch of them in your fridge? Before just throwing them away, try using them in one of these ways:Cooking helps to break down dry, mealy apples and release their flavorful juice:1. Applesauce – Homemade applesauce is a great snack to have around the house, and you can make a batch with even just a few apples.

Oats! They are a powerhouse of nutrition and awesomely delicious breakfast goodness. Here are five ways to eat healthy, scrumptious, nutty oats — and none of them involve mush. Rolled oats, flattened under extreme pressure, on the left. Steel-cut (or Irish) oats on the right. They are the whole oat groat, chopped into pieces.We love oats so much! Here are some of our favorite ways to eat oats. What about you? What are your favorite nutritious ways to your oatmeal? Steel-cut!

Flax seeds are a magical health food that we hear a lot about but don’t always know what to do with. Do you eat flax seeds? They’re extremely high in omega-3 fatty acids, and they also have a deliciously nutty and toasty flavor. Here are five ways to get them in your diet. There are two sorts of flax seed: golden yellow (as pictured above), and a russet brown. Both have the same nutritional profile, and they are both from the flax plant, which is also used to produce linen.