Rice & Grains

Perhaps you’ve read a recipe that calls specifically for canned San Marzano tomatoes. But what’s so great about these particular tomatoes anyway? San Marzano tomatoes are the most famous plum tomato to come out of Italy. They are grown in the rich volcanic soil at the base of Mount Vesuvius, which gives them a sweet flavor and low acidity and they are coveted for their firm pulp, deep red color, easy to remove skin and low seed count.

Like quinoa, amaranth is an ancient, protein-packed seed. The tiny poppy seed-size “grain” was a staple of the Aztecs and Mayans. We must admit that we initially weren’t quite sure about amaranth, though. The first time we cooked it for dinner, we expected it to be fluffy like quinoa and were startled when it turned to sticky mush! However, we did like the malty, slightly nutty flavor and were determined to figure out what to do with it.

If kichri was a piece of clothing, it would be the well-worn pair of sweats that you reach for to feel cozy but would never wear outside of the house.

Learn how to make these ingredients taste their best.

We asked the experts.

Let me tell you how risotto saved my meal plan just this week: I had planned red beans and rice for dinner, only to realize that I had forgotten to grab both red beans and basmati rice at the grocery store. Scrounging my pantry I realized that I could still use the peppers and sausage I planned for this dinner to make a risotto without having to run to the grocery store. Every member of my family devoured this risotto and some even asked for seconds.

Wonder no more about this pantry staple's shelf life.

Alton's secret for better rice? Start the rice with boiling water.

What do you do when you pull out the container of brown sugar and it’s a perfectly formed, rock-hard brick? This happened to me the other day, which sent me on the hunt for some effective solutions. Here’s one that worked in a matter of minutes. If you have time to spare, putting a slice of bread or some apple slices on top of the sugar, sealing it up, and letting it sit for a day are a couple hands-off ways to soften brown sugar.

It takes a fraction of the time!

My mother might disown me, as might some of my cooking buddies. But I have to report the truth, and this method simply worked beautifully.

Cooking brown rice like pasta results in perfectly fluffy rice every single time.

It's good for so much more than fried rice!

From kombucha and kimchi, to sauerkraut and kefir, fermented foods are becoming more and more commonplace in restaurants, grocery stores, and even home kitchens. But one that might not be very familiar is koji rice. Maybe that’s because it’s a fermented food that’s hiding inside another fermented food you have in your pantry right now! Koji rice is cooked rice that has been inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae, a mold that’s widespread in Japan.

It's so good you'll want to try it even if you're not going gluten-free.

This one step will give you better risotto every single time.

It's an easy way to add a new dimension to your meal.

Using tap water is just wasting a flavor opportunity.

It turns out flawlessly every time.

We’re in that moment where it’s all about starting anew, which means I’m doing my best to keep my resolutions. On the kitchen front, I’m on a cleaning rampage — trying to eat more healthfully, and giving my pantry some love. I’m partial to grains because I eat mostly meatless at home, so they are the building blocks for almost 90 percent of my meals. But of all the grains tucked away in my pantry, I turn again and again to quinoa.

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.

Like quinoa and amaranth, kañiwa is an ancient little seed with major nutritional benefits. Some are even calling it the new quinoa. Have you tried it yet?Cultivated in the Andes, kañiwa is a close relative of quinoa and has a similar nutty flavor without any of the bitterness. Though tinier and less fluffy than quinoa, it has a pleasant crunch and makes a satisfying grain alternative. It’s also higher in protein and packed with fiber, iron, calcium, and zinc.

Avoid these common mistakes — and your breakfast will thank you.

And it's not an extra ingredient!

Sheet pan rice is a weeknight miracle.

Inspired by Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman in her Paradise Island mini skirt, Quinoa Woman is an earthy feminine goddess member of the League of Super Foods. With her grain sack cape and her fork bangles, she has been known to pair up with Captain Kale for an occasional dinner. All you need to become this superhero is some burlap, some cardboard, and a whole lotta pom pom trim. Read on to complete your Halloween transformation to Quinoa Woman.

I lived off packaged stir-fry dinners from the freezer section for the better part of my 20s. As easy as it is to throw together a spur of the moment stir-fry dinner, there were many nights when all I wanted to do was open a package, dump it in a pan, and have dinner ready — and let’s be honest, there are still plenty of nights like these.

When it comes to canned tomatoes, one name reigns supreme: San Marzano. But how can a small town near Naples, Italy produce enough tomatoes to fill the supermarket shelves year round? Easy — it doesn’t. Here’s what to look for to make sure you aren’t paying premium prices for San Marzano fakes. Gusti Blog offers a few tips from the Cosorzio San Marzano for identifying the real deal when buying San Marzano tomatoes.

Have you ever tried replacing eggs with ground flax seed in your baking? We spotted this tip on the Bitten blog last week and were instantly intrigued.We’ve been known to sprinkle flax seeds over our morning oatmeal or mix a few spoonfuls into bread dough for the boost of fiber and omega-3 fatty acids. But this is the first we’ve heard that it can be used as an egg replacement!

Leave it to the New York Times to take on the grand-daddy of all classic cookies and have the audacity to call it “perfect”! But from what we’re hearing around the blogosphere, “perfect” pretty well sums it up. Molly over at Orangette is ready to write love sonnets. Even PJ Hamel writing for the King Arthur Flour blog concedes the awesomeness of this recipe.

As holiday baking projects take over my kitchen, I find myself thinking of friends and family with gluten intolerance who might not be looking at this time of year so favorably. I caught up with Geri Peacock of the gluten-free Cherbourg Bakery in Columbus, Ohio to ask for some expert advice. Here’s her recommendation for a flour substitute that’s simple to make and even easier to use.

Have you ever ruined a whole batch of egg whites because one single yolk decided to break on you? Been there, done that! There were tears and some strong language involved, as well. For anyone who struggles with this, here are our three very best tips for fearless egg separating!1. Use Cold Eggs – We learned this tip from an issue of Saveur a while back, and it works like a charm. When they’re cold, the yolks and eggs seem to hold their shape better and separate more easily.

We love serving poached eggs with hollandaise at brunch gatherings, but doing more than a few can end up feeling annoying and time-consuming when hungry guests are waiting out in the dining room. Luckily, eggs can actually be poached ahead of time and then reheated right before serving. Here’s what to do!Poach all your eggs as normal, but under-cook them slightly. A minute off of your normal cooking time should do the trick. Just make sure the whites are nearly set.

If you’re making something chocolaty – crinkle cookies, chocolate mousse, brownies, fudge – and really want to turn up the chocolate flavor, there’s a simple trick you can use with just about any recipe. Do you know the secret ingredient?It’s espresso! A shot or two of straight espresso or a few tablespoons of very dark coffee along with the liquids in your recipe have the effect of enhancing the chocolate without adding much discernible coffee flavor.

Growing up, we always had a big can of Crisco sitting on the pantry shelf. It got used for everything from greasing pans to making the flakiest pie crust ever. Now that trans fatsFor many recipes, what you substitute depends on what your making. Lard is our first choice if shortening is truly necessary. It has all the same properties as vegetable shortening – makes flaky pastries, has minimal spread in cookies, and has a clean flavor.

Taking the extra step to toast nuts on their own when they’ll just be going back into the oven again as an ingredient in a baked dish can feel like just that – an extra step. As we toasted nuts for a batch of our Fruit and Nut Bars earlier this week, we started wondering if this step is truly necessary?Once we delved a little further into the issue, we realized that, yes, toasting nuts before using them really is a key step.

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.

When we talked about making pavlovasAlthough they stay edible for quite some time, eggs begin aging as soon as they’re laid. Both the white and the yolk start off slightly acidic and with their chemical structures and membranes fully intact. In the white, the proteins are tightly folded and tend to cluster. As it ages, the egg – and especially the white – becomes more alkaline.

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 chutneyUntil we started researching this post, we didn’t realize that the tamarind tree is actually native to Africa. The ingredient is so ubiquitous to Southeast Asian cuisine that we assumed it was from there! Tamarind trees have also spread to the Pacific islands, Mexico, and parts of South America, and gets used in the cooking from those regions as well.

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.

Beurre Manié [bur man-yay], noun: A kneaded paste of butter and flour added to a soup or sauce toward the end of cooking in order to thicken.If your dish is nearly done cooking and you feel that it’s soupier than you’d like, a simple beurre manié can save the day. Here’s how it works!If you add flour straight into hot liquid, you just end up with a clumpy sauce, right?

After listening to Evan Kleinman’s talk with Cindy Mushet about flour on the Good Food show this past week, we were left thinking about bleached and unbleached flour. Mushet is insistent that unbleached flour is best, and that made us wonder why it started getting bleached in the first place…Fresh flour straight from the mill isn’t actually quite ready to be used in baking and actually improves with a little aging.

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.

When making candy, we most often just follow the temperatures in the recipe and pay little attention to the actual stage. But it can be interesting to look at the stages side-by-side and realize what can be made with each one. Do you know soft ball from hard crack?! See for yourself below the jump!As we learned the other week when we looked at how sugar cooks, the longer it’s on the heat, the more the sugar molecules break down and recombine.

We all know that sugar will melt when heated, losing its granular form and turning into a liquid. This we can see with our own eyes. But how it goes from a simple sugar syrup to dark caramel (to burnt mess!) requires a peek under the microscope…Think of a pan of cooking sugar as made up of hundreds and thousands of molecules. Just like any other food, the molecules that make up sugar begin to break down under high heat or prolonged exposure to heat.

We recently attended a dinner party at the home of Abby from AT: Los Angeles. From the vegetable terrine to the crème brûlée, everything was beautifully presented and delicious. But it was the starter that really made an impression on us. While we were sipping the tomato soup, Abby revealed that it contained a secret ingredient…Vanilla! It wasn’t an intentional secret ingredient; actually, it was more of happy accident.

It seems like nutmeg week around here! First we talked about the nutmeg grinder we love, then Emma gave us the full scoop on this common spice. Now reader amt230 has a good question about fresh ground nutmeg.Should recipes calling for ground nutmeg (presumably not fresh) be adjusted when using fresh ground nutmeg? I recently made a vegan pumpkin icecream and used freshly ground nutmeg (ground in a coffee grinder).

We wish we’d discovered this one back during Vegan Week! The Italians might call this topping “poor man’s parmesan,” but toasting bread crumbs in olive oil until they’re golden and crispy sounds pretty rich to us. Who knows? We might ditch the parmesan altogether.We’re not sure that poor man’s parmesan was ever intended to actually simulate cheese or convince your taste buds that it actually is cheese.

Take a good helping of South American and Mexican cuisines and add in a splash of old-world Spanish ingredients. Blend with a healthy dose of Native American fare and sprinkle on some frontier trail food. Now give it all a good stir, and that’s the Southwest.What does Southwestern food mean to you?!

Ah, salt! This is what perks up our dishes and makes us go back for seconds. But don’t take our word for it – Alton Brown and the makers of Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt have teamed up to give us a fun, interactive tutorial on the wonders of our favorite seasoning. Got five minutes? Give it a peek!

Have you heard that whole grains and whole grain flours should be stored in the fridge or freezer? Keep them in the pantry and they’ll go rancid or be infested with weevils, right? Anyway, that’s what I tell myself every time I try to cram a bag of whole-wheat flour into my already-crowded freezer.

Whether you’re a die-hard fan or you could live without itquinoaprotein-packed texture goddess Now, in addition to its health perks, the South American super-seed has a new claim to fame: it could play an instrumental part in combating the world’s impending food shortage. So, what makes quinoa a viable solution for the global food shortage? First, as we all know, quinoa is a rich source of nutrients.

If you’ve been to Vietnam or even just the noodle aisle of your neighborhood Asian market, you might have been overwhelmed by the sheer variety of noodles available. Which ones are good for a stir-fry? Which should you buy fresh, and which are better dried? What even is the difference between all of those white, gray, translucent, and yellow noodles?

Fresh or dried, slurped or twirled, rice noodles are a great way to fill out a meal. They add texture and fun, no simmering required. What’s not to love? Here are five ways to eat more rice noodles this summer. Make a stop into your local Asian or Vietnamese market, and head for the refrigerated section first. If you’re lucky, you’ll find packages of fresh white rice noodles labelled bánh phở or bún, often translated to English as rice vermicelli.

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.

Baking soda, baking powder – what’s the difference? Both are white powders, odorless and nearly indistinguishable. Yet both help your baked goods to rise. Without them (or another leavener like yeast or beaten egg whites) all of our breads and cakes would be very flat and dense. We were curious about why recipes call for one over the other, and we went on a hunt to find out. Baking soda is also known by its chemist term: sodium bicarbonate.

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.

We are stocking up on our pantry basics and working on cooking without recipes this weekend. This reminds us that we have a whole new landscape of pantry basics that have been livening up our cooking and giving fresh inspiration for improvised meals. Our new love? Grains. Yes, grains are already part of our recommended pantry list – rice and pasta are both staples of our cupboards. But we’ve been exploring other grains lately too.

Peppadew peppers have become one of our go-to appetizer components. Honestly, our relationship with these sweet, tangy and slightly spicy peppers borders on addiction, and they’re pretty much guaranteed to impress any guests.Peppadews are great on their own, but find out how to make them really sing…Peppadew is actually a brand name for sweet piquanté peppers grown in South Africa.

A friend just got back from a trip to Arizona and brought us a pound of this blue cornmeal. We love its gritty texture and earthy smell, and we can’t wait to cook with it!The package comes with a tortilla recipe, but we’re wondering what other possibilities are out there. Any ideas?Tamales were our first thought, though we’re not sure if the cornmeal is ground fine enough. We might try running a cup through our food processor to see if we can get a finer grind.

Thanks for all the excellent blue cornmeal recipe suggestions, everyone! We think we’ll save it for something fun for the Fourth of July–stay tuned…As we were reading over the tortilla recipe on our bag of cornmeal, we noticed that the recipe called the flour “harinilla.”At first, we assumed that this was a Spanish term for blue cornmeal, but when we were looking up recipes, we learned that there’s actually a significant difference!

Simmer sauces are an easy and healthy way to make a quick, delicious meal for your family. It’s simple – add your choice of vegetables, tofu, meat, chicken, or seafood to a pan, add a jar of simmer sauce, cover, and cook over low heat. While that’s cooking you can prepare a salad, fold the laundry, or catch up on your email.We love simmer sauces, particularly ones that have a foreign flavor. Pictured here are Persian and Indian simmer sauces.

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?

In all our recent posts on buttermilk and what to do with it, we realized that there’s one topic that we haven’t covered.What, exactly, is buttermilk?!Traditionally, buttermilk is the liquid that is leftover after churning butter. It’s low in fat and contains most of the protein originally in the milk. True buttermilk ferments naturally into a thick, tangy cream.

As summer winds down, we’ve been pickling a lot, preserving as much of the season’s fresh produce as we can. But as a somewhat novice pickler, we’ve found ourself wondering: What’s the best vinegar to use? We recently made a batch of pickled wax beans using a recipe from Chez Panisse Vegetables that called for cider vinegar.

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!

Toasting nuts before throwing them in your muffin batter or salad is a simple way to boost flavor and add some extra crunch. Here’s how!Toasting nuts intensifies their flavor. The oils are activated and the nut flesh crisps. You’ll get more low notes of caramel and earthiness, while bitter and sour flavors are toned down.For large batches of nuts, spread them on a sheetpan in a single layer and toast them in a 400-degree oven for about 10 minutes.

We made these pickled beets after reading Emma’s review of them, and once the last beet was fished out of the jar, we wondered what to do with the leftover brine.First, we added more beets and did the whole thing over again. Once the second batch was eaten, however, we went a different route, turning the juice into a salad dressing. It is primarily vinegar, with some spices thrown in, and that’s the base of any good vinaigrette.

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.

Of all the things we love about fall, one thing we’re not so crazy about is the beginning of cold and flu season. Some of us have already been suffering through an early bug.We’re nearly useless in the kitchen when we’re not feeling well, but keeping a few heat-and-serve items in our pantry keeps us from constantly reaching for the takeout soup menus.