November/December 2018

Cook's Illustrated

Your go-to source for foolproof recipes that work.

Cook's Illustrated2 min readCooking, Food & Wine
Cooking For Twenty-five
Twenty-five years ago, the premier issue of this magazine hit newsstands and mailboxes. From day one, Cook’s Illustrated stood out as a unique publication that, quite frankly, shouldn’t have worked. Launched at a time when food magazines were glossy
Cook's Illustrated3 min readCooking, Food & Wine
Your Quirkiest Quick Tips
Boxed broth sometimes glugs and splashes out of the container, which can cause a bit of a mess. Dan Messier of Beacon, N.Y., found that by simply rotating the box so the spout is at the top of the container instead of the bottom, he can pour the brot
Cook's Illustrated5 min read
Low-Stress Turkey For A Crowd
Hosting a big crowd on Thanksgiving has the potential to be disastrous. That’s because the usual approaches—roasting two average-size birds or one enormous one—are fraught with issues. Two turkeys require dual ovens—a nonstarter for most. And a singl
Cook's Illustrated7 min read
Roast Beef and Potatoes for Company
Roasting beef with potatoes, a hallowed British tradition, sounds like it will produce the ideal holiday spread. While the meat cooks, the spuds sitting underneath or around it soak up the drippings and transform into a flavor-saturated side dish tha
Cook's Illustrated7 min read
Game-Changing Turkey Gravy
When there are pies to bake, potatoes to mash, and a turkey to carve, the gravy can become an afterthought, often thrown together at the last minute amid the chaos of getting all the food to the table. At that point, there’s no time to eke out a flav
Cook's Illustrated4 min readRegional & Ethnic
Rome’s Greatest Little-Known Pasta
Rome has four iconic—and outrageously good—pasta dishes: cacio e pepe, amatriciana, carbonara, and gricia. I’ve long been a huge fan of the more well-known first three but had never tried gricia, which features guanciale (cured hog jowls), ground bla
Cook's Illustrated4 min readCooking, Food & Wine
The Easiest Winter Squash
A few years ago, this magazine ran a tip on how to break down a large, dense winter squash such as Hubbard: Place it in a zipper-lock bag and drop it onto asphalt from chest height, smashing it to pieces. It sounds severe, but taking a knife to a gia
Cook's Illustrated7 min read
Real Kung Pao Chicken
If you haven’t eaten kung pao chicken in the past 10 years, there’s a good chance you’ve never had the real thing. I hadn’t, until recently. In the ’90s, the dish was my go-to Chinese restaurant order. The diced chicken and vegetables, peanuts, and v
Cook's Illustrated6 min read
Creamy Dressings, Hold the Cream
Last year, the test kitchen published a vegan cookbook (Vegan for Everybody), so for a while there was a lot of dairy- and egg-free food around here. It’s not a diet I’ve ever subscribed to, but watching (and tasting) the development process gave me
Cook's Illustrated5 min readCooking, Food & Wine
Ten Discoveries That Changed the Way We Cook
You may have missed our Roast Brined Turkey in 1993—the recipe that put brining on the map. But you can’t have missed that brining and salting poultry and meat are two of our core techniques. Here’s a refresher on why. adds moisture, which makes it a
Cook's Illustrated4 min readCooking, Food & Wine
White Bean and Mushroom Gratin
Anyone who thinks that meatless bean dishes don’t offer the heartiness of a meat-based meal should give the category another chance. As for those who think that meatless bean dishes tend to lack complexity and savory depth, I’m with you—and I have a
Cook's Illustrated9 min read
Modern Holiday Showstopper
Anna Pavlova was known as the “incomparable” ballerina, captivating audiences not just in her homeland of Russia but across the entire world at the turn of the 20th century. It’s no wonder, then, that chefs at the time immortalized her in recipes, in
Cook's Illustrated7 min read
Italian Chocolate-Almond Cake
Italian chocolate-almond cake (torta caprese) has a storied past—though it’s not clear which (if any) story is true. One legend has it that the cake came to be when an Austrian princess visiting the island of Capri longed for the Sachertorte of her h
Cook's Illustrated4 min readCooking, Food & Wine
The Best Unsalted Butter
In the test kitchen, we go through 30 to 40 pounds of butter a week, relying almost exclusively on the unsalted type because we prefer to control the seasoning of our food. But which unsalted butter is best? A few years ago, we decided it was Plugrá,
Cook's Illustrated3 min read
Tasting Unsalted Butter
We tasted seven top-selling unsalted butters, all sold in packages with individually wrapped ¼-pound sticks, priced from $4.49 to $7.58 per pound. Panels of 21 tasters sampled them in three blind tastings: plain, in pound cake, and in sugar cookies.
Cook's Illustrated7 min read
Ingredient Notes
Every major brand that makes a creamy peanut butter also manufactures a crunchy version. We wondered if the maker of our favorite creamy peanut butter would also produce our favorite crunchy one. To find out, we tasted nine crunchy peanut butters, pr
Cook's Illustrated6 min read
Kitchen Notes
This tool is a vintage cookie press from Denmark, where pressed (and piped) butter cookies have long been a holiday tradition. Manufactured in the early 1900s from rolled steel and wood, this simple manual press calls for filling the hollow tube with
Cook's Illustrated4 min readCooking, Food & Wine
Searching for a Superior Metal Spatula
A good metal spatula is an essential part of any cook’s toolkit. Often referred to as a turner or flipper, it’s used to flip or transfer foods whenever we’re working with metal cook- or bakeware. (When cooking in more delicate nonstick pans, we prefe
Cook's Illustrated4 min readCooking, Food & Wine
Equipment Corner
JUNE Intelligent Oven MODEL: 11-00001-00 PRICE: $1,495.00 KUHN RIKON Original Swiss Peeler MODEL: KHN 2771(blue) PRICE: $6.24 OXO Good Grips Salad Spinner MODEL: 32480V4 PRICE: $29.99 OXO Good Grips Silicone Pastry Brush MODEL: 1071062 PRICE: $7.99 L

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