Serious Eats

Vicky Wasik“What if we cooked potatoes like meat?”That’s the basic premise of pommes de terre fondantes, or melting potatoes, another classic of French spud cookery that combines elements of traditional French braising and butter-basting techniques. Unlike laborious and finicky dishes like pommes...

Vicky WasikIf restaurants priced menu items based on how much of a pain in the neck it would be for diners to make those dishes at home, French fries would quickly supplant caviar and blini as a special occasion splurge. I love a good fry, but that love quickly fades if I'm the one on the hook...

Vicky WasikCroquettes―small fried rounds or cylinders of meat, fish, and/or vegetables―are consumed on almost every continent in various forms. There’s Japan's korokke, which consists of mashed potato shaped into oval patties, coated with panko breadcrumbs, and drizzled with tonkatsu sauce...

Vicky WasikPommes dauphine, or fried potato puffs, fly under the radar in the wide world of potato dishes. Perhaps this can be attributed to a name that isn’t particularly revealing (unless you’ve spent time perusing old-school French culinary tomes) or the fact that it requires making pâte à choux...

[Image: Vicky Wasik]There's a world in which the instructions for homemade salchipapa consists of little more than this:Cook a bag of frozen French fries following the package instructions.Sauté sliced hot dogs in a skillet with some oil until lightly browned.Pile hot dogs on top of French...

[Image: Vicky Wasik]In my years as a recipe developer, there have been times when, after rounds of testing and tinkering with a recipe, my advice to the reader has been frank: The path to success isn't with novel methods or tricks, it's by practicing the classic technique. (See: French...

Ashley RodriguezIf there's one thing (most!) Serious Eats staffers agree on, it's coffee. We don't necessarily agree on a preferred brew method or what coffee beans are best; we just are all on the same page about coffee being essential to our daily lives and for us to function.As...

There’s a whole wide world of beans out there, from broad and flat fava beans to small, curvaceous pintos. The variation in beans is obvious in both their many shapes and in their many colors, but it's also apparent in the fact that different kinds of beans require different cooking times and...

Liz VoltzFor those unfamiliar with strata, it’s essentially a breakfast casserole reminiscent of a savory bread pudding or eggy stuffing. Built on a foundation of bread, eggs, and cheese, enhanced with milk and cream, and gussied up with an endless combination of add-ins—in this case, that includes...

Debbie WeeThere are few things as comforting as a bowl of warm, creamy beans dotted with pieces of tender pork. It's even better when the recipe for that bowl of pork and beans practically cooks itself, as with this pork and bean stew.My goal with this recipe was to cook the dried kidney beans...

Liz VoltzThese brownies are fudgy and rich and covered with sparkling strands of crystallized ginger, which provide a contrasting textural chew. But what makes them particularly exceptional is a delicate blend of fragrant spices that evoke the flavors of wintertime. Infused with ginger, cardamom,...

Jillian AtkinsonTell a person you want stew chicken and you'll likely get a different dish depending on who you're talking to. That's because there are stew chicken dishes across the African diaspora, and while methods and ingredients might change, they all evoke deep emotions. I...

Jillian AtkinsonGrowing up, I attended a Sufi mosque in South Carolina that served a community that was predominantly West African and African American. One of the benefits of this experience is that I was introduced to and fell in love with yassa at an early age. Despite eating it for years, I...

Debbie WeeInspired by the classic French 75, this cocktail is fizzy, pleasantly sweet, slightly spiced, and refreshingly tart. Designed with the fall and winter months in mind, it's made with pomegranate simple syrup, fresh lemon juice, sparkling wine, and Lillet Rouge.Lillet is a brand of...

Vicky WasikFocaccia is synonymous with Liguria, the northwestern coastal Italian region also famous for its pesto and Pixar child sea monsters. If you were to ask someone to describe the platonic ideal of focaccia, they most likely would describe a plush, yeasted dough, burnished to a golden brown...

Vicky WasikIf you’re a fan of chicken salad and curry powder spice mixes, this recipe is for you. It’s fragrant, flavorful, and perfectly spiced, and it has the right amount of mayo to bind all the ingredients together while letting the textures of crisp scallions and chewy raisins shine.There are...

Vicky WasikSometimes, while camping, picnicking, or pulling a double-shift, a travel mug just doesn't cut it. That's when you need a larger, sturdier thermos to keep hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold for 8, 12, and even 24-plus hours.Like travel mugs, thermoses use vacuum-insulated...

Tim ChinI’m a sucker for Progresso’s Chicken Rice Soup (With Vegetables). Call me uncouth or uncultured, I don’t care—I grew up on the stuff. That tall blue can of way-more-than-my-daily-allowance of sodium and mono-textured ingredients was (and is) comforting. But sometime between childhood and...

Sasha MarxThis year started off the same way last year ended, but eventually, there was a return to some of the joys of pre-pandemic life (though admittedly, some of that seems to be fading away once again). For the Serious Eats team, that meant a fully masked and vaccinated return to the test and...

Serious Eats / Amelia Manley2021 was an amazing year for cookbooks. And there were so many that were so good, we simply don't have the capacity to list all of them. Consider the following list—The Best Cookbooks of 2021, according to the editors of Serious Eats—to be a small slice of the...

Vicky WasikCarla Lalli Music can’t remember a time when her family didn’t celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes. “I have a lot of memories growing up of a lot of drunk adults at two in the morning opening presents in the living room,” the video host and cookbook author says.While Christmas Day...

Vicky WasikRisotto cookery has long been a hot topic of debate around these parts. “Stirring is for suckers; it’s so tedious!” “Rinse the starch off!” “Use a pressure cooker!” “Italian grandmothers are full of it!” It’s Marriage Story meme gold. I’m not interested in stirring up more controversy...

Vicky WasikFritto misto di mare is classic coastal Italian fare, served at seaside restaurants all over the peninsula. It’s a dish that embodies the “don’t mess with a good thing” approach that Italian cuisine is famous for: locally caught seafood is lightly floured, fried, and served with just a...

[Image: Vicky Wasik]Several years ago, I published a recipe for shrimp fra diavolo in which I made a pointed argument about why it was not a recipe for lobster fra diavolo. Shrimp fra diavolo makes more sense at home, I said, whereas lobster fra diavolo was a more logical restaurant dish, given the...

Vicky WasikThe winter holiday season in Italy is also prime baccalà season. In Central and Southern Italy, salt cod features heavily on Christmas Eve menus—you can find it battered and fried as an appetizer, flaked and tossed with potatoes and onion as a salad, simmered into a tomato sauce for...

[Image: Vicky Wasik]Cioppino is from San Francisco and the seafood found in a simmering pot there will usually come from the Pacific, but its roots are oceans away, up and down the coast of Italy and the South of France, where this style of tomatoey seafood stew is common.The word...

Rezel KealohaEating bibingka, a fluffy, lightly sweetened rice cake, is closely associated with Christmas time in the Philippines. It was the main reason I attended all those midnight masses as a child—the intoxicating smell wafted down the aisles of the church and had me inching closer to the...

Vicky WasikNobody has ever accused Roman cuisine of being too light. With its famous permutations of pasta, guanciale, and cheese, and the vast catalogue of hearty quinto quarto—offal—dishes, there’s very little chance that you’ll leave a meal in the eternal city feeling peckish. But that doesn’t...

[Image: Vicky Wasik]When I grilled some swordfish steaks for friends this past summer, one declared it the best swordfish she'd ever had, then asked me for my secret. I shrugged, pointed up the road towards the fishmonger where I'd bought it, and said, "That's a great fish...

[Image: Vicky Wasik]There are two kinds of lazy cooking. There's the "who cares" school, in which the cook has fully given up—whatever slop hits the plate is dinner, like it or not. Then there's the lazy approach, where the cook seeks efficiency and effortless invention. The...

[Image: Vicky Wasik]There's a poetry to baking a whole fish in a crust of salt. Stretching back billions of years, water flowing across the earth's rocks dissolved minerals like sodium and chloride to form salty seas that eventually grew full of life. When that sea water dries, the sodium...

Melissa RivardI got a gas-fired outdoor tabletop pizza oven this past summer (an Ooni Koda), and when I first fired it up I had a little trouble working with it, which left me feeling a little perplexed. I’ve been making pizza for nearly 40 years, and consider myself something of a pizza expert, at...

Vicky WasikThe wonders of the freezer as a tool for preserving food are obvious, but the freezer can do a lot more than just store food. It can also be used as a cooking instrument. Some of these techniques have been written about on Serious Eats before. There's cryo-shucking clams and other...

Vicky WasikMany households in Northeast China use the long, bitter winters to their advantage by storing ingredients outdoors. Since the temperatures are well below freezing, everything kept outside freezes solid. This is great news in terms of the preservation of ingredients that would have...

Jamelle BouieIn my review of the Little Debbie Cosmic Brownie cereal, I said that the actual Cosmic Brownies were never my favorite snack. That distinction goes to the Oatmeal Creme Pie, which I loved and would eat at every opportunity. My hope was that the Oatmeal Creme Pie cereal would capture...

Andrew JanjigianOne of the many things I love about my outdoor tabletop pizza oven, aside from its compact size and blazing hot running temperatures, is that it is ready to rock in less than a half hour. I've had two previous backyard pizza and bread ovens, and each of them took hours to heat...

Melissa RivardI’m a huge fan of the soft, spreadable, spicy Calabrian cured pork product ‘nduja, and keep a slab of it in my larder almost all the time. It's essentially a “hard” salami that has been formulated and prepared to remain soft and spreadable, despite being as shelf-stable as...

Melissa RivardLahmajun is an Armenian flatbread baked in a wood-fired oven that's topped with a spiced minced lamb topping, made bright red from the addition of tomato and red pepper paste. While it's often referred to by outsiders as "Armenian pizza" and it sort of resembles...

Melissa RivardI’ve been making pizza for nearly 40 years, and after all that time I thought I had my dough formulas dialed-in. More than a decade ago I developed a recipe for a New York-style pizza dough for Cook’s Illustrated magazine, which was a big hit and served as the jumping-off point for...

Vicky WasikAs farmers in Northeast China wrap up the final harvest of the winter pear season, excess pears are frozen so they can be enjoyed throughout the year. Of the fruit that’s harvested, the smaller, harder varieties are a little bitter and sour, qualities that make them less than ideal when...

Vicky WasikWhat’s the best way to cook a sweet potato? I don’t mean those boiled-to-death, mashed-with-maple syrup, drowning-in-marshmallows sweet potatoes (no shade at sweet potato casseroles). How do you cook whole sweet potatoes straight up, with little adornment?Some people boil their sweet...

Jillian AtkinsonI have a rule about recipes: never trust one where the writer professes to hate the dish or a key ingredient in it. It's an easy angle for the recipe writer, who's usually trying to convince the reader that this version is what made them see the light, but it doesn't...

Vicky WasikSalads are an integral part of a Thai meal. Growing up in Thailand, there were few dinners that didn’t involve some sort of a salad. And it’s not because we wanted to make sure we ate our vegetables! In fact, most of our salads are protein-centric with few veggies. Salads are typically...

Vicky WasikThere are a few things I look for when it comes to cornbread. It can't be dry, it has to have a tender, non-gritty crumb, and I like it to actually taste like, well, corn. These cornbread muffins meet all of those requirements. They're soft and almost cake-like, with a rich,...

Vicky WasikI think that there absolutely must be a pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, since it doesn’t feel right without one. But the one I like to make isn't the classic loved by so many, it's this silky, dreamy, light-as-air pumpkin chiffon pie.A pumpkin chiffon pie is similar to a normal...

Jamelle BouieThe Cosmic Brownie wasn't my favorite Little Debbie snack. Whenever I had a chance to eat a Little Debbie, it was usually an Oatmeal Creme Pie or a Nutty Buddy bar. Which is to say that my expectation for this cereal was not particularly high. I mostly just hoped that it would be...

Rezel KealohaThe origins of kare-kare—a peanut butter-based curry made with oxtail, tripe, and a wide variety of vegetables—are unclear, but there are a number of theories. It was invented in Pampanga, the culinary epicenter of the Philippines; it was originally a traditional dish of the Moro...

VIcky WasikNam prik pao is versatile pantry staple in Thai cuisine, a thick, savory, sweet, and slightly spicy paste—or jam or relish, if you prefer—primarily made from dried spur chiles, garlic, shallots, and dried shrimp. It's used as a flavor-boosting condiment for soups, stir-fries,...

Tim ChinWalk around in any Chinatown and you’ll eventually find yourself browsing the display case of a Chinese bakery. These shops offer cakes and snacks that present a departure from traditional European bakery fare: Fluffy coconut cocktail buns (gai mei bao), crackling pineapple buns (bolo bao),...

Rezel KealohaBulalo—a luscious, meaty soup featuring marrow bones, beef shanks, cabbage, potatoes, and corn simply seasoned with fish sauce—dates back to before the Spanish occupation of the Philippines. It originated in the Southern region of Luzon, one of the archipelago's three major...