The Bitten Word

Grilled Pork Kebabs with Hoisin and Five-Spice

Cook's Illustrated (May/June 2015)

Are you pro- or anti-kebab? 

Two summers ago, we declared our displeasure with kebabs. And since then, we've stayed pretty Debbie Downer when it comes to skewering our meals.

It just seems like a whole lot of work for very little payoff. True, you do get some "Pin-worthy" photos. But for the most part, kebabs seem, to us, to involve spending great amounts of time threading raw meat and oversized vegetables onto little skewers, just to then sit there and watch while your guests awkwardly try to figure out how to eat them.

But we're both smart enough to admit when we've made a mistake. And we were wrong -- horribly, unmistakably wrong -- about kebabs.

Because Cook's Illustrated has shown us the error of our ways. 

Slow-Roasted Chicken with Shallot-Garlic Pan Sauce

Cook's Illustrated (January 2015)

Let's start the new year on a comforting note.

That's right, good ol' roast chicken, a perennial favorite of ours -- and, we're guessing, many of yours. 

We've done our fair share of roast chickens over the years, be they sauced, stuffed, herbed, tandoori-ed, or faux-tisseried.  Why so many roast chickens? 

Really, roast chicken is not a hard sell for us. It's the meal equivalent of slipping on a pair of sweat pants (or as they're called in our house, "fat pants"), crawling under the covers, and marathoning Gilmore Girls (please tell us you know the full series is available on Netflix, and please tell us you're watching).

And a roast chicken paired with a delicious sauce? We're IN. 

That's why we chose this dish of Slow-Roasted Chicken Parts with Shallot-Garlic Pan Sauce from America's Test Kitchen as our first recipe of 2015. 

Perfect Poached Chicken Breasts with Warm Tomato-Ginger Vinaigrette

Cook's Illustrated Number 127 (April 2014)

Let's consider this dish atonement. 

As you might have seen on Instagram, we've spent the past five days in New Orleans, eating as if our lives depended on it. We made the rounds and will share a rundown of that with you next week. We landed back in our nation's capital early yesterday morning, and, Bittens, we need some light eating in our lives. Pass us the raw kale, the protein shakes and the fresh fruit. It is diet detox time. (At least for a few days.)

Just before our trip, we delved back into the world of poached chicken. The last (and first) time we made poached chicken -- with Food & Wine's Chinese-Style Poached Chicken with Pear and Orange -- we were underwhelmed. The individual components were fine (with the chicken being unsurprisingly bland) but on the whole we didn't love that dish. 

But we're not ones to give up, so when we got the newest Cook's Illustrated and saw they had a feature on Perfect Poached Chicken, we got back into the poaching game. 

Roasted Butternut Squash with Browned Butter and Hazelnuts

Cook's Illustrated (January/Februrary 2014)

We love traveling. By which we mean, we love eating while traveling.

Sure, we enjoy exploring foreign cities, wandering through different museums, seeing historic sites and traipsing around churches and temples. But mostly, we're there for the food.

The only downside of all that food travel is that we miss cooking. After a couple weeks of restaurant meals three times a day, we're always eager to get back in our own kitchen and make some food ourselves.

As you may or may not know, we just got back from couple weeks in Thailand. (We'll have photos and stories and a full food rundown for you soon.) When we got back last week, one of the first things we did was head for the grocery store. We stocked up on staples -- which for us, this time of year, means things like chicken breasts, sweet potatoes, broccoli and winter squash.

We always like cooking butternut squash, but we're never extremely creative with it. We peel it, dice it, add spices, toss it in oil and roast it. It's plenty good, but it's nothing special.

Apparently we have the same thing in common with America's Test Kitchen's Dan Souza. In the current issue of Cook's Illustrated, Souza writes about how his standard prep of butternut squash -- tossed in butter or olive oil and roasted -- was perfectly fine but a little boring. To mix up his routine, Souza was inspired by Yotem Ottolenghi's cook book Plenty, in which the London chef caramelizes squash and plays off its sweetness by adding savory notes of chile, lime, yogurt or toasted nuts.

We decided to follow suit.

Perfect Fried Eggs

Cook's Illustrated (August 2013)

Giving advice about cooking eggs is tricky.

Everyone has his or her own personal preferences, established and honed over years of habit. Fried, scrambled, hard-boiled or poached, you like your eggs the way you like your eggs.

It's a matter if personal taste; there's no "right" or "wrong" way to cook an egg.

But there is an effective and an ineffective way to get the kind of egg you want. And that's where Cook's Illustrated comes in.

Stir-Fried Asparagus with Shiitake Mushrooms

Cook's Illustrated (May 2013)

When asparagus arrives each spring, much heralded as a sign of great things to come, we gobble it up every chance we get, buying several pounds a week at our farmers market.

But we always feel a bit of pressure with the first asparagus of the season. It's a bit pricey at times and we want to use it way that really shows it off. Not, horror of horrors, overcooking it within an inch of its life. 

We grill it, roast it, steam it, eat it raw and stir fry it. All have had their triumphs and pitfalls in our kitchen. 

Cook's Illustrated has taken the guess work out of at least one of these methods. 

Ladies and gents, it's time to stir fry some asparagus. 

Fluffy Omelets with Asparagus and Ramps

Cook's Illustrated (April 2013)

As the write-up accompanying this Cook's Illustrated recipe says, there are basically three kinds of omelets.

There's the French omelet, with its uniform, creamy crepe-like texture and sparse accoutrements.

There's the American diner omelet, with its thicker texture and slightly scorched exterior bursting with cheese and other fillings.

And then there's the fluffy omelet. It's light and delicate and ethereal.

Well, we've tried French omelets. And we've tried diner omelets.

It was time for us to round out the trifecta.

 

Pressure Cooker Pork Vindaloo

Pressure Cooker Perfection from America's Test Kitchen

We've had a pressure cooker for a bit over a year now. In that time, we've been experimenting with it here and there, making short ribs and stocks, and playing around with our own pressure cooker concoctions. 

But now we've been inspired to kick our pressure cooker use into high gear over the last few weeks after reading the new book from America's Test Kichen: Pressure Cooker Perfection. 

We've previously read and recommended Lorna Sass's Pressure Perfect for those wanting to get more use out of their pressure cookers. Sass, the grande dame of pressure cooker chefs, published her first pressure cooker book in 1989 and quickly established herself as the go-to expert on using pressure cookers in the home. 

We still recommend Sass's book, but we love this new book from America's Test Kitchen. (Full disclosure: We recevied a free press copy from ATK). It's smartly organized and filled with recipes we want to try. The first we dove into was Braised Chicken Thighs with Potatoes. It resulted in a delicious chicken in a flavorful gravy-like sauce -- truly delicious. 

For our second foray, we wanted something more exotic to share with you. We opted for a dish that was new to us: Pork Vindaloo.

Foolproof Soft Boiled Eggs

Cook's Illustrated (February 2013)

There's always a better way to cook something.

That could pretty much be the mantra of Cook's Illustrated, which is always on the hunt for the absolute best, most replicable, most consistent kitchen techniques. 

Take a soft-boiled egg. We all know how to make one, right? Drop a cold egg into boiling water for five minutes, remove it, wash under cold water, and crack open.

Cook's wasn't satisfied. That method is inconsistent at best, and if you want to cook two eggs, or four, or six, forget it. That method doesn't work anymore.

So Cook's set out to find a better way. 

The quest for the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg is a perfect illustration of the exacting standards of Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen. In fact, developing a new method for the P.S.B.E. was a big part on a fascinating feature in the New York Times Sunday magazine last fall. Here's an excerpt:

I was at the meeting for the unveiling of the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg. It’s one of those recipes that isolate the weird, wayward essence of the Cook’s Illustrated project, a seemingly boner-proof preparation that, when fixed with [Editor Christopher] Kimball’s unsparing eye, reveals itself to be fundamentally broken. And therein lies the narrative arc of the C.I. recipe — invariably it begins with the insuperable flaw, that through toil and experimentation is resolved in a sudden, improbable revelation that, in-house, is known as the aha moment. ...

The P.S.B.E. is slated for the January/February issue and falls to Andrea Geary, from the magazine’s stable of overeducated, underpaid editor/cooks who research, test and write the stories. While the 20ish editors around the table resemble bright children at a model U.N. convocation, Geary, a hale, wiry 46, is the one you want beside you aboard the helicopter when smoke begins to billow from the controls. Her mien expresses unfussy competence; before coming to the magazine, Geary cooked at an inn on the Scottish Highlands, roasting venison in a coal-burning stove for hunting parties of drunk Italians. Even among the high-strung editorial ranks at C.I., Geary is considered a little intense.

If you’re wondering what could be especially difficult about boiling an egg, you should have heard her. The Flaw — the unappetizing probability of either a chalky yolk or a runny white — occurs because the yolk gets cooked before the white, and the desired temperature window turns out to be harrowingly small, so the ideal preparation must set the white while leaving the yolk custardy, and not do it too rapidly. Oh, and tossing a fridge-temperature egg into boiling water will cause the air inside to expand and sometimes crack it, and apparently no two cooks can agree on exactly what simmering means, and third, the number of eggs must be compensated for by adjusting the amount of boiling water to keep cooking time constant. Geary recited further facts imperiling the P.S.B.E., and after a while the difficulty of boiling an egg at home with anything like success sounded to be on the order of a bone-marrow transplant. This appeared to please everyone, particularly Kimball, and the meeting moved on to Dressing Up Meatloaf.

“Most magazines don’t write about failure, but we do,” Kimball told me later. “Disaster in the kitchen puts the reader at ease, and that’s why we start our recipes with it.” 

We were sucked in by that story (you should read all of it!), and we couldn't wait to try the P.S.B.E. for ourselves when the issue finally arrived.

Thanksgiving 2012: Simple Grill-Roasted Turkey

Cook's Illustrated (November/December 2012)

As you might have seen in our round-up of this year's hottest Thanksgiving trends, the turkey has hit the grill. At least five food magazines this year featured recipes for cooking your bird outdoors, either in a grill or a smoker.

We were more than a little intrigued.

You see, we have a small kitchen, with a regular old oven/stove ("old" being the operative word) and limited counter space. So throwing a big Thanksgiving/Fakesgiving for 20 people -- and at the same time serving 20 dishes -- is an excercise in maximizing space. The fridge, freezer, counters and oven are carefully budgeted, or else food doesn't end up on the table in time. Grillng a turkey outdoors removes a huge obstacle: A large piece of poultry that needs significant time in the oven, thereby knocking other dishes out of the oven.

Was this idea too good to be true? Could we really end up with a Thanksgiving bird that didn't hog any oven space?

To find out, we fired up the grill.