Smashed cucumbers, or pai huang gua, is a Sichuan dish that is typically served with rich, spicy food. We started with English cucumbers, which are nearly seedless and have thin, crisp skins. Placing them in a zipper-lock bag and smashing them into large, irregular pieces sped up a salting step that helped expel excess water. The craggy pieces also did a better job of holding on to the dressing. Using black vinegar, an aged rice-based vinegar, added a mellow complexity to the soy and sesame dressing.
For a frozen yogurt that’s dense and creamy—not icy and rock-hard like most versions—the key is controlling the water in the base so that the number of large ice crystals that formed during freezing was minimized.
Pernil is a Latin dish of tender, super-flavorful slow-roasted pork with the ultimate crispy skin
These Italian roast pork sandwiches boast tender, slightly spicy broccoli rabe and sharp, melty provolone cheese.
This chewy, cheesy snack bread is legendary in Wisconsin, and replicating it in our kitchen was no small task. To get a cheese-loaded loaf of bread without bogging it down with grease, we rolled cubes of provolone and Monterey Jack cheese into our eggy dough after its first rise. Paying special attention to the temperature of the ingredients ensures an efficient and effective fermentation time. Incorporating red pepper flakes into both the dough and the topping gives this bread its signature kick.
It’s an unlikely scenario—early season vegetables cooked at a low simmer to amplify their fresh flavors—but it works.
Clams, mussels, and oysters belong to the group of shellfish known as bivalves, and they can all be grilled in the same fashion. These two-shelled creatures are easy to cook; when they open, they are done. One of the biggest challenges when cooking bivalves is making sure they are clean. Even perfectly cooked clams and mussels can be made inedible by lingering sand. Over the course of developing our recipe, we learned that careful shopping plays the most important role in minimizing your kitchen work and ensuring that your shellfish are free of grit. While steaming is the easiest way to cook clams and mussels (oysters are often eaten raw on the half shell), grilling these bivalves is an appealing option, especially for summer entertaining. It's also an incredibly simple preparation. The key to great bivalves on the grill is not to move the shellfish around too much, and to handle them carefully once they open. You want to preserve the natural juices, so when they open, transfer them with tongs to a platter, holding them steady so as not to spill any of the liquid. Add an easy sauce or flavored butter to complement the natural brininess of the shellfish.
When it comes to beet salads, it’s hard to escape the ubiquitous combination of beets and goat cheese. The pairing works because the tangy, creamy, salty goat cheese is a great foil for the beets’ earthy sweetness. (Interestingly, beets’ sweetness is actually the result of a winter survival strategy. The sugars in beets act like antifreeze, keeping the fluid in their cells from freezing and forming destructive ice crystals.) But that doesn’t mean the combination hasn’t gotten a little tired. To reinvigorate the classic beet salad, we looked for ways to deal with the sweetness itself. By charring the cooked beets—essentially burning some of the sugar—we cut down on sweetness and add some complementary bitterness. We amplify that bitterness with crisp radicchio and toss it all with a dressing made from the beet cooking liquid. And to replace the goat cheese? A simple spread of feta and Greek yogurt adds plenty of creaminess. A final flourish of tart pomegranate seeds provides pops of bright acidity (while staying on message with the ruby color scheme), while fresh dill and tarragon round things out with some herbal notes.
Paired with some crusty bread and a simple salad, mussels make a lovely light meal. But getting them perfectly cooked can be tricky, with most stovetop recipes inevitably turning out some overcooked and some undercooked mussels. We made cooking mussels absolutely foolproof by using our multicooker, which evenly surrounded the mussels with steam and resulted in a pot full of tender, plump mussels every time. On the pressure setting, we needed to cook the mussels for just 1 minute; on the slow cook setting (which heats up much faster than a traditional slow cooker) the mussels were cooked perfectly within half an hour. To infuse the mussels with lots of flavor, we sautéed garlic, thyme, and red pepper flakes in butter, and used wine as the cooking liquid. We finished the mussels with a sprinkle of fresh parsley. You can substitute 3 pounds of littleneck clams for the mussels; increase the pressure cooking time to 2 minutes. Discard any raw mussels with an unpleasant odor or with a cracked or broken shell or a shell that won’t close. Serve with crusty bread.
A good vegetable stock is an important ingredient to have on hand, but supermarket offerings don’t taste like vegetables, and traditional homemade versions are expensive and time-consuming to make. In our recipe, we grind a selection of fresh vegetables, salt, and savory ingredients to a paste that we can store in the freezer and reconstitute as needed. Leeks provide good allium flavor, and a small amount of freeze-dried onions support the fresh flavor of the leeks. Tomato paste and soy sauce provide an ultimate boost.