The warm milk and melted butter mixture should be just barely warm to the touch, about body temperature – any hotter and it could kill the yeast. For a complex, super-yeasty flavor, leave the batter at room temperature overnight instead of in the refrigerator.
Not to draw a line in the sand here, but I’d take waffles over pancakes every time. I love how the browned, delicately crisp exterior gives way to a tender, practically creamy interior. And the pockets in the waffle pattern are custom-made for pooling syrup and melted butter.
You might not think you really need a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich, but the technique and the ingredients you choose can make all the difference between a good sandwich and a great sandwich. We wanted to make the perfect grilled cheese sandwich. Here’s what we discovered:
A thick, rich, delightfully gooey cheese dip or sauce. Try it over nachos, as a dip for vegetables or tortilla chips, or as a sauce for steamed broccoli or cauliflower.
Eggplant is a dinnertime staple on the southern Italian island of Sicily, where the vegetable is known as melanzane and might appear as involtini (rolled up with a filling) or caponata (the sweet-and-sour cooked vegetable salad). These are both first courses, but with a little tweaking, you can make them substantial enough for the main event. We fell for the dishes at the Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school in Sicily, where the late founder’s daughter, Fabrizia, teaches them.
Your Irish grandmother might not recognize this cheesy version of traditional soda bread. Like its sweeter, raisin-studded cousin, it is quick to make before a hearty breakfast. Before baking, the bread is marked with a deep cross and pricked in the four triangles “to let the fairies out.’’ The bread is best eaten on the same day it is baked, but makes delicious toast for a couple more days.
This is an adaptation of a Turkish recipe, a sweet and savory combination of lentils, onions and carrots that can be served hot or at room temperature, as a main dish or a side.
Kneading our pizza dough’s ingredients in the food processor was quicker and just as efficient as using a stand mixer. To keep our Thin-Crust Pizza recipe from puffing as it cooked and to infuse it with flavor, we let it proof in the refrigerator for up to three days. Finally, placing our pizza stone as close to the upper heating element as possible crisped our Thin-Crust Pizza and browned it.
I’m not anti-recipe (obviously), but some things just don’t need them — and most vegetable soups fall into that category. Here are easy-to-follow instructions for making vegetable (vegetarian and, for the most part, vegan) soups with common ingredients, a variety of choices and terrific flavor. Print the following page, stick it on your refrigerator and work your way through it. By the time you’re done — 12 days or 12 weeks later — you’ll never again need a recipe for vegetable soup. Promise.
In my flurry of experimenting, I found that virgin coconut oil had a deep coconut flavor that persists even after cooking. Refined coconut oil, which has been processed enough to raise the temperature at which it begins to smoke, lacks the same coconut profundity, but supposedly works better for stir- and deep-frying. In my recipe testing, however, the smoke point of virgin coconut oil was not a problem.