Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and food will taste good.
Tart and sweet, tinged with the faint scent of almonds and flowers, the Blenheim is the ideal apricot for both eating and preserving.
I love bitter broccoli rabe tossed with Calabrian chiles and hidden under a mountain of snowy shaved Parmesan.
One pillar of my cooking is that salad dressing is sacred and that you always make it with the most delicious oil you can find. Usually, that means extra-virgin olive oil.
Salt’s relationship to flavor is multidimensional: It has its own particular taste, and it both balances and enhances the flavor of other ingredients.
When I was young, one Sunday every month or so, my mom would load my brothers and me into our station wagon and drive 80 miles north to Orange County, where we’d meet our extended family at a Persian restaurant for lunch.
The cornerstone of every Persian meal is rice, or polo.
I take, like, 9,000 supplements every morning. I don’t know if it’s completely placebo or not, but I’m super committed to these supplements: like, I can’t face the day without them.
Inexpensive and forgiving, kosher salt is fantastic for everyday cooking and tastes pure.
Apricots are the most private fruit, loath to reveal their secrets.
I grew up eating and loving Persian food, going to school, and everyone making fun of me.
The apricot’s fleetingly short harvest – only a few weeks long – explains the urge to save the season in a jar. But cooked fruit, no matter how expertly preserved, can never measure up to the flawlessness of its fresh counterpart.
It’s easy to discount water’s importance in the kitchen. After all, it has no flavor, and more often than not, it’s left off ingredient lists, making it seem like an afterthought. Yet water is an essential element of almost everything we cook and eat, and it affects the flavor and texture of all our food.
I’m surprisingly squeamish.
Throughout my time working in restaurants, I developed an illogical dread of some basic kitchen tasks. None of them – picking and chopping parsley, peeling and mincing garlic, browning pans of ground meat – were particularly difficult. But at the scale required in a professional kitchen, they felt Sisyphean.
I live by myself, so I derive a lot of joy from being with my friends and their families.
Browning butter affects more than just the color and the flavor of its milk solids; the water that butter contains also simmers away.
The cornerstone of every Persian meal is rice, or polo.
There are so many food shows, really beautiful ones, that exist to elevate professional cooking and professional chefs. But there aren’t that many that really celebrate home cooking or are for home cooks especially.
There are two proper ways to use garlic: pounding and blooming. Neither involves a press, which is little more than a torture device for a beloved ingredient, smushing it up into watery squiggles of inconsistent size that will never cook evenly or vanish into a vinaigrette. If you have one, throw it away!
Like all Iranian kids, I grew up feeling strongly that the best part of dinner was tahdig, the crisp, golden crust that forms at the bottom of every pot of Persian rice – and sometimes other dishes, too.
My inability to follow recipes as written – without obeying the devil on my shoulder telling me to replace ingredients or change the temperature – is well documented.
By definition, comfort foods are rich and creamy or evocative of childhood pleasures.
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