Food & Wine March 2021

2019 TRIONE SAUVIGNON BLANC ($25) When it isn’t quite spring yet but the first faint glimmerings are starting to appear on the horizon, I start yearning for bright, citrusy whites like this tingly, lime-zesty Russian River Valley Sauvignon Blanc from Trione. (And regardless of season, this would be killer with sushi of any kind.) 2018 RIDGE THREE VALLEYS SONOMA COUNTY RED ($30) “An explosion of berries.” Seriously—that’s what I wrote after taking one sip, and it’s true. If you were standing in a field and the sky opened up and berries of all kinds started raining down, pretty soon the world would smell like this juicy, Zinfandel-based wine. REDBREAST 12 YEAR OLD ($60) I’d say I was going to open this for St. Patrick’s Day, but since I finished it long before that, I’d be…

How to Get Out of a Rut SHOW OF HANDS: Who here has fallen into a cooking rut at some point in the past year? You’re on top of your game, planning, shopping, and cooking like a champ, and then suddenly, you find yourself bored. You look into the fridge and shrug. Chicken. Again? Wait, what day is it? Hey, a pandemic will do that to you. Curious about solutions, I called Victoria Albina, a holistic life coach and nurse practitioner in Brooklyn, to ask how to rekindle some cooking passion once fatigue takes hold. “If you feed your brain with thoughts like ‘I’m so bored of dinner,’ then that will be the narrative,” she told me. Her advice: Change the story. “Focus on what’s easy and doable. You strengthen what you…

IF YOU’VE SPENT ANY TIME on Instagram over the past few months, you’ve likely noticed a massive uptick in pastry chefs selling eye-catching conchas, doughnuts, and loaves of bread through the platform. While not entirely new, this boon of so-called “microbakeries” gives out-of-work bakers the chance to start their own businesses and is made possible by cottage food laws, which in most states allow for the sale of foods that don’t require refrigeration, such as baked goods, jams, and jellies, without needing a commercial kitchen space. “Every corner of our home is turning into kitchen storage. We turned our second bedroom into a large pantry, where we keep several Metro racks with ingredients and molds,” says Miro Uskokovic, former executive pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern, who now sells pastry boxes on…

FIVE YEARS AGO, Lauren Ko had never baked a single pie. Bored with her job as an executive assistant, she started playing around in her kitchen, posting her geometrically stylized pies on Instagram (@lokokitchen). And then she almost burned down the internet, which has, it would seem, a bottomless appetite for beautiful pastry. (See “The Future of Bakeries Is … on Instagram?” p. 16.) “Things went viral quickly—I’m still trying to catch up with it,” says Ko, who lives in Seattle. Her first book, Pieometry, showcases the techniques behind her intricate designs, crafted from dozens and dozens of painstakingly placed fruit and pastry cutouts. But her stunning designs have much more to do with her natural affinity for order than a passion for mathematics. “Math has always been my weakest…

THERE ARE A FEW THINGS IN LIFE I simply won’t tolerate. People speaking with their mouths full, ranch dressing on pizza—we all have our boundaries. These also apply to coffee. I would never have married a man who regularly drank crappy coffee. Luckily, I married an Australian. The notion of a sophisticated coffee culture Down Under may seem strange, but it’s a nation that learned from the best in the business: Italians, who sailed south after World War II and found their way to the neighborhoods of Sydney and Melbourne with their espresso machines in tow. For a nation desperate to throw off the shackles of its British colonial past, Italian espresso represented something alluringly cosmopolitan that was also a direct departure from British tea. And so, a hard-core coffee culture…

EGG DISHES ARE OFTEN the stars of internet video breakfast challenges. There’s always some chopping, whisking, and plating, but the ones with the most likes and views tend to include a body roll or a shoulder shimmy. In fact, millions of people have viewed, liked, or shared a meme using “Breakfast Challenge,” a percussive track by Spence, a Los Angeles–based DJ and actor. The song samples the cacophony of dicing, eggs cracking, and sizzling. Spence adds handclaps and clanging pots to an acoustic guitar hook as the backdrop for a perfect omelet filled with onions and cilantro and topped with a lighted birthday candle. Since Spence dropped “Breakfast Challenge” in 2019, it has become the soundtrack for thousands of food-prep videos for dishes around the world. Users sync the sounds of bubbles,…