Cook's Country August - September 2017

RECENTLY, W H E N I was assigned to bring a dessert for a potluck, a friend suggested a recipe for a simple dump-and-stir sheet cake, saying it was as “easy as pie.” She was wrong. It was much easier than pie. Pie, for all its alleged ease, isn’t always a cinch to make. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. It’s this idea of “worth doing” that drives our decisions about which recipes to feature in Cook’s Country. We look for a wide range of recipes: Some are simple, a breeze to create on a weeknight; others are more involved but deliver an outsize return on your invested effort. Such is the case with our splendid Coconut Cream Pie (page 22). It’s a project, but it’s doable if…

Some of our low-and-slow grill-roasting recipes call for placing a disposable aluminum pan filled with water in the bottom of the grill adjacent to the hot coals. Both the pan and the water absorb heat, which helps moderate the temperature inside the grill and ensure gentler, more controlled cooking. The water also creates steam and moisture to help keep foods such as ribs, brisket, and chicken from drying out. To determine how much the amount of water in the pan mattered, we built small charcoal fires (using 4½ quarts of briquettes) in three grills and placed a 13 by 9-inch disposable aluminum pan opposite the coals in each of them. One pan we left empty, one we filled with our standard 3 cups of water, and one we filled with…

Perfect Pit Removal Nancy Jones, Plano, Texas I find removing the pit from a halved avocado awkward, so I was happy to discover another way to prep avocados. First, I run my knife around the pit from pole to pole. Then, I run the knife around the pit along the avocado’s equator to quarter it. The pieces separate easily; the skin often peels right off(sometimes I need to use a spoon), and the pit is easy to remove from the ffesh. I then use the avocado chunks in mashed applications such as guacamole. Worry-Free Straining Rita Foran, Endicott, N.Y. I am a recent convert to quinoa. The instructions on the package say to rinse it to get rid of bitterness, but a lot of quinoa heads down my drain since…

LITTLE IS MORE satisfying than a scoop of chocolate ice cream—but which one is best? To find out, we gathered seven nationally available chocolate ice creams and asked 21 tasters to sample them plain and in cones. An ice cream’s texture was very important to our tasters, so we contacted industry experts to learn more about how commercial ice cream is made. Though not listed on the package, air is a defining ingredient in ice cream; it is churned into the base ingredients to increase texture, volume, and, since air is free, the manufacturer’s bottom line. The percentage of air added is called “overrun,” so “100 percent overrun” means the base ingredients are infiated with air to double their original volume. A high overrun percentage makes for light, airy ice…

ON THE ROAD IT COULDN’T HAV E happened anywhere but in Detroit. As a child in Sicily, Connie Piccinato grew up eating squared-offwedges of focaccia studded with leftover meats. As an adult in 1946, while working as a waitress at Buddy’s in Detroit, she found herself craving the pies of her youth. But she faced a dilemma. Food-grade rectangular pizza pans simply didn’t exist at the time, so “square pizza” wasn’t known in the States. But Piccinato found inspiration in a discarded rectangular “blue steel” pan used for collecting errant nuts and bolts in the string of automobile-related factories along Six Mile Road. She and Buddy’s owner August “Gus” Guerra pressed a batch of dough into one of the pans, nudging it into the sharp corners; topped it with cheese…

D E T R O I T P I Z Z A , A deep-dish local favorite, is light and airy, with a crunchy, buttery crust. It’s topped with soft, stretchy cheese and a slightly sweet tomato sauce full of herbs and spices. But aficionados will tell you that the best part is the crispy, lacy fried edges. The pizza starts familiarly enough, with mixing and kneading the dough, which is then transferred to a 13 by 9-inch seasoned steel pan and left to rise and fill the pan. Cooks then flip the traditional pizza script, evenly spreading shredded brick cheese—a mild, slightly tangy semisoft cheese hard to find outside Michigan—from the dough’s middle to its edges before draping ladlefuls of the sweet tomato sauce over the cheese. In the…