Cook's Country February/March 2019

COME CLOSER. IT’S just us now. No one’s here to listen in. Between you and me: Cooking can feel like a real pain sometimes, don’t you think? Tell the truth. Not always, of course. We love to cook, right? I think about cooking (and eating) more than I think about anything else. I daydream about it on the bus in the morning. Whenever I have time to spare or creative energy to exhaust, I head to the kitchen, just to tinker around. But cooking is a relationship—a complicated, multifaceted, challenging relationship—and not every day is the same. Even for enthusiastic home cooks, there are times when cooking a meal is nothing more than a trip to downtown Dullsville. Uninspiring. Rote. Lackluster. The best response to these moments, I think, is…

Knife Angles When I got my knives sharpened at my hardware store, they asked me what angles I wanted the blades sharpened to. What does this mean? –Beth Balter, Somerville, Mass. Traditionally, there were two styles of chef’s knives: European/American and Asian. The blades of Western knives were manufactured with 20-degree angles, while Asian knives were made with narrower 15-degree angles. But in recent years, the trend toward slimmer blade construction has spread west; many European and American knife manufacturers now offer knives with blades sharpened to 15 degrees. In a recent testing, our top three favorite knives were sharpened to 15 degrees, including our winner, the Victorinox Swiss Army Fibrox Pro 8" Chef’s Knife. Assuming similar sharpness, a blade with a thinner edge (sharpened to a smaller angle) will…

French Vanilla French Toast –Jade French, Cody, Wyo. Sunday mornings mean French toast in our house. Recently, I sliced the bread and opened the refrigerator to grab the milk and eggs only to find we were out of both. Searching for a solution, I grabbed some vanilla ice cream from the freezer, melted a few scoops in the microwave, and used it as a soaking medium. To my delight, it made such delicious French toast that I may never go back to plain old milk and eggs. No Springform, No Problem! –Maria Sheahan, Biddeford, Maine Cheesecake recipes often call for a springform pan, but I found an easy way to make cheesecake using a regular cake pan that is the same diameter as the springform pan called for in the…

ELECTRIC GRIDDLES HAVE a reputation for being, well, retro. But with a good one, you can evenly cook big batches of food without using the stove. All the models we previously recommended, including our winner by BroilKing, have been discontinued or redesigned, so it was time to retest. We selected six nonstick models, including the updated version of our previous winner, priced from $29.99 to $99.00. We made pancakes, French toast, and hamburgers on each. Many of the griddles heated unevenly: Some batches of pancakes were both raw and overcooked. We ran a few tests and found that on some griddles, the temperature varied by 80 degrees or more across the cooking surface. The best models’ temperatures varied by less than 10 degrees. Why the inconsistency? Our winner had the…

ON A WARM February afternoon, I join the line that snakes out of Johnny’s Restaurant, a second-story lunchroom in a well-dressed strip mall in Homewood, Alabama. Johnny’s is what’s known as a meat-and-three: a restaurant offering a protein and three side dishes for a fixed price. The menu is built on “Southern ingredients and Greek technique,” as chef-owner Timothy Hontzas puts it, a nod to his Greek heritage and Alabama upbringing. A “Greek-and-three,” he says. At Johnny’s, items such as souvlaki are listed on the menu next to fried catfish and hamburger steaks. This subtle intermingling of cuisines has long been standard for Greek eateries in the South. “We laugh and say, if it hadn’t been for the Greeks in the ’60s and ’70s, the people of Birmingham would have…

IN HOMEWOOD, ALABAMA, if you say you’re going out for “Greek-and-three,” folks will assume you’re headed to Johnny’s Restaurant (see “Greek Home Alabama”) for lunch. There, on the menu behind the counter, you’ll see Greek baked chicken, a superflavorful dish of tender and juicy marinated and roasted chicken with tons of herbs and lemon. It comes with three sides, hence “Greek-and-three.” Once I’d tried it for myself, I knew I wanted to create my own version of this simple yet complex-tasting dish. Back in the test kitchen, the first order of business was determining which herbs to use in the marinade. After experimenting with fresh herbs, dried herbs, and even dried herb blends such as Italian seasoning and herbes de Provence, I found the best balance with fresh thyme, fresh…