Cook's Country April/May 2020

MOST OF THE banana pudding pies I’ve encountered in my life have let me down. Sure, they’ve made my sweet tooth happy, but for the effort involved, they’ve always seemed dull. Lacking in pizzazz. Our new recipe for Banana Pudding Pie (pictured on the cover) delivers that pizzazz and then some. Our Executive Food Editor, Bryan Roof, was inspired by a version at Buxton Hall Barbecue in Asheville, North Carolina. Test Cook Jessica Rudolph took his notes into the kitchen, where she spent weeks developing a recipe that any home cook can tackle with confidence. Make it (see page 22) and you will have achieved something remarkable—and earned major bragging rights. While on the subject of bragging rights: If you turn to page 24, you’ll see our recipe for American…

Encourage-mint I want to grow mint in my garden this year, but I don’t know which kind to plant. What is the difference between spearmint and peppermint? –Emily Wells, Saratoga, N.Y. There are more than 30 species of mint, but peppermint and spearmint are the most common. Peppermint has smooth green leaves and stems with a purple tinge, while spearmint (the type of mint most grocery stores carry) has bright green or gray-green leaves with a more crinkly texture. To compare their flavors, we had tasters sample raw peppermint and spearmint leaves side by side and then had them try our recipes for Fresh Mint Sauce (an accompaniment for our Crumb-Crusted Rack of Lamb) and Cucumber-Mint Lemonade prepared with each type of mint. Since peppermint contains more menthol, it makes…

Layer Cake Perfection –Stephanie Roberts, Broken Arrow, Okla. I’m an avid baker, and I love making tall, showstopping layer cakes for special occasions (and sometimes just because it’s Thursday). But I’ve never been any good at cutting a single cake round into two even layers. After botching another one, I finally got fed up and figured out a way to cut the cake without having to eyeball it. I set the round on my rotating cake stand and placed eight toothpicks halfway up the side of the cake around the perimeter (using a ruler to make sure that they’re even) to act as a guide for my knife. I then worked my way around the outside of the cake, cutting right above the toothpicks. Now it’s easy to get even…

ELECTRIC DEEP-FRYERS promise to make frying easier, safer, and less messy than frying in a Dutch oven with a probe thermometer attached, which is how we typically deep-fry foods in the test kitchen. The machines are essentially metal bins with an electrical heating element suspended inside: To use them, you pour oil up to a maximum fill line, turn the machine on, and, in most cases, set the desired temperature for the oil. Once the oil is ready, you lower the food into the oil (usually via a basket) and often stick on a lid, which helps reduce any mess and supposedly contains unwanted odors. To find out if any of these machines had advantages over a Dutch oven, we bought six deep-fryers and used them to cook frozen mozzarella…

What’s in a Name? Reading the names of Italian dishes, whether in cookbooks or on menus, can be confusing if you’re not familiar with the language. While knowing that ragù is a meat sauce and melanzane is eggplant, for instance, can help with decoding, some dishes have less literal names. Arrabbiata means “angry” and refers to this dish’s fiery bite from the garlic and pepper flakes; our version also includes pepperoncini. Some other Italian sauces to know: Amatriciana (from the Roman town of Amatrice) sauce is made from tomato, pancetta, and chile. Carbonara sauce contains egg, pancetta or guanciale, and lots of black pepper. Sauce alla norma is made from eggplant and tomatoes. Puttanesca sauce is a bold mix of tomatoes, anchovies, olives, capers, and garlic. Sauce alla vesuviana is…

I LOVE TO EAT the traditional dish of chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, but, to the uninitiated, the name of this recipe can be a bit shocking. Forty cloves of garlic sounds like enough to make your breath peel paint, but in truth the garlic in the dish is slowly cooked and becomes sweet, nutty, and mild. There is plenty of garlic flavor, sure, but it isn’t harsh or fiery. I thought that sweet, mellow garlic flavor would be a perfect match for the subtle natural sweetness of pork loin. For my first few attempts, I seasoned the pork with salt and pepper, put it in a baking dish, scattered peeled garlic cloves around it, and roasted it, testing oven temperatures ranging from 300 to 450 degrees. The pork…