Cook's Country June/July 2020

WHEN I WAS growing up, I often spent a couple of weeks during the summer with my grandparents, who lived in a small New England town with white clapboard houses and old brick civic buildings and a beautiful little Carnegie library, where my grandmother was head librarian. They both grew up in remote rural areas, farm kids, so they ate seasonally and locally as a matter of habit and necessity, not as a matter of choice. Berries came around in the summer, and if you didn’t have the foresight to put them in jars or freeze them, those were the only berries you’d see all year. Gram would sometimes take us into the woods to pick raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. She’d tell us it was for fun, which it was,…

My tube of tomato paste says that it is “double concentrated.” Should I use only half the amount called for in recipes? –Norma Dudley, Lynnwood, Wash. Of the tomato pastes sold in American supermarkets, most tubed pastes are made in Italy and most canned pastes are made in the United States. The term “double concentrated” refers to an Italian manufacturing method that differs from the method used to make canned pastes but yields essentially the same product (and concentration). In Italy, manufacturers heat ground tomatoes to a lower temperature, and the resulting tomato paste undergoes a longer evaporation period (hence “double concentrated”). In the United States, manufacturers heat the tomatoes to a higher temperature and evaporate them for a shorter time—two different ways to arrive at the same place. In…

Some of your recipes call for slicing foods such as carrots and scallions on the bias. What does that mean? –Ted Bachmann, St. Augustine, Fla. Foods cut on the bias are cut on the diagonal. Picture yourself slicing a peeled carrot into rounds. Instead of cutting perpendicularly to the length of the carrot to create rounds, or “coins,” you rotate either the knife or the carrot about 45 degrees to cut on the diagonal, producing elongated ovals with more surface area. This type of cut is typical with longer foods such as carrots, baguettes, scallions, cucumbers, asparagus, zucchini, and summer squash. You can take this concept even further by angling the plane of your knife so that your cutting strokes hit the cutting board on the diagonal. THE BOTTOM LINE:…

What’s the difference between a baking pan and a baking dish? –Emily Muldoon, Andover, Mass. When we call for a baking pan in our recipes, we’re referring to a metal pan, ideally one with straight sides and crisp corners that will give well-defined, professional-looking edges to baked goods. Our favorite 13 by 9-inch metal baking pan, from Williams Sonoma, is nonstick and has a gold color that produces perfectly browned baked goods (an 8-inch square version is also available). The only downside to this pan is that the nonstick coating can scratch and that it’s ovensafe only up to 450 degrees (it’s not broiler-safe). Baking dishes, on the other hand, are those made of either tempered glass or ceramic, with rounded corners to make it easy to scoop out soupy…

Can I use unseasoned rice vinegar in a recipe that calls for seasoned rice vinegar? –Morgan Affleck, Arvada, Colo. Rice vinegar is made from steamed rice. Also called rice wine vinegar (not to be confused with rice wine), it has a mild acidity and gentle sweetness. It is available both seasoned and unseasoned. Because the seasoned version contains added salt and sugar, we usually call for the unseasoned kind so that we can control the seasoning in a dish. That said, through testing we came up with a way to add “seasoning” to convert plain rice vinegar into a facsimile of the seasoned version. HOMEMADE SEASONED RICE VINEGAR Makes ½ cup Table salt dissolves most readily here, but if all you have is kosher salt, increase the amount to 2…

–John Dutton, Dover, N.H. I recently saw an ad for a silicone garlic peeler and realized I might already own something that could do the job just as well: my silicone baking mat. I grabbed a handful of unpeeled garlic cloves; rolled them up inside the mat; and then, using both of my hands, pressed and rolled them back and forth. To my delight, the silicone baking mat peeled the garlic just like the garlic peeler had in the commercial. Maybe now I’ll get some more use out of the baking mat.…