Saveur Summer 2016

This is my summer of paella. True, I’ve never made one before. This worries me not at all. My pronounced non-expertise in the field of paella production is actually a prime motivator in declaring it my go-to dish of the season. I enjoy a challenge, a project. l like learning curves, especially ones that end up feeding a crowd and provide me an excuse to play with shiny new gear (like a low-slung paella pan the size of a manhole cover). So if you need me, I’ll be by the grill, trying out various combinations (snails or no snails?), teaching my kids to say socarrat and indulging in a couple of my favorite activities: cooking over a wood fire and consulting too many cookbooks. Our new books columnist Russ Parsons does some grilling…

Brothers in Pie Crust This month Laurent Gras, French chef, and Mitchell Davis, American cookbook author and globetrotting food expert, embark on a new cooking column, and their first installment considers the whys and hows of American pie. Typical of their origins, in summer, you can find Gras and Mitchell eating pan bagnat on the beach with an Orangina or crushing buckets of cold fried chicken on family picnics. Respectively, of course. Season to Taste, page 44 How Hawaiian San Francisco writer and author Chris Colin traveled to Hawaii to see how an under-appreciated, sometimes villified fruit has been given new life. To Colin, summer is “my mom’s taco salad made in a very 1980s way, eaten in the grass at dusk.” Can Breadfruit Save the World?, page 64 Going South Melanie Dunea is a…

On a sunny Saturday morning in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York, Jose Reyes is pouring wine. A plastic cup of tempranillo, filled nearly to the brim, is his standard welcome at Despaña, the Spanish food importer and meat shop where he’s worked for 30 years. Reyes now oversees the company’s sausage operation: 2,000 to 3,000 pounds a week of garlic-laced chorizo, coils of Basque chistorra, and morcilla sausage, dark and sweet as dried fruit thanks to a smart combination of cooked-down onions and coagulated pig’s blood. Along with wine he doles out free samples of that sausage as well as bites of tinned tuna belly in olive oil and nutty Manchego cheese. It’s a happy way to start a day with a mission: eat your way through…

Havana— beautiful, decaying, perfumed by diesel fumes and sweet sea air—is a challenging place for an outsider to come to grips with, even after repeated visits: Why has someone left the carefully arranged head and feet of a dismembered goat outside a Catholic church? Why are the taxis nicknamed almendrones (literally, “big almonds”)? And, perhaps most puzzlingly, why do Cuban adults eat so much ice cream? Starting around 10 a.m. and going well into the evening, Havana, especially its Old and Central quarters, is filled with people—an old lady with smooth, nut brown skin; a young man with an Elvismeets-Reggaeton hairstyle; a teenaged girl in microshorts—consuming great quantities of helado with remarkable dedication. Some eat out on the street, but most spoon up their pint-size sundaes in one of the city’s…

WHY WE WE LOVE IT: Lard bubbles in shallow vats. Outside, the sun is punishingly hot. In a narrow shop facing the port, the Favata family scrambles to keep up with the lunch crowd. Domenico and Gieuseppe slice offal to order. Gaetano pulls meat off drying hooks. Rosario shouts the orders as they come in. Everyone’s here for what’s in those gurgling vats, for the only thing served here: pani ca’ meusa, the glorious grease bomb, classic street snack of this city, consisting of a soft sesame roll hollowed out and piled with a bounty of meusa (spleen) and lung, sometimes trachea. The sandwich, whose fame has not spread to mainland Italy, traces its origins to the 15th century, when the city’s butchers were paid for their services in scraps by…

Ever since I was 18, making the occasional trip to Mexico to do tequila shots with friends, I’ve thought of Tijuana as holding an untold story. A border town in Mexico’s Baja California, it wasn’t a safe place back in the 1990s. Yet, it held a certain magic that repeatedly lured us along the 30-minute drive from San Diego. Recently, I’d heard the city had blossomed, and when my friends and I arrived late last year, we were met with a stylish, vibrant food scene fueled by hip, hungry Mexicans. Restaurants in some seedier parts of town still crank out the deep-fried chicken necks beloved by locals, but food truck parks, serving everything from craft beer to local cheese, combined with sprawling open-air markets and elegant new restaurants, are telling…