Cook's Illustrated

Certain things are only really possible to do when you’re young. Sleeping on the ground in a tent. Staying awake until midnight on New Year’s Eve. And seeking out long-lost family in a foreign country and then showing up at their doorstep completely unannounced. In the early spring of 2005, I was about halfway through my year as an English teacher in rural Hungary. For months I’d been traveling around Eastern Europe nearly every weekend but decided to set my sights further afield: the Azores, the volcanic archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic. My grandfather was born on one of the islands, Terceira, and I’d grown up hearing about how special it was. But he hadn’t been back in decades and we’d lost communication with our relatives there. Fueled by youthful…

Clean Out Containers by Making Chocolate Milk When Laura Giuliani of Albertson, N.Y., can’t squeeze any more chocolate syrup out of the bottle (or scrape any more Nutella out of the jar), she fills the container with milk and shakes it vigorously to create chocolate milk. This trick not only creates a delicious treat but also helps clean out the container for recycling. Keeping Cut Avocado Green When Emily Alvarez of Sullivan’s Island, S.C., packs a salad to take to work for lunch, she cubes her avocado and then stores it not with the greens but submerged in the accompanying vinaigrette. This way, the cubes aren’t exposed to air, so they don’t brown. As a bonus, they also pick up the flavors of the dressing. An Easy Way to Dry Surplus Herbs When Coral Cavanaugh…

Not long into our conversation about borscht and the recipe I’d been working on, Darra Goldstein warned me to brace for the inevitable. “You’ll print the recipe, and probably people will say, ‘Well, that’s not how my family makes it,’” she said with a good-natured chuckle on a video call from her home in the Berkshires. The acclaimed author and scholar of Slavic cuisines was sharing her take on what constitutes a proper bowl of hot borscht in Ukraine, the soup’s ancestral home, and couldn’t help but note that it’s a divisive subject. She named beets, of course, for their earthy sweetness and vivid color, as well as green cabbage, carrots, onions, and potatoes—staple crops that grow abundantly in Ukrainian soil. Pork, the cuisine’s default protein, for building up a meaty backbone.…

A tumble of tiny morsels of pork generously coated in a golden and aromatic curry paste, khua kling is one of the spiciest dishes in southern Thailand, an area known for its capsicum-rich cuisine. But to classify it simply as spicy is to do khua kling a disservice: Galangal, lemongrass, and lime leaves lend it an astonishingly vibrant citrusy-floral fragrance; fermented shrimp paste and fish sauce provide plenty of funk and salt; and turmeric anchors it all with a subtly earthy base note. There’s so much going on in each bite that spooning up your khua kling with steamed jasmine rice, in a proportion of roughly 1 part pork to 2 parts rice, is strongly advised because the dilution enables you to appreciate every nuance without being overwhelmed by the heat…

A semisheer wrapper allows a hazy glimpse of the blush-pink mixture that rests inside. Its tacky surface clings lightly to the bamboo steamer and your chopsticks, momentarily prolonging the anticipation. Then you pop it in your mouth: At first, the dumpling resists your chew, but it soon gives way, baring a pristine, delicately sweet, juicy shrimp filling. This is har gow, a “small, small bite,” per Sarah Leung, writer for the authoritative The Woks of Life blog, who classifies each dumpling as “its own experience” with “its own interplay of texture and taste.” On a video call, Leung went so far as to say that the one-bite treasures are “emblematic of dim sum.” That’s quite a designation, as dim sum houses are known for a wide variety of delicious offerings—as well…

A French open-faced sandwich, called a tartine, possesses a certain refinement. Whether it’s a length of crisp-chewy baguette spread with soft salted butter and adorned with crisp dark chocolate shavings (a common “goûter,” or afternoon snack) or a thick slice of levain, lightly toasted, generously smeared with creamy Roquefort, and embellished with violet wedges of fig, a thoughtfully designed tartine displays a range of flavors and textures and caters to the eyes as well as the palate. My favorite versions require a knife and fork, not because their striking looks call for the formality of silverware but because they’re substantial enough to be a light lunch or brunch. I think of main-course tartines as triple-decker affairs: The base is a generous slice of bread that’s often toasted. The middle is a…