Tips&Techniques

Why You Should Cook Your Mushrooms in Water (Yes, Water)

There’s something Lucas Sin wants you to know: Water and mushrooms aren’t enemies.
“A lot of us have been told that when you process your mushrooms—when you cook them—they’re not allowed to touch a single drop of water,” says Lucas in a recent episode of Why it Works. “But in my experience, I found that not to be correct.” Not only is water not the enemy, he argues—it’s actually the key to extracting the most flavor out of your fungi. “Mushrooms, because of their cell structure and the way this fungus is set up, in between all these fibers are big air pockets that are filled with air and, eventually, whatever liquid that it comes into contact with,” says Lucas. “That’s a lot of the reason why some people say [not to] soak them in water.” Read More >> …

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How to Use a Stainless-Steel Pan (Without Worrying Your Food Will Stick)

Stainless steel is sturdy, sleek, and can be used to cook pretty much anything, making it the cookware material preferred by most professionals. Unlike its nonstick counterparts (which we still love!), stainless steel can handle high temperatures and metal utensils without the risk of damage. Cast-iron pans share many of the same benefits as stainless steel, but they tend to be heavier and bulkier—not ideal for moving around small kitchens or transferring from the stove or oven and to the table. Then why isn’t everyone cooking with stainless steel? Well, there is one main deterrent: Unlike a seasoned cast-iron skillet or ceramic-coated nonstick pan, things tend to stick in stainless steel, if used improperly. Because of that, many home cooks—especially those who are just getting comfortable in the kitchen—avoid the material entirely. We’re here to say: Don’t let that fear stop you from cooking with stainless steel. Just follow a few key pieces of advice from…

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How to *Not* Ruin Your Nonstick Pan

If you’re like me, your nonstick skillet makes its way from storage to stovetop on a frequent basis—it’s the efficient go-to for creamy scrambled eggs, crispy salmon skin, and fluffy pancakes on the regular. With all that use comes a sense of responsibility, because if my nonstick is showing signs of misuse, it’s hard to pass the blame—the culprit is very clearly: me. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about nonstick cookware over the years, it is that it’s among my most trusted helpers in the kitchen, but not without a little TLC. Nonstick, like many other cookware materials, can be a little finicky to take care of. While there are clear rules for how to handle these pots and pans, it can become confusing to parse out which rules apply to nonstick, and which guidelines you may have heard in passing that actually apply to the care of a different material. Is nonstick the…

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The Absolute Easiest Trick for Cleaning Your Grill

Why is it important to clean a grill? And how come leaving charred bits and leftover cooking oil doesn’t season the grates similar to a cast iron skillet? Well, first and foremost, grilling meats at high temperatures can actually produce carcinogens, which are then left behind on the grill, so it’s important to keep the grates maintained. Beyond that, regularly cleaning your grill will lengthen its life, prevent dangerous flare-ups, and simply make your food taste better. We know that summer is officially in full swing, but here’s a tip that will carry you well beyond the Fourth of July: how to clean your grill, using things you already have lying around. All you’ll need for this quick hack is a piece of aluminum foil and a pair of tongs. Oh, plus your dirty grill grate and a little bit of elbow grease. Read More >> …

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A Beginner’s Guide to Cooking With Kief & Hash

Next to my olive oil and kosher salt sits a small, hotel-size jam jar of decarbed kief. As a food writer, recipe developer, and maker of my own cannabis-infused confections, this simple form of concentrated cannabis allows me to have weed at the ready to sprinkle into any recipe without extra work or complicated calculations. Kief is to cannabis cooking what granulated sugar is to sugar cane, or all-purpose flour is to wheat: the accessible, easy-to-use version of a plant that’s been processed for home-cooking convenience. Like all-purpose flour versus wheat kernels, using kief instead of flower cuts the cooking time for making edibles in half. It also leaves the more expensive cannabis buds for the format in which they taste best: twisted up in a joint, not steeped in butter for hours on end. Meanwhile, kief—aka the concentrated resins of cannabis plants—is easily available in states where weed is legal and is ideal because it…

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Everything You Need to Know About Dutch Oven Cooking

The Dutch oven—or as I like to call it, the analog crock pot—is a favorite among those who love cooking. The hype around Dutch ovens exists for good reason: They are highly effective, beautiful, dynamic, and durable pieces of cookware. Many of the dishes central to your core cold-weather food memories likely came from a Dutch oven, as it is the ideal vessel for braised short ribs, seafood stew, sourdough bread, and countless other cozy classics. As someone who also loves to cook, allow me to stay true to form—here is everything you need to know about Dutch oven cooking. Read More >> …

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An Underrated (& Simple!) Technique for Fancy-Feeling Eggs

I’ve been trying to spread the gospel of coddled eggs to friends, coworkers, acquaintances—really, anyone who will listen. But I keep getting a similar response along the lines of, “What on earth is that?” I’ll give you the short answer first: A coddled egg is simply an egg gently cooked in a ramekin-like container (outfitted with a screw-on lid) in a pot of simmering water. Safely nestled in their individual vessels, the egg gets cooked by what is essentially a warm bath. Read More >> …

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How to Prevent Freezer Burn Once and For All

Freezers are magical appliances: They allow us to save homemade soups and sauces for months on end, keep ice cream frozen for our daily after-dinner sundaes, and store ice for cocktail parties (a must). As essential as it is to freeze leftovers and frozen pizzas for zippy suppers, freezers aren’t always our friends. In fact, they can sometimes be the foe—namely, when so-called “freezer burn” infiltrates our supply of frozen foods. Let’s get one thing clear: Freezer-burned food is completely safe to eat. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “freezer burn is a food-quality issue, not a food safety issue.” The FDA notes that freezer burn often presents itself as “as grayish-brown leathery spots” on the food in question. So even though freezer burn doesn’t always look or taste quite right, it doesn’t mean your food is spoiled or otherwise harmful if consumed. Read More >> …

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How to Properly Shut Down a Grill

Summer might be halfway over, but I’m determined to make this the season I finally invest in a grill for my backyard. After chatting with plenty of pitmasters, barbecue enthusiasts, and professional chefs, it seems like a charcoal grill is the way to go. (While I love the ease that a gas grill offers, you just can’t replicate that charred goodness a charcoal model can bring.) Still, I do have some hesitations about officially jumping on the charcoal bandwagon. How will I master that perfect char? Trial and error, I suppose. What about creating two cook zones? Looks like I’ll need to be strategic about where I place my coals. And what about putting out my charcoal grill? Oh, right. Though it might seem like a small step to wrap up your grill session, it matters.
“When cooking with fire, it’s very important that we’re responsible for the fire from the moment we start it until it’s…

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How to Steam Carrots Without Cooking Them to Death

One of the easiest side dishes to make is steamed vegetables—like carrots—but they’re also one of the easiest to screw up. One second the vegetables are practically raw and the next they’re an overcooked mess that may as well turn into a mash. So what’s the best way to steam carrots so that they’re actually appealing? From Our Shop our line! Five Two Essential Stock Pot $119

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How to Steam Carrots (No Steamer Basket Necessary) First, are you steaming baby carrots or large carrots? Will they be cooked…

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The Best Vegetables to Grow in Raised Garden Beds

You can Grow Your Own Way. All spring and summer, we’re playing in the vegetable garden; join us for step-by-step guides, highly recommended tools, backyard tours, juicy-ripe recipes, and then some. Let’s get our hands dirty. Every year during the strawberry harvest, I daydream of growing strawberries in a long, narrow raised bed (tabletop height, so I don’t have to crouch, crawl, and squat to pick the berries, which is quite tedious). But a raised bed for my sizable strawberry patch would be a considerable undertaking and expense. Plus, I would need not just one but two beds to ensure a seamless harvest. Read More >> …

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How to Make Soap at Home (Even if You Failed Chemistry)

My experimentations with homemade soap began when I became enamored with making things at home, like maintaining my own sourdough starter, painting my own kitchen cabinets, and repairing my own clothes. Even if time-consuming, I found that doing things myself, from start to finish, was immensely rewarding. It gave me a far greater appreciation for the goods that came my way, and made me a lot more conscious (in a good way) of the quality of ingredients. 
As time went by and my life got busier, my hobbies went on the backburner. However, soapmaking stuck around. It was very complicated at first, and therefore can be off-putting to some, but I’ve actually found it has one of the best effort-to-reward ratios out of all my hobbies. Much like knitting, it’s a meditative activity and a creative outlet. But unlike knitting, just a few evenings or weekends of work can reap great rewards, as well as furnish me…

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You’re Probably Buying the Wrong Light Bulb—Here’s Why

Ever swap out a light bulb at home only to realize its light appears completely different from the rest of the home? You’re not alone. When my husband and I moved into our apartment two years ago, it came with recessed lights—some of them I wanted to keep (like in our kitchen), others I wanted to convert to more attractive flush mount fixtures (hallways and bathrooms) and pendant lights (kitchen island). But once I installed all of them and added bulbs, to my horror, the light they cast just didn’t seem to match. Read More >> …

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What the Heck Are Hemp Hearts, Anyway?

We’ve teamed up with Manitoba Harvest—known for its commitment to high-quality hemp foods—to showcase a protein powerhouse: their hemp hearts. Manitoba Harvest’s hemp hearts are loaded with protein and omegas, and are free from preservatives, fillers, and artificial ingredients. Bonus: They’re grown without herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides, and have almost unlimited recipe applications. Meet the small-but-mighty shelled seeds we’re putting in and on everything, from smoothies to salads: hemp hearts. These soft, chewy seeds are a good source of protein, rich in ALA (alpha-linolenic acid) omega-3 fatty acids, and they’re a great way to add nuttiness and texture to any dish (especially when it comes to breakfast). Beyond morning meals, you can use them in just about anything—even to top something like this garlicky vegan flatbread—which we think makes them a must-have pantry staple. Read More >> …

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3 Easy-Peasy Ways to Cook Green Beans

It can be really easy to screw up cooking green beans. If you look away for just a minute, delicate beans can go from crisp-tender to over-cooked and mushy, and there’s no turning back. Plus when they’re at their peak, green beans have a vibrant green color and lovely spring flavor that shines when they’re barely cooked. Before your beans lose their brightness and a staple side dish is ruined, learn how to cook green beans three ways—boiling, steaming, and sautéing. 54 of Our Favorite Thanksgiving Vegetable Side Dishes
33 Green Bean Recipes That Go Beyond Casserole
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Wait, This Is the Best Way to Mince Garlic?

I come from a family of garlic lovers: The kind of family that fought over the cloves of garlic tucked into sautéed greens at an Italian restaurant. The kind that gifted things like a Garlic Lovers’ Cookbook, complete with a wacky, but very real, recipe for garlic ice cream (full disclosure, I have never attempted it.) Sautéeing garlic with another allium—shallots, onions, leeks, or a combination therein—builds a strong flavor foundation for any dish. It will also make your kitchen smell incredible almost instantaneously (I’ve been dreaming of a “sautéed onion” Yankee Candle for years.) Suffice it to say that I’ve minced a lot of garlic in my day. But it wasn’t until I started professionally recipe testing that I learned the ‘why’ and not just the ‘how’ behind mincing garlic. Read More >> …

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How to Store Fresh Herbs So They Last And Last

Ideally, you’d “store” fresh herbs in the garden, never snipping more than you needed. The chives on your scrambled eggs, the cilantro on your tacos, and the basil on your pizza would always be bright, fragrant, and bursting with life. Alas, the real world doesn’t work that way. To avoid wasting nature’s herbaceous gifts, we must use our ingenuity. There are multiple complex factors influencing produce’s longevity, and most of us don’t have the means, the time, or even the inclination to precisely control for all of them. Conjuring maximum herbal freshness is therefore more art than science. Rather than recommend one approach, let’s discuss the basic elements of freshness, then look at how things can go wrong so that you can respond based on what you observe in your kitchen. Read More >> …

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7 Tomato Paste Substitutes for Pantry Pasta Emergencies (& More!)

Tomato paste is having a moment. Made by boiling down tomato juice into smooth, concentrated form, tomato paste is absolutely packed with umami. Just a tablespoon can transform a braise, stew, or soup, imbuing it with an unplaceable but vibrant richness. Knead it into bread dough for a ruby-red pop, or add it to tomato sauce to make it even more tomato-y. The opportunities are endless, but this rich, sweet vermillion substance is just the kind of thing I’m constantly forgetting on my grocery runs. So if you’re staring down a recipe that calls for some paste and need a quick tomato paste substitute, we have your back. Here are 7 tomato paste substitutes you probably have on hand: Read More >> …

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9 Cream of Tartar Substitutes You Probably Have in the Kitchen

Where would we be without grapes? Think of all the culinary marvels the fruit yields: Jelly, balsamic and red wine vinegars, and of course wine. But lofty cakes, ethereal meringues, and chewy snickerdoodles also owe their existence to another child of the grape: cream of tartar. The white powder is most often found in baked goods, where it serves as a stabilizer, a leavening agent, or a crystallization inhibitor (more on this later). If you’ve just embarked on some baking endeavor only to find your jar of cream of tartar empty, there’s no cause for alarm. There are plenty of substitutions for cream of tartar, you just have to decide which purpose that sub needs to serve. Read More >> …

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9 Very-Clever Hacks to Get the Most Out of Your Oven

We teamed up with LG Studio to share useful hacks for making your oven work smarter, not harder. Using these simple tips and tricks, your baking, roasting, and more is sure to be a success every time. We already know that our beloved ovens are the best for roasting a whole chicken to juicy-crisp perfection, baking gooey chocolate chip cookies, and making the best-ever cheesy lasagna—but what else can they do? Aside from the more obvious uses, a few simple, time-saving tricks will help you get through the busy holiday season—and beyond—without breaking a sweat (or burning something). Read More >> …

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The Simple But Clever Way I Keep My Phone Safe in the Kitchen

I worked in a bakery for years, which means I was covered in flour for years. My hair was covered in flour. My clothes were covered in flour. My shoes and notebook and purse were covered in flour. And my cell phone. That was a bit of a problem. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why didn’t I keep my phone somewhere else, like away from where I was rolling hundreds of pie dough rounds? One very important reason: Read More >> …

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A $0 Trick to Make Your Stinky, Stubborn Jars Smell Clean Again

If there’s a glass jar in our house, there’s a good chance it’s being used to store any number of goodies: batches of minced garlic I like to whir up in my Vitamix, quick pickles, decanted gochugaru (Korean red pepper flakes), a variety of dried spices, remnant soy bean or red pepper pastes. Because the contents of these jars are usually pungent, I normally don’t have any problems using them interchangeably with one another. It’s when I need to fill them with milder things like smoothies and jams that I run into trouble. Read More >> …

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De-Stink Your Onion Hands With This Trick

So, say you’re chopping a whole bunch of onions. Just a hypothetical here. The tears that accompany slicing and dicing alliums are hard enough, but to add insult to injury, the harsh onion stink clings to your hands—even after a thorough washing. If you want a much faster way of getting rid of that smell, skip the soap and rub your hands with a spoon. Read More >> …

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6 Ingredients That Are Cheaper in the Bulk Aisle—and a Surprising One That Isn’t

There are a lot of smarty-pants reasons to buy ingredients in the bulk aisle. It reduces packaging waste (“Thank you!” says Earth). You can buy exactly as much as you want (one slice of dried mango? Sure!). And it saves you money. Or does it? Read More >> …

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A New Genius Recipe for Wildly Juicy Roast Chicken—Without Preheating the Oven

My favorite roast chicken method will always be my first love, a merit badge in confident cooking. Its notoriously high oven temperature and crisp skin are the legacies of Barbara Kafka, the pioneering cooking expert who changed how we think about roasting and much more, and who sadly passed away last week at the age of 84. But I roast a lot of chickens, and Kafka never was one to take “enough” for an answer. For the first time since I latched onto her technique six years ago, I recently added another, very different roast chicken recipe to my any-old-night rotation (pre-requisites for any-old-night status: no advance prep required, an absolute minimum amount of fuss). Read More >> …

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