How-To & Diy – FoodWatcher

How to Prep Everything You’ll Need For The Holidays Using This One Knife

With the holidays fast approaching, it’s time to think about your menu(s). Spiral ham for your aunt, extra creamy mashed potatoes for your dad, glazed carrots for that neighborhood potluck, plus an extra tray of green bean casserole for Friendsgiving. To pull all of this off, we need to start with the basics: knife skills. Luckily, our friends at Shun Cutlery have created the ultimate knife for basically every cut—Shun’s Premiere Master Utility Knife is just what you’ll need to expertly slice and dice your way through this holiday season.

We've compiled a brief, but thorough guide to some of the most-used knife cuts you’ll see while making every Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas dinner, plus a few recipes to help you show off your newfound knife prowess.

How to Make Your Carbon Steel Cookware Last For Decades

Carbon steel is cast iron’s more athletic cousin. It heats quicker, moves easier, and when adequately seasoned, maintains a nonstick surface. You can fry an egg on carbon steel, and you should sear a steak on it. You can also toss pasta, fry bacon, sauté asparagus, and blister shishitos. Using the words of chef and Food52 resident Lucas Sin, carbon steel is “a workhorse” and “the perfect piece of cookware for serious home cooks.”

There’s just one thing: To enjoy carbon steel, you need to maintain it. This includes seasoning, washing, drying, and occasionally repairing your cookware. Although none of this maintenance requires much effort, when done right, it enables pieces of carbon steel to perform for decades.

A Guide to Steak Grilling Times

Grilling a steak is among the most iconic summer activities, but for many, it’s also among the most daunting. There’s no worse feeling than investing in a high-quality (read: pricey) cut of meat only to find you’ve overcooked it. Add dinner guests into…

We’d like to help prevent that outcome. So, we asked our pros in the test kitchen to weigh in on how long to grill steak, how to test for doneness, and the differences between charcoal and gas grills.

How to Make Any No-Churn Ice Cream

Like beer cocktails and microwave risotto, no-churn ice cream is one of those things that sounds like it shouldn’t work, but actually totally does. As it turns out, as long as you have the right technique and ingredients, you don’t need any special equ…

Like beer cocktails and microwave risotto, no-churn ice cream is one of those things that sounds like it shouldn’t work, but actually totally does. As it turns out, as long as you have the right technique and ingredients, you don’t need any special equipment to make the creamy, dreamy summer treat we all know and love. To get you started, we asked members of our test kitchen team to break down the process—and share some of their favorite tools for the job. Whether you’re making your first batch or you’re ready to experiment with custom flavors and wacky mix-ins, here’s what you need to know.

35 Genius Summer Desserts That Couldn't Be Easier

What is no-churn ice cream?

Typically, churning is a crucial step in the ice cream-making process: It agitates and incorporates air into the ice cream base as it freezes, which creates a creamy, light texture. On the flip side, if you were to take a standard ice cream base and freeze it sans churning, you’d likely end up with a dense, icy mess. That’s where no-churn ice cream comes in. By being smart about our ingredients, we can mimic the properties of ice cream—namely its creamy, borderline-fluffy texture—without the need for any specialty equipment. The secret? It’s simply the combination of whipped heavy cream and sweetened condensed milk.

Microwave Risotto Is the Ultimate Weeknight Dinner Shortcut

My microwave is reserved, almost exclusively, for reheating leftovers. Occasionally I’ll use it to thaw frozen meat or melt chocolate, but I have never felt particularly inclined to actually cook anything in it. Needless to say, I had some serious reservations the first time I made microwave risotto. But, as it turns out, you can make a pretty convincing risotto in your microwave—even if it is totally cheating.

Risotto is one of those simple dishes that manages to feel fancy despite its (mostly) humble ingredient list. In its simplest form, a risotto is made from just rice, broth, wine, cheese, and butter, though endless variations, featuring different aromatics, vegetables, and meats, exist. At its best, a risotto is creamy and packed with flavor, but the rice itself remains al dente. Containing no cream at all, its rich texture is purely a product of a slow cooking process that requires near-constant stirring.

A Highly Useful Guide to Storing Cheese

This article is a part of Cheese Week—seven days of recipes and stories, all cheese—presented by our friends at Proudly Wisconsin Cheese.
When it comes to cheese, sometimes our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. Ideally, you shouldn’t buy more cheese …

This article is a part of Cheese Week—seven days of recipes and stories, all cheese—presented by our friends at Proudly Wisconsin Cheese.

When it comes to cheese, sometimes our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. Ideally, you shouldn't buy more cheese than you can consume in a few days. However, few of us have a strong enough will to resist the jewel-like beauties of the cheese aisle, despite their often hefty price tag. One thing's for sure: If you're dropping a bundle on a bunch of cheeses, you better make sure to keep them as fresh as possible for as long as possible.

How to Make Mozzarella at Home

For this episode of Dear Test Kitchen, former Test Kitchen Director Josh Cohen and cheese expert Elena Santogade whipped up a batch of perfect, creamy, fresh mozzarella. Watch them mix, stir, and stretch in the video below, then follow the recipe and s…

For this episode of Dear Test Kitchen, former Test Kitchen Director Josh Cohen and cheese expert Elena Santogade whipped up a batch of perfect, creamy, fresh mozzarella. Watch them mix, stir, and stretch in the video below, then follow the recipe and step-by-step guide to do it at home.

Mozzarella

View Recipe

Ingredients

¹/₄

rennet enzyme tablet

¹/₄

cup cold filtered water (to mix with the rennet)

1 ¹/₂

teaspoons citric acid

¹/₄

cup cold filtered water (to mix with the citric acid)

gallon whole milk (non-homogenized is best)

teaspoon sea salt, plus more to taste

¹/₄

rennet enzyme tablet

¹/₄

cup cold filtered water (to mix with the rennet)

1 ¹/₂

teaspoons citric acid

¹/₄

cup cold filtered water (to mix with the citric acid)

gallon whole milk (non-homogenized is best)

teaspoon sea salt, plus more to taste

How to make fresh mozzarella at home

1. Make the Curd

Start by dissolving rennet (on the left) and citric acid (on the right) in water. We prefer the rennet tablets over the liquid rennet. You can order these ingredients online from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, which also has some nifty cheesemaking kits.

How to Make Kombucha at Home

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by our editors and writers. Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.

I went from questioning kombucha, to loving kombucha, to making my own…

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by our editors and writers. Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.

I went from questioning kombucha, to loving kombucha, to making my own kombucha recipe—with a few road bumps along the way.

10 Simple Tricks for Better Home-Brewed Coffee

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by our editors and writers. Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.

If you’re like me, nothing puts you in a better mood than the smell an…

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by our editors and writers. Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.

If you’re like me, nothing puts you in a better mood than the smell and flavor of your morning coffee. However, depending on your personal taste or the season, you might be looking for more than just a simple, hot cup of brewed coffee to start the day.

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 simply melts into any fat. That’s right: You can use kief to make edibles without worrying about preparing cannabis-infused butter or oil ahead of time. Beyond the ease of cooking with it, kief tastes less grassy than flower and packs a lot more potency. In a nutshell, cooking with kief (and other concentrated forms of cannabis, such as hash) yields tastier edibles while delivering a powerful high.