Steak, man. There’s nothing like it. And the best way to cook a steak, bar none, is to cook it sous vide. Sous vide steak means perfectly cooked steak, every single time. No need to worry about “ruining” a pricey dry-aged ribeye; no need to babysit or fuss over your beef to cook it just right. Seal the steak in a bag, drop it in a precisely calibrated temperature-controlled bath, and all you have to do is take a minute or two to finish it on the stove when you’re ready to eat. Our foolproof sous vide method for cooking tender steak cuts produces consistently excellent steaks, cooked to exactly your ideal level of doneness with a burnished sear on the outside. The result is big beefy flavor of meat complemented by aromatic notes of garlic and herbs.  Choose your steak, measure its thickness, choose your preferred level of doneness, and then all you have to do is set the temperature of your sous vide bath and bag up your beef. (For the most flavorful steak, we recommend presearing the steak before putting it in the bag, but it’ll be plenty tasty without that step.) Pull out the steak when you’re ready to eat, give it a quick sear, and serve it up with a silky pomme purée (or a cheesy thrice-baked potato!), and you’ve got yourself a better-than-a-pricey-steakhouse meal that you can make any day of the week.

Sous Vide Steak

This vegan riff on foie gras mousse has all the flavor of fatty duck liver, with none of the distraction of ethical debates. It’s just plants, and it's creamy and delicious!  By using cashews and two powerful hydrocolloids—low-acyl and high-acyl gellan gums—we were able to replicate the texture and richness of foie gras mousse exactly. With a little of the same Sweet Spice mix we use in our classic torchon, and some miso, tomato paste, cognac, mushrooms, and aromatics, it also has the classic flavor profile and umami oomph of foie gras mousse.  You can call it faux gras, call it vegan cheese, or call it imfoiessible pâté ... it doesn’t matter. Serve it up with toast points, and we guarantee everyone will love it.

Imfoiessible Pâté (Vegan Foie Gras Mousse)

Every culture has its fried chicken. Crispy, salty, meaty, and juicy—it’s easy to see why it’s universally loved.  This fried chicken, the signature dish at Pecking House in New York City, is a marriage between Nashville hot chicken and Taiwanese popcorn chicken. A buttermilk brine produces deeply seasoned, tender, and juicy meat, while a mix of modified starches in the flour dredge creates a super craggy, crunchy, and crispy crust. Dipped into chile oil that's been spiked with a hot and numbing spice mix of Sichuan peppercorns, fiery Tianjin chiles, five-spice powder, and MSG, this might just be the most delicious fried chicken ever.

Chili Fried Chicken

Basque cheesecake has got to be one of the most exciting innovations in the annals of cheesecake history. Dreamed up by chef Santiago Rivera at La Viña in Donostia-San Sebastian, it’s a sight to behold: the iconic burnished (not burnt!) top; the oozy, custardy center; and, of course, the complete lack of a bottom crust.
 
Nailing it requires a two-phase bake, starting in a hot oven to brown the top, then dropping the temperature to gently raise the internal temperature of the custard. We pull the cheesecake from the oven well before it hits the target internal temp, allowing carryover cooking to take it the rest of the way.

Basque Cheesecake

Here’s what we love about cornbread: the sweet flavor of peak-season corn, a crispy crust, and a moist, tender interior that’s both light and super rich at the same time. We turned all those dials up to 11 to make this almost brownie-like riff on the corny quick bread.  While that places our cornbread firmly on the northern side of the North/South divide (southern-style cornbread is savory and crumbly, as opposed to sweet and cake-like), none of us are fans of how tooth-achingly sweet some northern-style cornbread can be. By subbing in some isomalt for the sugar, you can produce a cornbread that’s sweet but not too sweet, with most of the actual sweetness coming from real, peak-season frozen corn.   And that isomalt also does a lot more work than simply reducing the sweetness—it keeps the crumb tender and produces an almost glassy crispy crust.  It’s the perfect cornbread—rich with butter, packed with corn flavor, with a crispy-crunchy crust and a super-tender crumb.   EDITORS’ NOTE: We’ve updated this recipe by scaling down the batter by 10% to address the fact that readers were having issues with blending the batter and achieving a vortex. We’ve increased the amount of butter to provide a specific quantity for greasing the pans. We have also changed the baking procedure, preheating the pans at [f 450], which produces crustier cornbread with a better initial rise, and then baking at [f 365] to get the perfect interior texture. If you prefer to use the original recipe, we’ve included it as a tip at the end of the recipe before the make-ahead and storage instructions.

Rich as F*¢k Cornbread

Tonkatsu: It’s big in Japan. We’re not just talking about popularity. Some of the best tonkatsu spots offer up golden fried pork cutlets made from a wide variety of cuts, and some of them are absolutely massive. Think 2-inch hunks of juicy pork with a single rosy hue from edge to edge, surrounded by a crispy and airy shell of a crust that seems to defy gravity. This recipe gets you that—the most epic tonkatsu you’ve ever seen. For the pork, use a well-marbled and meaty piece of pork collar, and transform it into super-tender thick-cut chops with a long sous vide cook. For the crust, ditch the store-bought breadcrumbs and use Nama Panko—fresh breadcrumbs made from Shokupan—that fry up into an ultra-crisp and light coating. Is it a little stunty? A little over-the-top? Yes, of course, it is; that’s the point. It’s a cut(let) above.

Ultimate Sous Vide Tonkatsu

Katsu meets egg salad in this ultimate mash-up. You’ve maybe never heard “ultimate” and “egg salad” in the same sentence. But we’re sure that once you try this sandwich—where the texture of a katsu sandwich and the flavor of egg salad collide—you’ll totally agree.  Imagine the perfect egg salad sandwich. Tender white bread loaded with a mixture of chopped hard-boiled eggs, creamy mayo, tangy Dijon mustard, crisp celery, a bit of brininess from pickles or capers, and maybe a pinch of paprika.  In this ultimate egg salad sando, we swap those hard-boiled eggs for a thick egg patty that’s breaded and fried katsu-style. We’re leveling up the textures here. Instead of a sandwich that’s mostly soft, you get to enjoy layers of soft, crisp, and crunch.  This recipe is wicked simple and will make four sandwiches. The egg base can be prepared days in advance and keeps well in the fridge, so if you’re not feeding a crowd, you can spread your egg sandwich enjoyment over several days! EDITORS’ NOTE: We’ve updated this recipe with an improved method for lining the loaf pans for cooking the egg custard. Some readers found the parchment paper liner for the mold floated when the egg mixture was added; we have changed the procedure so the mold is lined with aluminum foil instead. If you want to level up this sandwich even more, make it with our new shokupan milk bread.

The Ultimate Katsu Egg Salad Sando

Outdoor cooking with live fire is deceptively simple. Fire, heat, smoke, and some way to get food near that heat—a grate, a hot stone, a stick—and you’ve got dinner going, baby. But there are all kinds of apparatuses we use to give us control over the fire—to control its intensity, its smoke—and allow us to either capture or disperse the heat it provides so we can exert precision control over whatever it is we’re cooking. Each one is distinct, with its own strengths and weaknesses. So how do you know which one to choose? How does the one you have in your backyard compare with all these others?

A Guide to Grills and Smokers

Burnt ends—super barky pieces of barbecue brisket carved off the point—are amazing, but they have one problem: There’s never enough of them. You only get a few precious morsels off a whole smoked brisket. There are a couple solutions to this problem: You can just be satisfied with this rare cook’s snack, like eating asparagus only in spring or tomatoes only in the summer. Or you can transform an entire brisket—or some other pricey cut of beef—into “burnt ends,” cutting it up and smoking the heck out of those pieces. But there’s a better way: Just use pork belly. Ingenious Kansas City pitmasters came up with this porky iteration as a way of satisfying the demand for burnt ends without breaking the bank (or messing with beautiful briskets). And it’s every bit as delicious as the beefy version, because pork belly seems designed by a deity for the task: rich with fat, robust enough to withstand a long spell in the smoker, and easy to portion into perfect cubes with tons of surface area for the smoke to stick.

Barbecue Pork Belly Burnt Ends

Pork belly burnt ends are a thrifty barbecue innovation, a variation on the burnt ends that come off a barbecue brisket. But while they give you a workaround for getting burnt ends without having to smoke a pricey cut of beef, they still require a long cook in a smoker. But what if you don’t have a backyard, let alone a backyard smoker? Use sous vide and cook ’cue in the great indoors! Cooking pork belly low and slow with a little smoked salt and a few drops of liquid smoke produces some killer results without any of the hassle of babying a smoker all day. Once the belly is tender, all you need to do is portion it into pieces, toss them in some barbecue rub and sauce, and finish them in the oven.

Sous Vide Pork Belly Burnt Ends

It’s hard to top chile crisp—people went crazy for it because it’s delicious: a flavorful condiment that’s at once rich and aggressively seasoned, packed with tons of texture from crispy crunchies. Like that other texture-packed condiment, salsa macha, it improves everything it gets spooned over because of that one-two punch of flavors and textures. But what if instead of “improving” it, you tweaked it to produce a specific flavor profile? How about one that captures the smokiness of great barbecue? And what if, instead of the chile heat of the original, you packed the condiment with spices you’d find in a barbecue rub, grinding them coarsely so they offer extra crunch, along with fried pecans, sliced garlic, and shallots? That’s what we did, and this condiment gives you a taste of great ’cue, any time you want, even if your smoker stuff is packed up for the winter or you live a sadly smoker-less existence.

Barbecue Chile Crisp

Korean barbecue isn’t just about all the delicious meats; the sides and banchan are at least half the draw. And one of the best of them is Korean steamed eggs, or gyeran-jjim (계란찜). Served piping hot and bubbling, this souffléd egg custard has an almost cloud-like texture—impossibly fluffy—and it’s deeply, deeply savory. Steamed eggs are traditionally prepared in a stone crock that’s set over a burner, the heat-resistant material of the pot dispersing the heat evenly, so the eggs aren’t hammered to oblivion. But this method takes a little effort and some dedicated cookware. So how do we hack that process? Just use a microwave—which is what a lot of restaurants do, too! There’s no hovering by the stove; there’s no stirring; and there’s very little cleanup. Just mix, pour, and let Chef Mike take over.

Microwave Korean Steamed Eggs (Gyeran-Jjim)

Tsukune might just be the best chicken meatballs in the world—so why not turn them into the best chicken burgers in the world? Tsukune are delicious because they directly address the fact that ground chicken preparations can be lean and dry. By using thigh and leg meat—already rich with fat and connective tissue—and supplementing the meat with ground up chicken skin, yakitori cooks imbue the meat mixture with extra fat and collagen, which will convert to silky gelatin as the meatballs cook. These burgers take the same tack, incorporating skin and (if you like) cartilage into the patties. A three-stage cooking and glazing process, starting with low, smoky heat and ending with a ripping sear, nets you a deeply savory patty that’s complemented perfectly by a nest of raw, shredded cabbage and a soft and squishy bun.

Tsukune Chicken Burgers

Shrimp scampi is an easy dish to upgrade: It’s already delicious, so why not just take the broken sauce of garlic, butter, white wine, lemon juice, and parsley the shrimp usually swim in, and fix it.  That means creating a silky-smooth butter sauce—a beurre monte, essentially—with deep shellfish flavor by building the emulsion with a shrimp stock made from the heads and shells.   Thanks to a little xanthan gum, the sauce is super stable across a wide temperature range so you can use it to gently poach the shrimp and then jack up the heat right before serving, so it’s ripping hot and ready for dipping some crusty bread or tossing with pasta.

Perfect Shrimp Scampi

There is no reason this recipe should work, but it does. It’s the perfect blend of chewy, crispy, buttery, chocolatey goodness—it’s the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. It’s also the average chocolate chip cookie. What does that mean? After baking, testing, and analyzing the 10 best chocolate chip cookie recipes in the world for our parametric analysis, we wondered what would happen if we averaged all the baker’s percentages for all the ingredients in these recipes to make a perfectly average cookie formula.   The result? The best chocolate chip cookies we’ve ever made. This is the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. Or should we say—the Ultimate Average Chocolate Chip Cookie.   EDITORS’ NOTE: We’ve updated this recipe to make the step instructions clearer, swapped out hard-to-find chocolate pistoles for chips, and added a tip for a simplified “dump-and-mix” cookie dough method. We have also given a range for the bake time, based on feedback from commenters, to account for variance in home ovens. If you prefer to use the original recipe, we’ve included it as a tip at the end of the recipe before the make-ahead and storage instructions.

The Ultimate Average Chocolate Chip Cookie

Beurre monté—a warm butter emulsion—is a secret weapon in French kitchens. It’s a cooking medium, a welcome addition to almost any dish, and a sauce in its own right. The tricky bit about beurre monté—and the reason why its use is largely confined to professional kitchens—is that it needs to be kept warm. Too hot and the emulsion will break and the milk solids and butterfat will separate from the water. Too cold and it’ll just be warm, spreadable butter. The key is to set it somewhere where the temperature is right in the Goldilocks window and all the beurre monté magic can happen, which is why it’s often used as a precision temperature-controlled cooking medium for poaching delicate proteins, like shellfish and fish.  But if you’re working with an emulsion, there’s a hydrocolloid out there that can stabilize it. This recipe for beurre monté uses xanthan gum to heat-stabilize the fat-in-water emulsion, which means it’ll stay emulsified within a much larger temperature range. You can even chill this beurre monté down, stash it in the fridge for a couple weeks, and warm it back up again. That’s right: It’s bulletproof, and, as a result, super-convenient to have around. The secret’s out. Use it to make Precision Butter-Poached Lobster and spoon it over at the end for a silky and delicious sauce. Add a spoonful to some sautéed vegetables for a shimmery shiny glaze. Add a spoonful to a broken pan sauce to bring it back together and zhuzh it up a little. The world of beurre monté is yours.

Bulletproof Beurre Monté

Top-tier fried potatoes have a couple things in common: crispy on the outside, creamy and tender within. That goes for (good) fries, it goes for tots, and it goes for air-fried spuds, too. Put those two qualities together with a stunning, Michelin mille-feuille look and what do you get? The potato pavé, aka the crispy and creamy potato preparation that’s designed to live on fine dining restaurant menus and blow up on your social feeds. 
 
You might see it served as a canapé—a squat square of potato layers almost magically fused together, its crispy exterior adorned with a dollop of crème fraîche and a mound of caviar. You might see it as part of the set for a meat course, alongside Poulet Farci and a pool of demi-glace. Or, you might serve it up as the fanciest tater tot of all time. You can do whatever you want with this fun little bit of potato wizardry. 
 
It’s a little bit of a process, sure, but the payoff is 100% worth it. And if you want to really up the ante, check out our leveled-up version: the Potato “Croissant!”

Potato Pavé

Creamy, buttery chicken liver pâté—it’s the stuff you order at a French bistro, not something you make at home. Maybe it’s never crossed your mind—it’s just one of those preparations that seem to exist outside the domain of the home kitchen, its liver-y beginnings perhaps better left a mystery. So, imagine your friends’ surprise at your next dinner party when you serve up grilled bread topped with a gorgeous rose-colored smear of the stuff, drizzled with honey, and topped with mounds of flaky salt. One bite and they’ll think they died and went to Paris, minus all the berets and attitude. With nothing but a simple sous vide setup, a blender, and some super-cute mini mason jars, chicken liver pâté is yours to master. EDITORS’ NOTE: We recently retested this recipe and found that it’s just as delicious when made with melted butter as it is when made with clarified butter (as called for in the original version). We’ve updated the ingredient list to call for melted butter—with clarified butter as an option—to simplify the process slightly without compromising on the result.

Chicken Liver Pâté

Picture this: It’s the first barbecue of the summer, and you’ve got guests gulping beers in the backyard. And then there’s you: You’re an hour in and still stuck behind the grill, sweating beneath your novelty apron, flipping burgers a few at a time and worrying about who is getting fed and who isn’t. We love grilling as much as anyone, but if you’re manning the Weber, you’re missing the party. There’s another option: Cook those burgers sous vide. Now before you start freaking out in the comments, let’s revisit that summer shindig: A half hour before the first knock on the door (or the night before), you mix ground beef with egg, portion them out, and shape them into patties. Then you drop your patties in the heated water for an hour while you prep the toppings. Your first friends begin arriving, and you’ve got a bunch of perfectly cooked patties that you can quickly sear in a skillet or char on the grill, leaving you plenty of time to pop open a bottle and start socializing. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  This technique makes a mighty fine burger patty and requires far less micromanaging than traditional ones—leaving you time to relax and have fun with your nearest and dearest. Not convinced? Try it. We can’t wait to hear what you think.

Sous Vide Burgers

We’ve tackled Texas-style barbecue brisket before. We’ve developed two indoor recipes that get you as close as you can get to the real thing without a smoker, using both sous vide and a low-temperature oven. But we’ve never done the real deal smoked brisket—until now. To get it right, we turned to pro pitmaster Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ, who honed his craft for years at some of the top barbecue spots in Central Texas. Joe lives, breathes, and dreams about barbecue. He walked us through every detailed step of the brisket process: how to plan the cook, how to trim brisket, how to wrap it, how to slice it. And, of course, how to smoke the dang thing! Best of all? He showed us how to make pro-level brisket with a regular old charcoal grill. No offset smoker required. This is the best brisket you’ll ever have. We guarantee it.

Ultimate Texas-Style Barbecue Brisket

Pre-made salmon burgers are one of those things I refuse to buy. They’re really easy to make yourself in very little time, and they’ll be much better than anything you can buy in a store.  The most important part of making salmon burgers is buying the highest quality salmon you can find. Once you’ve got your high-quality salmon, you want to keep it cold and work fast. Salmon is a fatty fish—and for this recipe, fattier is better; if you don’t mind buying farmed salmon, it’s excellent in this application for that reason. But that fat melts very quickly, making it difficult to form patties, let alone getting them to stick together. To help with forming the patties, and to give the patties a snappier texture, I combine chunked salmon with 0.5% of its total weight in kosher salt and add an egg yolk for every pound in a food processor and pulse it to create a coarse grind. The salt cures the proteins slightly, encouraging them to bond with one another and firming them up, and the egg yolk both adds a little extra richness and juiciness and interferes with the protein-bonding, which prevents the mixture from getting too snappy—we aren’t making salmon sausage. The mixture is still pretty loose when it comes out of the food processor, so I use a couple of tricks to help with patty formation. The first is I use a measuring cup to portion the salmon out. Filled up, the measure should yield consistent portions of about 235 g (1-cup measure) or 200 g (3/4-cup measure). A little nonstick spray in the measuring cup helps get the whole portion out cleanly onto a square of parchment, which has also been spritzed with nonstick spray, and set on a rimmed baking sheet. Instead of forming the patties in my hands, I spritz my (clean) hands with a little more nonstick spray and just form the patties on the square of parchment. Once I form all the patties, I transfer the baking sheet to the refrigerator to let the patties chill for anywhere from one hour to overnight. As the patties chill, the salt will do its work on the proteins, firming them up, and the salmon fat will also set up and become more firm. However, even when thoroughly chilled, these patties will stick if you throw them on a hot grill. So my final tip is to give the patties a little “presear” in a hot pan on the grill, just setting the exterior so that they’ll hold together once you transfer them to the grill for a little char and smoky flavor. Served in a bun with some instant-pickled lemon slices, these patties are everything the supermarket ones wish they could be: pure salmon flavor, snappy texture, juicy on the inside and lightly crisp on the outside.

Perfect Grilled Salmon Burgers With Instant-Pickled Lemons

Whether you want to eat less meat or you just freaking love mushrooms as much as I do, this portobello burger recipe delivers everything you want in a burger: a deeply seasoned and juicy “patty” with a light char and substantial bite, packed with umami and spice.  My goal was to maximize flavor and texture and minimize the amount of time the mushrooms spend on the grill, which can turn the caps leathery and dry. With a few tips and tricks, it’s actually pretty simple, and you can customize the flavors however you want. The main takeaway? The best way to grill portobello mushrooms is...use the microwave. Portobellos take a long time to cook on the grill; they contain a lot of water, and you want to get that bland moisture content out of the mushrooms so they become mushroomy and delicious. Scoring the mushroom caps and sticking them in a microwave—putting the mushrooms in a bowl, wrapping it in plastic, and nuking them for about two minutes—extracts a lot of moisture (about 25% of the mushrooms’ weight) very quickly, and cooks them completely without drying them out. The microwave takes care of the texture, but I wanted the burger to be tasty, packed with umami, almost “beefy.” So once the mushrooms are cooked, I marinate them in Worcestershire sauce and Montreal steak seasoning, which makes them taste super savory and steaky. The cross-hatching on the caps also helps them hold onto more sauce and seasoning, so you have an even tastier burger. Combined with the Swiss cheese, you get a nice, synergistic mix of guanylic acid (from the portobellos), inosinic acid (from the anchovies in the Worcestershire), and glutamic acid (from the cheese), which makes the final burger super savory. The mushrooms can go on the grill immediately, but they can also hang out in their marinade for up to four hours, which gives you a lot of time to get your mise and your two-zone grill setup ready.  When you’re ready to grill, the caps go on the hot side of the grill, gill-side down, for just about two minutes, which is just enough time for a little char and smoky flavor to develop, then I flip them over and move them to the middle of the grill, top with sweated, sweet onions, and Swiss, and let them hang out until the cheese is melted and the buns are warmed. Finally, I smear some of the leftover butter from sweating the onions onto the buns, add a little barbecue sauce, then slide the portobello patties in, top with lettuce, and they’re ready to serve. This recipe goes in a classic mushroom/Swiss cheese/onion direction, but you can take the technique and flavor the burger any way you like. You can marinate the cross-hatched, microwaved caps in whatever you want: soy sauce, lemon pepper, fresh herb oils, chile oil...anything is fair game. The one thing you want to pay attention to is buying the right mushrooms. When selecting your portobellos, look for ones that have caps that are still semi-closed. They’ll be thicker and more evenly textured after cooking, which will help with even grilling and produce a more substantial, “meaty” bite.

Super-Savory Grilled Portobello Mushroom Burgers

When you make Beef Short Ribs or Smokerless Smoked Chicken as mean as ours, it’s easy to see why plain ol’ potato salad is rarely the star of the barbecue show. Here, however, we treat spuds like the leading ladies they are, dressing them with a supporting cast of delicious condiments, eggs, and irresistible crunchy stuff. It starts with cooking baby Yukon Gold potatoes sous vide to highlight their firm texture. From there, we use some our favorite homemade fridge items, including Japanese (Kewpie-Style) Mayo and a pickled trifecta of mustard seeds, onions, and cucumbers—all stuff that can be made days ahead of time. Along with the yin and yang of creamy mayo and crisp pickled ingredients, this dish is big on texture. We amp it up even more by adding hard-boiled eggs, plus blanched celery for snappy bite. With those dense, creamy potatoes setting the stage, every ingredient adds something to the party, creating what we humbly think is the perfect side dish for barbecue.

The Ultimate Potato Salad

Hoping to find a vibrant summer side dish that’s easy to make? You want to cook your sweet and savory corn sous vide with Joule Turbo! You’ll have crisp corn and the bright flavor of fresh herbs, along with golden drippings of butter. It tastes of summer sunlight. Best yet? This dish requires no active cooking time—all you need is your trusty Joule Turbo and the patience to wait before digging in. If you’re going to any summer picnics—even a quiet gathering in your own backyard—this is the dish to bring. Change it up each time you cook it by using different herbs—basil and tarragon, for example—or spiced clarified butter. Look at that: You’ll be making it all summer long.

Crisp Corn With Butter and Fresh Herbs

Great baked macaroni and cheese is just great mac—tender pasta coated in a thick, creamy cheese sauce—bubbling in a baking pan beneath a blanket of crunchy, golden-brown breadcrumbs. But all too often that isn’t the case. Most baked mac and cheeses are stodgy and gluey, with the pasta hammered beyond belief. It’s a shame, because it doesn’t have to be this way. Our version solves all those issues. Using everything we’ve learned about melting salts and cheese sauce science, we’ve made a super-smooth sauce packed with sharp cheddar flavor that coats and clings to macaroni like a dream. And by adjusting the cook times on the pasta and bumping up the ratio of sauce to elbows to account for how much liquid they can absorb, we ensure that every spoonful is creamy, gooey, and never stodgy.

Ultra-Creamy Baked Mac and Cheese

Maybe you love grilled tomatoes. Maybe you don’t. We don’t know your life. We do know this: you are going to love these. They are jammy, smoky, and plenty sweet, and they pack a wallop of fresh tomato flavor.  We start by dividing the tomatoes in half and removing the pulp and seeds. To this juicy goodness, we add olive oil, fresh herbs, salt, pepper, and balsamic vinegar. We opt for a fresh bay leaf and white balsamic, but you can sub in your favorites with abandon. We mash this up, then grill our tomatoes skin-side up over medium heat. We flip them, add the pulpy mixture, and sprinkle those tomatoes with sugar to ensure sweetly balanced flavor. Then we just let them cook slowly until they look exactly the way we like them. Served as is or sprinkled with parmesan cheese or other toppings, these tomatoes taste amazing alongside grilled steak or chicken, or with a simple summer pasta dish. Try them once, and we predict they will quickly become part of your warm-weather repertoire—no matter how you felt about grilled tomatoes to begin with.

How to Grill Tomatoes That Will Blow Your Friends’ Minds!

Sai ua is a coarsely ground pork sausage seasoned with red curry paste, aromatics, and spices. Although the dish originated in Northern Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar, it’s so delicious it’s become popular all over Thailand. The combination of lemongrass, cilantro, makrut lime leaf, and red curry paste produces an herbaceous flavor profile that’s complemented beautifully by the smoky aroma the sausage takes on once it comes off the grill.  The key to any sausage is getting the texture right. For sai ua that means finely mincing fibrous lemongrass and makrut lime leaves before incorporating them into the meat, and getting the right lean-to-fat ratio for the pork. You can use coarsely ground pork from a butcher (usually that means shoulder), but grinding a mix of shoulder and belly supplemented by pork fatback yourself will ensure that you end up with a juicier sausage with a higher proportion of fat.  Casing the sausage helps to keep it juicy, too. Using the cooler side of a two-zone grill to gently cook the sausage to temperature before finishing them on the hot side ensures the casings will be tender and nicely snappy without splitting, and the sausage will be super juicy. If you don’t want to deal with the casings, the meat mixture is also excellent when formed into sausage patties, which you can sear and serve as they are or as the star in a Fried Egg and Thai Sausage Breakfast Sandwich. Serve sai ua with Nam Prik Num, sticky rice, and crisp raw vegetables like green cabbage and cucumbers, for a bright and refreshing meal.

Northern Thai Herbal Sausage (Sai Ua)

Sizzling sisig has been the best-selling dish at Pig and Khao ever since we opened. It’s the ultimate drinking food: salty, acidic, crispy, chewy, fatty, and meaty—it almost demands being served alongside a bucket of cold beers. Just like at Chili’s, once we run one sizzling platter out of our open kitchen, more orders come flying in—for pig’s head, not mid fajitas. A traditional Filipino dish, sisig transforms a braised pig’s head into a plate of pork hash with all kinds of different textures, from gooey and rich (the jowls, the cheeks) and deliciously chewy (the ears) to crispy and satisfyingly crunchy, with little hits of char and smoke in the mix, all dressed in a bright, savory-sour dressing. Getting that mix of textures and flavors requires some work—you have to braise, grill, and sear the pork—but the effort is way worth the reward. I even go a step further and add a deep-frying step for a crispy pig ear garnish (optional but so worth it!). There are two keys to the dish’s success: picking the right pork cuts and braising them for the right amount of time since they contain different amounts of connective tissue. I don’t use the snout or skin, which can make the chopped meat mix lean a little too gelatinous and fatty. And you have to pull the jowls out of the braise well before the ears; otherwise, they’ll be hammered by the time the ears are done. While the very best sisig is made with a pig’s head, you can make it with other more familiar pork cuts, such as shoulder and belly; it’ll be almost as good. For me, the only ingredients that are non-negotiable are pig ears, because of their amazing texture, and the (completely untraditional) finely cut makrut lime leaves, which complement the citrus in the dressing.

Sizzling Pork Sisig

This Thai-inspired riff on a breakfast sandwich is an excellent way to put Sai Ua sausage to use in a less traditional way. In fact, it’s so good that you might even consider making the sausage specifically for this sandwich. As a bonus, that means you don’t have to mess around with casings and a sausage stuffer. Along with richness from the liquid yolks on crispy-edged Thai-style fried eggs, the sandwich gets an umami boost from Nam Prik Num-spiked mayo, which has charred notes from pounded blistered chiles and funkiness from fish sauce and shrimp paste complementing the creamy Kewpie. The smoke flavor on the sai ua is key. When grilling links, the sai ua picks up that aroma from charcoal. But for patties, cold-smoking (you can hack a countertop smoker, or use a Smoking Gun Pro) before searing them in a skillet is the way to go. This is what we do at my restaurant Pig and Khao to make up for the fact that we don’t have a charcoal grill.

Fried Egg and Thai Sausage Breakfast Sandwich

You can find grilled pork belly all over the Philippines: Marinated in an acidic, slightly sweet, and very savory soy-based mixture to tenderize and season the meat, the pork belly is then cooked from start to finish on a grill, the marinade basted generously over the belly until the outside is sticky, caramelized, and charred. Cooking pork belly from start to finish on a grill is tricky, especially when it comes to dialing in the perfect not-too-tender texture, with just the right amount of chew. It takes time to convert all its ample collagen into gelatin, and without careful heat management, the sugars in the marinade will burn long before the pork is anywhere near cooked. And, since it’s a cut with a lot of fat, it’s prone to flare-ups. But if you cook the pork sous vide before finishing it on the grill, you can spend more time relaxing and less time babysitting the belly on the grill. The belly will have the perfect texture before it even hits the grill, which lets you focus on quickly building up and caramelizing successive layers of glaze while finishing it over hot charcoal.   Served with some garlic-shrimp paste fried rice and a pickle—I’ve been obsessed with this pineapple-kimchi atchara I’ve been making at home, which has sweetness and heat that complement the rich belly—and it’s my perfect meal.

Filipino-Style Grilled Pork Belly (Inihaw na Liempo)

Nam prik num, a roasted green chile condiment, is in a class of Thai relishes that have a consistency somewhere between a paste and a sauce. It’s the ultimate flavor booster for grilled meats and raw vegetables, and it’s a great stress reliever, since making it requires smashing stuff into teeny-tiny pieces with a heavy stone. Win-win! Nam prik relishes, like curry pastes, are traditionally prepared using a granite mortar and pestle. The preparation method accounts for their unique texture and the volume of flavor, which is best described as loud. A mortar and pestle can quickly pulverize small quantities of ingredients, releasing lots of flavorful and aromatic compounds without turning everything into a purée. Aggressively flavorful ingredients like fermented shrimp paste and fiery chiles guarantee the paste has personality, especially since the aromatics get charred on a charcoal grill (which softens them up, making them easier to pound into a paste) before being smashed. Fish sauce, palm sugar, and lime juice round it out with salty, sweet, and acidic notes.  It’s equally delicious when served alongside a spread of Sai Ua (Northern Thai sausages), raw vegetables, and pork rinds, as it is when stirred into mayo for a sandwich spread with some punch. Once you get the hang of pounding things to a paste in your mortar and pestle, nam prik num is the ultimate effort-to-reward ratio pantry secret weapon.

Nam Prik Num (Thai Roasted Green Chile Relish)

Pla gapong neung manao is a classic Thai dish consisting of steamed fish served in an acidic broth with lots of minced garlic and fresh chiles. It’s as easy to prepare as it is impressive to serve and tasty to eat.  The fish is scored, stuffed with lemongrass, gently steamed, and typically served in a fish-shaped heated serving platter with a chamber that can accommodate hot coals or a can of Sterno so the dish is bubbling hot when it's served. The fish is doused in a cooked sauce made with lime juice, minced garlic, sliced shallots, and vibrant chiles. Garnished with a tangle of fresh cilantro, it's an incredibly aromatic and beautiful centerpiece to a meal. The heated serving platter intensifies the aroma of the fish and its broth, but it’s entirely optional—just make sure you use a serving platter that can accommodate all of the broth. I like to shingle thin slices of lime over the top of the fish, because it looks nice and adds an extra aromatic bump from the oils in the lime zest, but that, too, is optional. Be sure to pile the minced garlic, chiles, and sliced shallots high on top of the fish before adding the cilantro. Pla gapong neung manao may be a simple dish, but it’s a classic for a reason. A bit of tender fish, scooped up with some of the deliciously sour broth, bits of minced garlic, chiles, threads of shallots, and cilantro, paired with steamed jasmine rice ... it’s the perfect bite: salty, aromatic, sour, spicy, bitter, and just a little sweet.

Thai-Style Steamed Fish With Garlic and Lime (Pla Gapong Neung Manao)

How do you transform a chicken into a Michelin-starred dish? You make poulet farci, a fancy French term for a fancy chicken-stuffed roast chicken crown! Inception chicken, incroyable!   You get all the best parts of a perfect roast chicken—browned skin and juicy breast meat—but with the added bonus of a luxurious mushroom-and-herb-flecked farce, made with the dark meat, layered between the skin and breast.  It’s an absolute showstopper of a dish and makes for the perfect holiday centerpiece for a small gathering.

Poulet Farci (Chicken-Stuffed Roast Chicken)

Tri-tip—aka Newport or Santa Maria steak—doesn’t get much love, and that’s a shame. It’s super flavorful and beefy, and like our other favorite, under-appreciated cut, chuck, it can be prepared as a showstopping roast or as a killer, budget-friendly steak. Cooking tri-tip properly can be challenging. It’s a whole muscle of uneven thickness; the direction of the grain changes about halfway through the muscle; and, since it comes from the rear leg, it can be tough when cooked too rare or too well-done. Cooking tri-tip sous vide addresses two of these challenges: It’ll cook evenly from edge to edge, and you can dial in your preferred doneness and texture. Not only can you get a perfect medium-rare steak every time, you can also control tenderness simply by extending the cooking time. For this tri-tip, we provide two options: steaky with just the right amount of chew or melt-in-your-mouth tender. Separating the tri-tip into two pieces makes it easier to figure out which way the grain runs, which will make it easier to slice against the grain once the beef is cooked sous vide. It also slightly increases the surface area of each piece, so you can add more of the aromatic blackening spice and get a higher ratio of blackened crust to rosy meat. You can serve the tri-tip all by itself, and it’ll be the star of any cookout. But when it’s dressed with our Grilled Tomato Vinaigrette and paired with a simple grilled radicchio and gem salad with roasted pine nuts and goat cheese, it’s this summer’s steak salad stunner.

Blackened Tri-Tip Steak Salad

Super Lemon Sorbet

Porchetta—a whole boned out pig, seasoned, and roasted until the skin is crisp and the meat is meltingly tender and juicy—is almost impossible to get right at home. We say almost impossible because it can be done, it’s just a project. We enlisted the help of master butcher Kevin Smith to show how it’s done with our Ultimate Roast Porchetta, replete with tips and detailed butchery demos so you can confidently execute it yourself. But we also wanted to develop a porchetta recipe that’s more approachable and forgiving. Unlike our roast porchetta, this sous vide version doesn’t require a special order cut of pork from a craft butcher, there’s no five-day minimum waiting period to air-dry pork skin, and you don’t need an advanced degree in butchery or knot-tying.  This is delicious, easy, hands-off porchetta that you can start tonight with a piece of pork belly from the grocery store and have it on the table for an epic dinner tomorrow, without ever breaking a sweat. It gets you most of the payoff of great porchetta—succulent, juicy, well-seasoned pork—with a fraction of the effort.

Easy Sous Vide Porchetta

If you love the Cinderella meatloaf that is pâté en croûte and you get a little thrill when you see a knife slide through a perfectly made beef Wellington to reveal its glorious insides, then you’re going to love this pithivier.  A pithivier is basically a French puff pastry pie. It originated as a sweet treat—layers of puff encasing something like frangipane, as in the iconic galette des rois, but the pie evolved to include savory variations as well. In some fine-dining French restaurants, savory pithiviers have become exercises in luxury—our Ultimate Pithivier is a great example, with its layers of squab breast, foie gras torchon, and chicken-and-mushroom farce. But enjoying a pithivier doesn’t have to involve a pilgrimage to a Michelin restaurant.  This level-one pithivier is a great entry point for cooks looking to dabble with fancy, layered, puff pastry pies. It demonstrates many of the core techniques of pithivier construction, and in doing so, also offers instruction on some basic operations in the French kitchen—working with puff pastry, making farce, transforming humble ingredients like ground beef and chicken thighs into a delicacy that’s both delicious and visually stunning.

“Meatloaf” Pithivier

This recipe is payback for all the times you’ve had frozen yogurt and wished you were eating ice cream instead.  Frozen yogurt always sounds good in theory. A sweet, creamy, and light frozen treat, with a little of that lactic acid tang. You could brighten it up with fresh fruit, but it shouldn’t need it. But a lot of the time, frozen yogurt isn’t good; a lot of the time, it’s just kind of icy.  Our recipe puts the ice cream in fro-yo, bolstering the yogurt with milk and cream, adding in nonfat milk powder to improve the texture, and turning to stabilizers to guarantee that the creamy treat you churn up stays creamy in the freezer. It’s so good, you won’t even want to add any fruit.

Yogurt Ice Cream

Dirty rice is an iconic Creole dish of seasoned rice mixed with chopped up, cooked down offal, often chicken livers and giblets. The “dirty” in the name refers to the speckled brown coloring the rice takes on once the livers and giblets have been mixed in. Deeply savory, with a pronounced minerality from the liver and other offal, it’s one of the all-time great side dishes. Fried rice is an iconic Chinese dish of rice tossed in a wok with finely cut vegetables and proteins. The best fried rice consists of cooked rice, coated in fat so that each individual grain is distinct, tossed in ripping-hot wok over the flames of a high-output gas burner, which periodically ignite aerosolized fat to produce the inimitable smoky flavor known as wok hei.  What this recipe asks is: What happens if you made dirty rice, but with Chinese fried rice technique? It’s one of the most popular sides that we serve alongside our Chili Fried Chicken at Pecking House. We borrow “the scrape” technique from Cajun cuisine, in which a purée of chicken liver is smeared onto a cast iron griddle and cooked until deeply browned on the bottom, and then it’s scraped off the griddle and chopped up into fine bits with a spatula. We also use the Cajun “trinity”—celery, green bell pepper, and onion—to hit that distinct flavor profile. But we cook everything in a ripping-hot wok, and we use the standard techniques for making great fried rice: cooking, cooling, drying, and fluffing the rice beforehand, so the grains of rice remain distinct; cutting the vegetables into the finest of dices, so they cook to “tender-crisp” in seconds; and, of course, using a high-output burner so the flames lick the fried rice as it’s tossed just over the lip of the wok, for wok hei. Each grain of rice is coated in oil (and a little butter, for richness), and each bite has a little minerality from tiny speckles of charred chicken liver, a little sweetness from the onion, and a little grassiness from the celery and bell pepper. Seasoned with salt and a little MSG, it’s a side that works incredibly well with strongly seasoned mains (like our Chili Fried Chicken) but can also stand on its own as a light meal.

Dirty Fried Rice

Break out your cornballer, folks, because it’s time to fry some cornballs! Hush puppies are basically fried cornbread nuggets. Packed with cubes of smoky tasso ham, cheddar, and sliced scallions, these nuggets are crispy, light, salty, tangy, and slightly sweet from the corn—the perfect side dish. Our batter uses a mix of cornmeal and all-purpose flour, enriched with buttermilk and eggs and leavened with baking powder. Mixing the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients in stages helps prevent overmixing, which would develop the gluten in the flour a little too much, and it keeps the crumb light and almost cake-like.  To boost the sweetness, we serve the hush puppies with “apple honey.” No, it’s not honey made in an apiary on an apple orchard—it’s a syrup made from freshly pressed, unpasteurized apple cider that has the same viscosity as honey at room temperature. Pasteurized cider—or cider that has been treated with enzymes to remove pectin to improve the product’s clarity—won’t work in this application. Since the texture is produced by pectin’s gelling qualities, the cider needs to start with an ample concentration of pectin. With the added sugar and the natural acidity of cider, gently reducing the liquid will transform it into a golden, flowing syrup that tastes distinctly of apples. Call it “vegan honey”! Serve the crispy, golden hush puppies up with a pot of apple honey and a honey wand alongside, so you can drizzle as little or as much as you like, and you might just forget about anything else on the table.

Cheddar-Tasso Hush Puppies With Apple Honey

There are countless ways to break down poultry, depending on the culinary tradition you’re working in and/or the way you plan to use the various parts. For example, breaking down a bird yakitori-style requires a different approach than breaking down a chicken for Chili Fried Chicken. This method for breaking down a chicken yields 10 bone-in pieces—two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and four breast pieces—plus a back that can be used to make stock. It’s commonly referred to as a “country-cut,” and it’s the best method to use for making classic Southern-style fried chicken or a stew. The process is designed to produce serving pieces of relatively consistent size, which makes it easier to nail cook times, and it also preserves the integrity of the skin, particularly on the bone-in breast pieces.  Let’s get into it.

How to Butcher a Chicken: 10-Piece Country Cut

When you make a Texas-style brisket, you end up with a lot of trim. And one of the best things you can do with that trim is grind it up and make smoked brisket burgers. They’ve got everything you love about smoked brisket, but they only take a couple of hours instead of 14 (or more!). Rich and juicy, with a beautifully smoky crust that’s reminiscent of the best barbecue bark, they’re an upgrade on your regular old backyard grilled burgers, not least because the low-and-slow smoke—which makes it easy to nail whatever internal temperature you like—dries out the exterior so you can get a killer sear. While nothing compares to a masterfully smoked brisket, these burgers come very, very close.

Smoked Brisket Burgers

People think Texas barbecue is all about beef: thick slabs of tender, smoky brisket and Lone Star State–sized beef ribs. But Texans also smoke some killer pork ribs. Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ gave us the rundown on how to make the best Texas-style spareribs. Like brisket, they’re a study in moderation: completely tender, but with a little bite; seasoned with a judicious amount of salt and black pepper to get a nicely textured bark; and a spare lacquering of barbecue sauce, applied right toward the end, bumps up the flavor while allowing the taste of pork and smoke to really come through. We’ve done ribs before but never ribs like these. Our sous vide ribs, apartment ribs, Kansas City-style oven ribs, and smoked ribs recipes will all get you a stellar rib dinner, but they all use baby backs. This recipe uses whole spareribs, and they’re smoked from start to finish on a regular old charcoal grill—no offset smoker required.

Texas-Style Barbecue Ribs

Once you’ve trimmed, seasoned, smoked, wrapped, and rested your barbecue brisket, it’s time to slice it. Just like every other technique associated with producing Texas-style barbecue brisket, the method for slicing it up is tailor-made to the preparation, designed to minimize waste and ensure that every slice that comes off the brisket has structural integrity and is surrounded by a continuous layer of undamaged bark. We asked Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ to show us how it’s done. Grab your serrated bread knife and your perfectly cooked brisket, and let’s get into it.

How to Slice Barbecue Brisket Like a Pro

Trimming a brisket properly is the first step in making a great barbecue brisket.  Trimming helps the brisket cook more evenly, producing even bark formation; golden, rendered fat; and juicy meat. The goal for barbecue pros is to produce a smoked brisket that’s cooked in a way that every single slice will satisfy discerning paying customers. So, if you want to serve competition-worthy brisket, start by trimming your brisket like a pro.

How to Trim Brisket Like a Pro

Wrapping is one of the key techniques for making great barbecue brisket.  The wrap can be used for two purposes: to help rest a finished brisket or to help finish cooking a brisket that needs a little help getting to the “memory foam” tenderness we’re looking for in the flat before pulling it off the smoker to rest. For resting, the wrap ensures that every part of the oddly shaped cut of meat cools at a similar rate, so all those hours you spent smoking the brisket don’t go to waste. As a cooking finishing move, the wrap allows you to bump up the temperature of the smoker in the final stages of tenderization without drying it out or burning the bark. We asked pitmaster Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ to demonstrate three techniques: two butcher paper methods—a beginner and a pro-level wrap—and a new-school “foil boat” method.

How to Wrap Barbecue Brisket Like a Pro

Smoking a Texas-style brisket takes time—a lot of time—and patience. Transforming the oddly shaped cut of meat with two distinct muscle groups and tons of connective tissue and intramuscular fat so that it can be cleanly sliced, with each slice consisting of tender, juicy meat surrounded by a distinct ring of bark, is a careful balancing act of time, temperature, and moisture levels.  And even when you’ve accomplished that perfectly, serving it to your family and friends at a reasonable hour requires serious scheduling skills. There’s no point in making the perfect brisket if you make everyone wait around until 11 p.m. to eat it! Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ helped us create this smoked brisket timeline to give you all the information you need to know to serve your perfectly smoked brisket at its peak, at whatever time works for you.

Plotting the Barbecue Brisket Timeline

Chilaquiles—crisp fried tortilla chips simmered in salsa and topped with fried eggs—sit in the pantheon of great breakfast foods. When done right, they can be texturally amazing, with freshly fried tortilla chips that stay crispy even after being coated and tossed in sauce. And if that sauce uses as its base a brick-red salsa roja that’s made with charred tomatoes, roasted garlic,  and toasted guajillo and árbol chiles? They’ll be super, super tasty. Chilaquiles are all about customization, about gilding the chip-and-salsa lily. You can use another salsa (our salsa verde, say) or a combination of red and green (for some “A+ for effort” chilaquiles divorciados); you can top them with fried eggs, carne asada, shredded chicken, or carnitas; and you can garnish them with a shower of cilantro, sliced serrano chile, crumbled queso fresco, dollops of crema, whatever you like!

Chilaquiles

Take a trip to Ensenada, Mexico, with these super-crispy fried fish tacos. Battered strips of fish, swaddled in corn tortillas, anointed with a simple tomato salsa, shredded cabbage, and mayocrema. These fish tacos are all gas and no brakes. The key is in that batter. We use a beer batter, bolstering the malty notes of a crisp Mexican lager with chicken bouillon powder (MSG, baby!), oregano, honey, and yellow mustard, so the crust is super tasty all on its own. To get it extra crispy without becoming tough, we use a mix of wheat and rice flours, which limits gluten formation, and we use both baking powder and vodka to create a lattice-like network of starches and wheat proteins that fries to a crisp in a just a couple of minutes, ensuring that the fresh fish (as fresh as possible, please!) is perfectly cooked.

Ensenada-Style Fish Tacos

Birria has exploded in popularity here in the States over the past few years and for good reason. Tender, braise-y meat swimming in a rich, spicy, and acidic consomé—what’s not to love? It’s great on its own, in tacos, quesadillas, and even mixed into instant ramen cups. If your local taqueria has recently added quesabirria to their menu, it’s most likely being made with Tijuana-Style Beef Birria, which can be great, no argument there. But you know what’s even better? The GOAT birria from Jalisco: birria de chivo. I’ve been making goat birria at my family’s restaurant, Birrieria Zaragoza in Chicago, since I was 12 years old. Like croissants, this birria is a three-day process (that’s why most folks leave it to the pros to make both). The goat is dry-brined, steamed, marinated in mole, roasted in lard, and served with a lightly fermented and simmered tomato consomé. It’s out-of-this-world delicious. And if you can’t make the trip to Chicago, now you can make it at home.

Jalisco-Style Goat Birria

Guacasalsa isn’t guacamole. And you won’t have to break the bank for a bag of avocados like some irresponsible millennial to make it, because it doesn’t contain avocados at all.  Sometimes called salsa falsa (“fake sauce”), guacasalsa is one of Mexico’s greatest taco toppers and culinary slights of hand. Its super creamy and bright green appearance is giving avocado, but you won’t find any in the ingredient list. Instead, green (and spicy) serrano chiles are cooked down with aromatics, blended with blanched cilantro, and emulsified with oil to yield a thick and creamy salsa. It’s said to have been born out of necessity, created by taqueros for whom avocado was too expensive to purchase or simply unavailable, but it’s now gained popularity on its own merits. The texture and heat level is the perfect complement for meaty tacos like tacos al pastor, carnitas, or carne asada.

Guacasalsa

Real-deal porchetta is a beautiful thing: A whole, boned-out pig, seasoned with fennel and garlic, roasted until the skin is crispy and glassy and the meat is meltingly tender and juicy. Chop it all up for a delicious mix of lean and fatty meat with shards of crunchy skin, stuff it into a sandwich, and you’ve got one of the most iconic Italian street foods. Making it is obviously a chore—like whole hog barbecue, it’s almost exclusively done by professionals who sell to large crowds. And a lot of places choose to go with a more manageable preparation, using pork belly and loin to approximate the blend of meat, fat, and skin of a whole pig. But even the smaller preparation is extremely hard to do well, and it’s often done poorly. This recipe gets all the details right, but it’s a project. It requires a special order cut of high-quality pork, time to properly dry out the skin, some butchery technique, a sharp knife, and a two-stage cooking process.  The skin: Nothing can ruin a beautifully roasted pork belly and loin like hard, impossibly chewy skin. There are two keys to getting pig skin super crispy in an oven: getting it dry and cooking it hot. The less moisture in the skin, the quicker it dries out and crisps in the oven, and using an intense blast of heat right at the start of the cooking process rapidly converts any remaining moisture into steam, puffing the skin up so as it dries it forms a glassy, crunchy crust. The meat: Porchetta should have assertively seasoned meat, and it should be luscious and juicy, both of which are challenging because it consists of a lean, whole muscle that’s technically “overcooked” and dry above [f 140] encased in a very fatty, tough cut that’s only palatable when thoroughly cooked through to a higher internal temperature of [f 170].  Our process is engineered to nail every one of these goals: -Using a specific cut of pork—skin-on belly with the loin attached—guarantees that the loin will nest neatly in the belly, with enough skin to completely the entire roast. 
-Air-drying the pork in the fridge dries out the skin and intensifies the flavor of the meat.
-Trimming the belly guarantees that you have enough skin to fully encase the roast.
-Butterflying the loin maximizes surface area for seasoning.
-Scoring the skin encourages fat rendering during roasting.
-A high-heat start puffs and crisps the skin, and a low-temperature roast gently brings the meat up to temperature. While it isn’t a whole pig, we get that it’s still a big endeavor, but there’s no arguing with the results. This is the ultimate roast porchetta.

Ultimate Roast Porchetta

Say goodbye to London broil and say hello to the London Royale!  London broil is a value steak, typically cut from the round, and it may be the worst named steak in the world. The cut doesn’t exist in London, for one thing, and this tough cut should never, ever, be broiled.  Treat it with care, however, and you can turn this inexpensive cut into one of the most delicious steaks—so delicious that we decided to rebrand it as London Royale.   Since it’s a tough, lean cut, the best way to cook it is super rare—blue rare, as some people call it. With a brief, hard sear on all sides, the center should be just warm. Sliced as thin as possible and then doused in hot browned butter infused with garlic and rosemary, this is a beef carpaccio fit for royalty.

London Royale Seared Beef Carpaccio

There are tons of ways to roast potatoes, but this is one area in which Brits really excel. They might just make the best crispy roast potatoes ever. They start by parboiling extra-large chunks of potato until the outsides are softened and the surface starches are gelatinized, but the interiors are still raw. The parboiled pieces get aggressively tossed to rough them up, producing a fluffy, mashed potato–like surface coating. Once roasted in a hefty amount of beef fat, the outsides crisp up beautifully as the insides cook up tender and fluffy like the best baked potato.
 
They’re an integral component of a classic Sunday roast, but they go well with pretty much anything—steak, chops, chicken, you name it.

Ultra-Crispy Roast Potatoes

When a beautifully cooked hunk of beef hits the table at a steakhouse, you know what to do: Roll up your sleeves and go to town. 
 
Steak is beauty, steak is life, and that’s true whether you use a razor sharp steak knife and a fork, or you grab the dang thing in your hands like the glorious carnivorous animal you are and down it in huge, honking bites. There’s no wrong way to eat steak. 
 
However, we believe that when you’re served a whole, unsliced steak at a restaurant, there is a way to slice it on the plate that maximizes enjoyment—making it more tender and more delicious. And it isn’t as simple as “slice against the grain”; it’s about taking into consideration the unique attributes of specific steak cuts, their disparate muscle groups and fat content, when the only tools at your disposal are a steak knife and a fork. 
 
We turned to master butcher Kevin Smith of Seattle’s Beast and Cleaver to fill us in on how he likes to cut up three “trophy” steak cuts that people love to order at steakhouses—filet mignon, porterhouse, and bone-in ribeye. It’s a master class in enjoying the best beef cuts to the absolute max.  
 
WHAT YOU’LL NEED:
Perfectly cooked steak (porterhouse, filet, ribeye)
Steak knife
Fork

Tips & Tricks: How to Carve Steaks for Maximum Tenderness

The porterhouse is the king of steaks.   The unique pleasure a porterhouse provides is that you get two steaks in one. It’s a cross section of the short loin that contains two prized cuts—a New York strip and a filet mignon—separated by a big old bone.   Like a tomahawk, a porterhouse ain’t cheap, and we certainly wouldn’t fault anyone for taking a safe sous vide or reverse-sear cooking approach to protect their beef investment, ensuring a perfect edge-to-edge cook. But if you’re willing to take on a little risk, we think a porterhouse is at its best when cooked in a hot pan, basted in butter, and finished in a low oven to intentionally yield a wonderful gradient of textures and temperatures within one mammoth steak.  When you’re cooking a 3-pound steak that can feed a crowd, variety is a good thing. Folks who like their beef rare can feast on slices of strip or filet from closest to the bone. Like you beef more well-done? The slices from the narrow end of the strip are perfect for you. Like chewing the fat? Wait until you try the knob of golden fat attached to the bottom of the filet, which eats like roasted bone marrow. A properly cooked porterhouse has a little something for everyone.

Ultimate Porterhouse Steak

Chinatown barbecue shops with char siu, roast duck, and soy sauce chicken hanging in their front windows specialize in a variety of foods collectively called siu mei—a catchall term for meats often roasted over an open-fire. There are few foods as emblematic of siu mei than Cantonese roast pork belly, or siu yuk—fragrant, succulent meat hiding beneath a uniform layer of golden brown, super-crispy skin. This version is a calculated spin on the traditional process of roasting a side of cured, skin-on pig over an open fire, utilizing a few modern-day techniques.  We cook the pork sous vide, ensuring a consistent, luscious texture throughout the meat. The low, slow process of sous vide also renders the otherwise tough skin soft and pliable, which makes pricking the skin—an essential step in creating siu yuk’s characteristic crispy, bubbly, crackled crust—light work. To guarantee the skin crisps and puffs, we air dry the cooked pork for three days, and then blast it in a hot oven (ideally, an air fryer). The result is a delight in textures and flavors: silky, salty, melt-in-your mouth meat and a deeply golden brown, crispy-crunchy skin.

Crispy Cantonese Roast Pork Belly (Siu Yuk)

We love a good hash brown—crispy, golden brown, just greasy enough, the perfect sidekick to any morning fast-food run. But what if we took all those qualities and engineered in even more texture?  Just like the ones at your favorite fast food joint, these are super crispy, but because we leverage a little starch science and use a combination of mashed and grated potato, and pure potato starch, they’ve also got a unique texture that’s reminiscent of mochi. Extra crispy, pleasantly chewy and stretchy, with perfectly textured shreds of potato, it’s the upgrade you never knew hash browns needed.

Crispy-Chewy Hash Browns

Egg foo young is a distinctly Chinatown dish that’s been a mainstay in Chinese menus as far back as the mid-1800s. And it’s not hard to see why: It’s basically a deep-fried, savory omelet packed with all kinds of meats and vegetables, and draped in velvety, umami-rich brown sauce. It’s crispy, it’s savory, it’s a little greasy, and it’s deeply satisfying.    This recipe puts a new spin on the takeout classic, but cranks up the crisp factor to 11, drawing inspiration from Thai crispy omelets, or khai jiao. It’s crispier and craggier than a traditional egg foo young, but with a super-light texture. And best of all, it’s not greasy or dense.

New School Egg Foo Young

Why should Cronuts, kouign-amanns, or croissants have all the crispy, multi-layered fun? Why can’t potatoes get the lamination treatment? We call this the potato “croissant”: a golden-brown, buttery, crispy-on-the-outside, creamy-on-the-inside rosette of deep-fried potato slices. You can call it 100% delicious. This idea came about while developing our Potato Pavé. We wanted to get all those layers but make them all crispier and prettier. And we did it.

Crispy Potato “Croissants”

The true test of any Cantonese restaurant is its beef chow fun. It has to be seasoned properly, the beef has to be tender, the noodles need to be slightly chewy, and—above all—it has to have the right amount of wok hei, the smoky, singed quality of properly stir-fried food.  This recipe gets you restaurant-caliber beef chow fun at home. The most important part is using fresh, homemade hor fun, since the noodles are long, elastic, and nicely chewy even after saucing and getting tossed around the wok. Store-bought noodles won’t give you the same results, and making them yourself gives you a leg up on most restaurants. And the classic technique of using baking soda to marinate the beef makes it tender and improves Maillard browning.  Ultimately, the success of this dish is dependent on proper stir-frying technique and producing wok hei, which is very difficult if you don’t have a burner with enough heat output to ignite aerosolized oil as you toss your food. If you’re using a wok on a relatively weak home stovetop burner, you have to focus on cooking in small batches to maintain a high enough heat to properly sear the ingredients without letting them steam. If you’re committed to leveling up your wok hei game and have outdoor space, cooking on a high-output outdoor wok burner is the way to go, but it’s cooking at warp speed—you have to work quickly and efficiently, toeing the line between perfectly cooked and straight up burnt.  It takes practice, but once you get it down, you’ll be rewarded with real deal beef chow fun: tender-crisp vegetables; deeply browned beef; chewy, sauce-slicked noodles; and the intoxicating aromas and flavors of wok hei.

Beef Chow Fun

Hello, breakfast! Ooey-gooey sous vide egg yolk, Fried Egg White Foam, and smoky maple syrup—all delicately layered in a cup. That’s how we do first meal. But who are we kidding? This is a killer dish for any time of day.   This recipe was originally inspired by Alain Passard’s l’Arpège Egg. Passard’s dish consists of a perfectly poached egg yolk topped with a sherry vinegar–infused cream and a drizzle of maple syrup. We sometimes like ours with a bread component (toasted cubes of brioche work great), and we top it with our Sweet Spice. Tie it together with a Fried Egg White Foam for an American diner breakfast by way of Willy Wonka. EDITORS’ NOTE: We’ve updated this recipe to provide more detailed information about its preparation, including instructions for making picture-perfect eggshell serving vessels. We’ve adjusted the holding temperature for the sous vide egg yolks and Fried Egg White Foam so they can be held in the same sous vide bath; and we’ve updated the recipe steps to improve clarity. If you prefer to use the original recipe, we’ve included it as a tip at the end of the recipe before the make-ahead and storage instructions.

American Toast (ChefSteps Breakfast Egg)

This is roast chicken, perfected. It’s what every other roast chicken recipe in the world promises but doesn’t deliver: a beautifully browned bird with actually crispy skin and super tender, super juicy, perfectly cooked meat. The process isn’t quick, but it’s worth it: Inject the bird with brine, let it air-dry for three to five days to dry out the skin, then use a two-step cooking process with a long rest in the middle to slowly bring the internal temp up, and then blast the exterior to get that crispy skin without drying out the meat. EDITORS’ NOTE: We retested and updated this recipe to streamline the process. We found the poaching step before air-drying the bird to be unnecessary and found that the air-drying step could be reduced to three to five days. We also offer alternatives for people who can’t (or don’t want to) hang a chicken in their fridge or oven, and we’ve included settings and directions for using a professional Rational oven and a home countertop oven.

Ultimate Roast Chicken

We all know the stories. “The Ugly Duckling.” “The Frog Prince.” “She’s All That.” We can’t help but root for a seemingly homely hero who undergoes a transformation that reveals the true beauty lurking just below the surface. And everyone lives happily ever after.  
 
Our favorite culinary version of that fable is the one that stars the humble beef chuck roast, a cut often overshadowed by its two polished pals, tenderloin and prime rib. Ridiculously inexpensive and often unfairly packaged as low-quality stew beef, chuck is in fact one of the most flavorful cuts on the cow. It’s a relatively tough muscle, so it’s got tons of beefy flavor, but it also has a fair amount of connective tissue. The trick is to bring out all that beefy succulence while slowly transforming the tough parts into a tender roast you can serve slice by silky slice.  
 
The best way to turn a chuck roast into a centerpiece worthy of a fairy tale feast is to cook it sous vide. We’ll walk you through the process, including techniques for trimming and trussing—the roast equivalent of removing a pair of oversized glasses and adding a little lipstick—plus presearing for maximum flavor. Once the chuck roast comes out of its tenderizing temperature-controlled bath, we cover it in an herbaceous rub and finish it in a hot oven to get a beautiful crust. Carve it up into generous slices and serve it up to your flabbergasted friends and family, wicked stepsisters, and all.

Herb-Crusted Sous Vide Chuck Roast

A well-made, oven-cooked prime rib is a thing of beauty. Just ask the denizens of the UK and her former colonies, who have served that stuff at holiday feasts since around the Industrial Revolution. It’s bloody delicious, govna. But it’s also expensive, which is why we seldom eat it outside the festive season—and why its preparation inspires plenty of hand-wringing.  So while we love a holiday tradition as much as the next guy dressed in a Santa suit, we recommend that this year, you cook that gorgeous hunk o’ meat sous vide. For one thing, your roast is guaranteed to come out just the way you like it—always important when we’re working with the pricey stuff. And then there are the results: silky, oh-so-juicy meat that boasts an incredible amount of beefy flavor. More good news: instead of shooing small children away from the oven as you nervously monitor dinner, you can spend some time making feast-worthy side dishes, wrapping last-minute gifts, or watching Love Actually for the umpteenth time. (All hail Emma Thompson, our one true sovereign.) Adapted from our own traditional rib roast recipe, this method calls for some trussing and trimming, plus a rub of fresh herbs that crisp up when we give the beef a little post-cook sear in the oven. You can skip the nips and tucks or ask your butcher to perform them. And if you don’t like the herbs we list here, ask your own favorite sage cook if she has thyme to make some suggestions, or just see what bay wants. Point is, you got options. So go forth and make the best rib roast you’ve ever eaten, secure in the knowledge that your meat will come out perfect every time. Because that, dear holiday host, is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

Herb-Crusted Sous Vide Prime Rib (Rib Roast)

A canelé is a classic French pastry made from eggs, milk, flour, butter, and sugar. These little two-bite morsels encapsulate everything you want in a pastry: a delicate balance of sweet and savory flavors and a crunchy caramelized crust that gives way to a custardy interior. Pastry enthusiasts who evangelize canelés will tell you that the real things are available only in some fairy tale town tucked away in Bordeaux—where canelés originated—to which you most certainly cannot travel. And perhaps the elusive French baker who created them also died long ago, again decreasing your chances of ever experiencing this French culinary treasure. But part of our mission is to make the impossible possible. With this recipe and the proper copper molds, you can make canelés that are worthy of selling at any patisserie in France. Nestle into your breakfast nook with a café au lait and a handful of canelés, and create your own little slice of Bordeaux.   EDITORS’ NOTE: We’ve updated this recipe to employ a two-phase baking process and a beeswax-clarified butter coating for the molds. The ingredient amounts and ratios for the batter are the same, but if you prefer to use the original recipe, we’ve included it as a tip at the end of the recipe before the make-ahead and storage instructions.

Canelés

The reason most people only ever eat oysters at restaurants is they don’t want to shuck ’em at home, which doesn’t make sense to us. We love slurping oysters at restaurants as much as anyone, but we don’t have any problem serving them up at home. But maybe that’s because we know shucking oysters isn’t a big deal—in fact, once you get the hang of it, it’s downright easy. Here are four ways to shuck oysters: the traditional way, a variation on the traditional way, and two methods for doing big batches of oysters in no time at all. With these methods in your back pocket, you’ll be able to perform master oyster shucking duties no matter what kind of oyster feast you’re preparing, whether it’s a shucker’s dozen for dinner with a special someone or a gross for your Ultimate Seafood Tower.

How to Shuck Oysters Four Ways

Not for the first time, we find ourselves wishing we could just reach through this screen and hand you a bite of food: Once you taste these crispy-skinned sous vide turkey legs, you’ll never cook your holiday bird any other way. The gentle application of heat for 24 hours in a sous vide bath transforms the tough turkey legs, making them velvety-tender, intensely succulent, and super-juicy, as the tough collagen they contain is converted to gelatin. Once crisped in a hot pan, they’re unforgettable enough that they could be the superstar of your Thanksgiving table, but they’re also simple enough to prepare that you could batch-cook a bunch and serve them any day of the week.

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