Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i Food & Wine

2021 ROCCA DI MONTEGROSSI TOSCANA ROSATO ($25) Though darker in hue than Provençal versions, this organically farmed Tuscan rosé from winemaker Marco Ricasoli-Firidolfi is one of the most refreshing, lively, expressive bottles to be had in everyone’s favorite summer wine category. I drank it in Tuscany this spring and plan to drink it all summer long here at home. 2019 CHATEAU MONTELENA ESTATE ZINFANDEL ($45) One of the remarkable “class of 1972” wineries in Napa Valley, Chateau Montelena celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. They’re still going strong, as this spicy, surprisingly subtle red made clear when I tasted it at the over-the-top, gold-themed birthday party they threw for 700 guests at the winery in May. 2020 CLOS SOLÈNE HARMONIE ($88) Earlier this year, I ran a deep-dive seminar…

NEW DEVELOPMENTS in the grilling world have largely centered around accessories—spring-loaded tongs, digital probe thermometers, silicone brushes—until now. Engineers and chefs are putting their heads together to create better grills for smarter cooking, offering unmatched innovation for every level of cookout. OFYR Featuring a 39-inch cast-iron cooking ring balanced over a corten steel fire bowl, the OFYR is at once a firepit, plancha, grill, and conversation piece. Griddle fresh tortillas, caramelize onions and beans, sear shrimp, or set a saucepan to simmer on the cooking ring, or set a grate over the center and cook directly over the coals. (From $2,995, westontable.com) DYNA-GLO PREMIER If meal prep is the name of the game, look no further than the Dyna-Glo Premier Series gas grill. The four-burner model preheats in a snap…

THE EARLY DAYS of the pandemic dragged on with the same banal routine: Zoom University, clocking an embarrassing amount of screen time, and unsuccessfully trying to convince my mother to enjoy natural wine. But then my Smallhold mushroom grow kit arrived. Soon, a clear bag of spore-filled gray sawdust tied up with one of my scrunchies was perched on my bathroom sink. Within a few weeks I had a massive, sculpturesque blue oyster mushroom–it was my Smallhold success story. Smallhold, a specialty mushroom company founded in 2017, is shaking up the mushroom section of the produce aisle. What started out of a shipping container in Brooklyn five years ago is now growing 15 varieties of specialty mushrooms to sell in over 400 major retailers like Whole Foods and Central Market,…

MY INFATUATION WITH PEPPERS began a few years back when I helped out at a retail greenhouse and brought home way too many pepper seedlings. Over the course of that summer in my little vegetable garden, I tended tiny, hot Biquinhos; spicy Lemon Drops; sweet lavender Islanders; plump Aces; trumpet-shaped Carmens; long, glossy Jimmy Nardellos; and a bunch more. As they grew, I marveled at their varied sizes, shapes, and hues. Once they were ripe, I hauled them to the kitchen and got down to tasting. From incendiary to sweet, from thin-walled to fleshy, from leathery to crunchy, their flavors and textures were as varied as their appearances, and I devoured them every which way: raw, grilled, roasted, sautéed, pickled. Yes, I went overboard that summer, and I now make room…

IF YOU WANT A WHISKEY that really speaks to where it’s from, distiller Iván Saldaña Oyarzábal feels you should consider Abasolo. It’s a corn whiskey, made in Mexico, which is essentially the birthplace of corn: Zea mays, to give the ubiquitous ears their scientific name, was first domesticated more than 8,000 years ago in what is now southern Mexico. Originally a wild grass with small, lentil-like kernels, today it’s one of the most planted crops on earth, feeding livestock, turned into sweetener, distilled into ethanol to blend into gasoline, and yes, eaten by us. But Saldaña Oyarzábal, creator of Montelobos Mezcal and Ancho Reyes chile liqueur, had another idea. His whole career has been devoted to plants and what to do with them. He decided to study molecular biology…

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHELSEA KYLE PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHELSEA KYLE New York City CHINTAN PANDYA & RONI MAZUMDAR The duo whose restaurants are changing the way Indian food is seen and experienced in the U.S.—and also happen to be the hottest tables in New York City FIFTEEN HUNDRED PEOPLE. That is the average wait list on a given night for Dhamaka, chef Chintan Pandya and restaurateur Roni Mazumdar’s high-energy Indian restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Reservations open at midnight a month ahead of time, and within a few hours, every table is booked by diners eager to get their hands on juicy goat belly seekh kebabs and cooked-to-order chicken pulao. Dhamaka, one of four Indian concepts in New York City owned by Pandya and Mazumdar, specializes in regional Indian dishes that aren’t…

Summit of Innovation THE OTHER DAY, I pulled out a copy of the March 1978 issue of Playboy magazine for a meeting with some of my new bosses to share the story of how and when this brand was born. The 18-page special insert of The International Review of Food & Wine heralded the launch of a new magazine (the founders shortened the title in 1981), and the document still holds up as a mirror of the times, including smart writing by James Beard and Jacques Pépin and a mock-serious canned-tuna taste test. The founders of Food & Wine recognized an emerging audience of gourmands and delivered an innovative magazine that met the moment. Forty-four years later, we’re still obsessed with innovation, a common thread in our reporting and recipe…

THE BOUNTIFUL HEALTH BENEFITS of consuming fermented foods have been well documented in recent years—and have fueled a global market valued at $58 billion. But the newest trend in fermented foods is not in eating them, but applying them: The skin-care world is tapping into the power of fermentation to create potent products designed to treat from the outside in, combining not-so-modern fermented ingredients with gold-standard beauty staples to create cutting-edge skin-care products that promise to smooth fine lines, mitigate the impact of environmental damage (think pollution, blue light, and UV-generated free radicals), and improve the skin barrier. Here’s how it works: Just as the ancient process of fermentation promotes the growth of beneficial bacteria, known as probiotics, and increases the nutritional profile of certain foods, studies indicate it also…

OK, FIRST THINGS FIRST: There are no oranges in orange wine. And no tangerines, tangelos, clementines, blood oranges, Buddha’s hands, or sumo citruses (citrii?) either. Not a one. Orange wine instead is the popular way of referring to what’s more technically called “skin-contact white wine.” Red wines get their color when the juice from crushed grapes macerates on the grape skins. White wines are typically made by crushing the grapes and then immediately removing the skins. Make a white wine the same way as a red wine—by keeping the juice with the skins as it ferments—and you get a wine that’s anywhere from pale amber to inarguably orange and also has some of the tannins and mouthfeel of a red. This approach is actually far, far older than making white…

I VIVIDLY REMEMBER my first Miami Vice. The time was high summer, the place was Martell’s Tiki Bar, on the boardwalk in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. I had recently turned 21 and was just starting to explore the world of cocktails. The setting called for a frozen drink, but I couldn’t decide between the piña colada and the strawberry daiquiri. Seeing me stuck at a crossroads, the waiter recommended, “Why not have both?” Puzzled, I told him I didn’t want to order two drinks. He pointed me to the Miami Vice, a drink combining the piña colada and the strawberry daiquiri and topped with dark rum. I gave it a try. Bands of white and red swirled around each other in the icy cup, making the palms of my hands…

OPENING A BOKKSU BOX, a monthly mailing of Japanese snacks, is like cracking open a treasure chest for food-lovers: Under the bright orange lid is a hand-picked assortment of edible goodies made by Japanese artisans. You might sample a zesty Yuzu Sake Candy from Daimonji Ame Honpo, a 100-year-old candymaker in Kyoto; or Dondon Yaki, a peppery, tangy, crunchy senbei (rice cracker) named after the sound of the beating taiko drum; or a White Strawberry, a chocolate-infused freeze-dried strawberry, made exclusively for Bokksu. The contents are different every time but always represent the diversity and ingenuity of Japan’s independent food businesses. Although subscription boxes have proliferated in recent years, Bokksu stands out from the rest: With more than 40,000 boxes being shipped to 100 different countries per month, their…

THE BEAUTY OF BIBIMBAP MOST KOREAN RESTAURANTS in the U.S. serve just one kind of bibimbap, usually consisting of beef (most often marinated and cooked like bulgogi), cooked carrots and zucchini, cucumbers, and a sunny-side-up egg, served with a side of gochujang. “Which is all delicious,” says 2021 F&W Best New Chef Ji Hye Kim, but it doesn’t show off the range of the dish. “Bibimbap is regional,” says Kim, who studied the history of Korean cuisine before opening Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “A seaside town may have seaweed, clams, or fish roe in their bibimbap. A mountain town may have foraged mushrooms and ferns.” Part of the appeal of bibimbap is also its versatility, Kim says. “In Korea, a market stall specializing in bibimbap will show…

A PROPER SRI LANKAN MEAL is always punctuated by a sweet, whether one as simple as fresh fruit, or a custard, or a more involved pastry. My favorite sweets are the ones that embody tropical fruit and summer flavors. Mango Fluff (recipe p. 80) is an old standby—one I would consume by the bowlful when I was younger and one that’s always a fixture at Sri Lankan parties. Its fluffy texture makes it a dessert that is light and refreshing, yet still rich with the sweetness of Kesar mangoes. The secret to my recipe is the sweetened canned mango puree, which makes the resulting fluff just sweet enough. Airy whipped cream gives each bite a light and decadent mouthfeel. Another of my favorite summer fruit desserts is my own creation,…

AFTER A TWISTY 40-MINUTE CAR RIDE down rambling lanes and dirt roads, I scoured the leaf-strewn landscape for what brewer Vasilios Gletsos had described in a text to me as “a mound of earth.” Somewhere, embedded in that green watercolor expanse, was a brewery. Finally, there it was: a hobbit hole hidden under the brush. Gletsos waved me through the door, his beers lined up waiting. His purpose, he soon told me, was to “explore the earth,” doing so through fermenting forageable ingredients—with delicious results. As I sipped on one of his chiseled Wunderkammer beers, its taste sharpened with mintlike fall pine tips, I eyed another bottle, this one brewed with rhubarb. These fresh new tastes are emblematic of a movement taking hold in the Green Mountain State. My love…

I CAN VISCERALLY REMEMBER the first aguachile that I ate. Let me set the scene. There I am, in Tijuana, crawling age, clinging to the edges of the coffee table as I wobble toward my dad’s botana (snack): an aguachile of dried shrimp soaked in his concoction of lime juice, habanero, and sea salt, garnished with cucumbers and julienned red onion. From my father, I inherited my hunger for flavors so exciting that they make me dance. He also happens to be the source of my dark sense of humor, and as I advanced on the dish, he didn’t pull it away. I snuck a shrimp. It was an introduction to acid and salt like I had never experienced. I proceeded to cry and pull on my pigtails “as if…

“1,001 household miracles in every roll. Saves food, saves flavor, saves work.”—Reynolds Wrap advertisement, 1947 HAVE YOU EVER referred to aluminum foil as tin foil? That’s a holdover from the early 20th century, when the metal most commonly used to make foil was, in fact, tin. Aluminum foil came about because Swiss industrialist Robert Victor Neher wanted an alternative to tin foil. Tin was rare, while aluminum, which made foil of equally high quality, was easier to source. Plus, tin foil tended to transfer a slight metallic, “tinny” taste to the foods it touched, whereas aluminum foil didn’t present that problem. In 1910, Neher patented the continuous aluminum rolling process and opened the first aluminum rolling plant in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Swiss brands quickly picked up on the merits of…