Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2022 / January 2023 i Food & Wine

MY HOMEWORK BEGAN before I’d even packed my suitcase. Viking provided all passengers taking the Longship Forseti’s “Châteaux, Rivers & Wine” cruise with a list of suggested reading that spanned French literature, history, art, wine, and food. A few weeks later, collapsing onto the bed of my modern, Nordic-style stateroom, I paged through an introduction to Bordeaux’s wine regions while surveying the selection of in-room wine education videos. My head was already spinning with grape varieties, terroir, châteaux, and appellations. Would I ever be able to remember all this? Is it possible to flunk a cruise? That’s when I made the wise decision to just grab a glass and have fun. For the next eight days, I drifted along on an elegant 443-foot oasis, joining 141 other passengers for…

When Wenceslaus “June” Provost Jr. comes out to the sugarcane field in New Iberia, Louisiana, the first thing he does is open up a window. Not a house window, but a window through the sugarcane field, an opening that he creates using a tractor. It’s one of the first steps of harvesting the cane and something that he’s done throughout his life, and that his family has done for four generations. Now able to walk in the newly cleared pathway, June beams as he gazes into the row of cane, glowing gold and green under the Louisiana sun on a warm December day. He grabs a 12-foot stalk and pulls the leaves off what he explains are the eyes and joints of the sugarcane. Surrounded by rows upon rows of…

Snack Attack BONILLA A LA VISTA PATATAS FRITAS Jenelle Manzi, New York City Ballet dancer and CEO of the snack bar company Get Golden, loves these olive oil–cooked Spanish potato chips. “They are perfectly crisp and salty,” she says. The paint-can-size container looks great, too. ($55, despanabrandfoods.com) TINY FISH CO. TINNED FISH “Nothing beats a bite of seafood with a glass of wine,” says chef Melissa Perello, who gifts conservas fans these tins from Top Chef’s Sara Hauman. ($42 for 3 tins, thetinyfishco.com) BJORNQORN This vegan popcorn comes in flavors like “earth” (truffle). It’s the perfect cocktail snack, says Chitra Agrawal, founder of the condiment company Brooklyn Delhi. ($43 for 12 3-oz. bags, bjornqorn.com) WEST~BOURNE TOGARASHI CRUNCH This savory snack is a great stocking stuffer, says Mélanie Masarin, founder of…

WINE & SAKE THE COMFORT FOOD OF WINES “Some people have comfort foods; I’ve got comfort wineries, and Sonoma’s Hirsch Vineyards falls into that category. The 2020 Hirsch Bohan-Dillon Pinot Noir ($45) channels summer strawberries and cherries long after the farmers market has bid them goodbye.” —OSET BABÜR-WINTER, SENIOR DRINKS EDITOR, DIGITAL ROSÉ THAT ISN’T JUST FOR SUMMER “Of all the wine I’ve had this year, the Forlorn Hope Queen of Sierra Rosé ($20) left the most lasting impression. It’s unfiltered, medium-bodied, and a bit darker than most rosés. My friends, who couldn’t care less about what they’re drinking, made a point of saying how much they were enjoying it.” —MERLYN MILLER, SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR MOST DELIGHTFUL DRINK “I was first introduced to the adorable Hakutsuru Sake Chika Sake Cups ($5) during a…

AT PEPE IN GRANI in the small town of Caiazzo, 45 minutes from Naples, Franco Pepe and his team knead about 550 pounds of dough by hand to make 700 pizzas a day, six days a week. Pepe is Italy’s most revered pizzaiolo, and his restaurant draws visitors from all over the world. They line up for an hour or more for soft-yet-chewy-yet-crisp rounds of blistered sourdough achieved through his customized approach to fermentation. Pepe is known for his clever, cheffy approach to pizza, which plays with flavors and textures, and for his ability to turn a seemingly basic staple into an art form. The restaurant is not open for lunch, so it’s a rare treat indeed to find myself at Pepe’s counter for a noontime pizza. I’m one of…

IN A FLOWERING GARDEN in the mountains on Turkey’s Aegean coast, at Kirazli Sultan Konak, a boutique hotel and restaurant, cooking instructor Muslume Corak speedily rolls a mound of dough into a nearly sheer rectangle. She cuts it into teensy precise squares before filling each with ground lamb and pinching the sides shut to make manti. Next, it’s time for me and my 10 fellow travelers—all voyaging on Oceania’s Riviera, on a 10-day sail between Trieste, in Italy, and Istanbul—to try. We have to laugh at our clumsiness fashioning such delicate dumplings, but nevertheless toast our attempts with a Pinot Grigio–like 2015 Turasan Emir, an indigenous grape grown only in the Cappadocia region, then feast together on an alfresco lunch. Boiled manti doused with creamy yogurt, lamb-stuffed zucchini blossoms, near-melting…

LAST CHRISTMAS, SAN FRANCISCO CHEFS BRANDON JEW, of the Michelin-starred restaurant Mister Jiu’s, and Evan Bloom, of Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen, embarked on a collaboration. For a few short weeks, both Wise Sons and Mamahuhu (Brandon’s casual Chinese American eatery) offered dishes that combined the chefs’ two food cultures, like corned beef and broccoli with everything bagel seasoning and a sweet-and-sour schnitzel sandwich. This is the kind of delicious cultural crossover we’ve come to expect from restaurants in California. (This is, after all, the state that brought us the bulgogi taco and the sushi burrito.) But this particular collaboration also had deeper roots. For millions of Americans, December 25 means Chinese food. Chinese Americans who celebrate Christmas, like Brandon’s family, often serve a meal that includes both traditional Western holiday…

LAMB BIRYANI IF THERE IS AN INDIAN DISH that signifies celebration, it’s dum biryani. At weddings in India, chefs who have specialized in making biryani for generations are brought in to create the feast centerpiece for hundreds of guests. With its bronzed dome of dough and layers of rice and braised meat, it’s a mesmerizing sight—and intimidating enough that you could be forgiven for thinking that this style of biryani might be a stretch for a home cook. Raleigh, North Carolina, chef Cheetie Kumar disagrees. “Biryani is the best family meal,” she asserts. “It’s like shepherd’s pie but way sexier. If you can make coq au vin or a braised brisket, you can do this.” She suggests a few shortcuts: purchased fried onions (preferably an Indian brand so the onions…

THE HOLIDAYS are synonymous with baking—which can be delightful to some and daunting to others. But whipping up an impressive baked good doesn’t have to mean spending hours in the kitchen. This year, skip the laborious spun sugar, and opt out of complicated pâte à choux. Instead, keep it simple. We reached out to our favorite pastry pros for their least fussy, most festive recipes, each achievable in under 45 minutes of hands-on cooking time. Whether you’re looking for a centerpiece-worthy showstopper like 2020 F&W Best New Chef Camille Cogswell’s Cheesecake Bars with Candied Orange and Pizzelle Crust (recipe p. 64) (featuring ultra-creamy cheesecake—no water bath required!), a giftable candy like chef LaMara Davidson’s Toasted Pepita and Ancho Chile Peanut Brittle (p. 66), or something that’s snackable and make-ahead like…

PEERING AT A SHELF packed with an assortment of culinary books, I make a surprising find that in my mind speaks instantly to the food cred of the book’s owner. There, sandwiched between East, Meera Sodha’s vibrant ode to vegetables, and Vignette, an excellent guide to the 100 wines you should be drinking, by sommelier Jane Lopes, is a copy of Aussie “fish butcher” Josh Niland’s The Whole Fish Cookbook. Niland is one of the world’s most innovative and creative seafood chefs, one who crafts seafood into charcuterie and dry-ages fish. It’s a cookbook for serious chefs, food nerds, and seafood cooks (and for very biased people who are both Australian and a food nerd, like me). But I’m not at a chef’s home, in a kitchen, or at…

New Year’s in America is indelibly associated with resolutions, fresh starts, and, generally, cleaning up one’s act (eating habits included). But if any of that stuck, why would we need to do it again year after year? How much change—or lasting change—comes of all this resolving? More effective, it seems, would be to alter your past so as to have a meaningful impact on your future. I asked six writers whose perspectives and ways with words have drawn me to their work to imagine what a do-over might look like for them, one where food is an important part of the story, but not necessarily a primary subject. Their interpretations of that assignment are each distinctive and provocative. Journalist Liana Aghajanian ponders second chances both possible and impossible with the…