Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i Food & Wine

2023 BIELER FAMILY DAISY PINOT GRIGIO ($15) This vivacious bargain may not turn the winter of your discontent into glorious summer, as Shakespeare had it, but at the very least, it will turn it into a balmy spring day. The scent of ripe melons comes from a touch of Moscato, and that melony note is accented with fresh pear and citrus zest flavors. 2022 PATZ & HALL SONOMA COAST CHARDONNAY ($40) It’s heartening to see winemaker James Hall back at the helm of the winery he founded back in 1988, which he was able to buy back from industry giant Ste. Michelle Wine Estates this year. This Chardonnay (which he consulted on) is true to his style: rich but never too much so, with layers of complexity. 2023 REEVE BOSCO…

WHEN YOU REPLACE the most basic rubbish bin with one that opens easily and holds in odors, it upgrades the entire experience of working in your kitchen. But the variety of available models can be overwhelming, and it’s hard to know which ones will truly stand up to daily use. To find out, we tested 20 of the most popular trash cans on the market. Whether you want a classic bin, one with built-in recycling, or one large enough for pizza boxes, these are our favorite trash cans for every size and style of kitchen. Every product branded with the Food & Wine Faves logo has received the highest marks from the professional cooks in the Food & Wine Test Lab to help you make smarter purchases. Tap here to find more of…

DESPITE THE IRRITATING over-glamorization of après-ski cocktails in movies, television, and most recently by fashion influencers in flawless-yet-impractical matching snow gear, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as the first sip of a well-made drink after a long day on the slopes. As a novice adult skier whose boyfriend comes from a family of experts, the ritual has become more a part of my life than I ever anticipated—just after lunch, while the rest of the group heads off to ski double black diamonds on the mountain, my mind starts to wander to cocktail hour. Before my first ski trip with his family, I’d imagined après-ski (the French term for the myriad social activities that might follow a day of skiing) would be like in the movies. I’d ski up to…

A STROLL DOWN THE PASTA AISLE at your local supermarket presents you with a panoply of forms, textures, and names: tubular penne, corkscrew-shaped cavatappi, ruffled radiatori. They’re so familiar and classic they feel like they’ve always been around, yet most of them owe their existence to technological innovations from the 1800s that have made them commonplace today. The mechanization of long pastas like spaghetti and vermicelli began in the late 16th century, but up until the 19th century, short pasta shapes were cut and shaped exclusively by hand, traditionally by women. The short pastas we find at the grocery store today only appeared at the end of the 19th century, when new types of dies (the perforated plates through which pasta shapes are extruded) capable of producing intricate shapes were…

Back in Action LAST YEAR, I WROTE ABOUT my kitchen renovation blues while enduring a project that felt like it might never end. At that point, my wife, Jen, and I had been cooking in our basement rec room for almost six months, giving our toaster oven and hot plate a workout while waiting for the kitchen to be completed. The breaker tripped when we made coffee, and our laundry room doubled as a dishwashing station. Fun! To my surprise, that editor’s letter resonated with many of you, who graciously wrote back to commiserate and share your own smart tips for cooking through a renovation. Thank you for being so generous with your ideas—I’ve included some of them here (see “Reader Reno Cooking Tips,” at right). As it turns out,…

MORE AND MORE RESTAURANTS around the country are producing consumer packaged goods (products like sauces, spices, and drinks) that are sold and shipped nationwide. Part souvenirs, part status symbols, these five restaurant-made products are the secret ingredients to elevate weeknight recipes and dinner parties alike—and they make a much better host or housewarming gift than that ho-hum bouquet or bottle of wine you picked up on a whim. KANN COFFEE Made in collaboration with Portland, Oregon–based Deadstock Coffee, each sip of this dark roast from chef Gregory Gourdet’s Portland restaurant Kann is an homage to coffee’s key role in Haitian history. This blend, kissed with vanilla, star anise, and cinnamon, plays especially nice with creamy oat or whole milk. ($36 for a 10-oz. bag, kanncoffee.com) VIA CAROTA SPARKLING FRENCH 75…

PAOLA VELEZ 2021 F&W Best New Chef Current Projects Dōekï Dōekï, Bakers Against Racism Legacy With her whimsical, savory-leaning desserts and nonprofit work, Velez wants to carve out a place in the culture for the “quirky, kind chef.” WHEN PAOLA VELEZ LEARNED she was a F&W Best New Chef in 2021, she initially turned down the honor. She had received several accolades that year for her Dominican-influenced pastry programs at Kith/Kin, Compass Rose, and Maydan in Washington, D.C., as well as for Bakers Against Racism, a grassroots collective that organizes global bake sales to raise money for social justice causes worldwide, which she founded in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. “My fear was that I was rising too quickly without any stabilizing forces in my life,” Velez…

FRANCE’S RHÔNE VALLEY is one of the great wine regions of the world, and its forceful, distinctive reds are, to my mind, the perfect antidote to a cold winter day. Something about the savory power of Syrah in the northern Rhône, and equally the luxuriant richness of Grenache in appellations to the south, makes the bite of winter wind or the whip of sleet in your face vanish instantly. They’re the wine equivalents of sitting in a cozy room by a roaring fire while it’s snowing outside. Covering the entirety of the Rhône would take a book—or two—so instead, I’ve concentrated on a handful of appellations: in the north, the land of Syrah, Crozes-Hermitage and Saint-Joseph; in the south, where Grenache is the dominant variety, Gigondas and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Maybe there…

LET’S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY FIRST. The process of renovating your kitchen ranks somewhere at the bottom of the fun list between a nightmare and a migraine, unless you have the means to take four months off and jet to a villa in Saint-Tropez while the most important room in your house undergoes open-heart surgery. Know this: A renovation is neither a tidy 30-minute HGTV show nor a glossy before-and-after magazine spread. It will change the way you cook. It will test your marriage. It will disrupt the flow of your family. It will cost more than you budgeted for. And it will take longer than you planned for. Fun, huh? Then why do so many of us choose to do it? Because for cooks like you and…

WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING: Why do an unsalted butter taste test when most butters seem to taste the same? How much variance could there possibly be in an ingredient made of milk solids, water, and butterfat (the natural fat found in milk)? As it turns out, each butter brand had subtle nuances that came to light when testing them side by side. Armed with salt-free crackers, we tasted 27 unsalted butters, ranking them for aroma, color, spreadability, and flavor, to find the best butter of them all. BEST OVERALL KERRYGOLD PURE IRISH UNSALTED BUTTER Kerrygold’s butter is the cream of the crop. It has a deep richness (thanks to its 82% butterfat) and sweet, earthy, and grassy notes, and it spreads like a dream. Although it’s unsalted, it has…

IT’S COME TO MY ATTENTION over the years that some of us are neat, and some of us—i.e., me—are decidedly not. The neat people tend to see non-neatness as a moral failing; cleanliness is next to Godliness, as the saying goes. The non-neat, on the other hand, just kind of dump things in random places and see zero evidence of God being ticked off at all. But recently, I decided to organize my kitchen junk drawer, which, I have to admit, had a TNT-went-off-in-here look that was a bit much. I needed help. So F&W commerce testing editor, former chef, and self-professed very neat person Jennifer Zyman stepped in. First, I asked her how a drawer like mine would make her feel if it abruptly materialized in her own kitchen.…

TRINIDADIAN OXTAIL STEW A HISTORICALLY inexpensive cut of beef, oxtails are having a resurgence, and Trinidadian chef Osei “Picky” Blackett, owner of Ariapita in Brooklyn, is part of the push. Similar to other ingredients that were once put in a corner (brussels sprouts and kale come to mind), oxtails are now trending and alluring. And to Blackett, that makes sense—he’s been encountering the increasingly popular ingredient in his frequent travels around the globe. Cut from the tail of a cow, oxtails are easily recognizable: The bone is crosscut into 1- to 2-inch-thick sections, revealing the marrow center that’s surrounded by fat and meat segments in a wagon wheel–like arrangement. A tougher cut with lots of connective tissue, oxtails require slow cooking to transform the meat into succulent, savory bites. Before…

I LIVE PART OF THE YEAR IN ISTANBUL, and my homecomings there always involve a ravenous re-encounter with lahmacun, that blistered, paper-thin, fire-kissed flatbread topped with spicy ground meat. Normally, one devours lahmacun at hazy kebab joints. But last year, I found myself at Seraf Vadi, a high-design restaurant in a district of glossy skyscrapers and malls far from the city center, marveling at the whole-wheat lahmacun crust, which was simultaneously earthy and light under a succulent topping of minced grass-fed Thracian lamb. My excitement continued with the içli köfte, lamb-filled bulgur balls, usually deep-fried but here delicately poached and served with a rich housemade yogurt. There were plump mantı dumplings, too, crisped over a wood fire, and flavorful dolmas of sun-dried eggplants and peppers. Aside from some regional specialties,…