Food & Wine June 2025

2022 PIERO MANCINI CANNONAU DI SARDEGNA ($22) On a trip to Charleston, I headed to Tutti, a new pizza place from the owners of Graft Wine Shop. Chilled glasses of this juicy Sardinian red paired perfectly with a stellar pepperoni-and-Calabrian-chile pizza. Owners Miles White and Femi Oyediran teamed up with chef Anthony Guerra to make this a do-not-miss spot. 2023 MATTHIASSON LOS CARNEROS CRESSIDA VINEYARD VERMENTINO ($32) Charleston’s Sorelle features a gorgeous dining room and innovative cooking from chef Nick Dugan. His branzino, filleted tableside, is delicious—and it pairs beautifully with viticulturist Steve Matthiasson’s crisp, stony take on a classic Italian white wine variety. Kudos to lead sommelier Angel Prado for the suggestion. NV LAURENT-PERRIER LA CUVÉE BRUT ($65) I had the honor of being inducted into the Ordre…

Life in Jars AS MUCH AS I ENJOYED LEARNING to make jam from scratch in this issue (see “Get Into a Jam” on p. 39), I’ll never be able to give up my Bonne Maman habit—those empty glass jars with the red-and-white checkered lid have become my kitchen MVPs. I keep six on hand, repurposing them as storage containers for the homemade sauces, dressings, and condiments I make on a weekly basis—especially olive oil–based sauces like salsa verde, chimichurri, and vinaigrettes. Opening the fridge and seeing the jars full of possibilities inspires my summer cooking—they offer a shortcut to flavor at a time when dinner prep should be inherently easier thanks to the season’s abundant produce. They’re easy to make and can be prepared ahead of time and stored in…

CHARCOAL DOESN’T get the credit it deserves. It’s a huge technological innovation: The result of heating wood without oxygen, charcoal burns longer and hotter than the wood it’s made from. It’s how humanity achieved the temperatures needed to smelt metals, ushering in the Bronze and Iron ages. It’s no exaggeration to say that without charcoal, modern civilization as we know it would not exist. But today, we primarily see charcoal as a cooking medium for our charcoal grills. As a fuel for grilling, it’s more controllable than wood and contributes more charred and smoky flavor than propane. To prepare you for barbecue season, we tested a dozen charcoal brands. Here are five of our favorites. Every product branded with the Food & Wine Faves logo has received the highest marks from the…

WITH SUCH LIMITED SPACE in my New York City apartment, I have a couple of rules when it comes to the ingredients in my kitchen—no single-use items, and certainly no duplicates of the same ingredient. But there’s one category where I make an exception: mustard. This is especially true during summer, when I lean on different kinds of mustards to add easy oomph and interest to everything from sandwiches to snack plates and grilled dinners. Here’s everything you need to know about the six essential mustard types—and how to make them your summer’s MVPs. 1. WHOLE-GRAIN MUSTARD Coarsely textured with a popping crunch, whole-grain mustard is made by combining black, brown, and yellow mustard seeds with water and white vinegar until just soft enough to form a rough paste. Whole-grain…

FOR GENERATIONS OF AMERICANS, lagers were synonymous with beer. Major brands like Coors, Budweiser, Busch, and Miller built empires based on easy-drinking, adjunct-packed lagers (those that include additional non-malt fermentable ingredients such as corn, rice, or wheat for clarity or taste). And though the modern era has brought us the resurgence of IPAs, doppelbocks, Belgian-style ales, and so on, most of the best-selling beers in the world are still macrobrewed lagers. Beer fans tend to stick to a favorite brand—it’s rare to hear someone who usually drinks Budweiser say, “I think I’m actually in the mood for a PBR tonight instead.” But with so much similarity between mass-market brews, can most people really pick their favorite lager out of a lineup? To put it to the test, we sampled 20…

RED DRINK IS JUNETEENTH’S OFFICIAL BEVERAGE. Please gently put aside any jokes that comedian Dave Chappelle has made about the primacy of “grape drink.” Forget as well what anyone under 30 may say about blue drinks, orange drinks, or any other drinks of color. The type of red drink varies. We don’t obsess over whether the key ingredient is cherry, cranberry, hibiscus, raspberry, strawberry, or tropical fruit, as long as the drink in question has the correct color. When it comes to emancipation celebrations, it’s all about red, baby! Juneteenth is just one of a number of African American emancipation celebrations. It commemorates June 19, 1865, when—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect—the Union Army major general for the District of Texas ordered from…