Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2016 i SAVEUR

This is my summer of paella. True, I’ve never made one before. This worries me not at all. My pronounced non-expertise in the field of paella production is actually a prime motivator in declaring it my go-to dish of the season. I enjoy a challenge, a project. l like learning curves, especially ones that end up feeding a crowd and provide me an excuse to play with shiny new gear (like a low-slung paella pan the size of a manhole cover). So if you need me, I’ll be by the grill, trying out various combinations (snails or no snails?), teaching my kids to say socarrat and indulging in a couple of my favorite activities: cooking over a wood fire and consulting too many cookbooks. Our new books columnist Russ Parsons…

My neighbor is a grill guy. He’s got a basic Weber kettle, of course. He’s got a gas grill, too, a barrel smoker, and a ceramic Big Green Egg that costs as much as my stove. He’s got a wood pellet–fired combination smoker-grill that costs way more. And he’s got a pizza oven that looks like a gleaming piece of Danish Modern statuary that I gave him because I couldn’t figure out how to put it together. But with all those grills, he doesn’t have a single grill cookbook. And really, that’s not surprising. You can sum up the information necessary to be a good griller in about 20 pages, and just about every grill book does—in nearly the same words. Indeed, this lack of a need for detailed instruction…

Roasted and Fresh Tomato Pie (recipe on page 74) This is how the blueberry helped me find my voice. When we opened Chef & the Farmer in Kinston, North Carolina, Kinstonians made a lot out of my pedigree. A small group of people were thrilled that a local girl, trained in New York, came home to open a restaurant, but most people were a little suspicious. Both groups believed I brought back with me a different notion of how to cook, a revised palate, and a penchant for the sophisticated. What I brought back, unfortunately, were just other people’s recipes. I had no sense of the type of food I wanted to cook. And I certainly had no idea how to use food, particularly the food of my childhood, to…

WHO: Sam Jones WHERE: Skylight Barbecue, Ayden, North Carolina THE TRADITION: Whole-hog barbecue My father used to say he put pig grease in my milk bottle when I was a baby to make sure it was in my blood. In July of 1945, my grandfather opened Skylight Barbecue, a joint specializing in whole-hog barbecue cookery, which means instead of starting with a Boston butt or a shoulder, you’re smoking a full pig, simply gutted and seasoned. I run Skylight today. Whole-hog cooking is the most financially irresponsible thing you can do. The margins are bad—the ribs, the spine, the blade bones, the shanks—all of that is waste. Compare that to a butchered piece of meat, where the yield is almost 100%. Plus, there are more fuel costs than other barbecue…

“I know you didn’t want me to cook tonight,” Eva Talde says, greeting us at her home in Niles, Illinois. “But I did. And dinner will be ready in 15 minutes.” _ Her son, the New York–based chef Dale Talde, wasn’t surprised. We’d arrived at his parents’ home just outside Chicago with plans to drop our bags and head out to eat a few of his favorite things—tacos from the back of a butcher shop, gyros from a strip mall, pizza topped with gyro meat at a sports bar. Eva had other ideas. “This is how it is with Filipinos,” he said. “You show up unexpectedly and conveniently someone’s pulling a pig’s head from the oven.” Soon we were eating pole beans plucked from vines in Eva’s lush garden and…

PRIMER A LOT OF WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT A CUISINE YOU WANT TO BE EATING NOW The History Mehmed II no doubt had matters more significant than food on his mind when his troops wrested Constantinople from Byzantine Roman control in 1453. Yet the establishment of Istanbul as the capital of the Ottoman Empire set in motion a culinary revolution. Its foot soldiers were the hundreds of cooks toiling in the enormous kitchens of Topkapi Palace. Using ingredients and techniques sourced from across an empire that included swaths of Europe, North Africa, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, they vied to impress a succession of emperors with ever more creative elevations of rustic Anatolian standards. In their hands, sac—flatbread dough, rolled paper thin—became delicate pastry to wrap around…

At the conclusion of a three-hour drive northwest from Austin, through rolling hills of scruff, a renovated 1878 limestone farmhouse materialized at the end of a small dirt road like Oz’s Emerald City: Rancho Loma. I’d been hearing about Robert and Laurie Williamson’s vaunted Friday- and Saturday-only 24-seat restaurant run out of their home for a couple of years, but I’d had to wait for months until my schedule aligned with their six-week waitlist. Now, finally, my boyfriend and I were here, to see firsthand not only how two former commercial filmmakers had managed to create a destination restaurant and inn in the middle of nowhere—with not a day of professional chef, restaurateur, or hotelier experience between them—but also how they are working to remake the nearby town of Coleman…

As you dip south of Raleigh, cruising eastbound on U.S. 70 toward Atlantic Beach, look around and you’ll see low-lying solar farms, strip-mall churches, and no lack of Bojangles’. Soon the highway links up with the North Carolina Barbecue Society trail, and around Goldsboro the aroma of hardwood coal settles in. Then, it’s only 25 more miles before you get to Kings Restaurant, “the home of the Pig in a Puppy.” A quarter pound of hand-chopped whole hog laid under a mess of vinegary slaw, the pig is squished into a superabsorbent hoagie of a hushpuppy—the sweet cornmeal fritter stretched out, pressed flat, and fried crisp to order. Welcome to Kinston, North Carolina. The storied tobacco warehouses downtown that made the nearby farmers rich—and at night doubled as dance halls…

On a sunny Saturday morning in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York, Jose Reyes is pouring wine. A plastic cup of tempranillo, filled nearly to the brim, is his standard welcome at Despaña, the Spanish food importer and meat shop where he’s worked for 30 years. Reyes now oversees the company’s sausage operation: 2,000 to 3,000 pounds a week of garlic-laced chorizo, coils of Basque chistorra, and morcilla sausage, dark and sweet as dried fruit thanks to a smart combination of cooked-down onions and coagulated pig’s blood. Along with wine he doles out free samples of that sausage as well as bites of tinned tuna belly in olive oil and nutty Manchego cheese. It’s a happy way to start a day with a mission: eat your way through…

Pie evokes nostalgia for a pastoral past—freshbaked, buttery goodness cooling on the farmhouse windowsill— and yet it touches just about every American soul, urban and rural alike. Historical records indicate that in 1895, some 22 million pies were baked and sold in Manhattan alone. That’s when a nickel got you a coffee and two slices of pie, which was considered a very fine and fast workingman’s lunch. In 1872, William Thompson founded what’s considered the country’s first pie wholesaler in Manhattan, just north of Canal Street, and eventually produced more than 20,000 pies a day—long before sophisticated automation or refrigeration. But by the 1970s, James Beard, born in 1903, the same year Thompson died, was unhappy with the quality of New York’s pies, noting, “It seems the only way to…

On a warm, sunny morning in Kauai, chef Adam Watten and I were perusing the assorted Seussian orbs at the local farmers’ market—if you haven’t been to a Hawaiian one, picture any farmers’ market after a button or two of peyote: garish dragon fruit, thorny soursop, hairy rambutan. At last, he found what he’d come for: three green, softball-size dinosaur eggs. Breadfruit. This is a rescue story. It wasn’t a lost hiker or marooned surfer that needed saving but a fruit, exotic yet lowly. I’d flown to Hawaii to watch the breadfruit be plucked not from the path of bulldozers or blight, but from its own past. Depending on whom you ask, the Artocarpus altilis has been either unjustly overlooked or mercifully avoided by the food world. To many who…

Patagonia exists somewhere on the spectrum between real and make-believe. Have you heard of the hairy mylodon? An immense, now extinct giant ground sloth, it roamed the fairy-tale lands of Chilean Patagonia until about 10,000 years ago. The mylodon inspired one of the best travel books ever written, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. And here it is now in the town of Puerto Natales, near Last Hope Sound and the mouth of the Mylodon’s Cave, commemorated in the form of an enormous sculpture standing 15 feet tall on its shaggy hind legs. That this thing actually existed, that it walked these thorny moonscapes, makes it somewhat easier to digest the theory that unicorns also populated the area during the Pleistocene era. It’s early February, the height of summer, and I haven’t…

There are no distractions on a free dive at 75 feet. No oxygen tanks, no heavy gear; it’s just you and the sea. But for Kimi Werner, a lifelong free diver and award-winning spearfisher, there’s usually something else she’s focused on: dinner. Kimi’s a chef and dedicated conservationist, so while she’s diving her eye is always trained on sea dwellers that are both sustainable and delicious. In the Bahamas last April, we spent an entire day in the water. The weather was perfect, the visibility was excellent, and the ocean was perfectly calm. First Kimi harvested some conchs from the seafloor for a vibrant fresh-from-the-sea ceviche on the boat. Then, after a few dives, she spotted our next course, a lone black jack circling the reef. She carefully aligned her…