How To Make Sourdough Starter from Scratch
The Kitchn · 9 minNo expensive heirloom starters, mashed-up grapes, or mysterious rituals required—just flour, water, and a little bit of patience.
No expensive heirloom starters, mashed-up grapes, or mysterious rituals required—just flour, water, and a little bit of patience.
Why is it that no matter what you order from an American Chinese restaurant, from the egg drop soup to the fiery kung pao chicken, the texture is out of this world? More often than not, it’s thanks to one simple pantry staple: cornstarch.
Green tea becomes rosy with the addition of a special ingredient.
Seven different methods, side by side. The winner is clear.
The cups from cold-brew breaks and the cartons from sushi and burrito runs that used to be tossed out at the office and forgotten about are now our responsibility, up close and personal — in our faces.
Extremely ripe bananas (along with sourdough) were among the must-have ingredients at the beginning of shelter-in-place orders, when it seemed like everyone was baking for comfort.
On a warm September morning in 1943, Chand Ali Khamaru walked eight grueling miles with a small bundle of rice to his father in Medinipur, in rural West Bengal.
I’m not sure about you, but one of the things that has been keeping many of us sane during these weird, not-so-wonderful times, is coffee and tea.
Why did pineapples seize the public imagination so violently?
FAIR LAWN, N.J. — Beth George was sitting in her kitchen when her cellphone chimed with an email. There was just one problem, the writer continued: “I really don’t know where to start. I am not a professional cook.” In fact, he said, “I work in the I.T. business.”
When you talk with aficionados, it usually doesn’t take long for the conversation to veer away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death.
Large waxy varieties of potatoes are better off cut into large pieces (wedges are nice and work well for starchy potatoes too) and roasted the same way you might roast (halved or quartered) smaller varieties of potatoes.
Journalists bear a lot of responsibility for the rise of the toxic celebrity chef. But they’re still in a state of denial.
Over the past months, Americans have embraced comfort food with a renewed fervor. But this isn’t the first time culinary habits have shifted during a pandemic.
Every workday, at ten o’clock, at noon, and at three in the afternoon, Eran Baniel receives an alert on his phone: the call to taste.
Decades ago, a marketing stunt promised Philippine soda drinkers a chance at a million pesos. But an error at a bottling plant led to 600,000 winners—and to lawsuits, rioting, and even deaths.
Oils are all packed with fat and calories, but their chemistry – and effect on our health – can be very different.
If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals. Is any panic more primitive than the one prompted by the thought of empty grocery store shelves? Is any relief more primitive than the one provided by comfort food?
Much of what we consider to be authentically local, regional, or national, rests on small acts of self-deception and selective memory, the endless making and remaking of myths.
In July, Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng released a YouTube video titled “DISGUSTED by this Egg Fried Rice Video” under his comedic moniker Uncle Roger in which he slammed Hersha Patel, a BBC Food presenter, for the way she cooked Chinese-style egg fried rice.
Bourdain’s incendiary industry tell-all was at once a colossal act of mythmaking and one of self-flagellation. Twenty years after its publication, and more than two years after his death, it feels just as urgent today as it did upon its release.
Publishing is becoming a winner-take-all game. Nobody dominates it like Madeline McIntosh and Penguin Random House. On a Tuesday in mid-March, the most powerful executive in American publishing slid into a booth at a restaurant on Central Park South for her last power lunch of the pre-pandemic era.