We’ve cooked thousands of recipes together, and when
you cook that much, you begin to develop an eye for the crucial distinctions
that make a standout recipe—an exemplar.
These are the recipes that inspire you
to change how you make a standard dish, that become the recipes you cook for the
rest of your life. Nigella Lawson’s dense chocolate loaf cake was greater than
all the other versions we tried because of the logic-defying amount of water you
add to the batter—which makes the cake luxuriously moist, and even better the
next day.
These special recipes would crop up from time to time, and
after a while we could see they belonged in a category all their own: genius
recipes.
And we knew just the person to uncover these gems. We
hired Kristen as our first team member when Food52.com was a wee upstart, and
her extraordinary talents as a writer, editor, and cook quickly became apparent.
More recently, as our executive editor, she has shaped our site’s voice and
look, recruited other excellent editors, and helped make Food52 a hub for
passionate cooks.
In 2011, Kristen debuted her first Genius Recipes post on
Food52. It featured the River Café’s strawberry
sorbet, into which you blend a whole lemon, skin and all. The column
immediately became a hit. With tireless curiosity and sly wit, Kristen has
introduced us to some of the best recipes from such cooking luminaries as
Marcella Hazan, Eric Ripert, Alice Waters, Nigella Lawson, James Beard, Patricia
Wells, Craig Claiborne, Martha Stewart, Fergus Henderson, April Bloomfield,
Yotam Ottolenghi, and Julia Child, to name just a few.
She has discovered genius recipes from many lesser-known
authors and chefs, as well. For Kristen, no stone goes unturned. She’s an
indefatigable researcher and perfectionist who will test and retest recipes not
only to make sure they work exactly as written, but to assess
whether or not they’re truly genius. She rejected many a recipe that we couldn’t
find fault with.
Along the way, Kristen has added her own touches of
genius. With a strange but delicious caramelized white chocolate
recipe, she discovered that you can use it as an ice cream topping in the
vein of Magic Shell. (She also styled the recipes for all of the photos in this
book.)
We’ve become avid fans of her column ourselves. After
Kristen wrote about Roy Finamore’s broccoli
cooked forever, in which you simmer broccoli and garlic in oil for seemingly
days, in essence making a confit with them, Merrill made it so often that she
began applying the technique to all species of vegetables from carrots to
parsnips to cauliflower. Likewise, Amanda will now only make the genius guacamole by
Roberto Santibañez from his book Truly Mexican for
which you crush white onion, cilantro, and salt to a paste and very gently fold
in the avocado so as not to smush it, an approach that produces a guacamole
that’s brighter, more aromatic, and somehow more delicate than any other. The
recipe’s tiny details have a huge payoff. And that is the brilliant and
rewarding principle behind all of the genius recipes in this book
These are the recipes that inspire you to change how you make a standard dish, that become the recipes you cook for the rest of your life. Nigella Lawson’s dense chocolate loaf cake was greater than all the other versions we tried because of the logic-defying amount of water you add to the batter—which makes the cake luxuriously moist, and even better the next day.
0 التعليقات: