Just when you thought you knew everything there is to know about the current craze for focaccia and all its pizzalike variants, along comes focaccia di Recco: a bubbly ooze of tart and fruity stracchino cheese barely contained by 2 supersize rounds of paper-thin dough. To make focaccia di Recco, you take a simple ball of unleavened dough larded with olive oil, divide it in 2, then roll and stretch the doughballs until you can read a newspaper through them. Then you line a pan with one of the dough rounds, top it with scoops of cheese, cover and seal it with the second round of dough like an apple pie, drizzle with more olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt, and bake for ~10 minutes.
Tag: food
Pimp my TV Dinner
Taylor Jackson challenged himself to photograph cheap pre-packaged frozen dinners so the look like a fancy food photo of a dish from a posh restaurant. To get it done, he sought the help of a professional chef pal who is a master at plating.
Dine-and-Dash Dater
Cass thought a ‘dine and dash’ was a fitting crime for a food-lover’s city like Pasadena. It is the birthplace of chef Julia Child, home to 500 restaurants, and one of America’s few Le Cordon Bleu culinary schools. Pasadena is known as the “City of Roses,” and it is Cass who cleans up its quirkier criminal cases. “They’re what we call the ‘X-Files’”. Recently, he captured the ‘Glass Man Burglar,’ a thief who skillfully removed window panes, and the ‘Guitar Bandit’ who delighted newspapermen by pulling off a “string” of thefts. When the detective typed “dine and dash” into Google, to brush up on the law, he was surprised to find 100s of news reports about 1 local man named Paul Gonzales. “He had, like, fans, and they were like, ‘hey, he’s not doing anything wrong. Some websites called Gonzales “scummy” and “Douchebag of the Week.” “This guy was not on any police department’s radar, yet he was one of the most wanted men in America.”
Best Cold Noodles in NYC
- Karakatta’s Cold Lemon Ramen
- Jeju Noodle Bar’s Truffle Kong Gook Su
- Hanjan’s North Korean Pyongyang Naengmyeon
Cosmic Crisp
Brooke Jarvis writes on the development and promise of the newest apple hitting store shelves this fall, and what it took to make it happen. The Cosmic Crisp is debuting on grocery stores after this fall’s harvest, and in the nervous lead-up to the launch, everyone from nursery operators to marketers wanted me to understand the crazy scope of the thing: the scale of the plantings, the speed with which mountains of commercially untested fruit would be arriving on the market, the size of the capital risk. People kept saying things like “unprecedented,” “on steroids,” “off the friggin’ charts,” and “the largest launch of a single produce item in American history.”
Non-animal whey protein
The US is the single largest exporter of whey products, with estimated sales of $10B last year. The category will grow by 6% annually through 2023. But for all its popularity, all that whey still comes from cows, a fact increasingly seen as a liability for climate- and health-conscious dairy and protein lovers.
Tenho Ramen
At Tenho the tonkotsu ramen is prepared using the yobimodoshi method, which uses the same soup stock every day and adding to it little by little, further amplifying the richness and creaminess of the broth.
High Street on Hudson
Instead of the standard-issue, coarse rock salt, Weller flecks her creation with a more delicate fleur de sel. It gently crunches without overwhelming one’s tongue, electrolyte balance, or cardiovascular system. And laced inside the bagel is a proper dose of cracked butcher’s grind black pepper. I’m calling the bagels ($2 apiece, or $4 with butter), along with the cardamom buns ($5) and black sesame kouign amanns ($5), a BUY.
Al-Aqsa
“This bread is straight from Jerusalem!” was stated at least 5 times during our stay and it could be felt how significant this was to him. Even in Palestine the bread is unique to the city, travelers from other parts buy many loaves to bring as gifts to their friends and family. The crust is soft and covered in sesame seeds, the bread inside even softer and so light. Despite being almost 1 meter long before cutting, it is not heavy and feels like it might float away.
Very Italian NYC
New York has never had a shortage of old-school red-sauce spots or exuberantly expensive odes to Italian cooking, but the last few months have seen a serious uptick in restaurants and cafés from Italians eager to introduce New Yorkers to the way Italy eats now, whether that’s sandwiches served on the Florentine answer to focaccia, strong cocktails poured in a bar bedecked in dark wood and Carrara marble, or regional cooking from Piedmont, Tuscany, and Emilia-Romagna. Here are the new molto Italian restaurants that demand your immediate attention.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 