Saveur

BY KATE HILL PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTINA HOLMES The Tsotsil Maya call themselves the people of the corn. It grows readily in their home, in the foggy cloud forests of Chiapas in southern Mexico, the lush highlands in which their ancestors grew the grain

SERVES 18–20 Active: 55 min. Total: 3 hr. 35 min. Every family seems to have its own recipe for this traditional yeasted birthday cake. Ruta Gailīte’s uses dough similar to brioche, but relies on cream instead of butter for its richness. With the add

BY STACY ADIMANDO Chef Esther Choi of mŏkbar in Brooklyn grew up cooking and eating traditional Korean food, many of the recipes taught to her by her grandmother. “My mom jokes with me that before I even had teeth, I was sucking on kimchi.” THREE DEC

BY CHANTAL MARTINEAU PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK It’s damp and chilly outside, but it’s toasty in Wendie Poitras’ kitchen, where rendered pork skins sizzle and pop in a cast-iron pan. Poitras—a teacher and artist who has become a vocal advocate

Once your chile paste is made, homemade kimchi is simply a matter of mixing everything together, sealing the jar, then just patiently waiting. “This is the number-one thing,” Choi says about salting, a part of the process called joelim in Korean. Sal

BY RACHAEL MAMANE SCRAPS MAY COME TO MIND when you’re piecing together a vegetable stock—whatever is left on the cutting board is often thrown in a pot and simmered to murky results. But while writing my book Mastering Stocks and Broths, I found a mo

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HANNAH WHITAKER Flexible, lightweight molds produce heavenly shells ACCORDING TO CHEF GIORGIA GOGGI of “The Newcomer” (p. 60), the key to crisp and bubbly cannoli shells is time (the dough needs at least two days in the fridge to age,

MAKES 4 CUPS Total: 10 min. Think of this as a sophisticated version of ranch dressing. Drizzle it over a baked pie topped with spinach or any other veggie that could benefit from a bright, tangy boost, like roasted baby onions or potatoes. 3 cups w

SERVES 8–10 Active: 1 hr. 30 min. Total: 4 hr. 15 min. The rich, beet-infused pork broth of this soup is briny, with tangy vegetables floating throughout. For the fullest flavor, marinate the beets in the vinaigrette well ahead of time. 1 lb. skinne

BY JUNO DEMELO SARAH MINNICK of Lovely’s Fifty-Fifty had little ambition to become a pizzaiola—which might be why she has one of the most refreshing, liberating takes on pizza around. In 2003, the former art student opened a fine-dining restaurant in

BY STACY ADIMANDO PHOTOGRAPHS BY EVA KOLENKO GIORGIA GOGGI STOOD WEARING RUBBER BOOTS AND HOLDING A BLUE-HANDLED SERRATED BUTTER KNIFE. AS THE 28-YEAR-OLD COOK BEGAN SHIMMYING SIDEWAYS UP AND DOWN HER GARDEN ROWS LIKE A HUMAN HARMONICA, HACKING FATTE

BY NAOMI TOMKY PHOTOGRAPHS BY AUBRIE LEGAULT OREGON • GREECE • HAWAII • TUSCANY • SPAIN • MUMBAI TWELVE YEARS AGO, FOLLOWING a short but eye-opening stint in prison, Mary Stallworth needed a new career. Floating around Detroit kitchens as a line cook

BY LESLIE PARISEAU PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHELLE HEIMERMAN Along the winding streets of La Paz, through a hidden alleyway and down a dim market corridor, a butcher wields a cleaver, bringing it swiftly down upon a glistening slab of scarlet beef. Another b

BY PRIYA KRISHNA IT’S NEVER SURPRISED ME that, in India, there are restaurants dedicated to dosas. One of the country’s most flavorful, sustaining, and comforting foods, these thin, sometimes massive crêpes made from a fermented batter of ground rice

You can use a nonstick pan to make a 12-inch version, or mimic the whopping crêpes made on commercial griddles in India by using a large, well-oiled cast-iron or freestanding electric griddle. Either way, learning to perfect the balance between crunc

IT’S APPARENT BY NOW THAT WHAT HAPPENS in the food world can have big, sweeping reverberations outside of it. The choices we make individually and collectively about food—like what we eat, and how and where we grow, make, and consume it—affect everyt

SERVES 4–6 Active: 15 min. Total: 30 min. Chef Giorgia Goggi, a self-proclaimed anchovy lover, marinates her own fillets and sundries raisins from local grapes to make this delicate sweet-sour dish. Store-bought marinated anchovies work perfectly wel

BY AMY THIELEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY SUSAN BELL MY SISTER-IN-LAW SARAH AND I ARE WALKING THROUGH the art nouveau district of Latvia’s capital, Riga—though, more correctly, you might say we are wobbling, having just toasted our arrival with many glasses of R

BY KIRSTEN WHATLEY A SOFT AMBIENT GROOVE drifts through the tasting room of Nani Moon Meadery on Kauai, as three travelers take their first sips of Laka’s Nectar, the most honey-forward blend in mead-maker Stephanie Krieger’s collection. Light, compl

SERVES 4 Active: 20 min. Total: 4 hr. 30 min. This simple garden salad sits on a milky bed of crumbled biezpiens, a soft, fresh cow’s-milk cheese omnipresent throughout Latvia. This recipe details how to make your own, but in its place you can substi

BY KATHERINE WHITTAKER THERE’S AN ART TO MAKING MASTIC TREES CRY. It takes a little bit of pressure to lodge the tip of a pick into the bark and pull it across the tree in a process called kentima, or sewing. Too little force and nothing happens; too

BY GILLIAN BRASSIL Jamón ibérico de bellota is arguably Spain’s greatest contribution to the world of food. It’s a melt-in-your-mouth treasure and priced to match, with packages in the United States fetching more than $200 a pound. Famously, it’s mad

MAKES 20 Active: 1 hr. 10 min. Total: 2 hr. 45 min. When made with properly fatty bacon, the filling in these rustic buns melts into an irresistible fondant of smoked pork and onions, each one indistinguishable from the other. To replicate the rollin

STORY & ILLUSTRATIONS BY HAWK KRALL They call them steamed, but they’re really fried,” John Fox says of the Easton-style dog. Fox, a North Jersey postal worker, is the undisputed hot dog savant of our time. For years he’s appeared regularly in articl

STORY & PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALLIE WIST In Cartagena’s Old City, heat presses into alleyways and sunlight streams over cobblestones. People move languidly and salty ocean breezes slip past handsome colonial buildings. Ducking the high-noon humidity, city d

BY MATT GOULDING So fundamental is the role of paella in Valencian life that an entire language has developed around it. To pagar una paella, literally “to pay a paella,” is to make a bet. When kids are acting up or being indecisive, parents might sa

BY KEITH PANDOLFI Joe Tucker doesn’t want to talk about who started the fire in his restaurant last year because he’s already forgiven him. The guy’s gone now anyway, of to God knows where. “He had his problems,” Joe told me as I swiped a biscuit thr

BY ALEX HALBERSTADT One night in September, in the kitchen of a Manhattan event space called the Lighthouse, David Bouley sliced into a black mission fig. Nearby, Daniel Boulud and Emeril Lagasse fussed over a tray of subrics d’epinards, a spinach di

BY ALEX TESTERE In the late 1970s, H.C. Wengler, a Texas pig farmer, stumbled upon a clan of cinnamon-colored pigs ambling around the eastern part of the state. He herded them home, and bred them with his Duroc hogs, an American powerhouse breed know

BY STACY ADIMANDO • PHOTOGRAPHS BY RYAN LIEBE The view of the tart as too uphill or too technique-oriented to make at home has always been the greatest obstacle to home bakers,” says Maury Rubin, owner of Manhattan’s City Bakery and author of the sle

BY MITCHELL DAVIS & LAURENT GRAS Photographs by Heami Lee “What were you cooking?” a neighbor asked. For hours, the rich aroma of beef braising in wine had wafted from the kitchen, under the door and into the hallway of the Manhattan apartment where

SERVES 4–6 Active: 1 hr. 30 min. • Total: 5 hr. 30 min. (plus optional chilling time) A low and slow braise is the best way to transform tough cuts of meat into fork-tender morsels. This version, made with a crosscut whole beef shank, is cooked in wh

BY MATT RODBARD PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON LANG Today the forecast calls for China dust,” our interpreter says cheerfully. A lingering smog often chokes this eastern coast of Korea, though for now the air is bracing, clear. It’s December and we’ve set off

MAKES ABOUT 4 CUPS Active: 35 min. • Total: 5 hr. 35 min. (plus optional overnight resting) Unlike stocks, which are often incorporated into dishes like sauces or stews, bouillon—which comes from the French verb for “to boil”—is a fortified broth tha

Photographs by MICHELLE HEIMERMAN and MATT TAYLOR-GROSS The saturated blue night sky dilates rapidly to chambray like an old TV coming to life. After color, we get sound. The first shot from the woods detonates from a distance, sounding like the low

—Amy Thielen SERVES 6—1 Active: 20 min. • Total: 55 min. (plus overnight marinating) My take on traditional teriyaki uses a bit of birch syrup in addition to mirin (sweet rice wine). Compared with maple syrup, birch is more feral—darker, less sweet,

STORY & PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER BAGLEY Every summer day, cheesemaker Stéphane Henchoz and his 55 cows have a routine. It begins at 5:30 a.m. in his seasonal chalet high in the Swiss Alps, when Henchoz wakes up and turns on the 20-watt bulb in his

BY SOPHIE BRICKMAN American Airlines Cargo Building 79, John F. Kennedy International Airport, Jamaica, New York: 5 a.m. Mitch Spitz is waiting for his apricots. “A box of fruit is like a woman who goes out at night,” Spitz says. “She puts on her jew

By Max Falkowitz The idea of rumtopf is this: Take your best fruit— your superlative strawberries and premium peaches—and don’t eat them. Instead, drown them in rum and sugar in a towering ceramic crock and forget about them for a while. Begin fillin

BY STEPHEN HEYMAN To Salvador Dalí, food was an endless buffet of symbols and sight gags, a metaphor for pleasure and pain, sex, and politics. As a child, Dalí wanted to be a chef, and as an artist, he was always hungry. “Beauty will be edible,” he o

SERVES 8–10; Photo P.108 Active: 30 min. • Total: 6 hr. 30 min. This dessert—a fudgy, frozen or semifrozen chocolate mousse that’s sometimes coated in ganache, then sliced— likely came from the 17th or 18th century, when royal pastry chefs lived larg

By Micah Fredman The garden is all but abandoned in the mild winter months here at La Torre di Montecarlo, a small, beloved inn and trattoria outside of Lucca, Tuscany: overgrown black kale, white cabbage heads that have toppled over and begun to dec

By Jack Hitt One evening, my 4-year-old daughter piped up, asking if she could do something to help with dinner. I was dicing carrots at the time, and a frying pan was crackling, so my first instinct was, no, but thanks. Then, I thought, well, why no

Photographs by CHRISTINA HOLMES Since I throw only one big party a year, and since I’ve been throwing it for 20 years, you’d think I’d be more organized. But I’m not. I usually don’t know who’s coming until a couple of days before the party—and I’ve

SERVES 8–10; Photo P.51 Active: 45 min. • Total: 1 hr. 30 min. (plus cooling time) A touch of egg is the simple, secret ingredient in this luscious tart’s filling. Just a little gives the combination of chocolate and cream a sliceable, fudgy consiste

LESLIE PARISEAU Photographs by MICHELLE HEIMERMAN Nicolas Palazzi and Alexander Rainer are walking in the c loud-shrouded Tyrolean Alps, somewhere above Innsbruck, Austria. The sun is setting; the cool air, scented with moss and barnyard. Cowbells ri

By Shane Mitchell My father, James Edisto Mitchell, painted the sea. His most compelling canvases were the abstract ones, nothing but water and light, capturing in oils an offshore vortex that only blue ocean mariners witness. He served in the mercha

Story and photograph by DIANA MARKOSIAN Under cover of night, two soldiers in a beat-up black SUV collected me from a border town in southwest China and smuggled me into Myanmar’s Kachin State, a half hour’s drive away. I’d come as a photojournalist