Y&H salutes Chow.com for this smart, straight-forward video on how to brine your turkey. Brining, of course, is a terrific way to avoid dry, tasteless, and under-seasoned birds that require a gallon of gravy to make them palatable.

But as chef Michael Chiarello from Bottega in Yountville, Calif., points out, brining is no insurance against inferior turkey. Plenty of things can go wrong with this preparation, too. Take a look and then learn how to brine the right way.

Chow.com “supertaster” James Norton takes up the challenge of trying to describe four different commercial ice cream toppings. Two of them he actually likes, but his description of the Smucker’s Magic Shell “limited edition” cherry topping is priceless.

It tastes, Norton says, like someone “melted a piece of watermelon Hubba Bubba onto my ice cream.”

There are few pleasures greater than eating pomegranate seeds fresh from the pod, and I’d say that even if the fruit weren’t a favorite of my wife, Carrie, whom, incidentally, I married three years ago today after gobbling down many pomegranates together. Pomegranates are a symbol of fertility, you know.

Pomegranates are also a bitch to eat.

Read More “How to Remove Pomegranate Seeds” »

Chow has deemed Russian River Supplication the perfect beer, a sour brown ale with sour cherries and three strains of wild yeast (including that Brettanomyces you may have heard of)…and oak-aged in Pinot Noir barrels. As part of their “The Perfect” series, which also crowns hamburgers, martinis, olive oil, and a host of other foods, Lessley Anderson tours the brewery with Russian River’s Vinnie Cilurzo and discusses the aging process as well as working with the wild yeasts that have made the name “Russian River” something of a rosary for East Coast beer nerds.

I’m not ready to single out the perfect beer — I haven’t even tried Supplication yet — but I will say that Consecration, also by Russian River, is certainly a perfect beer. I was reunited with this lush sour beer last weekend during a trip to San Francisco, where I sampled it on draft (repeatedly) and brought a bottle home. (Read on for the beer-porn description.)
Read More “What Makes a Perfect Beer?” »

You might not believe this, but I love chopping onions. I like the precision of it. I like the tactile nature and the very physicality of it. I learned the proper technique from Susan Watterson, who’s now at CulinAerie. What I don’t love is the painful sulfur burn of chopping onions. I seem particularly sensitive to it. If this technique works, I will forever bow before Chow.com.

As we enter prime strawberry season, including the delicious pick-your-own variety, Chow.com has a series of helpful videos on how to bring out the best in your berries. First up: Choosing strawberries.

More videos after the jump.

Read More “How to Choose, Wash, Hull, and Sweeten Strawberries” »

It is Y&H’s contention that home cooks sometimes stick to their personal techniques, even when those techniques are wrong and produce an inferior product. Chow.com’s primer on cooking bacon shows that even ingredients that taste good, no matter how poorly you treat, them can improve by following a few simple procedures.

Somebody please tell me this is a joke.

If you haven’t watched some of Chow.com’s Supertaster videos, you need to get yourself over there right now. (Click on the Supertaster link in the lower left corner.) This episode tackles the subject of baby food. The funniest response? When the taster samples Roundy’s vegetable turkey dinner: “Wow, was that unpleasant!”

Food isn’t like music or movies. The hospitality business doesn’t obsess over every restaurant or bistro or pub that opens during any particular year; it doesn’t base its overall health on the success or failure of the newbies coming into the market. Restaurants, young and old, must complete against each other. In some ways, the older restaurants have it easier: They may already have a loyal clientele that doesn’t require expensive marketing to lure them back to the place.

I say all this as prologue. You don’t see as many Year in Food lists as you do lists for movies and music. And when you do see them, they tend to be trend oriented, like the one Chow posted earlier this month. Now come two more:

Read More “Those Year-End Lists We Love to Hate” »