Kristin Sargianis: [Over the noise of the stand mixer whirring. . . ] Hey Sasha, what are you working on?

Sasha Marx: [Doesn’t look up from the mixer. . . ] Hey. I am working on a seaweed pasta dough made with nori and also currently curing some tuna in seaweed for a poke dish.

KS: How’s it coming along?

SM: It’s coming. We did tastings of different permutations of the seaweed-cured tuna and settled on a version we all liked in terms of flavor and texture. Now I have to build the rest of the poke dish itself—all the other components. For the pasta, in the first test I only had a small amount of nori in the dough and we couldn’t taste it enough. In the version I’m working on right now I significantly increased the amount of nori and I think the flavor and texture are pretty awesome. I want to test and find the maximum amount of nori we can incorporate into the dough without sacrificing the texture of the pasta.

KS: When we first started talking about the seaweed story, you were quick to volunteer to develop the recipes. What got you excited about cooking with seaweed?

SM: I’ve been able to work with seaweed in restaurants and I’ve always enjoyed it as an ingredient. It brings a lot of interesting flavor and textures to food. It’s fun to work with, really tasty, though it might be somewhat daunting for home cooks. . . the idea of working with seaweed beyond the seaweed salad that you get at a typical sushi restaurant. I was excited about the opportunity to develop some recipes that show off the versatility of seaweed.

KS: Last week we went to visit Walrus and Carpenter Oysters’ seaweed farm in Rhode Island. What was something interesting you learned on our trip?

SM: I didn’t know that seaweed is a winter crop and how quickly it grows—I was amazed that sugar kelp can grow several inches per day.

KS: What was your favorite part of the trip?

SM: The best part was meeting the whole Walrus and Carpenter team and going out on the water with them and seeing how their farming setup works. We had talked with them briefly on the phone the week before and Jules, the founder and owner, had walked us through their operation, but going out on the water and seeing how the seaweed grows, where their operation is, getting a sense of how the seaweed growing cycle fits with the oyster growing cycle and harvest, that was the best part. Getting a first-hand look at farms is something that I was able to do at a number of restaurants that I worked at in the past, and it’s always an exciting learning experience.

KS: Did you have a least favorite part?  

SM: I don’t really know if I have a least favorite part. It did start to snow pretty heavily during the end of our trip. It was a little chilly on the water, but it felt appropriate for New England seafaring.

[Sasha walks away to crack eggs into a bowl for his pasta. I bide my time watching a test kitchen intern stir a pot of vegetables that contains the largest bay leaf I’ve ever seen. Seriously—it’s probably half the size of my palm. Sasha returns with cracked eggs.]

KS: [As Sasha adds an egg to the still-going stand mixer. . . ] Let’s switch gears and talk about the recipe you just finished working on.

SM: Procrastination Valentine’s Day! [Editor’s Note: Check out Cook’s Science on Monday, February 13th for all of your last-minute Valentine’s Day dessert needs.]

KS: What was your inspiration for that recipe?

SM: My inspiration was my own personal procrastinating experience when it comes to major holidays and food-related events. Originally, we had wanted to do a Cook’s Science procrastination Thanksgiving, but I did my best Daniel Day Lewis method acting on that and procrastinated until it was too late to develop a recipe. Then, when I saw Valentine’s Day coming up, something I’ve personally procrastinated on in the past, I thought we could try again. There’s tons of resources out there for the Valentine’s Day planners, but there’s nothing out there for those of us who aren’t planners at all.

KS: So, do you have any Valentine’s Day plans?

SM: Um…not yet. Again, in character. But I will. Hopefully my girlfriend doesn’t read this. There will be something. [Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted on Tuesday, February 7th. Sasha might have made plans by now.]

KS: Changing the subject. What did you eat for breakfast today?

SM: For breakfast I actually had half of a delicious Italian sub. For the Super Bowl I had ordered a bunch of subs from Monica’s Mercato in the North End [Editor’s Note: the North End is Boston’s Italian neighborhood]. I had one left over and I was trying to hold off and eat it at lunch, but I ate it at eight in the morning. Maybe not the most classic breakfast food, but it was pretty delicious.

KS: Now we’re going to play a word association game. I’m going to say a word and you need to say the first thing that comes to mind. Ready?

SM: Sure.

KS: Super Bowl.

SM: Pats!

KS: Seaweed.

SM: Mmmmm. . . I think I should be going faster than this. Uhhh. . . umami.

KS: Valentine’s Day.

SM: Panic.

KS: Test Cook.

SM: Weeded.

KS: What?

SM: “Weeded”, as in “in the weeds” because I need to get these recipes done, but you said I could only use one word.

KS: Last question. When will this pasta be ready for tasting?

SM: This pasta? Probably in an hour or so. Dough needs to come together and rest before I roll it out.

If you somehow ended up in this crowd, and find yourself in a panicked state of day-of Valentine’s Day scrambling, I’m here to talk you off the ledge. If Tom Brady and the Patriots can rally back from a 25-point deficit to win the Super Bowl, then you can definitely rescue Valentine’s Day.

For the uninitiated, here’s a play-by-play of what a procrastinator’s Valentine’s Day looks (and feels) like:

February 14th, 7:00 AM: Wake up. Shake off the cobwebs and delay getting ready for work by scrolling through Instagram feed. Think: Huh, there sure is a lot of overly romantic content on here today. Read: Text from my girlfriend—Happy Valentine’s Day Babe! Realize: Crap, it’s February 14th. Oh no. How did this happen? Text girlfriend back in a panic: ♥. Not smooth.

7:45 AM: Leave for work. Spend morning commute scouring Open Table on my phone, looking for a reservation at one of our usual spots. No dice, unless I can find a casual way to tell my girlfriend that two weeks ago I thoughtfully booked us a 10:15 PM table for a Tuesday night. That’s not going to happen.

9:00 AM: Hope I can cobble together a dinner plan by mentally scanning the contents of my pantry, fridge, and freezer. Remember I have a nice steak in the freezer, and a bottle of red wine on the shelf. I’ll butter-baste the steak! That’s simple (and impressive). Dinner: solved.

10:15 AM: Text to girlfriend: So, I wanted this to be a surprise but I’ve planned a romantic dinner for two at my place tonight! ; )  Girlfriend reply: That’s so sweet, I can’t wait!! Netflix West Wing marathon after dessert!?

Dessert! Remember that I forgot to remember that my girlfriend loves dessert more than she loves me and would be sorely disappointed with just beef, butter, and red wine. I’ll have no time after work to shop for groceries but I do have a free half-hour at noon if I skip eating lunch. I’m high on adrenaline but the thoughts running through my brain are less optimistic: “Can I really make something special, pretty, and quick from stuff at the corner store?”

12:10 PM: Bust into the convenience store with a crazed look in my eye. Smile reassuringly at the cashier so he doesn’t think I’m there to rob him.

12:12 PM: Take a couple deep breaths to calm down and do a lap of the store. I cruise the aisles to get acquainted with the products at my disposal. I jot down some notes and highlight some key finds: cream cheese, graham crackers, Craisins, pistachios.

12:22 PM: I set my goal: something familiar in concept, that eats light (nobody wants a sugary gut-bomb cramping their style post-dinner). And no chocolate. Please, I’m more creative than that. Cheesecake mousse it is. I’ll cut the heaviness of cream cheese with whipped cream, and cut the sweetness with tangy cottage cheese. I hate sweet syrupy fruit that gets piled on top of cheesecake, so pineapple rings from the canned aisle are out. I’ll rehydrate the sweetened dried cranberries into a jam. I see that the bodega sells single tea packets! I’ll soak those Craisins with black tea to bring some herbal bitterness for balance. Pistachios for salt and crunch? You bet. For the crust component I decide on a graham cracker, oat, and brown butter crumble. I want turbinado sugar in the crust for added texture and pops of sweetness… but there is none to be found in the store. Pay and exit.

12:40 PM: Pop into coffee shop to steal a couple packets of turbinado sugar. Guilt consumes me halfway through my sugar heist (damn you, Quaker college education). Order a guilt espresso. Head back to work.

4:15 PM: Sneak out of work a little early to get a head start on prep at home.

5:00 PM: Defrost steak. Decant bottle of wine. Start on dessert. Realize that I want dessert to be layered so that every bite contains a little bit of everything. In the test kitchen, or in restaurant kitchens, I would use a ring mold to help form the perfect shape. But I’m not in the test kitchen. I’m at home. And I’m, to quote a chef I used to work for, “like eggs in a pan: scrambling.” So I cut off the top inch of the cylindrical cardboard canister my oats came in and wrap it in tin foil. DIY hack? Done.

7:00 PM: Bust out the mousse, jam, and crumble. Everything tastes pretty awesome, somewhat to my surprise. Assemble dessert. It looks great, too. Jacques La Merde would be proud. Valentine’s Day disaster averted. I pour myself a small glass of the decanted red (quality control is always important) and toast myself for what a solid boyfriend I am.

7:15 PM: Text from my girlfriend: On my way! I can’t wait to give you your present! Wait, present? Oh no.

Recipe: Eleventh-Hour Date-Night Cheesecake Mousse

Field photography by Kevin White.

Styled food photography by Steve Klise.

“How did you come up with that?” is a question Tim and I get asked a lot. And the answer truly varies from recipe to recipe. I usually draw on a combination of past cooking and eating experience, cookbooks, visuals, and word association when I’m brainstorming ideas for a dish. To give a better sense of this process, I thought it would be fun to look in detail at the development process for the nori pasta dough that I used in two recent recipes, Nori Pappardelle with Mussels and Butter, and Nori Pappardelle with Blistered Cherry Tomatoes.

You can read about my inspiration for the pasta in the “Back to the Test Kitchen” section of our feature story “In The Weeds,” which is a fascinating look at the current state of seaweed and seaweed farming. What doesn’t make it into that narrative is all the testing and tweaking that went into developing the nori pasta dough for the pappardelle. To get as much seaweed flavor as possible into the pasta, I drew on my experience from past restaurant jobs where I worked with nori powder (dried sheets of nori seaweed, like the ones used to wrap sushi rolls, ground to a fine powder). Nori is easy to find in grocery stores, and packs a lot of concentrated toasty seaweed flavor, so a little goes a long way. I wanted to see if I could incorporate nori powder into an egg-based pasta by mixing it with the dry ingredients of the dough (flour and salt) before adding the wet ingredients (eggs, extra-virgin olive oil, and water).

For my first attempt, I began with a small amount of nori powder (7 grams or 2 tablespoons) added to 285 grams (2 cups) of all-purpose flour. The resulting dough was an unattractive pale army green, and it didn’t bring enough seaweed flavor when the cooked pasta was eaten on its own, let alone with any kind of sauce. The dough also didn’t have enough chew—all-purpose flour doesn’t have very high protein content, so it forms a somewhat weak gluten network. Cutting the amount of flour to make room for the nori powder meant even less gluten and an adverse effect on the texture of the pasta. Nobody likes mushy pasta. We needed to bump up both the nori factor and the chew factor. For that to happen, the team agreed that I should see how much nori powder I could add and still end up with a workable dough. To bolster chew, I would also try subbing higher-protein bread flour for the all-purpose flour, a tactic Tim had success with when developing his hand-pulled noodle recipe.

The shape of the pasta was also important. For that first test batch I had rolled the dough into sheets with a pasta roller, before cutting it into fettuccine. We all agreed that fettuccine were too thin, and we wanted a more substantial noodle. A wider and thicker noodle, like pappardelle, was going to be the way to go. Bonus: they evoked the natural shape of sugar kelp, too.

For the second round of dough testing I made four batches of dough with increasing amounts of nori powder (14 grams, 21 grams, 28 grams, and 35 grams, respectively). I reduced the amount of flour in each batch to 225 grams (1½ cups), and used bread flour instead of all-purpose. As I had done with the first round of testing, I made the dough using a stand mixer. The doughs in this second round required more water to come together due to the higher protein content of bread flour (which leads to a higher water absorption rate), combined with the increased amount of nori (which also absorbs moisture very well). Water is necessary in a dough (be it bread, pizza, or pasta) to form the gluten network that provides chew, but there can be too much of a good thing. Too much liquid in a dough can actually dilute and weaken the gluten it typically works so well to build. The dough with the highest amount of nori powder (35 grams) required too much water (56 grams, which is ¼ cup!), and even after extensive kneading (10 minutes), the dough fell apart when run through a pasta roller. That left us with three workable doughs that I was able to successfully roll out and cut into pappardelle.

I cooked off portions of these three doughs for a team tasting. The unanimous favorite was the version with the greatest amount of nori powder (28 grams). Along with having the most nori flavor, meaning it could stand up to saucing without being drowned out, it was the most visually striking: the dough took on a deep, dark green color that made the pappardelle actually look like kelp. Mission accomplished, right? Not so fast.

While most of the development process focuses on getting to a working recipe, we also spend time on the back end to pick that working recipe apart and make sure it’s optimized for the home cook. This means asking questions like: If the dough can be made in a stand mixer, can it also be made in a food processor? Answer: Yes, a dough can be formed but the food processor doesn’t achieve the same level of kneading as a stand mixer, and the resulting pasta will have inferior chew.

If the dough calls for whole eggs, egg yolks, and water, can the amount of water be cut by increasing the number of whole eggs and using fewer separated yolks (seeing as egg whites are 90% water)? Answer: Yes, and the final recipe reflects that change.

What is the minimum resting time for the dough after kneading? Answer: 30 minutes, unless you have a commercial chamber vacuum sealer at home, which can be used to accelerate the absorption of water into flour that usually happens slowly as a dough rests.

If the dough is rested in a refrigerator, how long does it need to wait at room temperature before  it can be rolled out into pasta sheets? Answer: 10 minutes.

For every recipe, Tim and I go through additional rounds of “abuse testing” to answer these types of questions, and to find out what might cause our working recipes to fail under various sets of circumstances. A lot of this behind the scenes testing never makes it into the published version of a recipe, but it’s valuable for troubleshooting issues when readers have questions about one of our recipes.

With the dough recipe squared away, I could turn my attention to building a set (restaurant jargon for the components that make up a dish) to accompany the pasta. I made the mistake of making two very different dishes, hoping we would prefer one over the other. We liked both. Denying people pasta goes against everything I believe in so I volunteered to develop both versions. Should be easy, right?

[Editor’s Note: Check out the results of Sasha’s hard work: Nori Pappardelle with Mussels and Butter and Nori Pappardelle with Blistered Cherry Tomatoes.]

“Beets! You don’t even like beets!” That was my mother’s reaction at a recent family dinner when I explained that for my next round of recipe development I am embarking on a deep dive into beets (remember when we gave eggplant the spotlight last fall?). There are very few things in this world I don’t love to eat, and beets are on that list. They’re one of the few vegetables that can survive harsh winters, and I guess I unfairly resent them for that. I have cooked professionally in New England and Chicago, two areas known for their rough winters, and beets end up being one of the last holdouts of locally grown vegetables on restaurant menus until the arrival of a new spring bounty. To me, they are a constant reminder that (A) it’s really cold out and (B) if I lived in a warmer climate there would be variety in my winter produce. (I get it, San Francisco, you’re awesome, other than the fact that nobody can afford to live there.) I also don’t love the intense sweetness of beets. In order to survive cold winters, beets store a lot of their energy as sugar, which, like the sugar in ice cream, prevents large ice crystals from forming. Cell wall destruction by large ice crystals is the leading cause of death among less-sweet vegetables trying to grow in winter. Beets store this sugar reserve in what are called parenchyma cells. You may have noticed that a slice of beet is made up of concentric circles, not unlike tree rings. Those are alternating rings of parenchyma cells (and stored sugar) and of vascular tissue, which transports nutrients throughout the plant. So, I guess beets have at least one fun fact.  

When I volunteered for the beet deep dive assignment, it wasn’t because I was itching to spend weeks preparing my least favorite vegetable. Rather, I saw it as a challenge similar to that of creating something tasty with offal. Chefs often talk about how a cook’s skill is most evidenced not by properly preparing a prime cut of beef, but by creating something delicious out of an off-cut that others would discard as trash. Steak and truffles sell themselves, but kidneys and beets need some help. Could I come up with a few beet recipes that are tasty and maybe even a little off the “beet-en” path (beet and goat cheese salad, you’ve had your moment)? I am in the process of finding out.

When Tim and I start on a new batch of recipes, the first week of testing is always a little chaotic, but exciting. I like to start the process by brainstorming ideas in our shared office before setting foot in the test kitchen. I’ll scribble down thoughts in my notebook or on the giant dry-erase board that we have dedicated for recipe ideas. If Tim is unlucky and happens to be working at his desk during this time, I’ll pepper him with questions, puns and half-baked pitches: “Would you be into beet Wellington?” “Beet jerky?” “What about a spicy, braised cashew bao titled Cashew Me Outside, How Bao Dah?” That’s when he usually puts on his headphones and ignores me. After I devise a list of recipe ideas, I sit down with executive editor Dan Souza to sketch out a game plan for recipe development. When we’re developing a suite of recipes centered around an ingredient we aim to have a good variety of techniques, flavor profiles, degree of difficulty, textures, and so on. Some items on the initial list never make it past this stage (sorry, beet Wellington). For the ones that do, I order the necessary ingredients, and start cooking.

One of the ideas that made the cut for the proposed suite of beet recipes is a granita made with beet kvass—a lightly fermented Eastern European beverage in the same ballpark as kombucha—and Campari, the Italian liqueur that gives bitterness to Negroni cocktails. The kvass itself is part of a dual fermentation project: I’m fermenting beets for a borscht-inspired sandwich, and the brine from that fermentation process becomes the kvass for the granita. I love recipes that minimize waste and use byproduct, and I really love the idea of turning sweet beets into something sour and fermented, and then combining it with the bitterness of Campari to make a refreshing granita. I made a test batch of beet kvass (although a somewhat bastardized version, seeing as I omitted rye bread, which is traditionally used to help jump-start the fermentation process), which I then mixed with Campari and a little sugar. I popped the mixture in the freezer, pulling it out occasionally to scrape with a fork until it had set up with the snow cone texture I was looking for. Tim and I tasted it and were instant fans—it was a striking deep purple Welch’s grape color, and, at least to me, tasted like a Negroni slushie with a hint of beet. I excitedly called for a team tasting. The rest of the Cook’s Science team did not have the same reaction. “Challenging”, “rough”, and “aggressive” were very diplomatic assessments offered by Molly, Dan, and Kristin. The only person on our editorial staff who enjoyed it was senior editor Paul Adams. We were evenly split. I didn’t want to give up on the idea, so I made some adjustments and created two new batches—increasing the sugar, and lowering the amount of Campari. Same results. Split decisions like this are actually pretty rare with our team. While we often go back and forth on seasoning levels, whether to include a garnish, and the like, we usually reach group consensus on the overall scope of a dish pretty quickly. As of now, we still can’t agree on the granita, and it looks like it might be a recipe that ends up on the cutting room floor. I still have hope, though. This week I’ve made some additional tweaks with a new batch of kvass that will be ready soon.

What do you think? Would you want a recipe for a beet-Negroni granita? Let us know in the comments!

[Editor’s Note: Keep your eye out for Sasha’s suite of beet recipes coming your way on Cook’s Science in late March/early April.]

Photography by Steve Klise and Kevin White.

Being highly organized is a critical component of being a good cook, whether you’re on the line at a restaurant or in a home kitchen; there is even a Marie Kondo-esque book on the subject. Working “clean” in the kitchen is the first thing drilled into cooks upon entering a professional kitchen, and is fundamental to their success in a fast-paced, high-stress, and often overwhelming work environment. I vividly remember the first time I worked a station on the line, and how quickly the wheels came off. Just trying to keep track of a seemingly endless sequence of orders being called out by my chef at the pass—the spot where dishes are plated and picked up by wait staff—seemed a Sisyphean task. Properly cooking and plating the food I was responsible for, as well as coordinating timing with the other line cooks to have all the dishes for a table ready at the same time was daunting.

All “green” cooks go through this humbling initiation process. One of the key steps to moving out of this overwhelmed state is getting organized. Cooks who are unable to physically and mentally organize find themselves in over their heads and perpetually “in the weeds.”

Here at Cook’s Science, we don’t face the kind of grueling pressure experienced by cooks in the fine dining restaurant kitchens documented in the Netflix series Chef’s Table, but organization and working clean are still vital to our success—we aim to produce precise and consistently successful recipes on a tight publishing schedule.

In last week’s Behind the Scenes post, Tim wrote about our approach to coming up with creative recipe ideas. Once we’ve completed the brainstorming and recipe assignment process, our organizational guru and all-around bad-ass managing editor Kristin creates a schedule of deadlines for the upcoming batch of recipes, from when first drafts are due, to when photo shoots are scheduled, to when recipes need to be finalized for our copy editors’ eagle eyes. The turnaround time on these recipes can be pretty tight, so it’s critical that Tim and I are efficient and methodical with our approach. When I’m developing a recipe, I like to meet briefly with executive editor Dan each morning to talk through my game plan for the day. I then write a daily prep list (kitchen lingo for to-do list), prioritizing tasks by their importance and amount of time they will take, before I finally head downstairs to the kitchen.

Speaking of the kitchen, with all of the different publication teams at ATK, space in our shared test kitchen is always at a premium (at least until we move into our fancy new digs later this year). There aren’t assigned seats, so Tim and I try to set up our work stations near each other. This way so we can bounce ideas off each other throughout the day, and get quick-reaction tasting notes on recipes before we call team-wide tastings. As I work through the tasks on my daily prep list, I record progress and recipe measurements in a notebook. I prefer this analog approach to record-keeping in the test kitchen as I find that my laptop clutters up my workstation and I don’t want to worry about ruining my keyboard with beet juice (#testcookproblems).

Early on in the recipe development process Tim and I usually do a lot of side-by-side testing, meaning we change one variable across multiple versions of a dish, keeping everything else constant. For example, when developing a beet salad for our upcoming beet deep dive, I wanted to show the team why I think beets cooked using the sous vide method are superior in texture and flavor to oven-roasted beets. My contention was that when beets are cooked sous vide, the flavors of the aromatics and seasonings they’re cooked with penetrate deeply, virtually no moisture evaporates during cooking (a problem with roasted beets), and they have more consistent and appealing texture throughout (oven-roasted beets often have a softer exterior and a firmer center). I set up five tests with paired batches of beets cooked sous vide or roasted in the oven, and recorded lots of data, such as cooking time, technique, temperature, and the team’s reactions to the flavor and texture of each sample.

Along with group tastings, I keep everyone on the team updated on my recipe development by spending part of my day translating and transcribing my Moleskine chicken scratch into testing log spreadsheets and summaries (see below). This is usually when I break the news to Kristin that I’ve come up with two more recipes that I really want to include in the lineup at the last minute, once again ruining her perfect deadline schedule. Despite our name, we don’t have everything down to a science.

Regardless of whether you are working the line during dinner service, developing recipes at Cook’s Science, or making dinner for your family and friends, being organized and regimented is guaranteed to set you on the path to kitchen glory. Writing this piece got me thinking about easy tips and tricks for getting organized in the kitchen, wherever you are. Below are a few of my tried-and-true hacks:

If you’re working from a recipe, read it through. Twice. Jot down a sequence for the steps you are going to take. This will help you remember them and you can avoid constantly going back to read the recipe. Humming or singing those steps to the tune of a song is a trick that chef Jody Adams taught me during my line cook initiation. It sounds a little kooky but it works, and I still do it to this day.

Clear your work station of clutter. If you are working through a recipe that involves a lot of prep, don’t let it pile up around you, and especially not on your cutting board. Transfer those sliced onions to a bowl before starting on the peppers.

Assign designated spots for all utensils and ingredients and then keep them in their place. Once you measure out the flour for those cookies, put the bag back in the cupboard.

Keep a neatly folded kitchen towel on your station for wiping down your cutting board and work surface. Use it.

Clean as you go. Don’t let dirty pots, pans, and bowls pile up in your sink. Clutter is always bad, and having to tackle a mountain of dirty dishes after dinner takes the fun out of cooking an awesome meal.

Got any organizational tricks of your own? We’d love to hear them! Share them with us in the comments section!

Photography by Steve Klise.

But beets get a bad rap. For many people, they’re just ominously dark slices from a can that our parents forced us to eat when we were too young to appreciate their unapologetic taste of the earth.

I was never a big beet lover myself, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to revisit the root this month in our second ingredient deep dive (last fall we took a close look at eggplant). After exploring the vast culinary potential of the humble beet, I may be finally coming around.

I’m not alone. As chefs and the dining public have embraced sourcing and eating local and seasonal produce, beets are enjoying some well-deserved attention. This attention has led to new and creative culinary treatments for beets (a beet dish from my time cooking at Clio in Boston involved freezing roasted beets with liquid nitrogen in order to smash them into abstract shapes) and an appreciation for traditional preparations as well (check out this perfect whole-beet cookery from chef Christian Puglisi). In developing recipes for this beet deep dive, I wanted to show off the versatility of beets and highlight some techniques that address their more challenging characteristics (sweetness, texture, and long cooking time, I’m looking at you).

You may have noticed that slicing a beet reveals concentric circles that are inside the beet, not unlike tree rings. (This is especially obvious in Chioggia, or candy-stripe, beets.) Those are alternating rings of parenchyma tissue, where the plant stores sugar for energy, and vascular tissue, which transports nutrients throughout the plant. The sugar reserves act as a natural beet antifreeze, lowering the freezing point of water in the plant and thus helping prevent that water from freezing and rupturing cell walls when the temperature drops. Beets’ natural deicing properties are so effective that the Minnesota Department of Transportation uses beet juice to deice roads. Seriously. The beet’s natural sugar has the side effect of making beets very sweet, a trick other vegetables only achieve with significant effort. And that sweetness poses a unique challenge to the beet cook. Should one find ways to balance that sweetness with bitterness and acidity? Or embrace the sweetness and make a dessert? (Yes and yes.) In two of my beet recipes I counteract that intense sweetness with bitterness. I char beets (burning the sugar) for a salad, and pair pickled beet juice with herbal, bitter Campari for a refreshing, jewel-toned granita. But I also celebrate the sweetness by incorporating beet juice into a creamy beet panna cotta with candied black sesame seeds.

Beets are part of an exclusive club of underground stem vegetables that retain crunchiness even after prolonged cooking (other VIP members include the Chinese water chestnut, lotus root, and bamboo shoots). In his book On Food and Cooking, food science guru Harold McGee explains that beets’ “textural robustness comes from particular phenolic compounds in their cell walls that form bonds with the cell-wall carbohydrates and prevent them from being dissolved away during cooking.” In short, cooking beets can be a time commitment. To get around this problem, I mostly avoided whole-beet cookery (our Charred Beet Salad is the one exception). And for a few recipes I skipped cooking them altogether. The best example of celebrating beets’ “textural robustness” is my crispy, crunchy, lacto-fermented beets, where the natural acidity of lactic acid balances their sweetness.

A note on color: During preliminary testing I cooked batches of the three most widely available varieties of beets—red, golden, and Chioggia. The differing appearance of these varieties comes down to their respective types of betalain pigments. Red beets are colored by betacyanins, while golden beets contain betaxanthins. There is even an “albino” variety of white beets that don’t have any betalain pigments. We found minimal difference in flavor and texture when all three types were oven-roasted or cooked sous vide. However, we discovered that golden beets are very vulnerable to discoloration; raw golden beets quickly turned black when sliced or juiced. Also, I’m sorry to report that Chiogga beets lose their striking pinwheel color scheme when cooked, a result of cell walls breaking down and betalain pigment leakage.

We will be rolling out our sweet suite of beet recipes in the coming weeks, so stay tuned, and let us know your deep (dive) thoughts and feelings on beets in the comments section.

Photography by Steve Klise.

“Should we do anything for April Fool’s Day?” our managing editor, Kristin, asked during our team meeting last Thursday, March 30th. I jumped at the opportunity and suggested developing a gag recipe we could publish on Saturday, April 1st. What, exactly, the recipe would be was the next question. We needed an absurd dish, fast. (It seems we have a knack for procrastinating on special occasion recipes.)

I had jelly beans on the brain after a recent company-wide “guess how many jelly beans are  in the jar” contest. So, I was immediately inspired to pay homage to, in my opinion, one of the great television characters of our time, Charlie Kelly from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, with a rendition of his favorite dish: Milk Steak with Raw Jelly Beans. While not everyone on the Cook’s Science team was familiar with the reference, we all agreed that the recipe sounded bizarre enough for our April Fool’s prank, even without the background knowledge. If I could get a “working” recipe ready to publish in 24 hours, executive editor Dan Souza would make milk steak happen. Challenge accepted.

On a mission, I got to work in the test kitchen. The first issue at hand was ingredient sourcing. I didn’t want to waste food developing a fake recipe. Also, there was no time to order ingredients. (Our amazing Kitchen Operations team typically needs 24-48 hours to track down the ingredients Tim and I order.) The components for milk steak needed to be quickly foraged from what was in the test kitchen that day. As luck would have it, one of the test cooks on the Photo Team (read more about their role at America’s Test Kitchen in Tim’s recent Behind the Scenes post) was wrapping up a shoot that featured a lot of grilled meat. I was able to barter, Oregon Trail-style, for one of the leftover steaks. Score! All I needed now were the jelly beans.

With a little sleuthing I tracked down the winner of the aforementioned jelly bean jar challenge (congrats, Amanda!) on the fourth floor of the building. She was more than happy to part with some of her winnings in the name of April Fool’s shenanigans. I hustled back to the kitchen and cobbled together a quick dos leches milk sauce by cooking whole and sweetened condensed milks left over from some recent baking projects with a little cornstarch. With the milk steak mise en place good to go, the next step was snapping some photos.

Luckily, test kitchen photographer Steve Klise (he’s responsible for much of the awesome photography on Cook’s Science) happened to walk by my station just as the sauce was reducing. “What are you getting up to with that steak?” he asked, intrigued. I filled him in on my milk steak machinations and asked if he had some time to snap a few shots of the final product. Always up for a good joke, his response what exactly what I wanted to hear: “Bring me milk steak, and I will make time!” With the sauce at the perfect nappé consistency, I plated the final dish and grabbed Steve. We found an empty photo studio and took a couple of “beauty” shots. Jelly beans have never looked so good.

I really didn’t want to let good food go to waste, and I was curious if Charlie Kelly was onto something, so I grabbed a knife and fork and dug in. I can’t say that Milk Steak with Raw Jelly Beans is a dish I want to revisit, and I don’t recommend making it if you’re looking for a great way to enjoy steak. But, I will say that some bites were not as terrible as others. It really depended on what jelly bean flavors wound up on my fork. Banana was the most . . . challenging. Buttered popcorn was, surprisingly, the least offensive. I was only able to convince one other test cook to try a bite, which she promptly spat out. Milk steak, like haggis, appears to be an acquired taste.

With cooking and photos complete it was time to write the recipe. Note to self: fake Cook’s Science recipes are much quicker to write than real Cook’s Science recipes—no gram-to-traditional measurement conversions, no detailed testing, no fact-checking. A couple of edits from the rest of the team, and the text was ready to go. With the help of our awesome image production department (who loved the idea and took time out of their busy schedule to help us), Steve’s photo was cropped and looking even better than expected in record time. We were ready to publish. All that was left was the seal of approval from our chief creative officer, Jack Bishop. After what seemed like an eternity, his verdict came in: “I’m a bit worried about your sanity but this is fun . . . Can’t wait to see the pic.”

Milk Steak with Raw Jelly Beans had the green light. We hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did—we loved reading all of your comments on the site and on social media!

P.S. It was a joke, guys!

Photography by Steve Klise

Eggplant has enjoyed an uptick in popularity that owes credit to chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi, Michael Solomonov, and Ana Sortun, who champion Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines that prominently feature the vegetable. They have shown us that there is a world of eggplant possibilities beyond parmigiana, ratatouille, and moussaka. Even still, it’s not a vegetable that gets people hot and bothered. I was met with a number of skeptical looks as I embarked on this project in the test kitchen. But I was undeterred. When it came to recipe development, I started by looking at the unique characteristics of eggplant and the most popular cooking techniques—and then I started asking questions. Could the absorbent sponginess of eggplant be used as a positive to soak up a flavorful fat rather than just the neutral frying oil? Could we develop a roasted eggplant dish that didn’t have the texture of baby food? Could I improve on the tried and true salt-and-dry approach by imparting flavor to the eggplant during the drying process? I clearly had a lot of ground to cover, so I got to work.

For the first recipe in our eggplant deep dive, I wanted to develop a whole roasted eggplant dish that offered a variety of textures—from creamy to crunchy. Because roasted whole eggplant contains a lot of air (which expands in a hot oven) and water (which turns to steam when heated), it has a tendency to burst and deflate. This is a big positive if you’re making a puree like baba ghanoush, but that mushy texture is too monotone and Gerber-esque to stand alone as a dish. Enter the Hasselback eggplant. By making ¼-inch-thick slices crosswise down the length of the eggplant, stopping just short of slicing all the way through, I opened up a whole new world of eggplant possibilities. This setup allows steam to escape during cooking so the eggplant gets tender without bursting and turning to mush. Instead, it’s crispy at the edges, soft and creamy at the center. More important, I could pack the spaces between the slices with superflavorful muhammara, a sweet and spicy Middle Eastern paste made from roasted peppers, walnuts, bread crumbs, and pomegranate molasses.

Our second eggplant recipe addresses the eggplant-as-sponge problem from a different angle. First, I borrowed a technique developed by our colleagues at Cook’s Illustrated that takes the traditional salt-and-dry technique one step further by microwaving the eggplant on coffee filters to rapidly dehydrate it. That leaves us with eggplant that can be charred in a skillet (without it falling apart) to develop intense flavor. I then dress the charred eggplant in an equally intense Sichuan-inspired sauce, so it absorbs flavor, not just frying oil.

And we’re back!

As promised, we’re dropping Part 2 of our Eggplant Mixtape with two more recipes. So far we’ve given eggplant the charred and roasted treatments, and we’re moving on to fried and smoked. The third recipe in our deep dive is a salad with crispy fried eggplant that is tossed with cherry tomatoes, a ton of herbs, and nam prik—a bright Thai condiment made with lime juice, fish sauce, rice vinegar, palm sugar, ginger, garlic, and chiles. We use the same microwave dehydrating method from our Charred Sichuan-Style Eggplant, before shallow-frying and marinating the eggplant. The fry-then-marinate approach (think Buffalo wings) allows the eggplant to soak up the nam prik and the juice from the tomatoes, while taking on a varied texture that is crispy-chewy on the edges and soft in the center. We (but especially our Managing Editor Kristin) can’t get enough of this salad that will brighten up your dinner game, even in the dead of winter when we can’t look at another beet salad.

OK, you’ve made it to the final boss of eggplant recipes, and it’s time to show off your auber-genius. Our last entry in this series is the most labor-intensive and time-consuming recipe of the bunch, but we’re confident that this Smoky Eggplant Miso Soup is worth the effort. I often take issue with the way in which eggplant flavor is described as “smoky,” even when it hasn’t been anywhere near smoke, a grill, or even an open flame. It’s a catch-all generalization, like describing wines as merely “dry” or “oaky.” That doesn’t mean eggplant can’t be smoky though, we just have to give it a hand, and smoldering wood chips. For this recipe, we smoke eggplant slices on the grill, and then dry them out in a low oven. That smoked eggplant is first used to make a vegetarian riff on dashi, the mother stock of Japanese cuisine, which is the base for the soup. It’s then turned into a relish with some shitake mushrooms. The simplicity of this soothing dish belies its depth of flavor and technique used to achieve that result. Congratulations, Eggplant Master, you have earned your purple belt.

Photography by Steve Klise and Kevin White.

As Tim mentioned in last week’s post, our team has been focusing on salt for an upcoming feature story going live next week. In particular, we’ve been exploring how brining affects the flavor and texture of different foods.

My recent Fermented Beets and Beet Kvass recipe brines beets for a long time (at least a week). For this latest set of recipes, I was interested in shortening the brining time, so that, rather than allowing the vegetables to ferment, they’re treated in the same way that I would quick-brined meat or fish—well-seasoned with firm-yet-tender texture. In terms of cooking technique, with warmer weather finally making an appearance in Boston, grilling has been on my mind. I’ve always loved grilled vegetables, but it seems as though they usually end up an afterthought at summer cookouts; the ubiquitous platter of overcooked and underseasoned asparagus, bell peppers, zucchini, and portobello mushrooms, often skewered on those metal kebabs. I get it. Properly cooking vegetables on a hot grill is harder than it looks, especially when you’ve got burgers, sausages, and steaks going too. But it can be done.

First off, ditch the kebabs. Vegetables aren’t all the same and they don’t cook at the same rate. You wouldn’t stick chicken and steak on the same skewer, toss them on the grill and expect them to be perfectly cooked at the same time. Why should vegetables be any different?

Next, cook your veg less. A lot of produce tastes great raw, right? Grilling vegetables should be about enhancing their natural flavor with some of that delicious, smoky, charred goodness, not turning them into overcooked, limp-yet-somehow burnt, unrecognizable versions of themselves. Grilled vegetables can still have crunch, if you get them on and off the grill fast enough. Carryover cooking, where a food continues to cook with residual heat after it has been removed from the heat source, applies to vegetables as well as meat and poultry. Asparagus that looks perfect on the grill may be overcooked after sitting a few minutes off the grill. And nobody should be subjected to sad, limp grilled asparagus.

Fat and seasoning can be your friend. (In moderation, please. Vegetables don’t need to get doused with the Italian antipasto treatment every time.) A light coating of oil helps salt adhere to, rather than bounce off of, the surface of vegetables, but it also imparts flavor and changes the texture of the vegetables as they hang out on the grill, giving vegetables like carrots and asparagus that too-long-in-the-pool pruny skin. Not necessarily a bad thing, but coating them with oil and salt isn’t the only way to go about grilling vegetables. I’ve been experimenting with quickly brining vegetables, like you would chicken or fish, before giving them a quick cook on the grill. Just 45 minutes in a cold saltwater brine produces vegetables that are seasoned beyond just the exterior—they taste more like the best version of themselves.

The salt in the brine does more than just season the veggies. It also begins to break down plant cell walls and tenderize the vegetables, meaning they’re on and off the grill even faster, giving them nice surface char without sacrificing the crunchy, snappy texture so prized in fresh spring and summer produce. Needless to say, I’m pretty psyched for grilling season. I hope you are, too.

What are your favorite vegetables to grill? Got any brining thoughts or questions? Feeling salty? Let us know in the comments section!

(Editor’s Note: Be sure to check back next week on Cook’s Science to get Sasha’s brined and grilled vegetable recipes.)

Photography by Steve Klise.

From Sasha:

Tim and I are often asked by friends and family what exactly we work on all day in the kitchen. In fact, even our colleagues here at America’s Test Kitchen ask us the same question, often with raised eyebrows as we are setting up incubators or dehydrating tapioca slurry, the appearance of which could best be described as non-radioactive Ghostbusters slime. Our days are mainly consumed by failed experiments, bad food puns, tasty snacks, and the odd culinary eureka moment. We thought it would be fun to start documenting and sharing some of these moments to give a better sense of what our day to day experiences are like in the test kitchen of Cook’s Science.

I started working at Cook’s Science this past summer after spending two years in Chicago as a sous chef at Parachute Restaurant. One of the things I was most excited about when I transitioned from the grind of the restaurant schedule to a more normal 9-to-5 life was the possibility of cooking more at home for loved ones and myself. Alanis Morissette would agree that one of the tragic ironies of cooking in restaurants is that you rarely, if ever, have the time or energy to cook at home. I think I hit rock bottom working the wood oven station at a restaurant in Maine where I would make awesome Neapolitan pies all night and then go home and order Papa John’s. I’m glad those days are (hopefully) behind me.

At Cook’s Science we’ve been developing some quick, simple, and delicious recipes for mid-week dinners that call for something a little more approachable than our more project-heavy, impress-your-Tinder-date recipes (just being able to pronounce nixtamalization should get you a second date). For my first mid-week dinner recipe the team and I decided that I would tackle something pasta-related. I was totally down with this, mainly because I am always craving pasta, and if I can disguise my need for bucatini as recipe research and development, why not? We had some extra corn kicking around in the test kitchen, so I got to work on cobb-ling (I’m going to try to sneak as many food puns past our editors as possible) something together. The result: Creamy Corn Bucatini with Corn Ricotta and Basil.

During our early brainstorming, I had joked about making a “cornbonara” pasta dish and I decided to run with it. I was quickly able to develop a corn puree that mimicked the rich, egg yolk texture of a classic carbonara. An early version that mixed the corn purée with pancetta was tasty but struck me as a little too cute and gimmicky. I decided to ditch the pork and focus on the corn. Ricotta struck me as a another way to bring some needed fat to the dish—it’s unbelievably easy to make at home, and  By steeping corn in the milk used to make the ricotta, I was able to bring even more corn flavor to the party.

From this point, the dish came together quickly (not something that happens very often, as I soon learned—stay tuned). Even though we were developing the recipe in summer—peak corn season—I wanted to see if it would work just as well if someone wanted to make it in February (read: NOT peak corn season). I tested the process with frozen corn kernels in lieu of fresh and had my team do a taste test of one recipe made with fresh corn and one made with frozen. They, lucky for me, weren’t able to detect a difference. After some additional testing and tweaking, we sent the recipe to a panel of home cooks to try it out and give us feedback on both the process (the recipe) and the finished product. A few more adjustments to the consistency of the sauce, and we were ready to call it a day.

However, recipe writing was not as much of a breeze for me. This was the first recipe I developed and wrote at Cook’s Science and I had been warned by our Executive editor Dan Souza that it’s a pretty steep learning curve. He was right. I was coming from restaurants where recipes are, at best, a list of grammed-out ingredients followed by shorthand instructions: “slice and sweat veg, blend on high, pass through chinois, chill.” Not exactly something we could publish and guarantee home cooks’ success. Now I had to step back and really examine all of the steps I was taking during cooking. Exactly how many seconds did I blend the corn purée? Precisely how much pasta water did I add to the sauce? Did I need to strain the ricotta through cheesecloth or would a fine mesh strainer suffice on its own? Answering questions like this meant going back to the test kitchen to cook through the recipe again and again, recording measurements, and paring out unnecessary steps. It’s a lot of work. A lot of delicious work.

From Tim:

I spend a lot of time in the kitchen failing. And coming from the restaurant world, where failure can mean getting pulled off the line and being ridiculed by my chef—or worse, resulting in my own unemployment—the notion of failure is unsettling. But, since landing at America’s Test Kitchen a year ago, first on the book team, and now on the Cook’s Science team, I’ve found that sometimes failure can be a gateway to discovery. Sometimes failure encourages me to explore things that might otherwise never have seen the light of day here at Cook’s Science—but that nonetheless make our lives mildly more interesting.  

I was playing around with different variations on the Butternut Squash Gnudi recipe I’d been working on, and thought that sun-dried tomato might be a cool flavor base as a substitute for butternut squash. Traditionally, gnudi are dumpling-like pillows of ricotta and semolina flour that are a close cousin to gnocchi. Instead of ricotta and semolina flour, I opted for a non-traditional approach using egg white powder and tapioca starch to bind the filling and create solid little bite-size gnudi with maximal squash flavor. The egg white powder helps form a stable gel via the coagulation of albumin proteins in the egg white and also contributes to the gnudi’s custardy texture. The tapioca starch is there to bind water and help with gelation, working in combination with the egg white powder to form an even more stable but creamy gel.

My first attempt involved rehydrating a jar of sundried tomatoes by gently simmering them in crushed tomatoes to maximize the tomato flavor, blending them up, and incorporating them into my working gnudi formula in place of the butternut squash. The results sucked. The gnudi never set up properly, so I was left with a hot mess of egg white- and starch-thickened tomato purée. I tried bumping up the proportion of tapioca starch to increase the gelling potential of the base. This time, the gnudi properly set up, but the texture was pretty appalling. I ended up with fire-red hot dog-looking logs that had a bizarre, crumbly texture—nothing creamy at all.

I made a few more tweaks to the amounts of tapioca starch and egg white powder, but after a particularly harrowing team taste test, we agreed that this recipe idea was a non-starter. But I had all this tomato-y goodness left over from my last failed gnudi attempt. Sasha suggested that we spread it on large sheet pans and dry it out in our dehydrator. We basically ended up with tomato-flavored fruit leather—pliable, twisty, and reminiscent of a Totino’s pizza roll. Since we’re tight on space in the test kitchen these days, we keep our dehydrator in our office upstairs next to the marketing department. The whole floor smelled like a pizza shop for a solid week.

Photography by Steve Klise and Daniel J. van Ackere.