Spiced

April 1, 2019
In another excellent offering, the team at America’s Test Kitchen provides practices for enhancing the flavor of snacks, entrees, and desserts through spices. They create 47 blends, dry mixes, spreads, and infusions, and sprinkle, rub, or drizzle them across more than 125 dishes. Each entry begins with a summary of “why this recipe works” that explains the balance of tastes, textures, and fragrances. The first chapter is devoted to pepper: unripened peppercorns are used in seared duck breasts with green peppercorn sauce (“the slightly gamy flavor of the duck... tames the pungency” of the peppercorns); while pink peppercorns, which are actually berries, add a hint of fruit to pan-seared steaks with brandy-pink peppercorn sauce. Rubs for meat, fish, and poultry fill the second chapter, while the third is an exploration of the hot and smoky flavors found in chilis and curries. Wasabi tuna salad, balanced with pickled ginger, is a highlight of a section centered around spiced sauces and finishing blends. For dessert, there is the familiar, such as pumpkin spice muffins (with allspice, ground ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon), and the daring, as in a ginger-tumeric frozen yogurt. Home cooks wanting a deeper appreciation of the contents of their spice cabinets will gain it from this unique collection.

April 15, 2019
In the customary style of their many great cookbooks, the team at America's Test Kitchen here covers the why and the how of their latest topic, cooking with spice ( anything from a plant that is dried and can flavor food, plus salt). After a pleasantly textbook-ish introduction that includes a spice glossary and a whole chapter devoted to seasoning with salt and pepper, subsequent recipes are grouped by method, like coating foods with spice rubs, toasting and blooming spices to intensify their flavor, or finishing foods with a sprinkling of spice or a sauce. A handy reference also lists the book's globally influenced dishes (nearly 150 in total) by course and spice. A few standouts: marinated cauliflower with chickpeas and saffron, pomegranate-braised short ribs, pink peppercorn panna cotta. Recipes for DIY spice rubs, oils, and salts are also included. Popular book-to-TV crossovers like Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat (2017) and Michael Pollan's Cooked (2013) have shined a spotlight on cooking's individual elements and should help create an enthusiastic audience for this useful book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)