Cape Town-based butcher Andy Fenner serves these cheesy sandwiches called braaibroodjie (“barbecue bread”) with beer. His version stacks slices with cheddar, tomato, onions, and chutney before grilling. The chutney is key: Mrs. Ball’s, an iconic brand in South Africa, is made from dried fruits and vinegar, but any sweet-and-sour chutney will do.

Featured in “The South African Art of Braai” by Mark Byrne.

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This take on okroshka, a classic summer soup named after the Russian word kroshit, meaning “to crumble,” uses tangy kefir or buttermilk as a base and is filled with heaps of torn fresh herbs. Grated horseradish and spicy mustard add a gentle backnote to the soup. If you can’t find quail eggs or don’t have the patience to peel them, hard-boil chicken eggs and cut them into quarters.

Featured in: “The Brothers Berezutskiy and the New Russian Cuisine.”

Our Most Refreshing Cold Soup Recipes for Instant Air Conditioning

Slurpable and satisfying, cold soups are the essential bowls of summer »

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We’ve seldom met a stuffed bread we didn’t love, and khachapuri—Georgia’s national dish and the country’s catch-all term for various breads filled with cheeses—is the latest and most tempting example.

Sometimes flat and chewy, other times tender and fluffy, khachapuri dough comes in many forms, and its myriad potential fillings are adapted and improvised all over Georgia. For months we’ve been turning out our own classic and creative variations from the test kitchen (nine kinds to be exact), but our favorite is one of the most traditional and recognizable: adjaruli khachapuri, a yeasted crust with a gooey filling of salty brined cheese, runny egg, and melted butter. While you may be tempted to eat one of these on your own, this one’s meant to be shared and devoured as an appetizer by a hungry, carb-loving crowd.

For the recipe, plus more on khachapuri and its variants, check out our Guide to Georgian Breads »

The post Get to Know Cheese-Filled, Egg-Topped Khachapuri appeared first on Saveur.

Frozen dessert technology has come a long way since the days when Emperor Nero would send Roman slaves into the mountains to harvest blocks of ice, shave it down, and sweeten it with honey. In 1843, Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia patented the first ice cream freezer, but it required relentless hand-cranking and relied on rock salt to lower the temperature of the ice. Today, affordable entry-level ice cream makers can churn out a noticeably superior product compared with mass industrial brands, and are as simple to operate as a blender.

Yes, an ice cream maker is an investment in money and counter space, but if you’re a true ice cream lover, it’s a small price to pay for the good homemade stuff. Here are my recommendations—honed from years of home ice cream churning—for the best machines and other tools for your personal sundae bar.

The Entry Level Machine

Heami Lee

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Almost all ice cream machines function the same: They rapidly chill a base while agitating it to incorporate air. This keeps the ice crystals that are forming inside as small as possible. Which machine you need largely depends on how much ice cream you plan to make.

Cuisinart’s entry-level is compact, foolproof, and makes an excellently textured product. The downside is prep time. Its freezing power comes from a gel-filled bowl that must be frozen 8 hours in advance of churning and refrozen after each 1- or 2-quart churn.

The Upgrade

Heami Lee

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Breville’s Smart Scoop has a built-in cooling element so you can spin batches back to back (though, for best results, pre-cool base in the churning chamber for five minutes between projects). It also churns at a slower speed and whips less air into the base for a subtly denser and creamier result.

The Scoop

Heami Lee

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Disher-style scoops are popular for their quick-release sweeper arms, but the old-school aluminum kind, like Zeroll makes, is still the best for the job. Its edge is perfectly angled to cut through ice cream (twist, don’t dig), and with no moving parts it can never break. And did you know the handle is full of a conductive fluid that transfers heat from your hand for easier scooping?

The Container

Heami Lee

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Yes, containers matter! For storage, you want a long and shallow plastic container, which freezes ice cream fast, essential for preventing iciness. Rubbermaid’s 5-cup Dry Food containers are stackable, completely odorless, and conveniently fit a quart of ice cream.

The Thermometer

Heami Lee

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If you’re making a thicker, custard-style batch of ice cream, you run the risk of overcooking your eggs, curdling the base while adding unwelcome eggy flavors. A quality thermometer (the Thermapen is best-in-class for accuracy, speed, and readability) will help you locate the ice-cream-custard sweet spot: 170 degrees. It’ll also tell you when your chilled ice cream is ready to churn, no guesswork required.

The Manual

Clarkson Potter

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Chicago pastry chef Dana Cree is a bonafide ice cream obsessive. Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream is her comprehensive guide to understanding just how the stuff works and includes recipes like toasted hay and pineapple-jasmine that will get you itching to churn, too.

The post The Best Ice Cream Maker, Scoop, and Other Tools for Your Home Sundae Bar appeared first on Saveur.

Gelato is a totem.

Yes, it’s a dessert, but at this point in the collective American unconscious, it’s also an idea. An aspiration. Gelato is the sophisticated European answer to everything crassly American. More pure. More worldly, yet too good for this world. Gelato is everywhere now, but the mystique remains. The idea of the perfect gelato experience still feels rare. And actually making it? Unattainable.

I admit to being a perpetrator of this magical thinking. Despite owning three ice cream machines and spending my Friday nights churning up new flavors on a whim. I’ve made soft serve. Sorbet. Frozen yogurt. Midwestern custard. But gelato’s always seemed out of reach.

Truth is, this has more to do with the Italian delight in yelling at other people for screwing up their food—see: Entire Town Mad at a Chef for Putting Garlic in His Pasta Sauce—than any innate difficulty making gelato. Gelato is just the Italian word for ice cream, and if you can make boxed brownie mix, you can make ice cream.

The key to making great gelato? Knowing what it is and how to overcome its limitations.

What’s the Difference Between Gelato and Ice Cream?

In broad strokes, we all know that gelato is denser and richer than American ice cream. Its flavor is intense and it forms swirly folds rather than pert round scoops. But what does that really mean, and how does it happen? There are three big factors at work:

Fat

Fat: American ice cream has way more butterfat—that is, fat from cream and milk—than gelato. Legally speaking, the FDA requires ice cream to be at least 10% by weight to be labeled as ice cream. Super premium ice cream brands climb as high as 16%, and home recipes—which rely on less efficient machines that require more texture insurance—can climb above 20%. By comparison, Italian law requires gelato contain a mere 3.5% butterfat. It can go higher than that, but doesn’t need to.

Cold fat tastes like pretty much…nothing. It coats and dulls the tongue, impeding the sensation of flavor. Since gelato’s so light in fat, it tastes more intense. The flavor hits you first, not the dairy.

Air

Air: Butterfat also affects texture; the more butterfat an ice cream mix contains, the more air it’s able to absorb during churning, which translates into a billowy scoop that holds its shape and, paradoxically, registers in the mouth as super light. (Consider the light-as-air texture of whipped cream compared to the coarser froth on a carton of shaken milk.)

Since gelato’s so light in fat, it doesn’t suck in much air during the churning process. American ice cream can double in volume during churning, ballooning up with air. Gelato’s overrun, in ice cream speak, is much lower, resulting in an ice cream that feels more dense and rich—because it is. But since that richness is less dependent on fat, gelato melts fast and clean on the tongue.

Temperature

Temperature: When you order a scoop from an ice cream shop, it’s likely sitting in a service freezer that hovers around 0 to -10 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which hard-pack American ice cream is scoopable but keeps its shape.

Gelato’s served much warmer—a good 10 to 20 degrees—which helps keep it soft and dreamy despite its lower butterfat. Cold also dulls the tongue, and gelato’s warmer serving temperature makes its flavor that much more immediate and aromatic.

The result? A scoop that’s potent and pure-tasting and dense but not heavy.

Bringing Gelato Home

Once you understand the basic principles, the rest is just plugging in numbers. Where most home ice cream recipes call for a high proportion of cream to milk, my pistachio gelato recipe uses a 2:1 ratio of whole milk to cream. And to compensate for the lower fat content, I throw in some egg yolks and a fair amount of sugar to help keep ice crystals at bay.

If you’re a particular kind of ice cream nerd, you might read that above paragraph, dart over to the recipe, plug it into this butterfat calculator, then come back here and ask, What gives? That’s a recipe with 10% butterfat! And you’re using so many egg yolks. How dare you call this gelato?

Take a minute. Breathe. Good? Good.

Remember what I said at the beginning of this long story, how gelato’s just the Italian word for ice cream? Well, just as American ice cream comes in all shapes and styles, so does gelato. The broad differences hold, but if you drive your way across Italy eating ice cream (not a bad idea), you’ll notice that the gelato changes from place to place.

In Sicily, what some consider to be the empire of ice cream, gelato tends toward milk to the extreme, often eschewing cream entirely, and it often excludes egg yolks altogether, thickening the base with cornstarch instead. But if you head up north, where dairy cows roam all over and there’s a lot of cream floating around, guess what? The gelato gets creamier. More eggs may enter the picture.

Because of course gelato is a many-splendored thing. Just as there’s no one Authentic Italian Pasta to Rule Them All, there’s no one way to make gelato. Hell, Meredith Kurtzman, one of the greatest gelato makers in the world, makes a ridiculously delicious olive oil gelato with a whopping 10 egg yolks per batch. And if eggs and cream are okay with Meredith, they’re good enough for the rest of us.

You can use this pistachio base, minus the pistachio, as a template for all your gelato flavors. Will it bring to mind that perfect spoonful you can’t forget on that sun-dappled day you strolled down the cobblestoned streets of Milan as a gorgeous Italian winked at you? That’s between you and your god. But will it be sitting in your freezer come 3 a.m. when you’re in need of a middle-of-the-night spoonful of cold, creamy comfort on a swampy summer night?

You better believe it.

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More Tips for Gelato Greatness

Don’t skimp on ingredients. A cliché, but true here. Gelato’s low butterfat leaves no place for subpar stuff. In the case of pistachio, buy the best pistachio paste you can afford. Agrimontana from Sicily is my favorite.

Let it thaw. If your freezer runs cold, your gelato will be hard to scoop after hardening. Thaw it in the fridge for 10 to 15 minutes before serving until it loosens up.

Eat it fast. Gelato isn’t meant to last, and one of the reasons Italian gelato tastes so good is because it’s fresh. Extended time in home freezers causes the ice cream to melt and refreeze, forming crunchy ice crystals. Eat yours within two days of churning, but ideally the day it’s made. If you have leftovers stored for longer, you’re better off melting the gelato down entirely and churning it again.

The post How to Make Real-Deal Italian Gelato at Home appeared first on Saveur.

First, look for their silvery eyes. And the murky holes where they nest, the way their legs sprawl out across the swaying seaweed as they swish from place to place. Danai Kyriaki, Greek zoologist, schoolteacher, and diver, is describing how to hunt an octopus as she prepares to go in after her purple prey. She paddles through the blue-green Aegean, ducking her head below. At first, nothing is visible except a few fish too small to eat and shelled mollusks stuck to rocks.

Kyriaki, 26, lives in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-biggest city, but she returns often to Chalkidiki, a series of peninsulas in the north, to reconnect with the sea. She started spearhunting at 12 when her father, an experienced hunter, handed her the gun for the first time.

Away from shore, pebbles and urchin-coated crevices give way to smooth sand and seaweed forests. Kyriaki makes a slow left turn until she’s parallel with the beach, and points out what’s living in divots and holes in the sand—a long, brightly striped fish and several graceful purple octopuses that she’ll take aim at every so often. She doesn’t shoot at anything unless she knows she’ll hit it.

Before he instructed her in the art of aquatic hunting, Kyriaki’s father allowed her to paddle through the water behind him as he pointed out what was edible (octopuses) and what was not (moray eels). Although octopus is common at the Greek table, Kyriaki doesn’t know many hunters outside a few male friends who live in other parts of Greece. She’s a rarity in Chalkidiki and most of Greece, as not many people—especially young people—still take to the water in pursuit of octopus. It’s particularly labor-intensive work for potentially little gain, and there are easier ways to catch your octopus, like on a fishing line or in a trap.

Even after Kyriaki got her gun, the octopus eluded her—she wasn’t an “instinct hunter,” as she puts it, and her father continued to be a lookout, swimming alongside, pointing them out, and shooting them for her. Three years passed until she found and made her first kill. Watching her swoop smoothly down upon a hidden octopus, you’d never know she once struggled to find her prey at the bottom of the sea. When Kyriaki brings her catch to shore, her mother prepares it. Sometimes it’s grilled, or boiled in water with vinegar and olive oil. Dinner is often served at a table outside overlooking the crystal blue of the Mediterranean.

Kyriaki has been looking at this same stretch of sea and the terrain below for 20 years, and now knows where octopuses are likely to gather—in a hollow brick nestled on the sea floor, for instance. After she floats down and lines up the shot, there’s a soft pop that reverberates through the water. She returns to the surface in a cloud of tiny bubbles, octopus affixed to the end of her three-tined spear gun. Soon, Kyriaki is sinking again, this time toward a narrow tire around whose rim purple tentacles are gently spread. The octopus barely has time to move.

Octopuses don’t always die when you shoot them, so even if you manage to get one at the end of your trident, the fight is far from over.

Kyriaki pulls the animal from the water, its body stretching to her elbow, and immediately its long tentacles wrap around her wrist and down her arm, shimmering purple and green in the sun. It spews ink, spurting a bloody brown onto her snorkel mask. Once the fight is over, she cuts the head at the crease where its tentacles are attached, flips it inside out, and tosses out a gray mass of guts. When they finally loosen, the tentacles fall away from her wrist to reveal a tendril of suction cup-shaped bruises. She drops her prize into a mesh bag slung around her waist.

This is a particularly good hunting day, Kyriaki says. There are three octopuses in her bag, which is more than she shot in her first seven years of hunting combined. She didn’t hit her stride until the summer she turned 21, when her father passed away. That summer, she hunted them more easily and brought her tally up to seven.

To Eat or Not to Eat? We Ask the Experts About the Ethics of Octopus

Peter Godfrey-Smith, philosopher of science and author of Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

After spending so much time observing octopuses and cuttlefish, was your appetite for the creatures deterred?
I don’t eat octopuses anymore. I stopped at some stage during the writing of Other Minds. I regard this as a somewhat sentimental decision, though. I am not a vegetarian, and in general I try to avoid eating the products of cruel factory farming. Compared to other kinds of meat, octopuses are not a particularly bad animal to include in your diet, as octopuses are wild-caught, short-lived, and not endangered. They are sensitive animals and I think they often suffer when they die. I am attached to them now in a way that prevents me from eating them.

Dave Pasternack, chef at New York City’s Esca, lifelong fisherman, and acclaimed “fish whisperer”

As someone who cooks octopus regularly, are you ever deterred by claims of their intelligence?
I’ve caught octopus many times, they’re spectacular creatures, beautiful to see in the water. I’ve been cooking it for 30 years and had it on the menu since we opened in 2000. Sometimes you look at octopuses as animals and sometimes you look at them as food.

The post How to Hunt an Octopus With a Trident Gun appeared first on Saveur.

With three colorful layers of ice cream domed atop a fudgy, flourless chocolate cake, our version of this retro dessert is a project perfect for celebrations. (Especially if you make your own ice cream: We used our homemade Pistachio Gelato and Raspberry Ice Cream.) You can vary the assembly as you like—layering the ice cream in any pattern or thickness, or flambéing the meringue topping or not. But whatever you choose, give yourself a day or two in advance to prepare.

What You Will Need

• Freezer-Safe Bowl
• Plastic Wrap
• Rubber Spatula
• 9-inch Cake Pan
• Parchment Paper
• Double Boiler
• Food Processor
• Large Bowl
• Electric Mixer
• Stand Mixer
• Crème Brulée Torch
• Small Pot
• Small Metal Ladle

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Left with a freezer full of ice cream from “Churn After Reading,”, we decided to make something with it (rather than merely grab spoonfuls each time we walked by the fridge). Baked Alaska, a 19th-century American dessert of layered ice cream cloaked with meringue, came to mind. The choices of how to make baked Alaska are endless—some contain only one type of ice cream, others three or more; some have a layer of cake as a base, others don’t; some are flambéed, others not. We went full throttle by using three plentiful ice cream layers separated by crumbled chocolate cookies atop a fudgy, flourless chocolate cake. Then we topped it with a splash of rum and set it ablaze, because the best part of this old-school dessert is the drama.

• Use an offset spatula to spread one ice cream flavor at a time. Allow each at least 10 minutes to harden in the freezer before adding the next.

• The best thickness for the meringue coat is about 1/2 inch. Any thicker and it will weep; too thin and it will disintegrate in the freezer. For the best texture, apply the meringue no more than 4–6 hours before igniting.

• Meringue will not stick to sorbet. You can layer ice cream in any pattern or thickness you like, but be sure the outer layer is dairy-based, or coat dairy-free domes with a thin layer of cake crumbs, chopped nuts, or cocoa nibs before adding meringue.

• Blowtorch meringue before it’s flambéed to give it a deeply toasted marshmallow flavor that the flambé alone won’t provide.

• Since booze will slip down the sides if drizzled on top, nestle half a clean eggshell into the top of the meringue before freezing. To serve, fill it with overproof rum and light with a long match or lighter. Carefully ladle more rum into the shell for a “flaming volcano” effect.

• To avoid slicing rock-hard ice cream, temper Baked Alaska in the refrigerator for 20–30 minutes before serving. Dip a sharp knife in warm water and wipe it clean between each cut.

The post Baked Alaska is Ready for a Comeback appeared first on Saveur.

The annual Field to Table dinner hosted by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers is part conservation fund-raiser, part celebration of the wild bounty of the Northern Rockies.

Five cooks, amateur and professional, created this feast using game and ingredients foraged, caught, and hunted on the abundant public lands of the West.

That osso buco was served over risotto, made with a stock extracted from the roasted bones of a ram that had lived its life in the mountain range looming behind us. The wild morels in the savory flan were picked by members of the group in areas of national forests that had been burned by wildfires. The flan was served with a rich and complex moose consommé. The moose was shot south of here in the Big Hole Valley. The sweet, fleshy northern pike—poached in olive oil and accompanied by pickled carrots and spring pea purée—was hooked through the ice of frozen public lakes.

Backcountry members’ bird dogs were key contributors to a fricassee of apple, sage, and Hungarian partridge. It took hunters and dogs, foragers and fishermen, many miles of exploring public grasslands, mountains, lakes, and rivers to gather these ingredients—a satisfying reminder of the importance of wildlife and wild places, and one of the prettiest and most fun shopping trips you could ever take.

The post A Wild Game Dinner to Help Protect America’s Public Land appeared first on Saveur.

We wait all year to reunite with the first-of-the-season strawberries, plums, and summer tomatoes, and to snack on slippery, sweet wedges of cantaloupe and watermelon sliced straight from the rind. But we found a way to make these beloved summer flavors even brighter: Drape them with a thin, buttery slice of Italian lardo.

Lardo is a slab of pork fat taken from the pig’s back and then salt-cured—occasionally with spices such as peppercorns, oregano, garlic, or star anise—and aged anywhere from a couple months to several years. It tastes best at or just above room temperature, when it gets a little translucent and dissolves on your tongue. Ask your butcher or local Italian specialty shop to cut it so thin it’s nearly transparent.

Ways to Love Lardo

• Wrap around fresh cantaloupe or honeydew slices, cherry tomatoes, or grilled asparagus spears, or around warm shell-on (or peeled) cooked shrimp
• Drape over grilled stone fruits, then top with flaky sea salt
• Serve on warm crostini with sliced strawberries or blackberries
• Layer atop toast with tomatoes for an open-face sandwich
• Place over warm clams in the shell, and top with toasted bread crumbs

The post How to Cook With Lardo, the Cured Pork Product That Goes With Everything appeared first on Saveur.

Endlessly variable, the nuts and herbs in this pesto can be switched up based on whatever’s in your pantry (try raw pistachios or hazelnuts for the almonds, and cilantro or basil for the parsley).

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