Rachael Ray

A long-standing dream of mine came true this week: Steak n Shake, the greatest of American hamburger restaurants, opened up in New York City. I got to spend some time with Ken Faulkner, the VP o f Operations, and was again flabbergasted at how hard it is to make hamburgers well. A few weeks earlier, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Tom Ryan, the head of Smashburger. Ryan is the CEO, but is essentially Ken Faulkner’s opposite number, the true author of the hamburger at each place. What both have in common is a commitment to making hamburger the best and hardest way, which is to cook them, quickly, on a flat metal surface, and serve them fresh. You [...]...

Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that, more than one full week into the new year, I have not made good on my New Year’s resolution. You know, the one where I said I was going to cook better for my wife, and make things besides meat sauce? I have actually managed to do worse! I didn’t even make meat sauce! I reheated meat sauce, not once but twice; ordered Chinese food despite her express protestations, and my sure knowledge that she absolutely loathes the stuff; and finished up by making myself meat sauce that she couldn’t eat when she was fasting. So all that was bad. But on the other hand, I have started making my Italian tuna salad again. Which [...]...

The week before Christmas is traditionally a time of recovery and relaxation, but not for me. I’m worked up. I cooked a cathedral roast and some satsuma-glazed beef back ribs in New Orleans for Christmas, and now I’m all nervous energy and restless plans of action. And one such plan has a special claim on me. I am making my new year’s resolution. I don’t know about you, but I take my new year’s resolution seriously. Not in the sense of actually sticking with it, or accomplishing it, or even thinking about it. But at the time, I mean it, or at least I try to mean it. And it seems to me that if you try to mean it, than [...]...

It’s not the flavor of gourmet hamburgers that I hate so much. It’s not their dense and cloying buns. Their mushy pickles don’t annoy me that much, and their meat is often very good indeed. No, my problem with them is hypocrisy. Let me back up a little. Over the years, I know that I have been ungenerous towards gourmet hamburgers. I have abused them in print, badmouthed them in private, railed against their makers and the consumers alike. I have alienated myself from half the hamburger-loving population. And so I want to clarify my position. I’m not against innovation. I like all the burgers Rachael makes – her beer burger, her sage-scented veal burgers, and so on. What galls me so [...]...

Have you ever met a hipster? Neither have I. All hipsters, by definition, despise hipsterism, and each other, and themselves. Foodies are not much different. I’ve never known someone who is really into food and restaurants to unironically call themselves a foodie. (The same is true of Trekkies, Cork Dorks, and any other subculture you can name. They’re insular and angry, always writing off aggrieved messages into cyberspace and getting into heated defenses of things other people barely know exist. So the fact that we foodies were wrong about pork should come as no suprise. But wrong we were. I learned this the hard way recently, when I was organized a big pork dinner out of New York. I had two [...]...

I wrote in my last column of my ambivalence, verging on dismay, at having to choose between making my own turkey - which I assumed must necessarily be crappy - and doing the Torrisi turkey, which was deboned, injected, cooked for 20 hours in a CVAP oven, and just amazing as a result. I decided to make my own, and to my immense surprise and pride, it came out great! I did have some help. As I always do, I took the time to brine the bird for a good 24 hours prior to cooking. But turkeys are big, and it’s hard to find something big enough to submerge a turkey in. I have a bathtub, but that wasn’t an option, [...]...

It’s four days before Thanksgiving, and I have a real problem. It’s about what I’m serving, and it’s a moral choice, and I think I know the answer. But let me tell you about it anyway. Right now there’s a turkey sitting in my refrigerator. It’s a very good one, about the best you can find: a Bell & Evans young turkey, air dried. I was planning on making it, despite the fact that, as I’ve written so often, I hate turkey, and resent even the one time a year that I’m forced to cook it. On the other hand, people look to me as the feeder, the cook, the meat man, and it gives me bone-deep gratification to deliver. [...]...

I just got back from Uruguay, where I was attending the Punta Del Este Food and Wine Festival. This was an awesome event; the country was gorgeous, it’s late spring there, and the constant flow of great wine and meat nearly made me want to stay there. (Had I not been married, I probably would have.) My reason for coming was a simple one: I wanted to learn about asado. Argentina and Uruguay, both major beef-producing regions, do some of the best asado anywhere; and I, who so idealize the connection between live fires and dead animals, needed to see it at its best. Asado, I should say here, is not a food; it’s both an event and a [...]...

For some reason which eludes even me, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately. Tuscany, Tennessee, Charleston, and Uruguay. This is a bizarre business, and enervating for a homebound kitchen pig like myself. But I also learned a few things. In Charleston, to take the most important example, I learned how to make the best fried chicken of all time; and if that’s not worth the trouble of getting on an airplane, what is? Sean Brock is a young chef, the man behind two super restaurants, McCrady’s and Husk. McCrady’s does modern tweezer food; Husk is a celebration of southern tradiionalism. (”Husk” refers to the outer protective casing of a seed.) Of all the recipes and methods which Brock [...]...