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Full-flavored chicken with sweet & nutty garlic

Perhaps an arbitrary number of cloves, the 40 in this French dish are iconic; while the chicken braises, the generous cloves become appealingly soft and spreadable. But their flavor is often spiritless. Another offense: The chicken is tender, but the breast meat dries out and tastes wan. We wanted to revisit this classic dish to make it faster and better, so it would boast well-browned, full-flavored chicken, sweet and nutty garlic, and a savory sauce. Using chicken pieces rather than a whole bird ensured that the meat cooked evenly_and quickly. We roasted the garlic cloves first to ...

A pasta dish that brings out the earthy flavor of mushrooms

We wanted to create a pasta dish that brought out the delicate, earthy flavor hiding in supermarket mushrooms. We selected cremini mushrooms, which have a meatier texture and a more intense, woodsy flavor than button mushrooms but are still readily available. Butternut squash heightened the dish's wintertime appeal and gave it heft and a subtle sweetness that perfectly complemented the mushrooms. To start, we sauteed the mushrooms with shallots, garlic, thyme, and a small amount of salt to help the cremini release their liquid, then added the squash. The liquid released by the ...

You won’t miss the meat in this veggie-packed lasagna

There's no reason why a vegetable lasagna made with the classic trio of eggplant, zucchini, and summer squash should be any less satisfying than a meat-based casserole, especially when the produce is in season and locally grown. But we've rarely cooked one that we've been moved to make again. Some versions look tempting enough with a topcoat of bubbly cheese and thick tomato gravy, but cutting out a square of it invariably reveals trouble at the core. Often placed between the pasta sheets raw, the zucchini and squash turn out steamy and limp, flooding the dish with their juices_or, in ...

Irish brown soda bread that’s hearty and easy to make

Irish brown soda bread is a hearty, wholesome loaf that tastes as good with a helping of scrambled eggs as it does with a smear of salted butter or tangy marmalade. And not only is this humble bread versatile, it's also simple to prepare. We mimicked the wheaty, nutty flavor and rustic crumb imparted by hard-to-find Irish wholemeal flour by combining whole-wheat flour with wheat bran and wheat germ. Cutting this mixture with all-purpose flour and a touch of sugar helped balance out the strong wheat flavor. The addition of baking powder guaranteed a nicely risen loaf, but we also ...

Old-fashioned recipes for hermits often produce rock-hard cookies peppered with bland, tough raisins. We wanted a moist, chewy cookie, gently redolent of molasses and warm spices. Traditional recipes for hermits call for creaming the butter, but this produces a dry, biscuit-like cookie. Melting the butter and then cooking it until it browns delivers a chewier, moister cookie, with a nutty flavor. Adding cinnamon, allspice, and ginger to the browned butter blooms their natural flavor, which allows us to use a smaller quantity of each for gently spiced cookies that aren't dusty-tasting ...

A pasta dish that’ll have your family asking for seconds

There is something magical about this recipe, which coaxes the ultimate flavor out of just a few humble supermarket ingredients, turning them into a rich-tasting and well-balanced pasta dish that will have your family reaching for seconds. After browning the sausage, we sautéed a hefty amount of sliced onions, along with sliced fennel, which added texture and flavor to the dish. And while it may seem like a mistake to add an entire can of tomato paste and no other tomato product to make the sauce, the concentrated, bold flavor of the tomato paste intensified during cooking and added ...