Ladies and gentlemen, start your ovens. The Pillsbury Bake-Off is back. After a three year hiatus, the granddaddy of cooking contests is returning for a 48th year. The national contest sponsored by General Mills, partnered with the Food Network to “reimagine” the contest, according to the official website. While full details of this year’s contest won’t be disclosed until Oct. 1, the contest page says, “We are in search of the best made-at-home recipes, and the heartfelt, funny, crazy, family stories behind them!” Entry will official open next month and the winner announced in February. According to a company statement, “the prize will be an experience that money can’t buy.” The Bake-Off started in 1949 as the Grand National Recipe and Baking Contest. The event was held in honor of Pillsbury’s 80th anniversary and a promotion for its flour. It evolved into a baking contest and then into a general…
The one ingredient Ina Garten won’t buy at the store
Followers of all things Ina Garten already envy her expensive collection of Le Creuset cookware, her fabulous roster of friends, and her wildly popular cooking show on the Food Network. Despite all of her success, Ina famously reminds us not to get in over our heads if we can’t prep a certain ingredient and that “Store bought is fine.” That is, except for one ingredient in particular. In a recent interview with Time, the Barefoot Contessa opened up about the one ingredient she could never give the grocery store green light for: pre-grated Parmesan cheese. Sure, some of her recommendations might garner an eye roll — do we really “good” vanilla from Madagascar? — but this is one recommendation we should all get behind. Tubs of the pre-grated stuff has been previously found to contain wood pulp or other fillers. Even if you can’t hop a flight directly to Parma to pick out your own wheel…
Alton Brown’s tips for never messing up a recipe again
You’ve diligently worked all day on a recipe, and it’s finally time for the first taste. You, dig in for a heaping forkful of the fruits of your labor only to find something isn’t right. Alton Brown knows every cook has been there so he offered his insanely simple solution: read the recipe. Like, actually take time to read and digest everything it’s telling you to do. Most recipe mishaps can easily be avoided, he says. The problem is that we don’t take the time to grasp exactly what a recipe is calling for. We may do a quick scan before beginning to cook or bake, but we don’t focus on detail words that can make all of the difference. On his website, Brown wrote, “According to my calculations, about 30 percent of the dishes prepared from written recipes go wrong because the cooks concerned didn’t actually read said recipe. Sure, we glance at them…
Iron Chef makes its TV return with new but familiar Iron Chef Gauntlet
Food Network’s hit show Iron Chef is back … kind of. After a three-year hiatus, the show came sizzling back this past Sunday with a brand new name — Iron Chef Gauntlet — and brand new rules of the game. Unlike any other previous Iron Chef series, which played up the kitschy competition factor, author and showman extraordinaire, Alton Brown wanted to cook up a show that would be more about the food and the folks who cook it. Brown tells Fast Company: I always wanted to find new Iron Chefs, and we did the show The Next Iron Chef, but it was like a big-arc reality show. I wanted to tear that down and make it a lot more straightforward… I wanted to finally be able to take the series into a place that I thought it ought to go, which is that it’s all about the food, and it’s all…