Saveur

Photo: Andre Baranowski

Tie on the apron and fire up the stove: every item in this year's saveur 100 is devoted to you, the home cook. This eclectic mix of our favorite foods, drinks, people, places, and things is about celebrating everything we do in our kitchens: from inspirational role models (Great Home Cooks) and indispensable cookbooks (Cook's Library) to homemade condiments (Do It Yourself), versatile seasoning bases (Foundations of Flavor), and sumptuous single-course meals (One-Dish Feasts). We also pay tribute to the best salts, sugars, oils, and vinegars (Pantry Essentials), the most reliable cookware (The Right Gear), and the most underrated ingredients (Everyday Heroes). Also on the menu: the new face of supermarkets, fascinating food innovators, thoughtful culinary musings, time-tested tips, and more. —The Editors 

2 Bringing Us to the Table
When we turn on our television to find LIDIA BASTIANICH preparing dinner in her home kitchen, we can't wait to cook what she's cooking. Maybe it's the relaxed way the 61-year-old host of Lidia's Italy, among other series, tells us to trim an artichoke or prepare a ragù that makes us want to try it for ourselves, to experience the joy of cooking that she radiates on-screen. "Food is a gift," says Bastianich, and over the five decades since her family left Istria, in northern Italy, she has been more than generous with it. Starting in 1971 with a 38-seat restaurant in Queens, New York, she has expanded her reach, overseeing a multifaceted empire that includes her television shows, cookbooks, restaurants, Italian vineyards, and other culinary businesses, which she runs with her children. We're in awe of how consistently Bastianich has remained true to what she feels is the most important: the pleasures of the table and their ability to bring people together. "I want everyone to know they can cook," she says. "It's an innate part of being human."

4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Sugar
Along with salt, vinegar, and oil, sugar is one of the most elemental ingredients in the kitchen. And when it comes to the variety of sugars available to home cooks today, sweet is just the beginning. Along the spectrum from flavorful raw sugar to refined white exists a dramatic range of tastes and textures, each suited to different kinds of baking and cooking. The five cane sugars shown here are five we wouldn't want to do without.

A great choice for sprinkling atop baked goods, INDIA TREE SPARKLING SUGAR comes in a variety of colors and adds a crackly texture to cookies, cupcakes, and dipped candies.

BILLINGTON'S DARK BROWN MOLASSES SUGAR is, hands down, our favorite brown sugar. This unrefined muscovado sugar (sugar from which molasses is not removed) adds an intense, earthy flavor to gingerbread, chocolate brownies, and even barbecue sauces.

The Mexican cousin of Indian jaggery, GOYA PILONCILLO comes in caramel-colored cones, made from boiled-down cane juice. The sugar has a maple sugar taste that lends complex sweetness to dessert sauces and unifies the flavors in smoky sauces like mole negro.

Unlike refined white sugars, which are stripped of all molasses, FLORIDA CRYSTALS NATURAL CANE SUGAR is made directly from filtered cane syrup—a process that leaves a touch of color and molasses flavor on the crystal. This is our everyday sugar; we add it to everything from coffee to corn flakes.

A mainstay in the arsenal of professional bakers and experienced home cooks alike, finely ground C&H BAKER'S SUGAR has a clean cane flavor; its powdery grains dissolve easily in custards and meringues and help give a delicate texture to cookies and cakes.

9 Grandes Dames
We're obsessed with Le Creuset's enameled cast-iron pots, from the old wood-handled skillet we bought at a yard sale years ago to the shiny new gratin dish we splurged on last winter. But the ones that we brag about—and use—the most are our round and oval LE CREUSET FRENCH OVENS. We love everything about these French-made heavy-lidded pots: how they feel as we carry them to the stove, so heavy and capable; how their cooking surfaces help brown meats beautifully and then release the flavorful charred bits with a splash of wine. That they're easy on the eye doesn't hurt, either: sometimes just looking at these beauties makes us want to cook.

Granted, much of what we admire about these cookpots owes to the characteristics of the material from which they're made—enameled cast iron—and to the pots' shape, which is essentially that of a dutch oven. (Le Creuset calls its versions French ovens for the American market and cocottes in France.) Cast iron retains heat as no other material does and distributes it evenly, and the tight-fitting lid of dutch ovens traps moisture, making the pots ideal for succulent, slow-cooked dishes. We use our Le Creuset French ovens for everything from simmering soups to braising short ribs to making ragù. We've even baked bread in them. They've become our all-purpose pots—which is exactly how they are used in France. "French home cooks don't have a dozen different pots," says the famed chef and restaurateur Laurent Tourondel, who grew up in central France. "You get a Le Creuset cocotte when you get married and you have it for life."

We've often wondered whether our preference for Le Creuset's French ovens over other brands is backed by empirical evidence. Does the company employ a special type of enamel? A unique recipe for cast iron? As it turns out, the pots are still made by hand the same way they have been since the firm's founders, a Belgian enameler named Octave Aubecq and a Belgian casting specialist named Armand Desaegher, started producing the pots in the northern French town of Fresnoy-le-Grand, in 1925. For making a pot, two sand molds are cast to fit together and molten iron is poured in; when the iron is cool and hard, the molds are cracked away, the pots are sanded, and three coats of enamel are applied. After sanding the pot, workers apply three coats of enamel—a clear base coat (which constitutes the surface of Le Creuset's nonstick skillets) and two top coats. In the 1950s, some of the pots were made in a 16th-century foundry in Cousances (these rare editions stamped "Cousances" fetch the highest prices on eBay). Nowadays, they are made in Fresnoy-le-Grand, and all Le Creuset's designers, engineers, and craftsmen work there; of the 3,000 people who live in the town, 600 derive their livelihoods from the company.

For the first part of the 20th century, Le Creuset was little known outside France—a situation that changed only in the mid-1950s as the popularity of French cooking spread. In 1969, Elizabeth David wrote a slim cookbook that was a love letter to the brand. In the introduction to Cooking with Le Creuset (Clarbat), David describes the thrill of discovering the pretty pots in Marseille and hauling a few back to her apartment in London. Her description sums up the experience of using them: "Everything I cooked seemed to turn out right," she wrote.

10 Home Schooling
We admit that we're forever inviting ourselves into the kitchens of people that we meet when we travel. That's why our favorite trend in culinary tourism is that of seasoned cooks' teaching cooking classes in the comfort of their own homes. Some of the best-known HOME COOKING CLASSES are given by established cookbook authors like Elizabeth Andoh, author of At Home with Japanese Cooking (Knopf, 1980) among other books, who teaches intimate classes at her homes in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan; and Faith Willinger, who wrote Red, White, and Greens: The Italian Way with Vegetables (HarperCollins, 1996) and runs classes in the kitchen of her 17th-century house in Florence, Italy. But the majority of the teachers are celebrities of a more local variety: people like Agata Amato, who offers courses on the cooking of the Amalfi coast at the estate in Ravello, Italy, where her family has lived and farmed for more than 250 years; and Nimmy Paul, a cook in the city of Kochi, in India's Kerala State, who introduces travelers to regional dishes like appam, the rice-flour pancakes commonly eaten for breakfast, and fish curry with coconut milk. Or, you can make a detour to the village of Sungai Penchala, in Malaysia, where Rohani Jelani lives. Jelani presides over a sunny, open kitchen where she teaches visitors how to use ingredients from her garden like lemongrass and torch ginger flower (a woodsy-tasting aromatic) to make local specialties like nasi kerabu, an herbal rice salad. The best part of all these classes? They usually double as lunch or dinner.

11 Cook's Library
There are dozens of Italian cookbooks on our shelves, but there are none we use as faithfully as Marcella Hazan's THE CLASSIC ITALIAN COOK BOOK (Harper's Magazine Press, 1973). With this book, the Italian-born culinary teacher gave American cooks their first comprehensive and authentic Italian culinary compendium; all these years later, it is still our undisputed favorite source for everything from making risotto to understanding Italian techniques for cooking vegetables (like trifolare, which calls for thinly slicing and sautéing ingredients in olive oil and garlic). Her recipes are lucidly written and reliable: the fresh pasta we make has always been her version. You can find the recipes from the original book in Hazan's updated volume, Essential Classic Italian Cooking (Knopf, 1992). Our only beef with it is that the publisher omitted the Italian names of most dishes. Still, it contains all the brilliance of Hazan's first book, the gold standard for Italian home cooking.— Nach Waxman
owner of the Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore in New York City

12 Tastes Like Home
"What I make, and what my daughter makes, my mother made before us," says EULINE JOSEPH, a 59-year-old native of Trinidad and Tobago who has lived in Brooklyn, New York, for the past five years. It would be hard to express the essence of home cooking more succinctly than that. And yet, one thing that impresses us about Joseph's cooking is not her rigid adherence to tradition but rather her easy adaptability in the kitchen. For instance, she tosses canned chickpeas, as opposed to the dried kind, which her mother used to slow-cook over an open fire, into the pot along with store-bought curry powder for her version of chana, a spicy Trinidadian main course. Is her cooking compromised by such North American–style shortcuts? Not a chance. As we tuck into the chana, which Joseph serves with homemade floats, puffy fried flatbreads she whipped up earlier this morning, we're convinced that her mother would be mighty proud indeed.

13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 Oil
A home kitchen doesn't need dozens of oils; just a few diverse, high-quality ones. Each of these oils comes from a different part of the world and has a bold, distinctive taste that evokes the fruit, nut, seed, or vegetable that the oil is made from.

Depending on where and how they're made, extra-virgin olive oils vary so widely that it makes sense to stock a few. For a variety of cooked dishes, we rely on subtly fruity NUÑEZ DE PRADO EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, from the Baena district of Andalusia, in southern Spain.

Our favorite olive oil for drizzling over salads or even just toasted bread is FRANKIES 457 EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, from Sicily, which has the green hue and ripe, grassy flavors prized in oils from that island.

Milled in California by a 150-year-old French company, LA TOURANGELLE ROASTED PISTACHIO OIL has an intensely nutty taste. We use it on its own as a condiment or toss it with warm boiled potatoes.

Peanut oil's high smoke point makes it excellent for frying and sautéing. While most brands are bland tasting, LION & GLOBE PEANUT OIL, from Hong Kong, has a distinctly peanutty taste.

Clean tasting and satiny, grapeseed oil is a great all-purpose oil, reliable at high temperatures or used fresh in a dressing. Our favorite, SCALIGERA GRAPESEED OIL, produced near Verona, Italy, has a pleasing hint of nuttiness.

Rich coconut oil adds fragrance and body to South Indian curries and is perfect for cooking dishes with tropical flavors. With its smooth, balanced taste, PARACHUTE COCONUT OIL, from India, is our go-to brand.

19, 20 Cook's Library
We cherish PARISIAN HOME COOKING (William Morrow, 1999) by the late chef Michael Roberts for teaching us how Parisians cook day in and day out. From the building of impromptu meals based on market purchases to making your own rillettes (potted meats), this gem reveals the wisdom and celebrates the passion of French cooks.

For American cooking, our perennial resource is Jean Anderson's captivating AMERICAN CENTURY COOKBOOK (Clarkson Potter, 1997), which approaches the recipes of 20th-century America chronologically, charting the evolution of soups, salads, casseroles, and so on. Few cookbooks are this much fun, thanks to Anderson's tart writing, archival images, and wealth of information, which serve as a guide to our most influential culinary benchmarks, from chicken divan to blackened redfish. .— Nach Waxman
owner of the Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore in New York City

21 Friendly Foes
Kitchen Stadium it was not, but on a recent Sunday afternoon, in the smallish kitchen of a two-story wood-frame house in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, gladiatorial combat was being waged. Four couples—teachers, lawyers, and advertising professionals by trade—and their kids had convened at the home of Chris and Laurey Tussing for the 22nd installment of a remarkable home-cooking competition that the group of friends has dubbed IRON CHEF CHICAGO. Today's chosen ingredient: squash. Laurey Tussing led off with luscious butternut squash ravioli, which was followed by Sloane Stegen's roasted kabocha squash gnocchi and then an ethereal winter squash soufflé from the reigning champ, Liz Feiertag. The eight competitors, who were also the judges, shuttled food from the kitchen to the dining table, where they marked their scorecards and knocked back glasses of wine. When the winner was announced—the ravioli, by a landslide—a few groans of disappointment could be heard, but mostly there was applause. "It's about the camaraderie, not the competition," said participant Vicky Mangosing Almiron. Then Chris Tussing chimed in: "It depends on who you're talking to."

22 Blades of Glory
We probably were given our first CUISINART FOOD PROCESSOR as a housewarming gift or a wedding present, and it instantly placed within easy reach a world of sauces, spice pastes, salads, soups, breads, pie doughs, and more. Cooking with the Cuisinart felt like something magical. You took a potato, placed it in the plastic cylinder, pushed it through the spinning disk grater, and suddenly it was not just a potato anymore but perfectly shredded wisps, soon to be hash browns or latkes.

Of course, we still love our kitchen knives—especially for items like minced herbs, which can be bruised by automated blades, or ingredients that benefit from being diced to a uniform size—but once we'd embraced progress, there was no turning back. "The Cuisinart democratized who could be a good cook," says Barbara Haber, a food historian. "It used to be that if we wanted to make chopped liver, say, we had to use a bowl with a sort of half-moon gadget that you'd bang away with for a long, long time. Only very ambitious cooks would ever make certain foods before the Cuisinart came along."

For this we have a man named Carl Sontheimer to thank. In the early 1970s, the semiretired MIT physicist from Greenwich, Connecticut, came across a restaurant-grade food processor called the Robot-Coupe at a cookware convention in France. It was big and unwieldy and expensive, but the "robot cutter" in the act of slicing and dicing was a wonder to behold. Sontheimer, who had lived in France and loved to cook, shelled out for a few Robot-Coupe machines, sent them home to tinker with, and worked out an agreement with the device's manufacturers to adapt their design for American home cooks.

He spent the next two years refining the shape of the chopping blades, improving the mechanism for feeding food into the machine, adding safety features, and recalibrating the weight distribution of the grating disks so that they would spin smoothly over many years of use. In 1973, he deemed his creation ready. It consisted of a clear plastic bowl resting atop a white base that housed an electric motor. The motor drove a set of interchangeable cutting and mixing implements, including a metal chopping and puréeing blade, a plastic dough blade, a slicing disk, and a grating disk. He unveiled his invention, under the name Cuisinart Food Processor, at the National Housewares Expo in Chicago later that year.

The Cuisinart didn't sell all that well at first. Then, in 1975, an article about the appliance appeared in Gourmet magazine, and suddenly everyone from James Beard to Julia Child (who had both owned Robot-Coupe processors) was singing its praises. The then New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne compared it to the printing press, the cotton gin, and the paper clip. Within two years, the invention had spawned no fewer than 30 imitators from companies like Sunbeam and Hamilton Beach. We've used some of those other products, and they get the job done; just not as well: proof that obsessive perfectionism like Sontheimer's sometimes pays off. Sontheimer died in 1998, but we're reminded of his legacy every time we rev up our Cuisinart.

23 Sweet And Tart
We enliven our cooking with all sorts of commercially produced vinegars (see 94-99 Vinegar for some of our favorites), but the variety we like the most is the HOMEMADE WINE VINEGAR we make ourselves. Since ancient times, cooks throughout the world have been making good use of leftover wine by putting up vinegar; the result adds sourness to everything from salad dressings to pan sauces. Our version, which we prepare by adding a live bacterial culture called a mother (a gelatinous mixture of acetic acid bacteria and yeast that helps convert alcohol to vinegar) to rosé wine and letting it age, retains the wine's sweet, crisp character. It's so good, you could sip it on its own.

24 Poet of the Everyday
The milieu of celebrity chefs and food fads couldn't be farther from the kitchen of JOHN THORNE, which isn't to say the 65-year-old, Massachusetts-based author doesn't have insights to offer on the topic. He's won praise for creating, in partnership with his wife, Matt Lewis Thorne, a canon of practical recipes, inquisitive essays, and musings on all manner of culinary themes. Thorne shares his discoveries in his homespun newsletter, Simple Cooking, excerpts from which have been anthologized in collections from North Point Press, including Serious Pig (1996) and Mouth Wide Open (2007). Equal parts curious and erudite, Thorne could be called a philosopher of the American kitchen, a man as adept at illuminating the anthropological underpinnings of the supermarket soup aisle as he is at puzzling out the perfect meatball recipe. Ultimately, the satisfaction to be found in everyday cooking is the true north to which all his writing returns. "What delights me about cooking is not getting things right," he told us, "but messing with them enough to keep things interesting."