I love pressure-cooking grains. Many of them, especially barley, don’t need to be soaked. That, combined with the short cooking time of a pressure cooker, means it’s a big time saver. The barley in this recipe takes only 20 minutes to cook. It works perfectly and has a wonderful texture.

On the stove top, the water will evaporate as you cook the grains, so you must continually add water, which can result in grains that are really mushy. In a pressure cooker, however, you use only a small amount of water (just enough water to cook with) and none of it escapes, so the grains don’t lump up too much. It’s so easy!

This is a great recipe, but my favorite use of pressure-cooked barley is in our Barley with Wild Mushrooms and Red Wine recipe from Modernist Cuisine at Home, which is a variation found in the Risotto and Paella chapter.

Anjana Shanker, Development Chef

A seven-layer dip is part of the quintessential Super Bowl experience, especially as far as my wife, Rose, is concerned. So this recipe is for her.

Johnny Zhu, Development Chef

In our Korean Chicken Wing recipe, which calls for a blend of Wondra and potato starch, you could use just potato starch, but your wings might turn out cakey, and if you leave them out for your party guests to enjoy, they might get soggy over time. Wondra really increases their crispiness, so much so that on the rare occasion that there are some leftovers from the batch made the day before, we eat them cold. Wondra flour is readily available in the U.S., but if you live elsewhere, we recommend ordering it online.

Sam Fahey-Burke, Development Chef

I love my pressure cooker. I love it so much that I’ve started taking it with me to friends’ houses, and once even to a cabin during a ski trip. It’s gotten to the point where when I ask my friends, “what do you want me to make when you come over this Saturday?” they reply, “I don’t know, Judy, something in your pressure cooker?”

While my friends and family tease me, they have always been wowed by the results. Meats like these carnitas, vegetable soups, and risotto are just some of my new favorite dishes to make. Having learned these techniques, I can apply them to other recipes, or add my own flavors, which allows me to be more creative in the kitchen.

Judy Oldfield-Wilson, Online Writer

This salmon recipe is a fun and simple way to begin enjoying the virtues of low-temperature cooking without investing in sous vide equipment. A pot of water preserves a constant temperature for up to 1 hour, far more time than is necessary to cook fish, and even enough time to cook some steaks (a picnic cooler keeps the water temperature stable for up to 5 hours!). The more food you put in the water bath, or the colder the food is, the more the water temperature will drop. To help hold the heat, bring the food to room temperature before cooking it, and use your largest pot and an abundant amount of water. We love to serve our salmon with sautéed asparagus and peas in the spring, or with cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, and thyme in the winter.

Adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home

The reason we freeze the steaks in this recipe before cooking them is to make sure we don’t overcook them. It will work even if the steaks are frozen as solid as a brick, though it might take a little longer in the oven. That’s why this recipe works so well as both a weeknight dinner and as a main course at a dinner party.

Nathan Myhrvold, coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home

I decided to make our Microwaved Eggplant Parmesan the moment I tried it. I was at the lab, meeting with Maxime Bilet and our Managing Editor for Modernist Cuisine at Home, Tracy Cutchlow. Anjana Shanker, one of our Developmental Chefs, had prepared the eggplant Parmesan and brought it over for Max to taste test. She also offered a spoonful to Tracy and me. I was sold on the recipe with just that one spoonful. It’s a very easy dish to make on short notice. Your guests will be impressed with what you can do using a microwave.

Jennifer Sugden, Production Editor of Modernist Cuisine at Home

For more about microwaves, including how they work and why we think they’re so great, check out this week’s article in The New York Times.

At its best, roast chicken can be one of the world’s greatest culinary achievements. Brown, crispy skin covers tender, juicy meat: the combination of flavors and textures is simply amazing. Yet the perfect roast chicken is nearly impossible to achieve in practice. The temperature required to brown and crisp the skin is so high that it leaves the meat underneath scorched and dry. The dark thigh and leg meat similarly need higher heat than is ideal for the white breast meat. Brining the chicken in salt water can help the delicate breast meat retain more juice at higher temperatures, but the brine has the same effect on the skin, which then ends up unpleasantly chewy.

But we have a solution. In Modernist Cuisine at Home, we show you how you can inject brine into your poultry to speed up the process, ensure even brining, and keep the skin dry so that it roasts to a crispy, golden brown.

For the complete Roast Chicken recipe and other brining variations, see page 238 of Modernist Cuisine at Home.
Amazon.com carries a wide assortment of brining needles and marinade injectors.

In this season of gift giving, one of the most thoughtful gifts you can give is food you made yourself. Using a whipping siphon, you can create flavorful infusions that taste like they’ve been aging for months, but actually only take a few seconds to make. Below are recipes for herb- and spice-infused olive oil, “barrel aged” maple syrup, and candy cane vodka.

The traditional approach to creamy, smooth potatoes is to add so much cream and butter that you can hardly taste the potatoes anymore. But, we’ve discovered how you can make velvety-smooth potatoes without adding any cream at all! The secret ingredient is diastatic malt powder, an ingredient available from specialty baking or brewing supply stores that converts potato starches into sugars, leaving no trace of gumminess or graininess.

Potato starch granules are big: up to a tenth of a millimeter in diameter. That’s large enough for your tongue and teeth to detect. The microscope image above, taken by our very own Nathan Myhrvold, reveals the potato starch granules (stained red by iodine vapor) surrounded by the potato’s cell walls (stained blue).

Diastatic malt powder is made from a grain containing the enzyme diastase. This enzyme speeds up the rate at which starches breakdown into sugars. When you set this enzyme loose on potato starches, it actually splits the giant starch molecules into much smaller sugar molecules, smoothing the puree at the microscopic level and eliminating the graininess associated with dairy-free potato purees.