Every Friday morning, Bon Appétit senior staff writer Alex Beggs shares weekly highlights from the BA offices, from awesome new recipes to office drama to restaurant recs, with some weird (food!) stuff she saw on the internet thrown in. It gets better: If you sign up for our newsletter, you’ll get this letter before everyone else.
Chicken is the answer
A friend asked me for a slam dunk chicken recipe and it reminded me how much I love/adore/cherish Andy Baraghani’s hot honey chicken thighs. START FROM A COLD PAN, PEOPLE. The toast fried in the chicken fat is almost absurd. Sometimes I just make the chicken + honey part because endive is not typically in my crisper. Look out for “What’s in my crisper?” a new column in Us Weekly.
Get the recipe: Hot Honey Chicken Thighs with Fried Bread
The dough senses fear
This week marked the debut of Bon Appétit’s newest not-TV but can-we-just-call-it-a TV show, “Making Perfect.” The Test Kitchen comes together to create the perfect pizza, Avengers-style, with different cooks in charge of different components. I watched all three hours in two nights. If you haven’t watched yet, let this be a warning: Do NOT watch without pizza, even if it’s frozen Trader Joe’s or floppy Papa John’s. It is absolute torture to watch Molly Baz bite into slice after slice of crispy-crust, gooey fresh mozz, mortadella mountain-topped pizza while sitting on my couch with a cup of water. TORTURE.
Watch the first episode here, and view the preview below.
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Hi Jesse
To celebrate the launch of the show, there was an exclusive party in the Test Kitchen, which explains how my invite got lost in the mail. According to sources—again, I wasn’t there—a fan named Jesse (hi Jesse!) drove nearly 11 hours from Ohio to attend. Another fan was in town from D.C. to see Hamilton AS WELL AS to come to this event, and presumably, find $100 on the sidewalk, fall in love, and find the perfect pair of jeans. Sounds like everybody had a good time.
Chocolate chip cookies
Chris Morocco’s biggest fear was letting everyone down. His family. His friends. Strangers on the internet. He had to develop BA’s best chocolate chip cookie. After tasting approximately 15 different iterations, I can testify that this is The One. Chewy, gooey center, crispy, caramel-like edges, balanced bitter chocolate chunks to fragrant vanilla, nutty brown butter and just enough salt to bring everything out.
It took nearly an hour for him to explain every ingredient decision to me (read that here). At one point when he was telling me what would happen if you added flaky salt to the top of the cookie, his eyes widened, his hands waved in the air, and he cried out: “If there’s salt on top, we can’t put as much inside, then what if the person opts out of the flaky salt, and the rest of the cookie is undersalted? The cookies don’t taste right! Is that the world you want to live in, Alex Beggs?!”
Get the recipe: BA’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookie
New words, same world
It’s time to throw out the 500-pound dictionary propped on a pulpit in your living room, because Merriam-Webster announced some official new words this week, making all other dictionaries woefully irrelevant. Except for Urban Dictionary, and the red squiggles that know your worst failings. There are officially new Food Words. So let’s welcome to Planet Earth, “ghost pepper!” Good job, “chai latte!” You’re finally legal, “umami”! And a round of applause for “cow parsnip,” who’s been waiting a long time for this. A long time.
