Food news antipasto

A recent TikTok trend has people boiling their wooden kitchen utensils in an effort to sanitize them. A video of someone giving her wooden spoons a bath in a vat of boiling water has over 49 million hits. One person who is not jumping on this bandwagon is Rachel Cooke. The daughter of microbiologists, she was taught that wood is naturally antimicrobial. Not only will she not be joining the wooden utensil boilers, she has a few choice words about modern society’s attitude toward cleanliness: “Our attitude to hygiene, and by extension to dirt in all its multifarious forms, is increasingly strange and stupid,” she writes.

March 20 marks the start of Nowruz, the holiday celebrating the Persian New Year that coincides with the spring equinox. If you’re looking for more information about the sweet treats offered during this holiday, head over to King Arthur Baking. Journalist and historian Ramin Ganeshram writes about his family’s Nowruz traditions, explaining that desserts serve an important role as the centerpiece of the sofreh haft seen (Table of the Seven S’s). There are also a couple of recipes for traditional Persian sweets including the Persian walnut cookies pictured above.

Remember all of those “one weird trick” posts from a few years back? Some of them were laughable, but there is a useful “weird trick” – actually a unique ingredient – that will make a huge difference in your bread baking. Epicurious explains what this ingredient – diastatic malt powder – can do for yeast breads of all types. I keep a jar sitting next to my bread flour and will vouch for this bread baker’s secret weapon.

Does your busted NCAA bracket make you want to cry? You are not alone; out of 20 million+ brackets filled out before the premiere college basketball tournament began last week, fewer than 1,000 are still intact, according to the NCAA. Frozen pizza company DiGiorno feels your pain and has created an all-onion “Cry Pie” that aims to “mask your basketball heartbreak.” There’s a catch, however: the pizza is only available through a sweepstakes that ends April 3, the last day of the tournament.

A few weeks ago we reported that Good Food (Aus) was getting a makeover and would be integrated into the Sydney Morning Herald. The site is making its debut, so if you are a subscriber to the Herald, you can preview the new Good Food before its official launch of 21 March.

Between Jenny’s monthly cookbook reviews and her weekly updates we try to keep our Members up to date on the best new releases, but we recognize that there are other opinions on the subject. That means we frequently share outside book reviews so readers can have additional information about the latest books. To that end, you may want to check out Eater’s recent post on the best new cookbooks of the upcoming season.