Food news antipasto

Cookbook author, food writer and longtime EYB collaborator, Roberta Muir, runs online cooking classes featuring a new cuisine each month. She packages detailed written recipes and step-by-step videos in a glossy eMagazine with lots of extra food, wine and travel info relevant to the month’s cuisine. There are also pescatarian-friendly variations for all meat and poultry dishes. All 26 of Roberta’s existing online classes are now indexed on EYB, along with over 200 recipes from her Be Inspired website. You can order single classes (12+ recipes) for AU$39 or buy a 12-issue subscription for just AU$179 (saving AU$289 on the single issue price).

For those of us in northern latitudes, our summer gardens are (hopefully) going strong during this time of the year. I have already put up several jars of strawberry-rhubarb preserves and am now turning my sights to the black raspberries. If you would like to preserve your garden’s bounty but aren’t sure where to start, head over to Midwest Living. They are providing a step-by-step guide to canning.

The restaurant kitchen brigade, the classification system that assigns different tasks to a series of positions in a hierarchy, has existed since the 1800s. However, most modern restaurants do not fit exactly into this system due to the types of food being served or the size of the eatery. While it can be useful to specialize in a certain area, kitchen staff in a highly segmented regime do not get to learn how to do other tasks. Today’s restaurateurs are rethinking the kitchen brigade, and most of them are moving away from it.

Making homemade pasta is something every cook should try at least once. There is something exciting about making your own tortellini, pappardelle, or any of the hundreds of pasta shapes. Experimenting with new shapes can be fun but also intimidating. Over at Life & Thyme, Ali LaRaia provides an introduction to several pasta shapes, with her tried-and-true pasta dough recipe to boot (possible paywall – I was able to get in once but was blocked out when I tried a second time).

Eleven new restaurants including Knipe Grill at Gilpin Lake House in Windermere were added to the Michelin Guide Great Britain & Ireland’s selection this month. We won’t know if the restaurants will receive a star or other award until the next formal Michelin Guide ceremony.

Bakeries have been a growing area in the food industry of late. I remember several years ago when I was hard pressed to name more than a handful of excellent bakeries in my city, but today you can hardly drive around the block without stumbling upon a great bakery (okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration). As with any industry, trends have been emerging in the baking arena, and FSR Magazine’s Mark Plumlee explores the top five hottest trends.

The Sriracha shortage has continued into its second year, and the people who love this spicy condiment are apparently getting desperate for their hot sauce fix. Bottles of the stuff have been selling for upward of $30USD, and people have been stealing bottles from restaurants. Huy Fong, the company that makes Sriracha, recently said in a statement ““Although some production did resume this past Fall season, we continue to have a limited supply that continues to affect our production. At this time, we have no estimations of when supply will increase.”

“Never wear white after Labor Day, and never drink red wine with fish.” Those are two old-fashioned rules that have not stood the test of time. The Guardian’s Felicity Cloake investigates ten different rules about food, including the wine pairing mentioned above, and lets us know the reasons we can ignore axioms like this. Other rules mentioned in the story involve washing mushrooms and tiptoeing around a soufflé.

One of the most popular – if not THE most popular – condiments in the US is ketchup. People love it with fries, of course, but its uses are far greater. It’s indispensable in Thousand Island and Russian dressings, is essential to cocktail sauce, and forms the backbone of many barbecue sauces. Epicurious brings us the history of ketchup, tracings its origins through to the product we know and love today. You will not be surprised that as with most US foods, ketchup’s roots lie in a faraway country.