July 30th, 2014
01:30 PM ET
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Kate Krader (@kkrader on Twitter) is Food & Wine's restaurant editor. When she tells us where to find our culinary heart's desire, we listen up.

Summer. The grill. Burgers. Steaks. Hot dogs.

Stop.

As great as those staples of summer grilling are, it’s the very best time of the year to eat your vegetables. And so many of them are even better after spending a little time over fire.

Who would be the best person to get tips for grilling vegetables from? A ton of great chefs are big into vegetables these days, but I went to Rich Landau, chef/owner of Vedge, Philadelphia’s sensational vegetable restaurant. Landau is so good that the "The Tonight Show" bandleader Questlove asked for his recipe for pastrami-spiced beets. (“This dish makes me believe in beets,” Questlove said.)

Here are Landau’s excellent tips for prime-time summer produce, like his very favorite way to grill corn. Now, go fall in love with smoky carrot dogs and have a happy summer!
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June 23rd, 2014
01:30 PM ET
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America's Test Kitchen is a real 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three dozen full¬time cooks and product testers. Our mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, we test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most¬foolproof recipe. America’s Test Kitchen's online cooking school is based on nearly 20 years of test kitchen work in our own facility, on the recipes created for Cook's Illustrated magazine, and on our two public television cooking shows.

Grilling bone-in chicken breasts is trickier than it seems. You want well-browned, crisp skin, and tender, moist meat. The challenge is the thick part of the breast: It’s quite slow to cook, while the tapered end cooks quickly. Adding a glaze to that equation makes the situation even a little thornier.

Here’s how we ensure success: First, we brine the chicken breasts to boost their moistness and to season them. Second, we set the grill up with a modified two-level fire; the hot side is used for browning and crisping, and the cooler side for the bulk of the cooking time. Finally, we apply the glaze to the chicken breasts only in the final minutes of grilling, so that the sugars won't burn.

Once you master this basic technique for grilling chicken breasts, you can apply any number of glazes or sauces, even barbecue sauce, if you like.
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June 23rd, 2014
10:45 AM ET
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The Biolite Basecamp transforms heat into an electric charge that can power devices through a USB port.
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Filed under: Grilling • Grilling • Technology


June 6th, 2014
01:30 PM ET
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America's Test Kitchen is a real 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three dozen full¬time cooks and product testers. Our mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, we test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most¬ foolproof recipe. America’s Test Kitchen's online cooking school is based on nearly 20 years of test kitchen work in our own facility, on the recipes created for Cook's Illustrated magazine, and on our two public television cooking shows.

Fish fillets have a bad reputation on the grill. Why? Because it’s likely that they’ll stick to the grill grate, and when they do, you can forget about removing them in whole pieces. The delicate texture of cooked fish makes it virtually impossible to remove fillets neatly, so what you end up bringing to the table are inelegant shards of what you hoped would be an elegant piece of fish. Enter our recipe for perfectly grilled, easy-release fillets. You may find it surprising that the key to success revolves around how you treat the grill before you even begin to cook.

Here’s the secret: After heating the grill grate and scrubbing it clean, wipe the grate well with a wad of paper towels dipped in vegetable oil. Greasing the grate is not the objective here - rather, coating it with oil seasons the grate, much like you’d season a cast-iron skillet. Due to the high heat of the grate, the oil polymerizes, creating a layer that helps prevent proteins in the fish from sticking to the metal. When cooking delicate seafood, we recommend wiping the grate multiple times so that it builds up a coating, guaranteeing that your fish won’t stick.

This recipe works best with salmon fillets but can also be used with any thick, firm-fleshed white fish, like red snapper, grouper, halibut or sea bass. Cook white fish to 140 degrees, up to two minutes longer per side.
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