Best of Lifehacker Best of Lifehacker Whether we’ve made a complicated recipe absurdly simple, illustrated how to survive a natural disaster, or explained a political crisis in terms even your great-grandma would understand, these are some of our favorite stories from the past year. A good condiment can make a meh meal worth eating. When doused or dipped in the right sauce or spread, formerly unappealing foods become tantalizing, and your fridge should be stocked with a few flavorful friends to help make eating more fun. Below you’ll find our favorite dressings, condiments, and sauces of 2019 (a lot of them are butter based).
When you combine duck fat with butter and whip the heck out of it, you get a creamy, glossy spread that is best described as “duck frosting.” It’s hard to beat sheet pan meals for convenience. Roasting proteins and vegetables side by side in the same pan is a fuss-free path to a complete meal. Well, almost complete—where’s the sauce? A sheet pan is still a pan, so why do we reserve pan sauces for skillets? This fruit is all peel and pith, making it terrible for eating out of hand, but great for flavoring. After a prolonged stay in salty lemon juice, the pith softens, the bitterness fades, and the citrus becomes an intensely flavored, almost pickled version of itself. Thanks to long-term heating under extremely specific conditions, the garlic mellows, darkens, and turns into the stickiest, sweetest version of itself—it’s practically garlic candy. (It’s also fairly impractical to make yourself, but you can find it at specialty grocery stores like Whole Foods and asian markets.) Think of all the flavors you associate with roasted garlic, eliminate the harsh ones, and add a little balsamic vinegar reduction; that is what black garlic tastes like. An emulsifier, in its simplest form, is an ingredient that encourages oil and water to hang out without separating. Mustard—in addition to providing flavor—also happens to be a pretty excellent emulsifying agent, thanks to mucilage, the mustard seed’s outer coating. But not all prepared mustards have the same amount of mucilage, which means not all prepared mustards are well suited for a vinaigrette. Browned butter makes everything taste better—except, of course, when you can’t taste it at all. Its rich, toasty flavor has a way of getting lost in all but the most butter-forward dishes. The solution is simple: Just add milk. I love many things about the salad bar at my local bougie grocery store, but I love their lemon-tahini dressing the most. It’s rich, nutty, slightly tangy and sweet, and makes any vegetable it touches—even the driest of broccoli slaw—infinitely more edible. There are so many good jams, jellies, and preserved fruit spreads in this world, it can be easy to accumulate quite a collection. (At any given time, I have three to five Bonne Maman jars in my fridge.) Though these fruity beauties are perfect on nothing more than good bread, they can also be used to make a bomb (bonne?) glaze for roasted meats. Cobs, silks, and husks can be used to add corny flavor to dishes long after the husks are gone. The cobs are full of a sugary juice some refer to as “corn milk,” and the husks and silks impart a fresh, grassy note. You can even roast the cobs at 400℉ until they start to brown, caramelizing the sugars and adding some nuttiness. To extract every last bit of corn-related glory, you can use water (and make a stock) or you can use fat, and make a drawn butter that calls out for crab legs. A mediocre salad can be made great by the help of an excellent dressing, but one of my favorite salads—the steak salad—is barely dressed. Rather than whip up a vinaigrette or creamy tahini, I like to finish my ribeye-crowned pile of greens with a squeeze of lemon and—more importantly—the juices from the pan. Somehow, both ingredients come through in equal measure; it’s almost like they agreed to take turns. You get hit with the brie right up front, but then the cheese yields to its counterpart, giving way to a creamy, buttery finish. Burnt onions are good in fancy house-made ranch dressings, but they’re also good in crappy store-bought dressings. They add a deep, roasted alliumy note, but they also add bitterness, which is an excellent addition if you want to shake up a monotonous flavor profile or distract from overly synthetic, factory-made flavors. Since I’ve never lived anywhere Duke’s is sold, I didn’t get to try it until a trip to D.C. last month. Make no mistake: it’s worth the hype. Duke’s is saltier, creamier, and so much tangier than any other mass-produced mayo I’ve tried, and I fully understand why people go nuts for it. But why it so good? What trade secrets are hiding in the ingredients list?
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Best of LifehackerWhether we’ve made a complicated recipe absurdly simple, illustrated how to survive a natural disaster, or explained a political crisis in terms even your great-grandma would understand, these are some of our favorite stories from the past year.
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