Kitchen tests
How salty should pasta water be? We measured four pots.
Forget 'salty as the sea.' We cooked spaghetti at four salt levels, weighed everything and found the range that seasons pasta without ruining the sauce.
Test kitchen lead
Teo Halvorsen
Teo runs the side-by-side tests: five trays of potatoes, four pots of pasta water, a dozen sticks of brown butter. He trained as a lab technician before cooking, and still writes everything down in a notebook.
Stories by Teo
Kitchen tests
We roasted the same potatoes five ways. Here's what makes them crisp.
Raw, parboiled, roughed up, alkaline water and preheated fat: a side-by-side test of the steps in every roast potato recipe, and which ones matter.
Technique
Brown butter, and the eight places we now put it
How to brown butter without burning it, why it tastes the way it does, and where it earns its place: pasta, vegetables, cookies and cornbread.