Food Guys

Saffron is an aromatic, colorful spice that flavors Spanish paella, Italian risotto, and numerous Middle Eastern and South Asian dishes. It is also the most expensive spice in the world. The delicate yellow-orange saffron threads (i.e., stigmas) must be handpicked from the eponymous crocus, ideally on the day the flower blooms.

There's a coconut boom going on: the versatile flesh of the fruit can be manufactured into substitutes for milk, cream and other cooking oils. The Food Guys, Jon Jackson and Greg Patent, point out that there are reasons to be concerned about the growing demand. Coconut farmers in Asia are among the poorest people in the world, and often, their trees are planted as a monoculture, a risk to farmer and the environment alike.

Here’s a baking miracle that performs its magic due to air alone—choux paste or pâte à choux. It translates literally as “the pastry for making little cabbages.” Cream puffs are, hands down, the most well-known choux paste descendant.

The Food Guys, Jon and Greg, remain undaunted champions of parsnips, a vegetable that suffers from its resemblance to an anemic carrot. Jon reminisces about the sweet and flavorful parsnips his gardener father kept buried in a box of soil in the root cellar. "Their taste approached the mythic sweetness of mature parsnips left in the ground all winter."

Among a certain group of food lovers, bone broth is enjoying its moment of hip, but as Food Guys Jon Jackson and Greg Patent point out, slow-cooked, mineral-rich meat stock never went out of style. 19th-century cookbooks always included a section in the back for food as medicine, with recipes for chicken soup and 'beef tea.'

The Food Guys, Greg Patent and Jon Jackson, don't trust the claims of agribusiness regarding the safety and importance of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. "The industry asserts it's like natural plant breeding. But anytime you insert genes from one species into another, you're disrupting the entire genetic structure of the organism. Putting a bacterial gene into a rat or a plant might have long-term effects on the physiology of the rat or the plant," says Greg.

Whether you call it bok choy, pak choi, pok choi or Shanghai greens, "Food Guys" Jon Jackson and Greg Patent think you should incorporate more of this adaptable, aroma-less Chinese cabbage into soups, stir-frys, stews and side dishes. After all, it's been around for 10,000 years.

"Food Guy" Jon Jackson loves a good French pear tart. "I once went to Paris once specifically to get some pear tarts, and you know, the people there were anxious for me to have them." Jon asks Other "Food Guy" Greg Patent: is it worth trying to substitute pears for apples in tarte tatin, the Hotel Tatin's signature caramelized upside-down apple tart recipe?

When "Food Guy" Greg Patent, who had been sitting on a bottle of Ligurian extra virgin olive oil - made with black Taggiasca olives and wrapped up to protect it from the ravages of daylight - discovered food writer Samim Nosrat 's Netflix series, " Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat ," serendipity struck in the form of Nosrat's recipe for Ligurian focaccia.

As he does each July and August, "Food Guy" Greg Patent went on a sourdough kick this year, taking advantage of summer's balmy kitchen countertop temperatures of 72 to 73 degrees F. That's the sweet spot for a sourdough culture's bacteria and yeast; they get busy fermenting, which means your sourdough bread dough can double in size after a four-hour rise without the aid of any additional yeast.