How to rain proof your barbecue: Planning a barbecue but worried about the weather? Don’t be put off: follow these tips for great grilling come rain or shine. Plus: recipes you can cook in the oven or over coals.
Picking up the baton as the world’s best chef: There’s a persistent clicking sound inside the kitchen of the Hôtel de Ville. It takes a while to locate it and then, I realise… it’s coming from the chef, Franck Giovannini. The at-times frantic clicking on and off of a pen is the only sign of the adrenaline below the surface in this boyish-looking 42-year-old. He’s leading a lunch service at the restaurant in the Lausanne suburbs, which is adorned with three Michelin stars and 19 Gault&Millau points. Last year it was also named best in the world in a new French ranking. But what must it be like to take on the mantle as the world’s top chef at a restaurant where the previous two star cooks died prematurely?
Five Star mayor of Turin to create Italy’s first ‘vegetarian city’: From vitello tonnato – veal with tuna sauce – to beef braised in the Piedmont region’s most famous red wine, brasato al Barolo, meat dishes have been central to the food tradition of northern Italy for centuries. But Chiara Appendino, the new mayor of Turin and a force in the populist Five Star Movement (M5S), could be about to change all that with her pledge this week to promote vegetarian and vegan diets as a “priority” in her administration.
Seafood saganaki and stuffed squid recipes inspired by Crete: When you have grown up in a place you can forget the beauty of it. You take it for granted. Sometimes you even find it boring, want to leave and cross the seas for new adventures. Then, as the years go by, you find yourself looking around when you go back to visit. You marvel at the beauty of it all, almost incredulous that you spent your childhood there.
Divers in Sweden sniff out 340-year-old shipwrecked cheese: Divers exploring a historic royal shipwreck off the south-east coast of Sweden have discovered what they believe is probably a chunk of exceedingly smelly, 340-year-old cheese. “We’re pretty sure it’s some kind of dairy product, butter or cheese,” said Kalmar county museum’s Lars Einarsson, who is in charge of the dive on the wreck of the Kronan, a 126-gun warship that sank in 1676. “It’s like a mixture of yeast and Roquefort, a sort of really ripe, unpasteurised cheese,” Einarsson told local media. He added that, while he was partial to cheeses “whose character lives on in their smell”, this one was “probably not for everyone”.
The secret to super-smooth scoopable ice-cream: Every small town in America has an ice cream parlor. Okay, that’s probably not true. But every small town that has ever attracted a tourist sure does. Tourists love ice cream. In fact, everyone does. And we’d probably eat it ceaselessly if we didn’t see it as an indulgence—a treat reserved for when, say, you find yourself in a small town doing a little touristing.
This Chef Makes Beautiful Knives Out of 7,000-Year-Old Oak: On a farm in West Cork in Ireland, surrounded by a frenzy of pigs, cows, and chickens, is where Fingal Ferguson makes world-class handcrafted chef’s knives. His improvised workshop at the back of a cattle shed may seem ramshackle, but his knives are things of rare beauty. They have patterned firework finishings on their blades and carved handles from buffalo horn, antlers, or reclaimed wood: apple, tamarind, rosewood, bog oak. Watching awestruck chefs peruse Fingal’s collection of weaponry is like watching Rambo at a gun show.
Jacques Pepin blasts Gordon Ramsay’s Hell Kitchen for humiliating aspiring chefs: Celebrity chefs today are just as likely to be known for their food as their brash personalities, messy public divorces or even spiky, gelled hair. But one of the original culinary small screen scars, Jacques Pepin, comes from a simpler time—and he isn’t happy about the state of modern programming when it comes to cooking. In an essay penned for The Daily Meal, Pepin calls out the new wave of ‘so-called “reality” shows’ for misrepresenting the industry.
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