Digest

1. Effortless Chicken Stock in Your Slow Cooker

2. Oreo and Cream Cheese “Truffles”

3. Homemade Dulce de Leche

4. Thou Shalt Salt Thy Pasta Cooking Water Liberally!

5. The Best Cake Ever, Thanks to Elvis

6. Scrumptious “Waffled” Eggplant

7. “The Universal Condiment”

8. Super Recipe Search Engine

9. Really Thick, Really Fudgy Brownies

10. Salted Coffee, You Say?

Beer bread is an endlessly adaptable quick bread that you can flavor with whatever strikes your fancy, or whatever you have on hand. It’s simple to make and takes very few ingredients. In fact, you don’t even need beer—club soda or seltzer supplies the necessary carbon dioxide just as well. But beer’s malty and yeasty flavors add dimension to the finished bread, and interesting beers impart their distinctive characters to each loaf.

To the basic recipe, hounds add for flavoring: chopped fresh basil or dill, Italian seasoning, mustard seed, dill seed, chopped or dried onion, and grated cheeses of all kinds. Some like to dot the top with butter; others mix melted butter into the batter. You can make a sweet version by increasing the sugar and including warm spices, nuts, or dried fruits; try using a spiced or fruit-flavored beer or a lambic here to complement the sweeter flavors.

Basic Beer Bread
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
12 ounces beer

Preheat oven to 375°F. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and turn into a greased 9-by-5-inch loaf pan. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until a tester inserted comes out clean.

Board Link: Fallen in love with 3-ingredient beer bread. What’s your twist?

Gravlax is very impressive, and certainly the easiest cured fish to make at home. It helps to have a surefire recipe and some key pointers at hand. Several hounds endorse as flawless the Café des Artistes recipe, paraphrased here, and its accompanying mustard sauce. Use center-cut fillets of extremely fresh, firm wild salmon. If your pieces are thinner on the ends than at the center, trim off the thinner sections and use them for something else. Make sure all the pin bones are pulled from the fish before you begin (needle-nose pliers are excellent for removing these). jfood offers a good tip for weighting the fish as it cures: Placing a large bag of rice between the covered fish and the weights helps distribute the weight more evenly over the fish.

Board Links: Gravlax at home
Making my own gravlax?

Potato gratins are creamy, rich, and comforting—in other words, perfect cold-weather fare. There are two schools of gratin methodology: roux-based cheese sauce layered with potatoes, and potatoes simply bathed in cream and gilded with cheese. In both cases the potatoes (russets or Yukon Golds) should be sliced as thinly as possible, preferably with a mandoline if you’ve got one. Gruyère is classic, but any cheese that melts well, or a combination, will work in a potato gratin.

monavano, who is of the cheese sauce school, shares a basic recipe for the sauce:

2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
2 cups shredded cheese
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 400°F. Melt butter and add flour. Cook for a minute. Add milk and whisk until smooth. Increase heat and allow to thicken. Lower heat to medium and add cheese, thyme, nutmeg, and salt and pepper to taste. Layer potatoes, then sauce, potatoes, sauce, etc. Bake covered for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake for 10 minutes more. If you wish, add more cheese at the end and place under broiler to brown.

purple goddess adds crispy bacon bits to the cheese sauce and, after uncovering her gratin, tops it with a combo of seasoned breadcrumbs and cheese, dotted with butter; chef chicklet layers her potatoes with onions and grated cheese and pours cheese sauce over all.

linguafood offers a straightforward recipe from the cream-and-cheese-only camp:

1 pound potatoes, very thinly sliced
Chopped garlic
Salt and pepper
Pinch nutmeg (optional)
1 cup light cream
Grated cheese
Butter

Preheat oven to 350°F. Layer potatoes evenly in a buttered baking dish. Mix garlic, salt and pepper to taste, and nutmeg (if using) into cream and pour over potatoes. Top potatoes generously with cheese and dot with butter. Bake for 45 minutes, or until golden brown.

Hounds recommend this Simple Two-Potato Gratin, and BRB points blue-cheese-lovers to a recipe for Roquefort Potato Gratin, in which he ups the cheese by about 50 percent.

Board Link: Au Gratin Potatoes---Your Best, Please