America's Test Kitchen

Kids can take the lead in prepping this easy weeknight one-pan dinner.

Fritos plus homemade chili make a satisfying dinner in a bag.

Baba ghanoush is delightfully adaptable, and it inspired us to make a zesty eggplant dip with scallions, cilantro, and pepper flakes.

There are two big issues with most gluten-free cookies: off-flavors and a dry, tough texture. But given the huge amount of flavor and moisture melted chocolate provides, you'd think that making a great gluten-free chocolate cookie would be easy. Not so fast. Even the most promising recipes we tried failed us, with subpar flavor and a pervasive dry texture. So we started by amping up the chocolate flavor; in addition to melted chocolate, we loaded our dough with chips, cocoa powder, and a little espresso powder. To address the texture, we began by tinkering with the sugar. Cookies made with all granulated sugar were too crisp, while those made with all brown sugar were flimsy and unpleasantly moist. A combination worked best: ¼ cup of granulated sugar (along with xanthan gum) provided sufficient structure, and ¾ cup of brown sugar boosted chewiness. Still, the cookies weren't chewy enough, so we turned our attention to the butter. We switched out 5 tablespoons of butter for vegetable oil to achieve the proper ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat that delivered the chewy cookies we were after.

Plus, how to make a quick scallop broth.

Essentially baked potatoes but par-sliced into thin, even segments that create a fanlike shape, our air-fried potato fans become extra-crispy on the outside while their interiors remain fluffy and moist.

Vigorously stirring the pasta sloughed off some starch to create a glossy, creamy sauce.

There’s a reason beyond mere convenience why fast-food burgers are so beloved—it’s the particular combination of salty, crispy, sweet, sour, pickled, savory, and meaty that fast-food chains do so well. Here, we use plant-based meat to replicate that ultimate fast-food-style burger patty: pressed thin and deeply browned to crispy deliciousness. Cooking the patties in a blazing-hot skillet triggers the ­Maillard reaction, a process (signaled by browning) that causes the proteins and sugars in food to recombine and form hundreds of new flavor compounds. The result: super savory, drool-worthy burgers.

These easy tips can keep your beloved stand mixer out of the repair shop and working for many years to come.

A few tricks from James Beard Award–winning chef Ken Oringer promise perfect caramel every time.

For tangy, creamy yogurt, we skipped the usual preliminary scalding and cooling steps by starting with ultra-pasteurized milk, which has already been rapidly heated and chilled. This lets bacterial cultures turn it into an especially thick and silky yogurt. We brought the milk to 115 degrees and stirred in store-bought yogurt with live cultures, strains of bacteria that digest the lactose in milk, producing lactic acid. This acid is what gives yogurt its flavor and causes the proteins in milk to gradually form a gel, turning liquid milk into creamy yogurt. To provide those bacteria with a cozy environment to do their work, we placed a covered pot of boiling water in the oven beside the pot of warm water holding the jars of milk. This setup helped the oven maintain a temperature of 100 to 115 degrees for hours. After that, it was just a matter of tasting for tartness and thickness to decide when to pop the jars into the fridge to let the yogurt set.

French cooks prepare scrambled eggs slowly over low heat with butter, stirring constantly until they form small, velvety curds. This version has no added fat. (Save it for the bacon!) Stirring constantly and adding a touch of water at the end controls the egg proteins so that some form delicate curds while the rest thicken to a saucy consistency. Be sure to cook the eggs slowly; it should take 12 to 14 minutes total. For the luscious bacon, simply sprinkle sugar, rosemary, and black pepper over the pieces and bake.

Angostura whipped cream, anyone?

Our starting point, cashew cheese, turned the risotto sticky and pasty. Some recipes call for chia seeds, but they speckled the rice with unappealing globules. Simply stirring in olive oil made the risotto greasy, and store-bought vegan Parmesan imparted a plasticky sheen. We thought creamy vegan risotto wasn't meant to be until we stumbled upon the use of miso, and it was a breakthrough. We add miso to dishes for its savory notes; here it also acted as a thickener, giving the risotto a satiny gloss. To make our risotto a meal, we added savory cremini mushrooms and dried porcini. This more hands-off method requires precise timing, so we highly recommend using a timer.

These petite pancakes folded around a creamy filling, edged with nuts, and drizzled with honey are the holiday's most anticipated confection. The handheld dazzlers are made by stuffing small semolina pancakes with a creamy filling, folding them partway to create a beak shape (“asafiri” means “little birds”), adorning the exposed filling with chopped pistachios, and drizzling attar (a thick sugar syrup) or honey on top. The dessert is highly fragrant, with orange blossom and rose water extracts and heady spices such as cinnamon, mahlab, and ground anise seed flavoring both the cakes and the filling. Importantly, the pancakes are cooked only on one side so that the top side stays tacky and moist and able to be pinched together. Instead of ashta, the creamy filling that is used in the Arab world, we chose mascarpone cheese thinned with a little milk. To efficiently stuff the pancakes, we first pinched them into a beak shape before squeezing the cheese filling inside with a pastry bag.