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The Most Popular America's Test Kitchen Recipes in January 2020

The recipes you loved the most last month.
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Published Feb. 8, 2020.

The Most Popular America's Test Kitchen Recipes in January 2020

January can be one of the longest months of the year. We are settling down after a busy holiday season, some of us are back at work, and the weather isn’t getting any better. However, as we all know, food can make life a little better and a little easier. Our members took to the kitchen this month by making hearty dishes, such as a famous restaurant dish with chicken and potatoes, a breakfast favorite, a hearty soup, and some bread to soak up the broth. As you wait for spring to show up, check out our top six most popular recipes in January and then view the rest of our top 25 in this collection.

25 Most Popular Recipes in January

Curious what other recipes our members made in January? Check out the rest of our Top 25 collection.  
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1. Chicken Vesuvio

Chicken Vesuvio is a classic Chicago restaurant dish: crisp-skinned chicken and deeply browned potatoes in a potent garlic and white wine sauce. Line cooks make it one order at a time in a potent garlic and white wine sauce. Line cooks make it one order at a time in a big skillet, which provides plenty of space for browning and sauce reduction and goes handily from stovetop to oven. To transfer Chicken Vesuvio to the home kitchen, we traded the customary skillet for a large, heavy roasting pan on the stovetop, browned the chicken thighs and halved Yukon Gold potatoes, and added the traditional dried herbs and plenty of garlic cloves. We poured wine into the pan and moved it to the oven so the chicken, potatoes, and garlic could finish cooking unattended. After transferring the cooked chicken and potatoes to a platter, we returned the pan to the stovetop to reduce the sauce further. Mashing the cooked garlic cloves released polysaccharides, which brought the oil and wine together in a rich emulsion, and some fresh minced garlic, tempered with lemon juice, delivered robust flavor. [GET THE RECIPE]

2. Easy Pancakes

We wanted tender, fluffy, flavorful pancakes that are simple to make using pantry-friendly ingredients and basic kitchen tools (no appliances). To make them tall and fluffy, we prepared a thick batter by using a relatively small amount of liquid and lots of baking powder and mixing it minimally. Sugar, vanilla, and baking soda provided sweetness, depth, and saline tang, respectively. [GET THE RECIPE]

3. Slow-Cooker Greek-Style Chicken with Warm Tabbouleh

Slow-Cooker Greek-Style Chicken with Warm Tabbouleh

Attempting to cook whole grains in a slow cooker along with a lean chicken breast is a tall order. Most grains need to cook for much longer than chicken to become tender enough to eat. Looking for bright and fresh flavors to pair with our Greek-inspired chicken, we turned to the classic tabbouleh salad. Fortunately, our testing revealed that medium-grind bulgur is one of the few hearty grains that can cook in the slow cooker without breaking down and becoming gummy. Rubbing the chicken with an aromatic mixture of garlic, oregano, and lemon zest seasoned not only the chicken but also the bulgur as it cooked. We drained the bulgur at the end of cooking to remove excess liquid and seasoned it with olive oil, lemon juice, parsely, and tomatoes to turn the hearty grain into a vibrant salad. [GET THE RECIPE]

4. Almost No-Knead Sourdough Bread

For an easy bread recipe that allowed us to put our Sourdough Starter into action, we developed a sourdough version of our Almost No-Knead Bread, which we let rise overnight to develop flavor and then baked in a Dutch oven to produce a well-risen loaf with a crisp, crackly crust. [GET THE RECIPE]

5. Moroccan Lentil and Chickpea Soup (Harira)

This recipe carefully streamlines the ingredient list and technique of this classic Moroccan soup to deliver all the bold North African flavors you’d expect from harira in just a fraction of the time. Using canned chickpeas rather than dried saved about 2 hours of cooking time, and paring down the number of spices to a key five made it a dish most people can prepare without a special trip to the market. Using large amounts of just two herbs made for quicker prep and a more efficient use of fresh ingredients. Finishing the dish with fresh lemon juice helped focus all the flavors. [GET THE RECIPE]

6. Spumoni Bars

Spumoni Bars

These Spumoni Bars look like they come from a single dough at first, but it is actually three different varieties combined into one. A rolling pin merges the different ropes of dough into one coherent cookie. Slightly chilling the doughs made it easier to roll them and ensured three distinct bands. [GET THE RECIPE]

Want to see the rest of our top 25? Check out our Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes in January collection. And view these recipe collections to see which recipes were popular in past months:

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