Three types of heat cook your food in an oven: convection, thermal radiation, and conduction. We experience these three types of heat every day— convection makes a cold day with a breeze feel colder, thermal radiation warms us when we stand in front of a roaring fire, and conduction warms our hands when we hold a hot mug of coffee.

Types of Heat

*Power-to-Volume ratio.* This is why you want to use a countertop oven.  

How much power do you have to heat all that metal, air and food? And how much power do you have to create efficient airflow so you have faster, more even cooking?  Home appliances are limited to the power that comes out of the wall, so if you want more performance, you might consider a smaller oven.

Let’s think about cars for a minute. Drivers talk about horsepower, but racers talk about horsepower to weight ratio in cars. You can think of power as what makes you go fast, but your weight is what makes you go slow. If you have lots of power but you are heavy; you can go fast, but if you have a high power to weight ratio you can go fast and you can also be quick. This is why racing divisions are limited by power and weight, not just power. 

Whether your home oven costs you $10,000 or $100, it has a limited power supply of about 2400 watts of power and an average volume of about five cubic feet of air to cook in.  Countertop ovens have about 1800 watts of power but only one cubic foot of volume of air to cook in. Which oven wins?  

It might just be the countertop oven but let's dig into a few other key ideas to know for sure.

Countertop Ovens—Small but Mighty

Guess what? All your favorite foods are mostly made up of water. In fact, they range from about 75 percent water in meats to 90 to 95 percent water in fruits and vegetables.  

Want to know something else? Water is arguably the most important factor in most cooking processes—and you can’t even see it.  

For example, a boost of humidity when you bake bread lets the dough puff and spring and create a light and fluffy texture. But only when you get rid of that same moisture can a delicious crust form. Higher humidity in a Dutch oven helps transform collagen into gelatin faster to give more succulent braises. But not everything looks better with more humidity. If you want crispy crackers or a crunchy, flaky pie crust, you have to get rid of the moisture. 

Following? 

Let's dive deeper by exploring some recipes that demonstrate the highs and lows of humidity.

On Humidity and Cooking—How and When to Use It.

Basic Oven and Heat Principles

Other Tools and Equipment

What You’ll Need

Boil ’em, smash ’em, season ’em, and let the air-fryer do the rest.

Air Fried Smashed Potatoes

Wrangle up some classic buffalo sauce and slap it on florets of cauliflower that, thanks to the magic of air frying, turn out even crunchier than chicken wings.

Air-Fried Buffalo Cauliflower “Wings”

Tearing tofu instead of cutting it turns it into crispy, craggly nuggets with more surface crunch.

Air-Fried, Crispy, Craggly Tofu

If we had one wish for the air frying cycle on countertop ovens, it would be this: change the name.  

Countertop ovens with an air fry setting force air to move powerfully through the oven and around the food in it. Forced convection heats the surface of food almost twice as quickly as the natural convection heating that happens in an oven. The air fry setting moves the air more efficiently throughout the oven, heating the oven faster than usual.  

(See this article on [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/types-of-heat types of heat] for more explanation.)   

This is probably why people began calling it air frying. This super convection process heats every part of the food, surrounding it with hot air the way deep frying cooks food quickly by surrounding it with hot oil. It’s a similar process with a different medium.  

Air frying is not a “healthier” way to fry foods than hot oil. You’re also not going to have the irresistible fatty, salty, crispy texture of fried foods that make everyone’s brains happy.  

Instead, if you use the air fryer setting to cook foods more quickly—frozen french fries, for example, or reheating leftover pizza—you will discover its usefulness in your own kitchen.

What Is Air Frying?

These thick-cut sweet potato sticks dredged in cornmeal and spices are our twist on American “Jo-Jo fries.”

Crispy Cornmeal-Coated Sweet Potato Steak Fries

A real crowd pleaser, air-fried chicken wings are finger food champions—each one is a perfect crispy, crunchy, juicy, meaty bite.

Air-Fried Chicken Wings

Air Frying

What Is Baking?

Attention, customers: bacon, leeks, and Gruyère. That is all.

Quiche Lorraine

Cake is not about sustenance. It’s not about getting the job done.  Cake is about wish fulfillment—the edible equivalent of a crystal-crusted pair of Jimmy Choos sparkling in a window display or an Apple Watch that follows you around the internet until you fork over your Visa details. The difference is that those little luxuries are price prohibitive, for most of us anyway. And a cake, well, a cake is just a few common pantry items whizzed together, then baked in a pan. It’s a trifle, really. Sometimes literally so.

And yet, cake is undeniably special. Like caviar-topped [link /activities/blini blini] or pigs in a blanket, it’s a food that feels somehow off when you’re not at a party, or at least toasting someone. That has to do with its richness, sure, and hefty caloric load. But there’s something more. Something about the care involved in **stacking a layer cake just right**, **then carefully decorating it in fudgy ganache or a sparkling glaze**. When you make someone a cake, you’re saying, “You’re important to me.” And given the emotional payload that comes with this particular confection, you want to get it just right.

To that end, we’ve put together this guide to making bakery-level layer cakes at home. Follow the instructions, and you’ll wind up with **a moist**, **juicy carrot cake**; **a dangerously delicious red velvet**; **a bright banana dessert**; **or a decadent chocolate number** to rival any you’ve ever tasted. As you bake, you’ll master the fundamentals of a first-rate crumb—lessons you can apply to creating your own original cakes. A custom confection you can tailor to the tastes of whomever you’re celebrating? Now that’s something special.

Mastering Homemade Cakes

There is no reason why this should have worked. But this cookie checks all the cookie qualifier boxes in a big way. It’s the perfect blend of chewy, crispy, buttery, chocolatey goodness—it is far more than average.

After baking, testing, and analyzing the [link /activities/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies-the-10-best-recipes 10 best chocolate chip cookie recipes] on the internet, Grant put all the recipes into a parametric. (A parametric recipe is one that lays out all the parameters of multiple formulas, side by side, for easy and concise comparison.) He translated each of the 10 recipes into baker’s percentage—with flour representing 100% and every other ingredient expressed as a percentage of that flour weight—then compared them all. That allowed the chefs to understand the recipes in a different way. Which one had the most chocolate? The most sugar? The least flour? We learned again by answering those questions.
  
One night, Grant took that parametric home and looked at it in a new way. Since every recipe was expressed in a percentage, why not find the average number among all those percentages? If every recipe used baking soda, why not take the average of the amount of baking soda in each recipe? The same with sugar and vanilla and salt?  

What would happen if we made an average cookie?  

[fetchActivity the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies-behold-the-cookie-calculator]

Grant wrote a new recipe, using amounts translated from the average of each ingredient. He asked Matthew, our pastry chef, to make the new recipe. Why not play? The worst that could happen is that we would make another batch of pretty-good cookies.  

The first time people on the ChefSteps staff tried these cookies, there were plenty of happy noises around the office. Grant let out an extra-long grunt of pleasure. The chefs started laughing. They had, through playing with the parametric and being willing to give it a try, invented what we believe is the best chocolate chip cookie we have ever tasted.  

Look no further. This is the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. Or, should we say—the Ultimate Average Chocolate Chip Cookie.

The Ultimate Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies: When Average Equals Amazing

Your New Favorite Soufflé

Baking

Picture this—[link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/tender-crispy-skinned-whole-suckling-pig a pig on a spit, slowly turning over a hot fire]. Someone is sitting by the fire, manually turning the handle to make that pig go around and around so it does not burn. As the pig roasts, the fat glistens and spits into the flames, the skin browns golden to tawny brown to dark pecan, and the warm aroma drifts through the room. Now that is a roast.

Can you get the same kind of intense radiant heat that varies in the particular spot on the food that is roasting, with plenty of airflow around the food, in an oven? Nope. True roasting takes place over a fire. Can you cook food in an oven to mimic many of the same effects that fire roasting gives? You bet. That’s why designers built a roasting function in an oven in the first place.

So, let’s talk about roasting.

What Is Roasting?

Roasting beets instead of boiling or steaming them helps concentrate their natural sugars and enhance their flavor, which is why we prefer this technique to boiling. This same premise goes for other root vegetables like parsnips or carrots. 

But why is this true? Neuroscientists have shown that our brains pay attention to the intensity of the tastes in our mouths—sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness, savoriness (umami)—when deciding how flavorful a food seems. If you concentrate the taste molecules during the cooking step, then you can make the overall flavor more pronounced. Leech out the sugar, however, and the flavor will seem diminished. 

Once roasted, these beets can be used with equal ease as a warm component in a dish—like our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/duck-breast-beet-and-chocolate">Duck Breast, Beet and Chocolate</a>—or in a cold salad.

Roasted Beets

When you are cooking up a feast with a steal-the-show centerpiece dish, you want lots of fun, easy sides to bring color, texture, and flavor to the table. But you don’t want anything too complicated—you have that meat to think about, after all. And you don’t want to get caught in the weeds, especially after your guests have arrived all thirsty for a glass of wine. 

So when we were dreaming up the recipes for [link /activities/throw-an-epic-game-of-thrones-finale-feast a *Game of Thrones* dinner], a colorful kabocha squash dish was a no-brainer. A more flavorful update to the Old World relative served at medieval dinner parties, squash tastes best roasted simply and seasoned with drippings from a meaty main course—be it a [link /activities/standing-rib-roast Standing Rib Roast], a [link /activities/turkey-crown crispy-skinned turkey], or a [link /activities/tender-crispy-skinned-whole-suckling-pig whole suckling pig] roasted in your own fireplace.

Simple Roasted Squash

We love giving you the science of cooking and insights into new ingredients. However, sometimes we like to offer you delicious food without a lot of fuss. Roasting pears and apples with honey and thyme transform them into something sublime yet versatile. 

Here’s what you need to know. Cooking the fruit at just the right temperature promises a nice caramelization and a sliceable toothy texture. Too low a heat? The apples and pears won’t caramelize fast enough, which will yield bland and ugly results. Too high a heat, and the steam pressure can cause the fruit to explode into mush. What you need is a temperature that’s just hot enough to caramelize but not so hot that it creates steam too quickly. 

Eat these honeyed apples and pears warm with a bowl of cold vanilla ice cream. Add chilled slices of these honeyed fruits to a salad. We strongly suggest you pair chunks of these roasted fruits with [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/red-cabbage-with-koji our charred cabbage with creamy koji dressing.]

Time to start roasting.

Oven-Roasted Honey Apples & Pears

If you throw a dinner “just because” and then serve your guests a gorgeous rib roast, they’re going to think you’re some kind of wizard. Deep-brown crust, juicy pink meat—prime rib is elegant, crowd-friendly, and really quite easy to prepare, requiring no special equipment or hard-to-find ingredients. And while we too often corral this carnivore crack into the holiday-meal category, **there’s no reason you can’t use rib roast as the inspiration to throw an impromptu party**. In fact, we highly encourage it. Pop by the market and pick one up, tell your friends to come by in a few hours with some wine or a side dish, and enjoy a casually spectacular repast with none of that weird stiffness of special-occasion meals. Got leftovers? Lucky you. Roast beef anchors one of the world’s most delicious sandwiches: the French dip. 

Here, we walk you through the three simple stages of creating a perfect rib roast. Once you’ve tried the well-tested method, we bet you’ll return to it often, reproducing the roast easily without needing to consult a recipe. French the bones yourself or ask your butcher to do it. Swap in whatever fresh herbs you happen to have on hand. Fiddle with doneness until the perfect amount of pinkness is yours. **This is destined to become your house specialty**, so go ahead and make it your own.  A holiday-worthy dish that’s flexible and easy to make on the fly? Now that’s what we call culinary magic.

Classic, Oven-Roasted Standing Rib Roast

Roasting

What Is Broiling?

You might have a habit of roasting trays of vegetables in the winter. Keep it up. Those root vegetables are hearty and delightful to have in the refrigerator any time you want. However, if you want a cooking method that brings you crunch and bright greens in the midst of winter, broil some broccolini. 

Broiling uses high heat to cook vegetables faster than roasting can. Roasting broccolini means the stems of the vegetable are soft by the time the florets are charred. Sweet potato? Roast. Anything green? Broil. Put broccolini under the broiler with a good seasoning of salt and a hit of lemon and you’ll have a full green experience, with crunch and crisp. The end result has the sensory experience of crunching on potato chips. This is the way to eat your vegetables. 

We think you will love this technique and the final dish that showcases the broccolini. But this simple recipe is only the template. Chop up the broccolini and use it as part of a quinoa salad or a take on the familiar broccoli salad with raisins, red onions, and sunflower seeds offered at your local coop. As soon as the broccolini comes out from under the broiler, drizzle it with tahini, black sesame seeds, and lots of fresh herbs.

Time to turn on the broiler.

Blackened-ini Broccolini

You will never think of lettuce the same way again. 

Lettuces are 95 percent water, so they’re a perfect candidate for broiling. The leaves on the top, closest to the broiler, start to desiccate as they char. The water exudes from the lettuce and starts the self-steaming transformation of the lettuce. The char transforms the texture of the top of the lettuce, which means the final result is soft, supple lettuce that has charred, almost smoky flavor on the edges. It’s an incredible change.   

We used romaine lettuce here since we like its sweetness and sturdiness. (Also? It’s cheap and it’s everywhere, and tastes like nothing at all until you broil it.) But you can choose any sturdy lettuce, as well as any of the chicories, such as radicchio, or escarole. You could even do cabbage.

Whatever lettuce or greens you use, you are going to want to eat this lettuce as soon as it is cool from the oven. You can jazz it up with some creamy dressing or vinaigrette, then top it with nuts, seeds, cheese, pickled things, fresh herbs, or whatever you want.

Charred Lettuces Will Blow Your Mind

Broiling

What Is Grilling?

Grilling

What Is Slow Cooking?

To paraphrase Magritte, “Ceci n’est pas un plat.” For those of you who slept through French (not to mention art history) class: **This is not a dish. Nope. It’s a versatile technique**, rather, that you can use whenever you want some uber-tender, oh-so-tasty pork belly—a bone-sticking braise that can anchor all sorts of delicious dinners. 

It’s a simple formula: combine chunks of pork belly with a cooking liquid (such as wine, stock, or soy sauce), season as you wish (but always include good ol’ salt and pepper), and then add some aromatic veggies (a classic [link http://www.foodnetwork.com/how-to/photos/how-to-make-flavor-bases-mirepoix-soffritto-and-more.html mirepoix], **a bouquet of fresh herbs from the garden**, the leftover shallots sitting on your countertop, whatevs.)

There are many ways to go with this one. Want a main dish to go with your killer wok-fried green beans? Toss in some soy sauce, bok choy, and garlic, and serve over steamed rice. Prefer a frenchified belly? Empty leftover white wine into the pot along with diced onions and fresh herbs. Take things in a Mexican direction by whipping up some carnitas with tomatillos, or go all Iberian on it with paprika and peppers and garlic bread crumbs. **Like we said**, **lots of ways to go**, but as long as you’ve got fresh belly, on-point flavor combos, and great ingredients, very few ways to go wrong.

Super-Simple, Oh-So-Tender Braised Pork Belly

Slow-Cooking

This spice blend is made up of dehydrated onions, garlic, and herbs, with toasted chiles, spices, and a kick of pepper to make your Creole wishes come true. 

You can use this blend to spice up anything you want to eat: fish, fried chicken, or kale tacos. (Don’t laugh. We have been eating tacos with vegetables roasted with this spice blend, again and again.) Any food for which you want a medium heat that leaves a little tingle on the tongue? Use this spice and eat up.

Creole Spice Blend

We wanted to create a textural experience similar to beef jerky with some of our favorite vegetables instead. Initially, we ran trials brining the vegetables with calcium oxide, which we hoped would give the surface an interesting texture and dried-out look. However, that did not improve the texture of the jerky. We stopped going that direction. Instead, we tried the classic route of using a simple salt and sugar brine, roasting the vegetables, and dehydrating them. Bingo. 

We ran tests using all sorts of vegetables—tomatoes, mushrooms, beets, carrots, celery root, leeks, sweet potatoes, and eggplant—and decided that our favorites are eggplants and mushrooms for their ability to absorb the flavors we added. We also like bell peppers and beets for their hardy flavor and sturdy structure. 

What you see below is the process to make this vegetable jerky. We focused on the technique so you can master that, then make your own flavor combinations.

Vegetable Jerky

What Is Dehydration?

Dehydrating

That bag of popcorn is just the beginning.

Making the Most of Your Microwave

The beauty of the microwave is that it offers a fast, foolproof way to get your vegetables just right every time.

Quickest, Easiest Way to Cook Vegetables

We heat the radicchio in the microwave to achieve that perfect in-between texture, while toasted hazelnuts bring deep, nutty flavor and even more satisfying crunch.

Warm Radicchio Salad

Tomato soup is all about comfort. Sick days, snow days—what would they be without a big bowl of it accompanied by a gooey grilled cheese?

Easiest-Ever Tomato Soup

Microwaving

We’d like to meet the guy who first decided to put a big, juicy burger patty between two slices of brioche. It’s a multicultural marriage made in culinary heaven: the French are responsible for the rich, eggy bread, and the Americans (with a little help from nineteenth-century German immigrants) lay claim to the ground-beef patty. If that’s not international diplomacy, we don’t know what is.

But while French babies are rumored to start cranking out unimpeachable brioche at birth, the rest of us can run into trouble. There’s dry, stodgy brioche, cloyingly sweet brioche, and—perhaps the worst offender when it comes to burger building—the dreaded butter bomb. So what’s the secret to the gorgeous, golden-brown buns that grace so many restaurant menus these days? Most chefs and bakers will evangelize their own formulas, and for good reason: different approaches work well for different reasons. We designed this simple, universal formula to yield a great result at home.

Our recipe calls for about 30 percent butter relative to the weight of the bread flour, whereas many recipes use as much as 75 percent butter, and a few artisan formulas combine equal parts flour and butter. In general, as you increase the butter-to-flour ratio, the brioche will taste more like a cake and less like a bread. We use a nice, lean “breadlike” formula and tenderize the crumb with amylase, an enzyme that breaks starches down into sugars. Amylase is naturally present in wheat germ—and thus naturally present in flour—but only in small amounts. A small amount of pure amylase speeds the fermentation process by breaking the starch into sugars the yeast can consume (while enhancing flavor at the same time), leading to a softer product with none of that stodgy quality we’re so eager to avoid. 

Follow the instructions below, and you’ll wind up with a bun that’s rich in flavor, moist, and eggy, while also durable enough to hold up to a juicy burger. As they teach the babies in France to say: Bon appétit.

Brioche Burger Buns

About Phase Cooking (coming soon)

Phase Cooking (edit only)

When we set out to create our [link https://www.chefsteps.com/indoor-barbecue Indoor Barbecue series], we knew we’d have to include a pork shoulder recipe. Pork shoulder, after all, is the perennial crowd-pleaser of the barbecued-protein set. Whether you’re **stuffing it into pulled pork sandwiches, mixing it into a hearty breakfast hash, or cutting it into thick slices for a fancy dinner**, a rich, meaty pork shoulder renders every meat eater happy and well fed.

Here, we show you how to make a smoked pork shoulder sans smoker—you can cook it up easily in the comfort of your own kitchen, no outdoor equipment required. **We cook the shoulder sous vide to slowly transform it into tender, fall-apart barbecue.** After that, there’s very little oversight—just leave it in the water while you whip up some tasty sides for that pig. Once you’ve massaged it in spice rub and transferred it to the oven to finish, its incredible aromas are hard to miss. Don’t be surprised when your neighbors come a-knockin’.

**A FEW NOTES BEFORE YOU BEGIN:** 
**Curing salts**: This recipe includes the *optional* step of using nitrites to create the appearance and flavor of a traditional smoke ring. The nitrites can be found in the curing salt we use, called **Prague powder No. 1**. It works because the nitrites in the curing salt slowly decompose into nitric oxide, which reacts with myoglobin in the meat to create the telltale pink color of traditional wood-smoked shoulder. (With traditional barbecue, burning wood creates nitric oxide directly.)

When adding the curing salts to the brine, it’s important that the brine not be too acidic. Ours isn’t, but proceed carefully **if you decide to blaze your own trail**. A highly acidic solution will cause the curing salts to rapidly decompose into nitric oxide, which is dangerous as a concentrated gas. Don’t add vinegar to the brine, and never mix liquid smoke (which is acidic) directly with curing salts. (It’s okay to add curing salts to a watered-down solution that includes some liquid smoke, as we do in this recipe.) When in doubt, just follow the recipe carefully. If you’re going to add any acid, feel free to ask about safety in the comments. 

**Brining:** We use injection brining. Yup, you’ll need a [link http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00191YVW2/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B00191YVW2&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=delvkitc-20 syringe], but don’t worry: they’re easy to buy and easy to use. Just inject your meat and move on with your meal. **You can totally go with the traditional method**—**submerging meat directly in brine**—but the drawback is it takes a long time for the brine to penetrate the large cut of meat. Here, you’d need to wait six days.

**Cooking temp:** We cook the shoulder at [f 140] to achieve a steaklike texture. For the fall-apart texture that makes great tacos and pulled pork, set the temperature to [f 158].

**Finishing temp:** We finish the shoulder in the oven for three to four hours, cooking it slowly to allow a rich bark to form on the outside of the meat. If you are short or time, however, you can crank the oven up to [f 325] and bake the pork for one hour. You’ll still get a good bark, but you may run the risk of overcooking your meat around the outside. Don’t worry. It will still be amazing.

Smokerless Smoked Pork Shoulder

Brisket is a pitmaster’s mainstay. But let’s face it, even at the best places, it’s often the least interesting option on the menu—dry, bland, blah. Tired of the ho-hum stuff (and never willing to shy away from a challenge), our kitchen crew set out to make **a better brisket**, **with juicy**, **smoky meat and a sticky**, **satisfying bark**. Just to up the ante, they decided to develop it **without the aid of a smoker**, instead testing recipes indoors and using liquid smoke and nitrites to evoke a smoky flavor and signature pink ring at the edge of the meat—both hallmarks of first-rate ’cue. 

The upshot for you, hungry meat fiends: the best dang barbecue brisket you’ll ever make. What’s more, **you can make it in the climate-controlled comfort of your own kitchen**. You don’t need a smoker, and you don’t need a lot of space. Heck, you don’t even have to have any prior barbecuing experience to make this thing happen. What you do need: a few easy-to-find ingredients. These include liquid aminos (a gluten-free soy sauce alternative), but you can sub in soy sauce if you want. A big ol’ hunk of meat, however, is mandatory. Grab some carnivorous buddies—you’re gonna want to show this one off.

NOTE: Our recipe includes curing salts to create the appearance and flavor of a traditional smoke ring. This works because the nitrites in the curing salts slowly decompose into nitric oxide, which reacts with myoglobin in the meat to create the telltale pink color of traditional wood-smoked barbecue brisket. (With traditional barbecue, burning wood creates nitric oxide directly.) A word of caution, however, about adding the curing salts to our brine: it’s important that the brine not be too acidic. A highly acidic solution will cause the curing salts to rapidly decompose into nitric oxide, which is dangerous as a concentrated gas. So don’t add vinegar to the brine, and never mix liquid smoke (which is acidic) directly with curing salts. (It’s okay to add curing salts to a solution that includes some liquid smoke, as we do in this recipe.) In other words, just follow the recipe carefully. If you’re going to add any acid, feel free to ask about safety in the comments.

ANOTHER NOTE: Salt: We love it! The salt amounts in our recipes tend to reflect the time we’ve spent in restaurant kitchens. We season assertively, and we often eat and serve meat in smallish portions. If you prefer your food less salty or envision eating great quantities of brisket at a time, you can opt to omit the salt in the rub step below, adding it only to the brine. Your meat will still be delicious—so, so delicious.

Smokerless Smoked Brisket

With crispy, amber-hued skin and penetrating smoky flavor, this barbecued bird is the go-to dish you’ve been waiting for all your chicken-loving life.  And **you don’t even need a smoker to make it**—all you need, in fact, is a basic oven. So whether you’re keeping it tight in a tiny urban studio or spreading out in some Nashville mansion, we think the technique will find a recurring role in your repertoire of favorite recipes. 

There are three challenges to achieving a great smoked chicken indoors. First—and this is true whenever you’re working with a whole bird—it’s **tricky to get the dark meat cooked through without overcooking the white meat**. Second, you want to get that crackly, golden skin without drying out the interior meat. And third, you want to achieve smoky flavor, but you don’t have the benefit of a smoker. 

Our chefs conquered the first issue by cutting the bird in half, then laying the halves flat out on a baking tray. This helps the chicken’s legs and thighs get done faster, so the breast won’t end up overdone. They took on the second challenge with a brine-and-glaze method, cooking the chicken at a low temperature in a traditional oven and applying a simple glaze several times to **really develop the texture, color, and flavor of the skin while ensuring that the meat stayed nice and juicy**. Both the brine and the glaze contain liquid smoke, which, used in the proper proportion, gives the chicken a deep, smoky flavor without overpowering the dish. We think you’re going to love the results as much as we do. So give it a go, and then tell us all about it in the comments. 

PSST: Need more dinner ideas? Looking to up your outdoor and indoor cooking game?  Enroll in our free [link https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/barbecue/landing#/ Barbecue class] for tons of meaty tips, low-and-slow techniques, and delectable side dish ideas.

Smokerless Smoked Chicken

Maybe you live in a tiny Tokyo efficiency and gaze up at the clouds each morning from your sweet little box in the sky. Maybe you reside in a stately London row house with lion-head door knockers festooning the front entry. Doesn’t matter. Because whether home is a sprawling ranch on the range—where the deer and the antelope play—or a five-floor walk-up in a major metropolis, **we believe you should be able to make barbecue** there. And not just when the weather permits or once you’ve amassed the funds to invest in a smoker. No, you should be able to create incredible barbecue, indoors, whenever you damn well please. And if you don’t want to wear pants while you do it, well, that’s okay too. 

Driven by this belief, we’ve spent countless hours figuring out how to **harness the strengths of sous vide cooking to replicate traditional barbecue techniques**—slow-and-low cooking, smoke-infused flavor, a beautiful red rub to lend spice and sweetness. But **barbecue is as much an art as it is a science**, and we’re constantly adjusting our favorite recipes to get more consistent, more delicious results that are easier to replicate at home. In that spirit, we present an updated version of one of the classic ChefSteps recipes: [link /activities/apartment-ribs Apartment Ribs]. Inspired by [link /activities/amazing-ribs-with-meathead-part-ii-exploring-indoor-barbecue a collaboration ] with our go-to ’cue guru and all-around good friend Meathead Goldwyn (the man behind [link http://amazingribs.com/ Amazingribs.com]), these tender fellas showcase a new rub and a more straightforward approach to developing smoky flavor and a traditional look. You can use this recipe to make ribs indoors easily, whether you’re working in a wee kitchenette or a tricked-out professional commissary. So stop by the deli and pick up a nice rack or two. Tonight you’re gonna experience a whole new spin on superlative indoor barbecue—pants optional, flavor guaranteed.

Smokerless Smoked Ribs: Incredible Barbecue, No Smoker Required

Stones, Salt and Steels

Hacks, Tips, and Tricks

See what other people are cooking in the Breville Countertop Cuisine group on Facebook.

See what other people are cooking

There’s a Facebook Group

Red Cabbage With Koji

**Exclusively for Studio Pass members!**

Recently, Grant shared a story about his favorite lasagna, which he makes with fresh pasta, béchamel, ground cheese, fresh tomato sauce, and a spinach-basil blend. Then, he sears slices of it for crunchy, oozy lasagna. (Sometimes he eats lasagna for breakfast this way.) After reading the email, you wanted us to make this lasagna recipe for you. We listened to you. Get ready to make lasagna.  

Grant focuses on two principles for making lasagna: Make fresh pasta to make sheets as fine as possible, for lots and lots of layers. (People forget that lasagna is a pasta dish. Make amazing pasta.) He also reduces the moisture in the lasagna, by blanching and squeezing dry the spinach and basil, and only uses enough tomato sauce and béchamel to make incredible lasagna, not a goopy mess with pounds of melted cheese.  

Want to take this lasagna to the next level? Bake the lasagna, refrigerate it overnight (or, let’s be honest, refrigerate the last bit of lasagna after eating well with your friends or family), then slice it up. Have you ever eaten seared slices of lasagna? You should. You really, really should.  

Make this and throw a lasagna party soon.

What Do You Call 24-Layer Lasagna? Freaking Delicious.

**Exclusively for Studio Pass members!**

One of our chefs, Kyl Haselbauer, loves to dip things in ranch. Chicken strips, pizza, quesadillas, fries—you get the point. So, after roasting nearly 80 chickens to enhance [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/ultimate-roast-chicken our Ultimate Roast Chicken] and create [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/the-ultimate-guide-to-roast-chicken our Ultimate Roast Chicken guide], Kyl had only thing left to do: put ranch powder on a chicken and roast it. 

He went straight to the source and used the super-condensed flavor bomb of the Hidden Valley Ranch powder mix to blast this chicken with ranch flavor. It turns out his ranch problem made one of the tastiest roasted chickens the staff has ever eaten. 

Besides, sometimes you want your dinner in under an hour, start to finish, with as little active work as possible. That’s why we decided to pack as much flavor as we could in this chicken, make it moist, and have it be done fast. The secret? Spatchcocking.  

Spatchcock is a quite a thrill to say sometimes. To make it takes a little more work, but not much. Spatchcocking a chicken means to break down the chicken, take out the breastbone, and lay the chicken flat for the heat of the oven to reach every inch of surface area of that chicken. Kyl took it one step further and scored the chicken, so the skin could grow crisp. Besides, that allowed more space for the ranch to get in the crevices. Plus, since he roasted the chicken on a bed of smashed potatoes, the fat and flavor that cooks out of the chicken drips down onto what become crisp roasted potatoes.

Are you hungry yet? We are. And we have eaten this chicken quite a few times now. So, if you know someone with a ranch problem like Kyl—and it is okay if that is you—make this for dinner. Make someone happy with crisp potatoes, spatchcocked chicken, and ranch.

Ranch Chicken

For a couple of days here at ChefSteps, we did some really difficult work. We ate a lot of french fries together to ensure we could figure out the best batch size and timing to make french fries in your countertop oven on the air fry setting. 

Sure, you can make your own fries—we taught you how [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/thin-cut-french-fries in this recipe]—but unless you want to measure the initial water content and sugar content in the potatoes, cut them perfectly, blanch them, then freeze them, so you can cook one batch of fries that will be gobbled up quickly, you should probably buy some frozen fries and enjoy the convenience.  

Let’s be honest, french fries taste the most satisfying when they are cooked in a deep fryer. However, we did a bunch of trials in the countertop oven on the air fry setting, to see the best results we could obtain.

For each of the trials below, we used the Breville Smart Oven Air set on the air fry setting and Ore-Ida frozen french fries.

French Fries—Achieve The Holy Grail Of Air-Frying

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This dark chocolate soufflé has a molten chocolate core and a light, springy exterior. This is decadence in a dessert, always a treat. Oh, and did we mention that this one is gluten-free? 

Before you turn away, we have something to teach you. We found, after a few trials, that using sweet rice flour—then cooking it in hot milk to hydrate the starches—yielded a stable soufflé with a small bubble structure and an incredibly soft interior. We do believe this soufflé might be better than the traditional wheat-flour version. Also, we added as much chocolate as possible to the soufflé formula to make this a definitively decadent chocolate treat.  

The best part? This recipe requires no special tools or skills. Soufflés have a reputation for being particularly finicky, but we have made this one bulletproof. You can make this easily. Serve this soufflé with a dusting of powdered sugar and [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/creme-anglaise crème anglaise] for a celebratory dinner party. Or, just whip up a batch on a weeknight. Love savory desserts? You can use sweet rice flour and the same technique we show you here to make our spicy [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/black-pepper-souffle Black Pepper Soufflé]. The soufflé possibilities are endless now.

Gluten-Free Molten Chocolate Soufflé

**Exclusively for Studio Pass members!**

An accurate instant-read digital thermometer is an essential tool for success in the kitchen. If you don’t already own one, you need to buy one. 

The realization that your steak is too well-done, your cake sags in the middle because it was not fully baked, or your simple syrup for cocktails has crystallized because you stirred it too much, since you worried it would burn? No one needs that. Get a thermometer. 

However, once you have the thermometer, you also need to know where to place it in the food you are cooking. The accuracy of the thermometer depends on you putting the probe into the right place. Let us show you how.

How to See the Future With a Thermometer

Have you ever made a paste of salt and liquid and made an igloo on top of your food? Do you think that makes us crazy for suggesting it? Play with us. Salt crusting meat, vegetables, fish, and fruit makes each one of those foods interesting and delicious in a way that would not be possible without that salt crust. 

Some of you might remember being served a salt-crusted whole fish before. However, this practice has fallen out of trend in American restaurants, which is a shame. This is a cooking technique worth exploring. It’s believed that ancient Mongolian warriors would encase their food in a salt paste to preserve it, carry it with them, then roast it over a fire for their meals. Cooks across the world have been salt crusting for thousands of years. 

By choosing to pack food with a paste of salt and some kind of liquid, you are trapping all the heat and moisture from cooking inside that dome. If the food is entirely sealed in that salt crust, it can cook more quickly than it does with other cooking methods like sautéing or roasting, since the salt dome serves as a kiln. This tightly sealed dome traps steam within the food, which means the seasonings do not escape into the ambient air of the oven. Food cooked in a salt crust retains its moisture far better than if it had been cooked in a different fashion. 

We played with a few different mixtures of salt and liquids: salt + water; salt + egg whites; salt + flax egg (which we refer to as flax goo). Each had its benefits and drawbacks. However, they all created a crust that trapped in steam and made some delicious food.

It’s a Salt Crust Frenzy!

**Exclusively for Studio Pass members!**

You might think these look like hippie crackers. You know the ones: flat with ragged edges, free of anything but seeds and dirt, and frankly nothing like a cracker. Sawdust with nutritional yeast—these we have tasted. 

These are not hippie crackers. 

Sure, these are non-traditional crackers. They have no flours, so they are gluten-free and grain-free. They do not contain any animal products, so they are suitable for a plant-based diet. Our chef Matthew Woolen used dark leafy greens, fermented vegetables, and soaked sunflower seeds to make them. He even included a bit of nutritional yeast. And, if you want, you can keep them raw when you dehydrate them to keep the probiotics alive. 

Okay, we know. They really sound like hippie crackers. 

Here’s the surprise: everyone loves these crackers. Every person on our staff asked for more of these crackers. They are snappy on the teeth and thick enough to feel substantial. These are dark green crackers with bright flecks of orange, covered in a field of black and white seeds. The tamari, that nutritional yeast, and onion powder lend a depth of umami. Plus, the kimchi gives a zing that leaves a happy warmth in the mouth. A ChefSteps member visiting the kitchen the day we made this video tasted one of these crackers. He loved it, then immediately said the crackers reminded him of pizza-flavored Pringles. That’s cool. 

To us, they taste like the most-interesting cracker that you cannot stop eating. Keep eating them.

Like the best recipes, this one is a template. Swap the kimchi out for some sauerkraut. Add watercress, dried seaweed, or any kind of dark leafy green. 

When you want to eat the crackers, try dolloping some plant-based yogurt on top, then add a bit of sauerkraut and sprouts. Or, set them out with a bowl of hummus. These will be gone fast. Make more. We think the people in your life will love these (okay-they-are-hippie) crackers.

Vegetable and Seed Crackers

Mastering Hand-Laminated Croissants

Extras

Welcome to the ChefSteps countertop oven class: 13 articles of scientific insights and practical tips; a section on baking that everyone can access; 6 new recipes, plus bonus content for Studio Pass members only. The large ovens installed in home kitchens were invented and moved into homes after World War One. At the time, a large oven was an unbelievable innovation for home cooks. But what felt brand-new in 1918 is pretty outdated now. What is today’s upgrade on the large oven that can level up your cooking immediately? The countertop oven. In this class, we show you the science of how a countertop oven works—whether you are roasting, broiling, or dehydrating—and why you should choose a particular cooking cycle for that meal you want to make. We also have some incredible new recipes, with extensive video tutorials and scientific explanations of what is happening while you cook. Of course, we also have tips and tricks for you, including hacks and other tools you can use to make your countertop oven as useful as any other oven. We have made the baking section of the class— including recipes for amazing chocolate chip cookies, plus savory and sweet soufflés—available to everyone. As well, we share some classic ChefSteps recipes we have re-tested in countertop ovens and found success. For Studio Pass members, we have an incredibly detailed guide—with videos for every step—to making croissants. We have vegetable jerky, red cabbage with creamy koji sauce, gluten-free chocolate soufflé, and what Grant believes might be your new favorite lasagna. Now, let’s get cooking.

Cook smarter with ChefSteps classes.

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