Essential Chef Blogs

Linda: As American as apple pie….you are the apple of my eye….Eve unleashed all our problems by (allegedly) making Adam eat an apple…. Apples are an important fruit in America. But before this tasting, I had no idea there were so many apple varieties. You're lucky if you see a dozen in a grocery store. The apple farm we visited, T...

Linda: "Looks can be deceiving." When it comes to tomatoes, truer words were never spoke. Did you know that most store-bought tomatoes are picked well before they are ripe and then ripened using ethylene gas? So a red tomato isn't necessarily a sweet tomato. Ripening a tomato on the vine and picking it at the optimal moment is the best...

Max Sevier of Uncle John's BBQ, died on June 1, 2015.  His restaurant, Uncle John's, is closed. This is truly a tragedy -- his ribs and hot  links were delicious and he trained a lot of other really good rib masters. It was over 90 degrees in Chicago at the start of the Labor Day weekend and we were four souls looking for...

​Which tastes better: ice cream or gelato? Linda: I know, I know, that's like asking a mother "who's your favorite child?" Her response is "They are all my favorites". But our inquiring minds (and the heat of the summer) led us on our quest to see if we could taste the difference and which we preferred. My personal answer to the question is: g...

Does a $13.99 per pound pork chop taste better than a $4.29 per pound pork chop? Yes, but….. Linda: We got to wondering if the hype about naturally raised pork was just that, or if we could actually taste the difference between a standard grocery store pork chop and a fancy butcher shop chop. So we set off to buy and blind-taste-test four bone...