The Pantry Dispatch
Guides to the foods, makers and techniques behind what we stock.
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Producer ProfileChocolate Bars
Dandelion Chocolate Guide: Two Ingredients, One Origin
In 2010 Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, two of Plaxo's co-founders, started making chocolate in a borrowed garage from cocoa beans and...
Producer ProfileChocolate Bars
Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate Guide
Adam Dick and Dustin Taylor came from woodworking and boat building when they bought small-scale equipment in 2010 and began making chocolate....
Regional GuideChocolate Bars
Piedmont in Autumn Guide: Truffles and the Langhe Table
Every autumn the hills of southern Piedmont fill with fog, and white truffles are hunted with dogs. Under that fog comes the...
History and CraftPickled / Brined / Oil Soaked Goods
How Cornichons Are Grown and Picked at the Size of a Fingernail
A cornichon is an ordinary cucumber picked absurdly early, at the size of a fingernail, before it has softened or filled with...
History and CraftCandy & Other Sweets
Panning
Every smooth, glossy, perfectly round coated candy, a chocolate-covered licorice ball, a malted milk ball, a Jordan almond, a coated coffee bean,...
Kitchen Know-HowSwedish Candy
Fika
Fika is the Swedish practice of stopping, twice a day, for coffee and something sweet with other people, and Swedes will tell...
History and CraftBaking
Curing Vanilla
The vanilla bean is the only spice that has to be made after it is harvested. Green, it is a scentless pod;...
History and CraftChocolate Bars
How Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Is Made: The Process Step by Step
A craft chocolate maker receives dried, fermented beans and turns them into bars. The roast develops the flavor that fermentation set up,...
Complete GuideOlive Oils
Olive Mill Guide: What Happens Between Tree and Bottle
Olive oil is the juice of a fruit, and the mill decides much of how it tastes. Here is each step, from...
History and CraftTea
From Leaf to Tin
White, green, oolong and black tea are the same leaf, Camellia sinensis, treated differently in the two days after it is picked....
History and CraftMustards
Why Is It Called Dijon Mustard?
A jar labeled Dijon can be made anywhere: in France the name describes a recipe, not a place. The history runs from...
Regional GuideOther Cooking Sauces
New Nordic in a Bottle: A Danish Pantry Guide
In 2004 a group of Nordic chefs signed a ten-point manifesto about purity, season, ethics and the north, and a Copenhagen restaurant...
History and CraftOlive Oils
Olive Oil in Antiquity
Before it was a finishing oil, olive oil was light, soap, medicine, perfume, fuel and money. The tree was domesticated in the...
History and CraftHoney
Honey Before Sugar
Before sugar was cheap, the sweet things within reach were mainly fruit and one substance made by insects. Honey was food, medicine...
History and CraftSalts
Salt: History Salt Currency
Salt is cheap now, which makes it hard to remember that for most of human history it was one of the most...
History and CraftTea
How Did Tea Travel West? From China to the Paris Blend
Tea reached Europe in the early 1600s as an expensive medicine and a drink for the wealthy. Over the next two and...
Regional GuideSavoury Spreads & Dips
Moroccan Pantry Guide: Chermoula to Mint Tea
Moroccan cooking has a reputation for patience, but much of its flavor lives in a few things that keep: a green herb-and-spice...
Regional GuidePickled / Brined / Oil Soaked Goods
Puglia on a Plate
Puglia grows olives on more land than any other Italian region, and its cooking is built from wheat, oil, wild plants, the...
History and CraftCocktail Bitters
Bitters Were Medicine First
For centuries, a bitter infusion of roots and barks in alcohol was medicine, sold by apothecaries as a tonic and a digestive....
History and CraftSpices
The Spice Harvest
A spice is a plant part, dried, and the drying is where most of the flavor is won or lost. Cinnamon is...
History and CraftVinegars
The Acetaia Attic
Traditional balsamic is made in attics, on purpose. A family cooks grape must, fills a row of barrels of shrinking size and...
Regional GuideCaramels
Argentina's Sweet Tooth
Argentina eats dulce de leche at breakfast, at the five o'clock merienda and at midnight, in alfajores, on toast, in ice cream...
History and CraftSalts
Harvesting Salt
Every salt began as seawater or a buried sea, and the way the water is taken away decides the crystal. Sun and...
Regional GuideCaramels
Brittany Food Guide: Why the Butter Is Salted
Brittany never paid France's salt tax, and Bretons kept salting their butter. This guide covers the Guérande salt marshes, the caramel au...
History and CraftBaking
Vanilla and the Twelve-Year-Old Who Solved It
Vanilla is the fruit of an orchid, and for three hundred years after Europe fell in love with it, nobody outside Mexico...
Kitchen Know-HowBar & Beverage
The Martini Hour
The martini depends on cold and on what sits next to it. This is the self-serve bar applied to gin and vermouth:...
Producer ProfileMaple Syrups
Runamok Maple Guide: From Vermont Sugarhouse to Rye Barrel
Runamok began with two organic vegetable farmers in Vermont and grew into a maple house that treats syrup the way a distillery...
Regional GuideTinned Fish
Portugal's Conservas
Portugal has canned fish since the second half of the nineteenth century. This is the story behind the Portuguese tin: the June...
Kitchen Know-HowCaramels
Dessert Without Baking
The last course of a dinner does not have to be baked. A jar of goat's milk caramel, a serious chocolate bar,...
Kitchen Know-HowSwedish Candy
Halloween the Swedish Way
Sweden barely observed Halloween until the 1990s, yet its candy suits the night: BUBS skulls, sour fish, strawberry and blueberry foam clouds,...
History and CraftChocolate Bars
Inside a Cacao Fermentation Box
A cacao seed fresh from the pod is bitter, astringent and purple, and tastes nothing like chocolate. The flavor is made on...
Producer ProfileVinegars
Giuseppe Giusti Guide: Reading the Medals on Modena's Balsamic
A Modena house that dates itself to 1605, an IGP range sorted by medals, and a logo ringed with medals since 1900....
Regional GuideTinned Fish
Galicia's Rías Guide: Where Spain's Shellfish Tins Begin
Galicia, in Spain's green northwest corner, has a coastline folded into sea-drowned river valleys called rías, and the Ría de Arousa alone...
Kitchen Know-HowCrackers
Snack Dinner
A snack dinner is not a failure to cook. It is a genre, with its own logic: five or six small things...
Producer ProfileTinned Fish
Espinaler
In 1896 a family opened a tavern in Vilassar de Mar, up the coast from Barcelona, and started serving vermouth with tins...
History and CraftTinned Fish
A Day at the Cannery
A tin of good sardines is a day's work compressed into a rectangle. The fish comes off the boat before sunrise, is...
History and CraftChocolate Bars
How Chocolate Went From Bitter Drink to Craft Bar
For most of its history chocolate was a drink, bitter, frothed and flavored with spices and flowers, and kept for rulers and...
History and CraftPasta
Marco Polo Did Not Bring Pasta from China
Marco Polo, the story goes, brought pasta back from China in 1295. He did not, and the story's most famous version, with...
Producer ProfileLicorice
Lakrids by Bülow Guide: Chocolate-Coated Licorice from Bornholm
Johan Bülow opened his first licorice shop in Svaneke, on the Danish island of Bornholm, on 7 July 2007, and cooked the...
Complete GuideOther Chocolate
Hot Chocolate Bar Guide: Setup and Quantities for Twelve
A hot chocolate bar is the winter party trick that works for children, adults and the one guest who does not drink....
Kitchen Know-HowCrackers
Cheese Plate Math
A cheese plate fails in two ways: not enough cheese, or too many cheeses. The fix is arithmetic. About two ounces per...
Kitchen Know-HowTinned Fish
How to Host a Tinned Fish Tasting for Eight
A tinned fish tasting is the easiest serious dinner party there is: eight tins, opened one at a time in order from...
Kitchen Know-HowEntertaining
The No-Cook Dinner Party
You do not have to cook to have people over. A dinner of opened tins, draped jamón, warm olives, good bread, two...
History and CraftTinned Fish
How Tinned Fish Was Invented
Tinned fish began as a military problem. Armies rotted their food faster than they could eat it, France offered a prize, and...
Complete GuideTinned Fish
The Vermut Hour Guide: Spain's Sunday Aperitif
In Catalonia, fer un vermut means stopping everything around midday on a Sunday to eat small salty things with friends before lunch....
Complete GuideDenver and Local
Cooking at Altitude: A Denver Kitchen Guide
In Denver, water boils at about 202°F, roughly ten degrees below its sea-level boiling point, and the kitchen changes in predictable ways....
Complete GuideCrackers
Crackers: The Complete Guide
A cracker is bread with most of the water baked out, and the choices on the way there decide whether it carries...
Kitchen Know-HowPasta
Pasta Shapes
Italy has more than a thousand names for pasta and a small number of rules for using them. Thin strands take oil,...
Complete GuideCured Meats
Jamón Ibérico: How to Read the Label and Serve It
Jamón ibérico de bellota comes from a black-footed pig that spends its last autumn eating acorns under oak trees. Spain regulates the...
Complete GuideCaramels
Caramel: The Complete Guide
Caramel is one word for burnt sugar, chewy candy, dulce de leche, cajeta and coffee syrup. This guide explains what heat does...
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