Snake River Farms

Celebratory and holiday traditions are generally great to have. Holiday traditions bring family and friends together,sometimes for the first time they’ve seen each other in months or even years. And while that’s the most important feature of those traditions, there’s more to them than the guest list. Turkey at Thanksgiving, for instance. Turkey tastes really good, which doesn’t hurt, but it’s at least as much about the ritual of carving and the expectation of and nostalgia for a turkey feast as it is about the feast itself. All that being said, and acknowledging how great traditions tend to be, who says that you have to celebrate other peoples’ traditions? While the comfortable familiarity and predictability of them is a big part of their charm, the great thing about traditions is that you can make your own. And when you do, there’s a good chance you’ll find them even more fun, special, and important than the ones you inherited. That, and the fact that some people ju...

More than any other feature of a menu, the steak can make or break a restaurant’s, and thereby a chef’s, reputation. A lot can be forgiven from a kitchen that delivers an unforgettable rib eye. While stellar sides, service, and setting can be rendered virtually meaningless among the haute cuisine set if the steak is subpar. As important and ubiquitous as steak is as a fine-dining staple, and as crucial as mastery of the season and sear on a good cut of dry-aged beef is for a chef, you’d think the fundamentals of cooking a steak would have been pretty much settled. To some degree they are. For instance, over-seasoning (more than just salt and pepper to a lot of chefs) is virtually universally regarded as a sin on a cut of dry-aged beef, while cooking a steak past (even to) medium can be considered blasphemy. However, there is a surprisingly basic point of contention that still splits chefs into two passionately opposed camps. Should a steak be seasoned immediately ...