After the great tours we've been getting of the Serious Eats office, you asked for it, so here it is: a virtual tour of the Food Lab's kitchen. If you're expecting fancy gear, lab coats, a sterile environment, and a multi-million dollar laboratory, I'd recommend you look elsewhere. As you'll see in these photos, I'm just a normal guy with a pretty normal kitchen, some nice (but still consumer-level) gear, and a couple of exceptionally cute taste-testers. More

A really well-constructed potato salad can be as interesting as the burger it precedes (and believe me: I love burgers). Tangy, salty, and sweet with a texture that's simultaneously creamy, crunchy, and fluffy in each bite, a perfect potato salad should taste feather-light, despite being made with potato and mayo, two of the heaviest ingredients around. How to make that perfect potato salad? Find out in this week's Food Lab. More

Baking powder and baking soda. Both of them are used so frequently in quick baking projects that unless you are a recipe developer, rarely do you consider what each of them actually does for your finished product. How come my scones call for baking powder, but my buttermilk biscuits call for a mixture of powder and soda? Is there an easy way to substitute one for the other if I don't have both on hand? And why do I have to bake my muffins right after mixing the batter? This edition of the Food Lab is a quick and dirty guide to how they work, and how they affect the outcome of your recipe. More

One of my earliest memories as a New York kid in the 1980s was when the Greek-owned pizza shop down the street first put up a poster featuring an attractive woman eating a Kronos-brand gyros sandwich. I couldn't get the image out of my head. Since then, I've been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to rigorously sample both women and gyros, and can safely say, it was the gyros that did it for me. Now, before I go any further, I want to clarify by saying that I'm not talking authentic Greek gyros here. I'm talking Greek-American gyros. More

It turns out that not only do you not need a large volume of water to cook pasta, but in fact, the water does not even have to be boiling. Wait. What? Let me explain. I, and every other trained cook I know have been taught that when cooking pasta, you need to have a large pot of boiling water. If my wife turned out to be right about this, just think of the pastabilities! This could turn my whole pasta-cooking regime on its head. Some serious testing was in order—I called downstairs and told my doorman that I hope he likes noodles, cause that's gonna be his lunch for a few days. More

Who doesn't love roast chicken? Crackly, crisp, salty skin. Moist tender meat. Deep aromas filling the house. Little bits of fat and meat to tear off with your fingers and teeth as you linger over the the last sips of your whiskey (whiskey goes with chicken, right?). It's about as classy and classic as food can get, and my go-to meal for company. But to be perfectly frank, most of the time, I don't like roast chicken, because most of the time, well, chickens just aren't roasted very well. More

For me, the big question about vinaigrettes has never really been "how?" but "why?" Is emulsifying the oil and acid really necessary? Does adding the olive oil and the vinegar to the salad bowl individually really make for an inferior salad? Could every red-sauce Italian joint with oil and vinegar jugs in the world be wrong? Well, stranger things have been true. I decided that a bit of hard-core kitchen work was in order. More

This week I decided to tackle lamb racks—one of the most expensive (try $20+ per pound) and potentially delicious meats out there—I figured my work would be easy. I mean, I'd already tackled Perfect Prime Rib, which is the beefy equivalent. Could the ovine parallel really be all that different? As it turns out, yes, it can. More

Sure, maybe early man got away with a fire and a stick, but any budding kitchen sleuth, or even a good home cook knows that the right equipment can make life in the kitchen a whole lot easier. So here we go, in no particular order: The Food Lab's Top 10 Favorite Pieces of Kitchen Gear. More

Can you spot the difference between the two hanger steaks? They were both cooked to a perfect 130°F medium-rare in the same pan, both cut from the same piece of meat, and both sport a beautiful brown, crackly crust. Yet one of them is more tender than Otis Redding on a good day, while the other has more in common with a rubber band. What's the difference? It's all got to do with the angle at which it's sliced. More