Expand your culinary vocabulary with this glossary of terms you'll find on restaurant menus and on TV cooking shows.

Al dente: Italian for “to the tooth,” aka when pasta is cooked until it has a pleasant bite but isn’t too crunchy or too mushy. Baste: To brush or pour juices, sauce or melted fat over a piece of meat ...

Cooks can feel like they’re in a foreign land when they stumble onto unfamiliar cooking terms. Consider the following definitions your cooking CliffsNotes, which should be taped inside your cupboard ...

Perfectly formed patties sizzling over white-hot coals. Spatchcocked chicken so tender it almost melts in your mouth. Steak, shrimp, salmon and veggies seared with griddle marks and bursting with ...

Michael Ruhlman wants bacon for breakfast. So he trots down to his basement refrigerator and returns with a big Ziploc bag holding a slab of pork belly that has been curing for a week in thyme, garlic ...

Today’s modern housewife is a far cry from the lady of yesteryear whose role seemingly was only to bear children, wash clothes, ensure that the house is kept tidy and last but not least cook for the ...

Australia used to be strictly a fish-and-chips kind of place. From its beginnings as a British penal colony, the nation was a culinary prisoner, its cooking a distant imitation of the not-so-enticing ...

Modern food moves at a bewildering pace. Where once, influences from star chefs would disseminate slowly and new products could take years to establish themselves, today rare ingredients and new ...

You’ve donned your proverbial chef’s hat, you’re in the middle of making crème brûlée and BAM, you’re a deer in the headlights. “What the hell does temper even mean?” you cry as hot milk slops onto ...