Ask Special Sauce, Holiday Edition: Stella and Daniel on What They Hate About the Holidays

Stella Parks and Daniel Gritzer are back for the second part of our Ask Special Sauce holiday edition, and we tackle some of the most pressing issues many of us face when cooking during the holidays.

For example, take the sticky subject of royal icing, which, according to Stella, is great for making a bunch of holiday-appropriate treats far in advance."You can make a bunch of frosted snowflakes, and they'll keep for weeks, without any kind of loss of quality, because there's nothing really perishable happening," Stella says. "The high sugar content of the frosting ensures that there's not really any bacterial activity coming from the egg whites."

Mr. Gritzer offers up some advice for prepping and storing fresh herbs, including the importance of using a salad spinner to wash and dry them. The key to storing tender herbs like cilantro and parsley? "Treat them like fresh-cut flowers," Daniel says. For further instructions, you're going to have to listen, but I will give you a hint that the next thing to do involves herb millinery.

Daniel also answers the vexing question of how to cook a beef tenderloin to satisfy both the people who like their meat rare and the folks who like their meat medium, which I will similarly leave for you to discover.

Finally, I asked both of them to tell me what they don't like about the holidays. Daniel's answer won't surprise you; his is a fairly common complaint. But Stella's, on the other hand, is most decidedly not commonplace. In fact, it's a hilarious, Grinchian shocker. But this is one gift I'm not giving away. You're going to have to find out for yourself by checking out the episode.

Happy Holidays, Serious Eaters, from all of us here at Serious Eats World HQ!

https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/12/special-sauce-holiday-cooking-part-2-2.html