Honey Spiced Pork Roast

Whereas the moist-heat technique braising offers a slow, comforting, easygoing cooking experience for which you can judge doneness of meats by sight (meat falls off bone) or feel (skewer gets no resistance going in or out), the dry-heat methods require more speed and vigilance.

The dry-heat cooking techniques — sautéing, pan searing, pan roasting, oven roasting, grilling, broiling, and deep frying — demand higher cooking temperatures and shorter cooking times than stewing and braising, so they require more attention to avoid overcooking.

In this post:
→Dry-heat cooking candidates
→Dry-heat cooking methods
→Prepping for dry-heat cooking
→Finishing dry-heat cooking
→This week’s eats: a sampling

Dry-heat cooking candidates

Tender, well-marbled cuts of meat are best suited for dry-heat methods. Fattier cuts such as rib-eye are moist and flavorful so they don’t require any breakdown of collagen to be enjoyed. Some cuts dry out more quickly than others, tenderloin being one of them, and therefore require additional watching during cooking.

Hard or semi-hard cheeses are also good candidates for dry-heat cooking, as are hardy vegetables and fruits such as squashes, root vegetables, apples, and pears.

Dry-heat cooking methods

In general, dry-heat cooking features high oven, grill, and stovetop temperatures, or very hot frying oil. Unlike braising and stewing, in which foods cook in covered vessels, foods cooked by dry-heat methods are generally uncovered to avoid creating steam, which can toughen meat or encourage soggy crusts. Other than hot oil for the deep-frying, barely any liquids are used. Here’s a quick run-through of the dry-heat options:

Sautéing. In a hot pan coated with very little oil, quickly move small cuts of meat, poultry, fish, and vegetables around to ensure even, fast cooking. “If the pan is not hot enough,” said Hong, “onions won’t sweat; meat will stick.”

Pan searing. In a hot pan coated with very little oil, if any, brown meats on one or more sides by letting them sit undisturbed until browned. Searing produces a nice color and flavor by way of carmelization, but doesn’t necessary ensure moisture retention.

Pan roasting. Sear one side of meat, flip, then place in oven seared side down. You can use the same pan you used on the stovetop, or transfer to ovenproof vessel after searing. Potatoes and vegetables can be pan roasted, too — but you can skip the searing part. In pan roasting, the food is in direct contact with the pan, as opposed to oven roasting, in which the food sits on a rack.

Oven roasting. This is often the method for big roasts, so searing is optional. Oven roasts sit on a rack in the pan to allow air circulation and prevent the roast from stewing in its own juices, thus upping your chances of even cooking and getting a nice crust or crispy skin.

Grilling. Grilling features a high-heat source below the food being cooked. Grilling over a fire gives nice grill marks and flavors to foods; gas grills and non-fire grilling methods may not impart as much flavor. Rule of thumb: High-fat meats get high heat, low-fat meats such as chicken breasts without skin, and fish, get low heat. Do not grill fragile fish; use a grill rack when grilling fruit or small items. Hong advised, “You never want to grill meat until it is done; finish it in the oven. You can even finish in the oven the next day.” But small steaks and such are OK to cook to doneness on the grill.

Broiling. The opposite of grilling, broiling features a high-heat source above the food being cooked. Hong recommended leaving the oven open a crack during broiling. You can sear meats under a broiler.

Deep frying. Deep frying is submersing food in hot oil. Make sure oil is 375° F. Use enough oil to fully cover food. Chill food before frying to keep oil absorption to a minimum. If you’ll be coating the food with breadcrumbs, put the coat on before sending it to chill.

Grilled Diablo Skirt Steak with Fresh Tomato Salsa

Prepping for dry-heat cooking

Rubs, marinades, and brines

Dry rubs are salt-free mixtures of dried and ground herbs and spices that flavor meats and help create nice crusts. Pat dry rubs directly, thickly, and firmly on the uncooked meat. (Don’t salt meat too early or the meat will start to dry out.) For best taste results, toast and grind your own spices.

Wet marinades are sauces that add flavors before a food is cooked. They usually contain an acidic ingredient such as tomato juice, citrus juice, or vinegar.

Brines are baths of water and salt that can help tenderize meats and poultry. Meats and poultry can brine for a few hours or up to two days. (Don’t brine for more than two hours without refrigeration.) Rinse and pat dry the brined food before cooking. Generally, you use one gallon of water per one cup of salt, depending on the coarseness of salt used. Sometimes flavorful ingredients such as molasses, orange zest, cinnamon, onion, and ginger are added to brines.

Temperature concerns, inside and out

For all dry-heat techniques other than deep frying, the internal temperature of the food should be at room temperature.

Oven type and temperature is important, too. In conventional ovens, heat radiates from above and below — a good environment for roasting. In convection ovens, hot air blown around oven. This situation is ideal for baking — a situation ideal for baking, but it can cause roasting meat to dry out too quickly. (“You do not blow air on tenderloin!” explained Hong.) If following a recipe designed for cooking in a conventional oven, set the convection oven 25 degrees lower than the recipe recommends.

Finishing dry-heat cooking

Carryover cooking

The temperature of fast-cooked meats and poultry can climb eight to ten degrees after removal from oven — this is one reason why you should always let a roast rest before cutting and serving. (Another reason is to let the juices redistribute themselves.) You must take carryover cooking into account when checking doneness — you want to take your meat out of or off of the heat BEFORE it reaches the desired temperature. In other words, if your pork roast is registering 137°, you should remove it from the oven because its temperature will rise to 145° or so while resting outside the oven.

Testing for doneness

You can test the doneness of meats using any of the methods listed below. Until you’re comfortable with your skills when using any of the first three methods listed, always double-check your guesses with a meat thermometer.

Your fingers. Testing doneness using finger-flesh firmness comparisions takes lots of practice to get it right. Because I’m not totally familiar with this method myself, I shall quote the Culinary Institute of America’s instructions:

To approximate what meat should feel like at various stages of doneness, press together your thumb and forefinger and feel the flesh on your palm, right below your thumb, with the index finger of your other hand: that’s rare. Now press together your thumb and your middle finger, them your thumb and your ring finger, and finally, your thumb and pinky. As you change fingers, you will be able to feel that the flesh is tightening. These changes represent an increasing degree of doneness, all the way from rare (your forefinger) to well-done (the pinky). —The Culinary Institute of America, Culinary Boot Camp, page 18.)

Skewer or fork. If you poke a fork or skewer into the meat and the meat’s juice runs red, the meat is not done. If the juice pink, it’s getting there. If it’s clear, it’s done. If no juice comes out, you’ve overcooked your dinner.

Metal cake tester. A metal cake tester is basically a very thin metal skewer. Insert the skewer into the food then judge doneness by how hot the skewer feels when you touch it to the top of your lip. If the skewer feels cool, the meat is nowhere near done. If the heat causes you to wince, the meat is probably overcooked. Hong says this is the method favored by chefs in professional kitchens because it’s faster and produces smaller holes than the other testing methods. It evidently take a lot of practice, for I’d actually been doing a similar routine for some time — using a fork — when reheating foods at home, and I usually go straight from cool to “ouch” stage.

Instant-read thermometer or continuous-read digital probe. Depending on the actual thermometer you use, this may be the most foolproof—if not always the quickest—method of testing for doneness. I never trust my instant-read thermometer fully, so I’m glad there are other ways to determine doneness that rely more on instinct than technology.

The USDA recommends certain minimum internal temperatures, as specified in the box below. Remember to remove your meat from the heat when its temperature comes to seven to ten degrees below these figures.

USDA Recommended Safe Minimum Internal Temperatures

• Steaks and roasts – 145° F
• Fish – 145° F
• Pork – 160° F
• Ground beef – 160° F
• Egg dishes – 160° F
• Chicken breasts – 165° F

—USDA brochure, Is it Done Yet? (www.fsis.usda.gov/is_it_done_yet/brochure_text/index.asp)

For steaks, rare is generally just under 120 °F, medium-rare is anywhere from 120 to 130° F, and medium is between 130 and 135° F.  If cooking whole poultry, check temperature at the thigh.

This week’s eats: a sampling

Scotch Eggs with Honey-Chipotle Mayonnaise and Grilled Swordfish Verde

Warm salad of fruits, endives, and pancetta. Make dressing of pomegranate juice, red wine vinegar, and canola oil. Cook quince and pears in sugar water (three cups water, one cup sugar), then grill until tender and the sugar carmelizes. Grill endive halves and grapefruit rounds. Sauté some pancetta until crisp. In skillet with some leftover pancetta fat, toss endive, quinces, pears, pancetta. Garnish with grapefruit or orange slices. Drizzle with dressing, sprinkle with tarragon and pomegranate seeds.

Scotch eggs with honey-chipotle mayonnaise. Soft boil eggs, submerge in ice bath, set aside. Combine ground sausage meat with freshly ground spices. Combine breadcrumbs and herbs, coat otside of each egg with sausage, roll in flour, brush with beaten egg, then coat with breadcrumbs. Shake off excess and deep fry until brown and sausage is cooked, four to five minutes. Remove, drain off excess fat, and serve warm with honey chipotle mayonnaise (mayonnaise with honey, chipotle pepper, and adobo sauce, of course!).

Honey spiced pork roast (Gary’s in-class contribution). Toast juniper berries, peppercorns, cardamon seeds (from the pods), allspice berries, and fennel seeds, grind to a coarse powder. Blend in salt. Pat 1.5-pound pork loin dry, brush with honey to coat well. Pat spice mixture all over loin, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight (if possible). Place loin on rack. Roast in middle of 400° F oven for ten minutes, reduce heat to 350° and continue roasting for another 50 minutes or until thermometer reads 144º in center of roast. Remove roast from oven and rest ten minutes before carving into thin slices. Once the meat is sliced, salt the meat lightly.

Diablo skirt steak with fresh tomato salsa (my favorite of the week!). Whisk together salsa and cider vinegar, sugar, oregano, and salt. Transfer to plastic bag, add two pounds of skirt or hanger steak, and marinate 30 minutes or up to four hours. Remove meat from marinate and grill over high heat three to four minutes, turn, then grill a few minutes more or until rare. Slice the meat thinly against the grain. Serve with fresh salsa.

Indian flavored roasted vegetables with paneer (in-class assignment for me and a classmate). Make paneer. Prepare a vat of marinade made of toasted and ground cumin seed, cilantro, chives, tomato juice, jalapeño peppers, red wine vinegar, ginger, dijon mustard, salt, sugar, vegetable oil, and garlic. Cut a nice variety of vegetables such as summer squashes, eggplant, onion, bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, and cauliflower into pieces about one-fourth inch thick. Cut up some red bliss potatoes similarly, but keep them separate. Reserve some marinade for the paneer, then toss the nonpotato vegetables in the remaining marinade. Toss potatoes in vegetable oil. Put vegetables and potatoes in 400° F oven to roast until tender. (Hong recommends roasting vegetables before adding marinade, however.)  Grill paneer carefully and briefly over low flame just long enough to get grill marks on both sides, then cut into cubes. Arrange vegetables, potatoes, and paneer on serving platter, drizzle with remaining marinade.

Other entrees created and enjoyed in class were quinoa with sauteed carmelized onions and mushrooms, grilled swordfish verde, and grilled cranberry-orange zinfandel bread with an absolutely luscious and dreamingly smooth orange mascarpone cream.

Oh, how quickly a bunch of perfectly just-a-hair-underripe bananas, purchased with the best of healthy-and-light-eating intentions, can go from fit for snacking or slicing into a bowl of Kashi Crunch to must-freeze-for-pops-and-smoothies to oh-dear-its-time-for-banana-bread. The inevitability of an upcoming banana-bread episode fills me with both glee and guilt—glee because I have an excuse to bake one of my all-time favorite snacks breakfasts nibbles splurges, guilt because most quick breads and muffins—no matter how much good-for-you lowfat yogurt, whole-wheat flour, or unprocessed wheat bran goes in them—are sweet, calorie-dense temptations. You think I’m going to have just one slice? I don’t think so . . .

Two simple criteria make a recipe splurgeworthy. First, the taste, texture, and overall delight must be worth the time and trouble to make it. Second, the experience has to be enjoyable enough to justify the overabundance of fat, sugar, and calories I will end up consuming. Of course, finding splurgeworthy recipes takes considerable trial and error.

→ Click here to go directly to the discussion of the Cook’s Illustrated recipe.

Banana breads I’ve known and sometimes loved

From As You Like It

The shortest and easiest recipe for banana bread I’ve used boasts preparation instructions of no more than thirty-eight words, several of which are superfluous. Here it is, actress Linda Purl’s submission to a fundraising cookbook from the Williamstown Theatre Festival Guild:

BANANA BREAD
(from As You Like It, Williamstown Theatre Festival Guild, 1993. Reprinted with permission.)

3 ripe or as-close-to-rotten bananas as you dare
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup raisins or dried currants
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
4 tablespoons melted butter

Mash the peeled bananas by hand, and then mix in all the remaining ingredients, in the order listed above. Pour the batter into a buttered loaf pan, and bake in a 325 degree F. oven for one hour. Serves 6 (one loaf)

As easy as one-bowl brownies! I did make this bread recently, but I don’t remember what I thought of it. But I do remember when I tried it years ago and it was indeed my first loaf for which I “dared” wait until my bananas got really dark. But I already had a go-to banana-bread recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, The Book of Bread.

From The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones

Though the Book of Bread recipe also made just one loaf, if offered more to love that the Purl bread: more sugar, more egg, more flour, more leavening, more stir-ins, and more moisture (here, in the form of yogurt). It was the first of many “yogurt-enriched” banana breads I would try. I assume the recipe requests plain yogurt of some kind, but according to my in-cookbook notation of December 13, 1992, I payed that detail no mind. I noted, “Very Good (baked with extra banana, low-fat vanilla yogurt, and hazelnuts instead of pecans).”

For at least 18 years I’ve sought a banana bread with more banana flavor than the average recipe offered.

From Eating Well

Despite the success of the Book of Bread recipe, in recent years I’ve embraced lower-fat, lower-calorie, or just healthier banana breads. In retrospect, the two recipes I’ve already mentioned don’t have all that much fat to begin with; their main evils are the sugars and white flour. Bread is bread, after all, and any serving of any bread that’s greater than a modest slice can really ratchet up the calorie count, with our without added sugar. But it doesn’t hurt to add some fiber, in theory, so I’ve most recently relied on a great banana-muffin recipe from the Winter 2004 Eating Well; I’ve made them at least three times just in the past year.

The Eating Well Banana-Bran Muffins recipe calls for more sugar and less banana than the others, but adds buttermilk, wheat bran, canola oil, and optional chocolate chips and walnuts. I always add the chips and walnuts, so we go from low-fat to not-so-low-fat in no time. Still, it’s an easy and healthy recipe (remember, boys and girls, walnuts in moderation are a good thing!), and nicely portion-controlled because they’re muffins. Anyway, the preparation is just as easy as the others (and unprocessed wheat bran can be had super-cheap from the Whole Foods bulk bins). If you add the optional chocolate chips and walnuts, a delicious muffin results, but I cannot pass fair judgment on the banana flavor because the chocolate and walnut might be upstaging it and I haven’t yet tried this recipe without the optional accessories.

From Bon Appétit

Photo: Editor At Large at wikicommons.org

My “healthy” banana-bread choices may reek of hypocrisy — but sometimes I throw the “healthy” criterion out the window altogether. Just last month I was seeking an ultra-yummy banana bread, healthfulness be damned. I took to Epicurious.com, relying on reader comments to find a popular and well-recommended bread. The winner: Banana Bread With Chocolate Chips and Walnuts from Bon Appétit.

Now we’re in really high-fat territory, with a whole stick of butter — twice as much pure fat as the other recipes in this collection — before you add larger amounts of chocolate chips and toasted walnuts than the Eating Well recipe required. Nevertheless, I wanted a treat. And this recipe had easy preparation instructions, as do the others, except that the chips and nuts aren’t folded in as a final step as in other quick-bread recipes. Instead, you initially “combine chocolate chips and walnuts in a small bowl; add 1 tablespoon flour mixture and toss to coat.” Then, when the batter is ready:

Spoon 1/3 of batter into prepared pan. Sprinkle with half of nut mixture. Spoon 1/3 of batter over. [sic!] Sprinkle with remaining nut mixture. Cover with remaining batter. Run knife through batter in zigzag pattern.

So, the chocolate chips and walnuts form a streusel. Cool. I couldn’t wait to see that zigzag pattern in action.

But, alas, with added complexity comes added opportunity for mishaps, even if you’ve read the recipe ahead of time. I had waited until I started assembling ingredients to toast the walnuts in a small skillet. As soon as the nuts started toasting, they quickly browned and continued to darken even after I took the pan off the heat. To prevent them from burning, I dumped them into the bowl of chocolate chips and started to stir — melting the chocolate chips! Panicked, I threw the bowl into the fridge — what would you do? Ten minutes later, I retrieved what was now a giant chocolate-nut cluster. Was it a huge, tasty chunk of candy? Yes. Was it streusel? No. I let it rest on the counter a bit before trying to break it into as many little pieces as possible with a knife, then proceeded with the recipe. My little chocolate pieces were too big to distribute as a streusel—no way could I cover two layers of batter with these chunks—so one-third of the way up, I got a thick chocolate-nut layer.

The resultant loaf was satisfyingly moist and sweet—but the chocolate layer, though isolated, carried most of the flavor. Not necessarily a bad thing, but banana breads should taste like banana.

The Cook’s Illustrated recipe

Since my latest banana-bread event was so devilish, I had given myself an edict of no more baking for the rest of the summer. Pumpkin breads and apple muffins can wait until fall!

That edict stood until the Friday I spotted the cover line “Extreme Banana Bread: SIx Bananas in One Loaf” on the latest issue of Cook’s Illustrated (August 2010). Whoa! Six bananas!!!!!! I bought the issue without even looking inside, except to quickly check the ingredient list. Indeed — six bananas!!!!!! I hightailed it to Whole Foods and bought a bunch of seven large bananas, figuring the bananas should be bread-ready by the following weekend.

Only after committing some precious weekend time and a large bunch of bananas did I read the accompanying article, by Andrea Geary. In sum:

The goal: “Figure out how to cram as many bananas as possible into the loaf without sinking its cake-like texture” or “turning the loaf into pudding.”

The challenge: Adding extra banana oomph without weighing the bread down or jeopardizing the texture with extra moisture

The alleged solution: Banana juice, extracted from the bananas then reduced to about half

Full disclosure: I started preparations (that is, began assembling the mise en place) Saturday night at 9:00, though recent experience had prompted me to toast the walnuts ahead of time. Another disclosure: I find nothing wrong with banana bread with a pudding-like texture, especially when the bread is frozen.)

Step 1. Standard: prepare loaf pan, whisk together dry ingredients.

Step 2. Here’s where complexity starts to breed mishaps. To prepare the bananas for the extraction of their juices via the microwave, I placed the bananas in large bowl, sealed the bowl with plastic wrap, and vented the plastic with paring knife — all as instructed. Then I was to microwave the bananas for five minutes “until bananas are soft and have released liquid.” After three minutes I had detected very little liquid, so I set the oven for two minutes more and walked away. Back at 1:45 into this round, I noticed ballooning plastic wrap that might soon pop, despite the paring-knife vents. “This can’t be good,” I thought. Sure enough, puddles of banana juice had formed on the plate and floor of the oven.

Banana-juice puddles

The bananas gave off a nice aroma with their juice, but what a mess! I quickly removed the sticky bowl, peeled off the plastic, and dumped its contents into a strainer already waiting over another bowl.

There was no easy way to determine how much juice was lost, so I nuked the sixth of my seven bananas. More concerned about the potential loss of banana flavor than the possibility of adding too much moisture, I threw the entire replacement banana, guts and juice, into the strainer with the other five.

The bananas should drain for fifteen minutes; I hadn’t accounted for that much extra time (I’m often guilty of not reading recipes closely ahead of time). Well, at least I can clean out the microwave while the bananas drain. The result: just under a cup of juice.

Juice from five to six bananas.

According to step 3, reducing the juice to one-quarter cup should take about five minutes if cooked over medium-high heat. Impatience set in after ten minutes of pot watching with no noticeable reduction. I shut off the heat and decided to use whatever was in the pan after the bubbling died down. Instead of the prescribed quarter-cup of reduction, I had—and used—a scant half-cup of who-knows-how-reduced-it-really-is juice. This step also required that I “stir liquid into bananas, and mash with potato masher until fairly smooth.” This baffled me for two reasons: I thought it would make more sense to do any banana mashing before the addition of liquid, and the occasional stirring of the bananas and pressing them against the strainer while they were draining (as instructed in step 2) gave me a smooth enough mash that the use of my Oxo Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher had no effect.

Step 4 instructs to slice the sixth (now my seventh) banana and shingle the slices on both long sides of the loaf before baking. I was concerned I would run out of slices halfway down the second side, so I alternated sides while applying slices. That worked well; there were enough banana slices as long as there was not too much overlap. After successfully shingling the slices, I was so excited to be finally putting the batter in the oven (as it was, the bread would not be out of the oven until after midnight), I forgot to sprinkle some sugar on top, which Geary says would have helped “the buttery slices caramelize” and given the loaf “an enticingly crisp, crunchy top.”  How disappointing. I do love enticingly crisp, crunchy tops.

After 65 minutes, a toothpick came out clean and the top was quite brown, so I removed the loaf and let it rest. After the 15-minute in-pan cooling, I was ready to flip it onto a wire rack to cool further. I’ve done this with breads a gazillion times, but this evening (or was it morning already?) I was stymied. Normally I’d put my hand or a dishcloth over the top of the bread to catch the loaf in my palm before inverting the loaf onto the rack. But this bread, though gorgeous, was moist and a little sticky on top, with two fragile rows of banana shingles down each side.

Lookin' good, but how shall I invert this moist, fragile loaf onto the rack?

Without further thought, I quickly but gently released the loaf upside-down onto the rack then coaxed it onto its bottom before the top had time to settle on the rack. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice until it was too late that one of the rungs had snagged the edges of one row of banana shingles, dislodging most of them as I turned the bread. Bleary-eyed, I slapped the shingles back onto their side of the loaf without rotating the loaf to see what I was doing. The result was not pretty, but there wasn’t much else I thought I could do. Oddly enough, the edges of all the shingles had turned purple.

Overall, though, a good-looking loaf with a beautiful crust, though the top and especially the sides might have been wetter than Geary would have desired. The bread didn’t look wet, but you could tell just by skimming a fingertip along the sides that the cake was very moist.

Gary’s verdict of the freshly baked loaf: “Light and fluffy texture, not dense and heavy. Tender. Very strong banana flavor. Bready-to-cakey fluffiness.” He said that he was perfectly happy with other banana breads, but that this was a nice change. But did he tag on that last bit because I was the creator of those “other” breads? Hmm.

I thought the bread had a nice banana flavor, but I couldn’t help wanting even more. The texture was nice and moist. Not dry. Not wet. Nice and moist. After sitting overnight, the texture seemed creamier yet firmer. The walnuts were a nice touch, as they usually are, and I did not miss the chocolate chips of my other recipes.

Though the bananas along the sides did add extra bursts of banana flavor, that advantage was short-lived: As I sliced the loaf further, the shingles slipped off both sides. Instead of trying to reattach them, some for a second time, I… er… took care of them.

The bread toasted well. In a few days, I will determine how well it freezes as individually wrapped slices.

General comments and afterthoughts

♦ I was disappointed that the sixth banana called for didn’t actually make it into the loaf.

♦ Extra flour might have compensated for the extra banana liquid, but texture wasn’t an issue for me — it was all about flavor, flavor, flavor. Though I do wish I had remembered to sprinkle that sugar on top.

♦ Parchment paper might have helped with the loaf inversion, either as a sling added before the batter, or as the barrier between palm and bread during inversion.

♦ There was a slight color variation in the loaf: darker on top, lighter on the bottom (see photo, right). I wonder if this means I should have baked it longer to get more color, or just the opposite.

♦ Would dipping the banana shingles in lemon juice have prevented the baked banana edges from turning purple?

♦ Were my bananas dark enough to begin with (see lead photo)?

Recipe ratings

Source: Cook’s Illustrated, August 2010
Ingredients: A-. All ingredients are easy to find and store, but bananas have to be purchased at least a week ahead. And buy an extra banana, just in case.
Overall time estimate (with all ingredients at the ready): 2½ hours
Taste: A-. There is always room for more banana flavor.
Presentation: A-. Be aware of those fragile, colorful shingles.
Healthfulness: C. (Per 1/12 loaf: 284 calories, 11g fat, 163mg sodium, 44g total carbs, 3g dietary fiber, 4g protein. Percent daily values: 6% vitamin A, 10% vitamin C, 3% calcium, 7% iron. Nutritional data via nutritiondata.com.)
Practicality (via No-whining Dining’s current food and cooking philosophies): B
Splurgeworthy? Hm. Not sure. I’ll give it another try before deciding.
Overall grade: B+