The Best Cooking Tips We Learned at the 2024 Food & Wine Classic in Charleston

The inaugural Food & Wine Classic in Charleston kicked off with a salty bang this year, with chefs from Charleston and all over the country — including Mike Lata, Stephanie Izard, Andrew Zimmern, Rodney Scott, Maneet Chauhan, and James London — cooking up a storm. Using ingredients local to the Lowcountry, including shrimp, oysters, rice, and a lot of butter, they shared tips and tricks from their kitchens that you can use in your kitchen all year long. Here are some of the best cooking tips we learned this year in Charleston. 

Get the grit out of clams

No one enjoys eating a gritty, sandy clam. Mike Lata likes to steam the clams ahead of time to get the clam liquor out. He then strains and decants the liquid through a wet coffee filter to make sure there’s no sand whatsoever. Why does he wet the coffee filter? “Because if the coffee filter wasn’t wet,” he says, “it would absorb my precious clam liquor. So by wetting it first, it’s just going to pass right through.”

Be gentle when mixing batter

While making the batter for her fried catfish, chef Nyesha Arrington of Next Level Chef stirs it in a figure eight pattern so she is combining the ingredients without developing the gluten from the flour in the batter. Doing this keeps the batter from getting tough or gummy.

Make your shrimp go further

Stephanie Izard loves all things seafood, since she grew up near the New England coast. Her tip for shrimp, besides making sure you always devein it, is to cut it in half horizontally, also known as butterflying the shrimp. “It makes it look like you have double the amount of shrimp and they cook more evenly,” she says, “Plus, it makes it easier to not overcook them.”

Don’t forget to season your cooking liquid

When poaching shrimp, James London of Charleston’s Chubby Fish doesn’t waste an ounce of flavor. He’ll add any scraps of aromatics, such as onion or garlic peels, to flavor the poaching water. London also tailors the cooking technique to the species of shrimp. In particular, for brown shrimp, he cooks them in their shells to provide flavor. “Even just the shrimp tail will impart a lot of flavor,” he says. 

Use baking soda to tenderize meat

Baking soda might be the standby for crisp chocolate chip cookies, and for cleaning your oven, but Andrew Zimmern has another use. “Sprinkling meat with baking soda tenderizes it and assists it in crisping up,” he says. Zimmern uses baking soda on even the nicest cuts of meat, such as the tenderloin he was preparing at the event. “Baking soda is having a moment,” he adds. 

The secrets to better biscuits

Contrary to everything we’ve ever heard about butter and biscuits, Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit founder Carrie Morey doesn’t use cold butter for biscuits — she believes it is a fallacy. “We’ve tested with all temps of butter and found no difference,” she says. Instead she uses room temperature, salted butter and soft White Lily flour for her biscuits. And, she adds, don’t forget to flour anything you’re using to cut your dough, such as a biscuit cutter, bench scraper, or knife. Anything that cuts the dough should be covered in flour to avoid pinching the layers together.

Keep lean ground meat from becoming dry

Using ground turkey or chicken can help reduce the calories and fat in a dish, but it can also make for dry meatballs. To keep them moist, chef and TV star Maneet Chauhan adds a spoonful of cream cheese to the meatballs to keep them from drying out. This makes for a much more luscious meatball without using fatty meat.

Be choosy with your ginger

You might be tempted to grab the big hunk of ginger at the market but Maneet Chauhan says to go small. When choosing at the supermarket, she says, “the smaller the piece of ginger, the more flavor you get.” Ginger-garlic paste is her secret flavor bomb — she blends her own then freezes it in ice cube trays so she can add a cube or two to soups, curries, and stews.

Add this to baked goods to amp up their flavor

Stephanie Izard always makes sure she adds salt to her baked goods. “Salt is important in baked goods,” she says. “It doesn’t make things salty, it just brings out the flavor.” She adds that Hondashi powder, also known as Japanese dashi broth powder, not only adds umami-savory flavor to everything she’s making, it also has salt, so she adds it even to sweet baked goods.

Fry your fish in advance

If you are hosting a fish fry at home and want to avoid frying the fish at the last minute, Nyesha Arrington says to fry up the fish an hour in advance and keep it on a baking sheet at room temperature. Just before she’s ready to serve, she’ll put it in a 300°F oven for 10 minutes to gently warm it up. 

Add some crunch to your crumble

While making a crumble topping for a yogurt bowl, Izard likes to add extra crunch and texture by adding puffed grains, like black rice or quinoa. In a pinch, she’ll reach for cereal like Special K or Rice Krispies, then spice it up before sprinkling it on top of a dip or salad.

Temper spicy food with other spices

Chef Claudette Zapeda loves heat in her mole and adobo sauces but she knows it can get a little spicy for some. If a sauce is too spicy, she adds a pinch of ground cloves to slightly numb the heat. She then strains her mole and adobo sauces to make sure they are less bitter and look glossy.