Top 10 DIY Food Geek Projects

Kevin Purdy @ Lifehacker posts:

The best-tasting food is the kind that comes from your own efforts, because victory tastes oh-so-sweet. Conquer KFC-style fried chicken, smoky barbecue, wood-fired pizza, five-minute bread, and other DIY delicacies with these great food-focused projects.
Photo from The Pizza Hacker.
We've previously tackled 10 clever kitchen repurposing tricks and food and drink hacks, but this here is a compendium of more involved, fare more awesome projects that actually create food and drinks you can brag about.

10. Put Your Chicken on a "Throne" for Crispy Skin and Moist Meat

It's a pretty light project, but you certainly get your hands dirty. Cooking chicken so that it's standing up, with a can of liquid inside its carcass, ensures that the skin gets the perfect kind of crisp you're looking for, but the inner meat stays juicy, thanks to the steam coming from the can. You can watch Christopher Walken—yep, that Christopher Walken—demonstrate a fancier indoor method in the video, or read up on how to make it on the grill.

9. Make Crispy Wings at Home in the Oven

Chicken wings you get at the bar are crispy, but their sauce sticks right to them. Wings you make at home in the oven are slick, and you're lucky if half the sauce stays on. The solution? Baking powder, along with some overnight, open-air refrigeration before cooking. You get healthier wings you can cook at home, and a great feeling of having somehow beaten the takeout economy. (Original post)

8. Brew Your Own Beer and Soda

You'd think homebrew beer or soda would be a pretty huge undertaking, but it doesn't have to be. Starting out with either project is nothing more than a weekend afternoon spent with some beginner's materials. Guided tours and cost analyses of DIY brew are provided by the Wise Bread and The Simple Dollar, while a great video on making your own 2-liter soda experiments is offered at Howcast. (Original posts: beer, soda).

7. Fry Some KFC-Style Chicken at Home

The Colonel's 11 secret herbs and spices do a good enough job when you want the bucket, but if you want the good stuff at home—or you're not a huge fan of MSG—you can pick up the mix provided by the Guardian UK's Word of Mouth blog. Many testers claim it to provide the same kind of mouth-filling feeling as the KFC's version, though if you disagree, the theoretically secret recipe is offered at the post, too, coming from Ron Douglas' America's Most Wanted Recipes. (Original post)

6. Make Fresh Bread Without a Bread Maker

First came the no-knead bread, and it was declared good. Then there came faster and whole wheat remixes, and it couldn't seem to get better. But then came another no-bread-machine-needed recipe, a mix-once, break-off-and-bake dough recipe that our own Jason tested and loved, and then a recipe that rises while you're at work for about a minute of prep time. There is nothing quite like fresh-baked bread, and that's all we have to say on that. (Original posts: no-knead, faster and whole wheat, five minutes, one-minute).

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