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Tiramisù, the classic layered Italian dessert consisting of layers of espresso-soaked cookies swaddled in mascarpone cream, is overdue for a glow up.

When we were developing a multicourse tasting menu, we wanted to end the night on a sweet, caffeinated note, so tiramisù was a no-brainer. But we also wanted something that would be visually striking, unfamiliar at first glance, yet wholly recognizable as soon as our guests sunk a spoon through the layers. So, what could we do? Easy: get out the paint gun.

In this video, chef Nicholas Gavin walks you through our process for making individual servings of tiramisù, set in beautifully plump molds that look like little pillows. By fortifying the mascarpone cream with stabilizers—gelatin for the zabaglione base, xanthan gum in the whipped cream—we were able to freeze the molded treats and spray warm melted chocolate all over their exteriors; the stabilizers guarantee the whipped mascarpone is as creamy and light once thawed as it is when it’s freshly made. When the warm chocolate hits the frozen cream, it immediately solidifies into wee fluffy pebbles, making it look just like the even dusting of cocoa powder used as a garnish for classic tiramisù preparations.

Oh, and if you watch the video and think, “Yeah, it looks great, but I ain’t doing all of that,” don’t worry: Head to our site for our Quick and Easy Tiramisù. It takes all of 30 minutes to make, no paint gun required!

Quick and Easy Tiramisù:

Ultimate Tiramisù:

Ingredients:
Buy ladyfingers:

Buy xanthan gum:

Equipment:
Buy a Control Freak™ Home:

Buy a Breville Joule® Oven Air Fryer Pro:

Buy a pillow-shaped silicone mold:

Buy a paint gun:

[Time Codes]
0:00 – How to make fine-fining tiramisù
0:49 – How to make zabaglione
3:28 – How to finish the mascarpone cream
6:16 – How to make the tuile
10:38 – How to make the coffee syrup
11:39 – How to trim the ladyfingers
12:58 – How to assemble, freeze, and unmold tiramisù
15:46 – How to make the chocolate shell
22:01 – Taste the tiramisù!

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ChefSteps 101: Through science, entertainment, and industry experience, we strive to help every home cook reach their full potential. With more than 1,000 recipes developed in our kitchen, there’s something for everyone. To find out more, visit our website:

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Chinese dumplings (jiǎo zǐ) come in all shapes and sizes, and they can run the gamut from simple, rustic preparations to super-refined works of culinary art. In this video, chef Tim Chin demonstrates how to make Northern-style pork, shrimp, and cabbage dumplings. Beyond that, he gives you options: You can choose to use store-bought dumpling wrappers or make the wrappers yourself using our dialed-in dough formula, and you can cook the dumplings by steaming them, boiling them, or pan-frying them so they’re crisp on the bottom and silky and tender on top.

This video is just the tip of the dumpling iceberg we have on our website. For everything you could ever want to know about making dumpings at home, including video demonstrations of folding and pleating techniques for 12 different shapes, check out our free Ultimate Guide to Chinese Dumplings (Jiǎo Zǐ):

And be sure to sign up for ChefSteps Studio Pass to get access to our recipes, including:

Pork, Shrimp, and Cabbage Dumplings:

Homemade Dumpling Wrappers:

All-Purpose Dumpling Sauce:

[Time Codes]
0:00 – How to make Chinese dumplings
0:36 – How to make dumpling skins
6:01 – How to make dumpling filling
9:59 – How to shape dumplings
12:27 – How to pan-fry dumplings
15:03 – How to make the dumpling dipping sauce
16:22 – Eat and enjoy the dumplings!

Equipment:
Buy a Control Freak Home:

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ChefSteps 101: Through science, entertainment, and industry experience, we strive to help every home cook reach their full potential. With more than 1,000 recipes developed in our kitchen, there’s something for everyone. To find out more, visit our website:

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Potato pavé is basically a tater tot as conceived by a Michelin-starred restaurant: crispy and crunchy on the outside, creamy and tender on the inside, perfect for serving up with literally anything you can think of, whether it’s a rosy slab of prime rib, a beautifully bronzed duck breast, or something even more elegant, like a chicken-stuffed chicken crown (Poulet Farci) and a puddle of savory Chicken Demi-Glace.

It consists of thinly sliced russet potatoes, salt, and clarified butter—that’s it. Layered in a loaf pan, gently baked, then chilled and pressed until the gelatinized potato starch sets and retrogrades, it’s basically a potato terrine that gets sliced into rectangles with clean edges and then deep fried.

Watch Tim Chin demonstrate our method for making this classic potato dish and follow along as he dives into all the little details that will help you make this dish perfectly at home!

See the recipes:
Potato Pavé:
Chicken Demi-Glace:
Poulet Farci (Chicken-Stuffed Roast Chicken):

Equipment:
Buy a Breville Joule® Oven Air Fryer Pro:
Buy a Control Freak Home:
Buy a flat-bottomed carbon steel wok:
Buy a blowtorch:

[Time Codes]
0:00 – How to make potato pavé
0:34 – Slice and soak the potatoes
3:07 – Dry potato slices
4:14 – Build the potato pavé
6:31 – Bake the potato pavé
7:23 – Press and chill potato pavé
8:43 – Unmold and portion potato pavé
10:35 – Fry potato pavé

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ChefSteps 101: Through science, entertainment, and industry experience, we strive to help every home cook reach their full potential. With more than 1,000 recipes developed in our kitchen, there’s something for everyone. To find out more, visit our website:

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Potato pavé is basically a fine-dining version of a tater tot: a terrine of stacks of razor-thin slices of potatoes that’s sliced and deep fried, crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside, but with all the sharp edges and clean lines that chefs like to put on a plate.

But what if you took a pavé and made it crispier, creamier, and made it look even more incredible? That’s what we did: We call it the potato croissant.

Like a croissant, it’s got beautiful, laminated layers, but instead of sheets of dough with butter sandwiched in between, it consists of potatoes and clarified butter. And instead of crispy tiled bricks, it takes the shape of a whorl that recalls a shell or a rosette. Because of that shape, it has significantly more surface area; when fried, it’s as crispy as a french fry on the outside, but it still has that tot-like creamy consistency within.

In this video, chef Tim Chin shows you how to prep and assemble our potato croissants. Pair them with holiday roasts or chicken for a stunning celebratory meal or top them with crème fraîche, caviar, and chives for the most ridiculously, ridiculously good-looking canapé.

Recipes:
Crispy Potato “Croissants”:
Potato Pavé:
Crème Fraîche:

Equipment:
Buy a Breville Joule® Oven Air Fryer Pro:
Buy a Control Freak Home:

[Time Codes]
0:00 – How to make potato “croissants”
0:53 – Peel, slice, and soak potatoes
4:13 – Build potato croissants
7:55 – Bake potato croissants
8:27 – Chill potato croissants
9:01 – Unmold potato croissants
9:30 – Fry potato croissants

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ChefSteps 101: Through science, entertainment, and industry experience, we strive to help every home cook reach their full potential. With more than 1,000 recipes developed in our kitchen, there’s something for everyone. To find out more, visit our website:

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Let’s face it: Most pumpkin pies are pretty mid. With gummy, almost raw crusts and grainy, curdled fillings, they’re a testament to how sugar and spice can make something taste nice, even when badly prepared.

So how do you make a great pumpkin pie? How do you make it perfect? Easy. Use good technique.

That means blind-baking the crust properly, so it’s crisp and flaky and the butter in the dough browns and has all those beurre noisette notes. That means making an actual custard for the filling and cooking it gently, like a good custard deserves, so it sets up beautifully but it’s still silky and smooth. That means adding the right amount of spices so the pumpkin purée gets a nice lift from all the warm notes you expect from the season.

ChefSteps’ Grant Crilly demonstrates how he transforms the pie recipe on the back of a can of pumpkin purée into the Perfect Pumpkin Pie, and he offers you tips for how you can make your own much, much better.

For more recipes, guides, and tips for making your Thanksgiving epic, visit

Recipes:
Perfect Pumpkin Pie:
Perfect Pie Dough:

Equipment:
Buy a Breville Joule® Oven Air Fryer Pro:

[Time Codes]
0:00 – How to make a better pumpkin pie
1:42 – How to roll out and rest pie dough
6:47 – How to make the custard for a pumpkin pie
11:15 – How to blind bake pie dough
17:21 – How to fill and bake the pumpkin pie
20:05 – How to slice and serve the pumpkin pie

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ChefSteps 101: Through science, entertainment, and industry experience, we strive to help every home cook reach their full potential. With more than 1,000 recipes developed in our kitchen, there’s something for everyone. To find out more, visit our website:

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What do those super-juicy and tender rotisserie chickens from Costco and grocery stores (and Butterball turkeys!) have in common? They’re brined with a solution of salt, sugar, and phosphates.

Chef Tim Chin demonstrates how to safely and effectively use sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP) safely in a brine to make a roast chicken that’s every bit as tender and juicy as a Butterball bird or a roast chicken from the store, but with golden brown, crisp skin, thanks to a few key techniques: injecting the brine into the meat, rather than submerging the entire bird in brine; air-drying the skin; and brushing a thin film of oil over the exterior before roasting.

For more recipes and tips and tricks on how to roast and truss chicken, visit ChefSteps.com.
Super-Juicy Butterball Rotisserie-Style Chicken:

Ingredient:
Buy sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP):

Equipment:
Buy a brine injector:
Buy a Breville Joule® Oven Air Fryer Pro:

[Time Codes]
0:00 – How to make rotisserie-style butterball chicken
1:35 – Make the butterball brine
3:26 – How to brine and truss the chicken
6:52 – How to roast a butterball chicken
7:40 – How to rest and carve chicken

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ChefSteps 101: Through science, entertainment, and industry experience, we strive to help every home cook reach their full potential. With more than 1,000 recipes developed in our kitchen, there’s something for everyone. To find out more, visit our website:

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The lion’s head meatball (狮子头, or shīzǐ tóu) is a huge, juicy, and tender pork meatball that’s an iconic example of Huaiyang cuisine, one of the Four Great Traditions in Chinese cooking. The cuisine is all about highlighting the flavors of a single ingredient in a refined yet uncomplicated way.

The baseball-sized meatballs are both enormous and light, springy and custardy tender, about as juicy as the filling in a soup dumpling, and, once they’re doused in a savory glaze, they’re as beautiful as they are tasty. To produce that unique texture, you need to use a series of techniques—mechanical and chemical tenderization, par-frying, and an extended braise to render fat and convert collagen to gelatin—and the result might just be the best meatball in the world! To access the full recipe and more, visit chefsteps.com.

Ultra-Tender Lion’s Head Meatballs:

Buy a Breville Sous Chef® 16: Https://breville.oie8.net/0ZebEN
Buy a Breville Bakery Chef™ Stand Mixer:
Buy a Control Freak Home:

[Time Codes]
0:00 – How to make ultra-tender lion’s head meatballs
0:56 – How to process pork belly for the meatballs
4:13 – How to mix the meatball base
7:29 – How to form and chill the meatballs
11:30 – How to fry meatballs
15:13 – How to build the braising liquid
19:13 – How to braise lion’s head meatballs
22:10 – How to thicken the braising liquid
25:05 – How to glaze lion’s head meatballs and serve with bok choy

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ChefSteps 101: Through science, entertainment, and industry experience, we strive to help every home cook reach their full potential. With more than 1,000 recipes developed in our kitchen, there’s something for everyone. To find out more, visit our website: