Umami Bites: Eat Delicious Buttermilk Pancakes, Cook Perfect Sous Vide Duck Breasts, & Explore Our Best Stories and Recipes from 2016

Buttermilk Pancakes

By Mark Hinds | Updated January 28, 2025

One of the things I have always liked about New Years is how it provides us with a way to close things out and start anew.

Having a bookend provides us with a way to look back and see what we were able to accomplish during the past year. For those of us here at Umami, itโ€™s been a busy year, weโ€™ve added some great new contributors and grown our audience to where weโ€™re regularly getting visits from over 70 countries and had people from over 15,000 cities check us out.  We were pretty good at making our deadlines most of the time, publishing something new around every other day or so.

In Umamiโ€™s Best Stories and Recipes from 2016, you can read some of our most engaging stories and most popular recipes from the past year.

For a while, Iโ€™ve been hunting for the best way to cook duck breasts at home.ย  With their pink center and crispy skin, theyโ€™re one of my favorite things to eat at restaurants. The problem was Iโ€™d never been able to get them to turn out right at home until I figured out that For Perfectly Cooked Duck Breast Use Sous Vide.ย  The great thing about cooking Sous Vide Duck Breast is how tender and juicy they come out when you can really control the temperature and add flavor at the same time.

If youโ€™re looking for an Indian inspired dish to make at home, try Chicken, Potato, and Chickpea Curry. Itโ€™s Lauraโ€™s latest recipe in her Cooking for You and Me series, which is all about weeknight dinners you can make in forty-five minutes or less.

Sometimes it can get old testing new recipes; most dishes lose their charm after the seventh or eighth time youโ€™ve made them within a couple of weeks.ย  But not our new Buttermilk Pancake recipe, these pancakes are so light and full of flavor that I keep finding excuses to make them over and over again. Which is why thereโ€™s probably going to be a new blueberry buttermilk pancake recipe coming soon to Umami.

For many of us, the new year is a time to set goals for ourselves. If one of your goals for 2017 is to eat better, read through Eileenโ€™s Better Eating with Umami: The Bread Experiment, try the experiment, and let us know how it goes.ย  For me, the simple act of reading the label on the back of bread bags completely changed how I buy bread.

If youโ€™ve been thinking about becoming a part of the bigger changes going on around us, read Danโ€™s Walking the Green Path: Being Counter Cultural.ย  Itโ€™s an inspiring take on the connection between the work he does running Butter and how his work there connects to his efforts to shape his community and the world around him.

If youโ€™re reading this, feeling like 2016 was just a giant mess, and now that itโ€™s the middle of winter all you want is something warm and comforting.ย  Make a big batch of Lamb Stew with Great Northern Beans or Chocolate Bread Pudding with Cherry Amaretto Coulis, then curl up in front of the TV, stream your favorite show, and know that everything will be alright.

The new year, forย me, is about looking forward and seeing how we can get Umami to take the next step.ย  To do that, we need your help.ย  If youโ€™ve been trying our recipes or like what youโ€™ve been reading, let people know and tag us on social media.ย  For us to continue growing, we need your help to reach new people because in the world of publishing, numbers mean everything.

Thanks as always for reading Umami; we genuinely appreciate your ongoing support and encouragement.

Umami Bites is Umami’s electronic newsletter. Each issue is filled with recipes, cooking tips, and ideas to help the curious cook explore the world of food. Check out our archives for past issues.

Mark is an experienced food writer, recipe developer, and photographer who is also Umamiโ€™s publisher and CEO. A passionate cook who loves to cook for friends, he can often be found in the kitchen or by the grill testing new recipes.

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