American

Kick off your Independence Day bash with a patriotic take on homemade chips featuring baking potatoes, purple potatoes, and beets that are sliced and then fried into a hot, crispy red, white, and blue snack. Gather your ingredients and check out our tips on the dos and don'ts of deep-frying.

No Fourth of July celebration is complete without a traditional flag cake studded with sweet summer berries. But slice into our Stars and Stripes creation and you'll quickly discover this isn't your everyday vanilla sheet cake with buttercream frosting. For a fresh new take on everyone's favorite red, white, and blue finale, we paired moist chocolate cake with tangy cream cheese frosting, and finished with juicy raspberries and blueberries. Have no fear if cake decorating isn't your strong suit. You'll be able to master this patriotic design using our step-by-step photos and tips for frosting and adorning the ultimate Independence Day dessert.

The key to a tender biscuit is to handle the dough as little as possible.

We love the way this recipe revamps a standard BLT.

This cocktail is from Ashley Christensen's Fox Liquor Bar in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Top these Tex-Mex–inspired burgers with some melted Monterey Jack and a spoonful of fresh salsa.

Warm, toasty, buttered rolls are key. If you can't find New England-style buns, trim 1/4" from both sides of standard hot dog buns to remove the crust and expose more surface area.

When Snow's BBQ in Lexington was named best barbecue in Texas by Texas Monthly magazine in June 2008, Tootsie Tomanetz became an instant star in the barbecue world. It's odd that her significant skill as a pitmaster was "discovered" only after more than thirty years of tending pits. As one of thee rare female pitmasters in Texas, she says some folks insist on calling her a chef because they don't feel comfortable applying the pitmaster moniker to a woman, but Tootsie is no doubt a master of the many pit types out behind Snow's. Even several years removed from the initial stardom, she still gets asked every Saturday morning to pose for photos. Always humble, this reluctant star says she is just a "plain old country girl" who has lived her entire life in either Lexington or Giddings, just seventeen miles away, and would just as soon keep a low profile. That's going to be tough if she keeps showing up at 2 a.m. every Saturday to cook some of Texas' best pork, and she has no plans to stop, even at age seventy-seven.

Grinding your own meat gives you total control over your burger. It frees you to select the cut of beef you want and lets you decide how finely or coarsely to grind. The chuck top blade has all the right characteristics for a do-it-yourself burger that's got everything going for it: It's beefy, juicy, and tender when cooked to medium (160°F). To further enhance the meat's juiciness and flavor, we recommend dry-brining the steaks overnight before you grind them. See the Cook's Note below for what to do if you don't have a meat grinder and for more about the chuck top blade as well as tips for cooking burgers, see our complete Burger Primer.

Oh, mama! This one's hot. Not in that obnoxious, burns you right off the bat kind of way, but in that slow, didn't see it coming, want to take two more bites to feel the burn just that much longer kind of way. That's a good kind of pain. This seasoning has got three different types of chiles to make it complex and give it some heat, plus white and black pepper to round it out. Use hot or smoked paprika instead of regular to alter the flavor, if you like. We don't call for any salt in our recipe, but you can use as little or as much as you like without making the food overly salty. However, do remember to salt your fish in addition to using the spice in a recipe. And if you're using the blend for blackening, get that exhaust fan going or be prepared to set off every smoke alarm you have. (Better yet, do your blackening outside on the grill in a cast-iron skillet!)

Grunts are a fish you'll probably never see on a menu and will most definitely never see at a fish market, especially on the West Coast. But as Charlie knows, they inhabit every dock, marina, pier, reef, and any other underwater structure in southern Florida. Because they are considered vastly inferior in taste to their snapper relatives, they're targeted for quick and easy meals by the fishermen in the Florida keys, where this breakfast dish originates. Considering grunt is largely unavailable (and truthfully, Charlie says, isn't very good), here we substitute small fillets of snapper or rockfish. This is an incredible dish—full or rich and spicy flavors, with a wild array of textures, from the pillow of creamy grits to searing fish to the crisp bacon. The classic accompaniment to grits and grunts is cheap beer, but coffee works, too.

We don't know where Bob Palmgren, head pitmaster and proprietor of RJ's Bob-Be-Que in Mission, Kansas, got the idea for smoked sausage in cornhusks, but we credit him for inspiring our own version. Bob features a pork sausage with chopped jalapeño peppers and other seasonings. Ours pays homage to the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, who spent much of her creative life in northern New Mexico at a place called Abiquiu, taking inspiration from the local terrain. This one features a chicken sausage with chopped fire-roasted Hatch chile peppers and other New Mexico seasonings.

Radishes are routinely part of the salsa and condiment spreads available at the best taquerias. Here, I use them as part of a fresh topping for earthy chicken tostadas that is anything but routine. Achiote paste, a popular Yucatecan seasoning made from ground annatto seeds, is available at Mexican stores.

Using the best and freshest crabmeat you can get your hands on makes all the difference in these lightly battered and totally delicious fritters from La Petite Grocery, a new-school NOLA bistro.

Putting fatback in the frying oil adds flavor, but we find it's a bit too salty to eat on its own.

"The only thing better than pimiento cheese dip? Melted pimiento cheese dip, laced with chopped pickles for a little zip." —Janet McCracken, deputy food editor

Serve spooned over roast chicken, steak, or pan-fried pork chops. And, of course, pancakes.

The most dainty and cute of the three, this little pink cake was the one that propelled me into a life in cake making and was the original inspiration for the cakes I made at Miette. For the SFMOMA, I make the Thiebaud Pink Cake pink by cooking down strawberry syrup and adding it to the buttercream, and I top the frosted cake with either a red buttercream dot or a big, ripe raspberry if they're in season. I use lemon curd in the filling because, being the giant kid that I am, I love the combination of strawberry and lemon in a dessert—to me, it always tastes like Froot Loops.

Cookbook author and food photographer Lara Ferroni created this classic doughnut recipe exclusively for Epicurious. For Ferroni's doughnut-making tips and more recipes, see our complete guide to homemade doughnuts. We've included two glaze options, sugar and chocolate, but these doughnuts are terrific on their own or simply dusted with confectioners' sugar. If your kitchen is on the cold side, an easy way to create a warm place for the dough to rise is to turn the oven on to 250°F, and set the bowl of dough or the baking sheet of doughnuts on top.