Taste

The season of ripe strawberries is still a few weeks away. In the meantime, a test of strawberry ice cream is a viable substitute. A few brands were up to the challenge, but some we tried either tasted artificial or had too little of that fresh berry flavor. Considering that 9 is the highest score on our tasting, Haagen-Dazs' average of 8 reflects its decisive victory. Still, the value-conscious among us were impressed that second-place Breyers was considerably less expensive - it also had just 120 calories per 1/2 -cup serving.

It happened with coffee. It happened with ice cream. It happened with jelly beans and mustard and olive oil and vinegar and cheese and even water, for Pete's sake. And now it's happening with salt.The salt of the earth has gone gourmet.Turns out there's more to sodium chloride than meets the eye. Not only does it have different forms and different tastes, depending on where it comes from; it also has different colors. Red salt from Hawaii. Sel gris, gray salt, from France. Black salt from India.

He is probably the world's best-known wine critic. Over the past 21 years, he has written 10 international best-sellers on wines, published more than 120 issues of his authoritative Wine Advocate newsletter and delivered his opinion on nearly a quarter of a million wines.But Robert M. Parker Jr. is not even remotely ready to shelve his tasting glass anytime soon."If I continue to do my job well," he says, "people become more confident, they learn more about wine, they learn that there is an extraordinary diversity of wines out there."

Fruit soups should taste of fruit, not sugar. Use the least amount of sugar called for, adding more only if fruit is very tart.-- Cole's Cooking A to Z

Anyone who has ever sown a few basil seeds in a patio container can testify that the herb absolutely loves warm, humid weather.This fragrant, fragile herb is easy to grow and produces prolifically if you trim off the flowers. Right about now, pesto-weary gardeners are wondering how much basil one clay pot can produce.Like many of the culinary herbs, basil also is a strong herbal medicine. A member of the mint family, it can be used as a tonic and an antiseptic. Rub crushed, fresh basil leaves on skin to relieve insect bites.

IF the New Yorker were just another magazine, nobody would care who edits it or how. Because it has been unique, because its intelligence and taste have been so high, people do care.Tina Brown, the first female editor after three males, the first English after three Americans, the first splashy journalist after three intellectuals, shook readers up.To save taste, she introduced vulgarity; to preserve tradition, she offended it; to rescue style, she substituted fashion; to preserve worth, she added celebrity.

Harry Brown's, on State Circle in Annapolis, is one of those places you remember was good, but you forget just how good until you return. And then you wish you hadn't waited so long to go back.My wife and I returned to the restaurant with the magnificent view of the State House dome Sunday for the first time in at least two years and remembered why we liked it so much. The atmosphere is warm and inviting, the service solicitous but not hurried, and the quality and quantity of the food stand up to the prices, which are a bit steep.

Visitors to the Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry yesterday found teasers for their taste buds.The youngest visitors created a mystery flavor, entered a smelling bee, sampled spicy cookies and colored a big mouth in a celebration billed as "Bite Your Tongue." The program was one in a monthly series of family events that culminates with the museum's second anniversary celebration in June.Housed in a renovated century-old building at Lombard and Greene streets, the museum rooms once served as the dental school for the University of Maryland, Baltimore, which claims the world's first dental college.

Within the food world, certain debates are never-ending: butter vs. margarine. Red wine vs. white. Chicken or beef.But none grows more heated this time of year, perhaps, than the face-off over fire under a grill: charcoal or gas?It can be a passionate dispute as it rages across back yards in America. It pits purists who love the smell of smoke and the blaze from wood or charcoal against those who gladly give up hopeless minutes blowing on coals, then cleaning up piles of ashes, for fire begun by turning a knob.

HAIRY ALIEN invaders are devouring thousands of acres of Maryland's invaluable wetlands, reproducing faster than rabbits and eating a quarter of their weight in marsh roots each day."A pack of brown Pac Men with a taste for precious marshland," the manager of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Dorchester County calls them."A big ugly rat" is a more common description.The culprit is the nutria, a yard-long, 30-pound rodent from Argentina that was brought to the United States 50 years ago for fur-pelt farming and as a "weed eater" of noxious water plants.

Andrew Telzak got a great deal on pine nuts at an Asian market in Catonsville and whipped up a batch of pesto for friends. It tasted great. But for days afterward, nothing else did. "I started getting this weird taste, kind of a metallic taste, in the back of my tongue," said Telzak, 23, a North Baltimore resident who works for the city health department. "Everything was tasting real bitter." Some of his guests had the same experience. One of them Googled "everything tastes bitter" and came across "pine mouth," a mysterious taste dysfunction associated with pine nuts that can last for weeks.

The third-graders at a Catonsville elementary school recently took a break from the usual cafeteria fare of corn dogs and pizza to sample organic, field-grown salad greens mixed with black olives, apple cider vinegar and oil, Maryland strawberries and honey. And they became chefs for a day, mixing their own salads and making their own dressing. Their experience last week was a culmination of a three-morning seminar, called "Days of Taste," which teaches children about what's produced on Maryland farms, tells them about non-processed foods and encourages them to grow a little more adventurous at mealtime.

Beginning today, this section is simply called Taste. It still has the features you're used to finding each week.

We're considering selling our 1980s ranch house. Our Realtor has advised us to entirely remodel the kitchen before putting the house on the market. While it probably wouldn't be hard to modernize the kitchen, it would certainly be expensive, and we're not sure that we'd recoup the costs by making the sale price reflect that investment. What do you think? And if we do follow the agent's suggestion, what do you recommend in regard to cabinetry, materials and overall style? Many homeowners face a crucial decision in planning a makeover of a particular room or an entire interior.

With its good-fat, zingy taste and Mediterranean elan, hummus is an appetizer of champions. Not only plain hummus but its flavored offspring are popular enough now to be available in every supermarket. But which tastes best? A panel of Taste section staffers conducted a blind tasting of four brands of roasted red-pepper hummus available locally. In this case, we were happy to learn that the least-expensive choices had actually fared best. Our winner was the Giant brand Simply Enjoy, which made a nice presentation and had the strongest red-pepper flavor.

Many recipes specifically call for either the white or the green part of the scallion. I have tasted both and can discern no difference. Is there a reason, aside from aesthetics, that a recipe would call for one and not the other? Well, aesthetics isn't nothing; sometimes you just don't want the green. And I'm not sure that there's no difference in taste - I find the green tastes a bit more vegetal, the white more sharply oniony. That said, when the scallion is to be sauteed slowly, I think recipes are justified in specifying "white portion only" because it will melt into a sweet, undefined mass.

With the opening of the Fresh Market at the Shops at Quarry Lake off Greenspring Avenue, the northern part of the Baltimore area has an abundance of upscale supermarkets. These markets cater to the increasingly sophisticated tastes of customers -- and with premium ingredients and high-quality prepared foods, they can charge higher prices than conventional stores. With so many upscale choices for shoppers in this area, we decided to rate five of the stores -- Wegmans in Hunt Valley; Eddie's of Roland Park on North Charles Street; Graul's in Ruxton; Whole Foods of Mount Washington and the new Fresh Market -- on everything from the taste of their crab cakes to service and navigation.

Cambridge, Mass. -- Hugo Liu says he hates recipes. The whole concept seems hopelessly antiquated to a guy who starts cooking by sniffing spices and thinking. Yet he has invented a revolutionary way of developing them. He explores new tastes with a vengeance. To learn to appreciate kale recently, he consumed it steamed, boiled, sauteed, raw, pureed and even as a cocktail. Yet he believes the future lies in helping other people make food decisions not by mouth but with the click of a mouse.

Youngsters (above) converged on the East Columbia branch of the Howard County Library Wednesday to record their ice cream preferences. Twenty kids taste-tested six brands of vanilla ice cream and recorded their impressions. Haagen-Dazs took first place, fol lowed by Turkey Hill. After thoroughly coating her bowl of ice cream with candy sprinkles, a smiling Kel ley Meehan, 10 (left), hands over the sweets to a fel low confection researcher.

Hungry for more? Find recipes for Chicken Hawaii and Double-Lemon Bars at baltimoresun.com/taste