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The picture above shows a hollandaise sauce that’s about to break. Yes, I purposely broke a hollandaise sauce in order to write this post! And I did it with confidence, because I knew how easy it would be to fix. As you can see, the sauce is thick and starting to look shiny on the [...]

Thanks to some local friends whose garden was starting to look a little overgrown, I managed to lay my hands on some tomato leaves to cook with. I figured the best way to experiment with them was in a dish that already included tomatoes. My favourite go-to pasta sauce is amatriciana, which uses bacon and [...]

The key to mastering hollandaise sauce is understanding emulsification. As you whisk the sauce, you’re separating the butterfat into very, very small droplets (called the “dispersed phase”), and spreading them out through a certain amount of water (called the “continuous phase”) so they can’t recombine. It’s the same thing you do when making mayonnaise, or [...]

Eggs Benedict are a pretty flexible dish. You can switch out the English muffin for other baked goods, or potato pancakes, or even Portobello mushrooms. You can substitute smoked fish, or sausage patties, or vegetables like spinach (in the variation called eggs Florentine) for the back bacon. When it comes down to it, the foundation [...]

Two cool videos to share with you today. First up, John “Docsconz” Sconzo has a video of Town House sous-chef Matt Edwards preparing the orange shells for the dish “The Orange from Valencia.” John writes: This won’t be freeze the eyes to the screen of anyone already solidly grounded in techniques using liquid nitrogen, but [...]

Not all the equipment used in avant-garde cooking was invented in the past two decades. Some, like the dehydrator, have essentially been around for centuries, if not millennia. All cooking can be broken down into a few simple processes. One of them is understanding and controlling water, and that’s exactly what a dehydrator allows you [...]

This picture shows the tomato plants in my garden back when they were still healthy. Unfortunately, they’ve since succumbed to a fungal infection (fusarium wilt has been implicated) so we had to pull them all out. Which is sad not just because it means I don’t get to eat the tomatoes, but also because I’d [...]

A couple of years ago, someone posted an interesting query to eGullet: Is there any kind of fare that Torontans (if that’s a word) call their own, like St Louis BBQ, San Francisco cioppino, or Brooklyn pizza? The answer on the thread was more or less unanimous: Toronto’s signature dish is, apparently, peameal bacon on [...]