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There are a few rules that apply to my kitchen. One of them is, “Always have the basic ingredients for pasta puttanesca on hand: canned tomatoes, olive oil, anchovies, garlic, capers, dried chillis and dried pasta.” That way, if I look up from my desk at 5 o’clock and realize I haven’t planned anything for [...]

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of making my own vinegar. In fact, the first copy I ever bought of The Art of Eating, now one of my favourite food journals, was issue 68, which I ordered specifically for its excellent article on homemade wine vinegar. What’s held me back until now, though, is [...]

For some time now, I’ve been frustrated by Thomas Keller. See, I’ve tried and tried to make glazed vegetables using the recipe in his Bouchon cookbook, but I can never seem to get it right. There’s just something about the precise combination of cutting the carrots properly, adding the right amount of water, and heating [...]

Although I’m not exclusively a cocktail writer, I do sometimes write about cocktails. So it was inevitable that, sooner or later, I would write about the Old Fashioned, as so many others have done. The Old Fashioned comes from a time when “Cock-Tail” meant something specific, before “cocktail” expanded to encompass any mixed drink. (“Martini” [...]

If fine dining in the 1970s and 1980s was defined by nouvelle cuisine, and the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s were the province of “technoemotional” cuisine (or whatever you want to call it), my prediction is that the next decade will be characterized by what could be called the “Danish model.” I [...]

After my first attempt at ultra-long-time cooking, I decided to go the other direction, cooking for a short time at an ultra-low-temperature. Salmon “mi-cuit” was the order of the day: wild salmon fillets, brined for 10 minutes in a 10% salt solution, dusted with ras-el-hanout from Philippe de Vienne, and vacuum sealed with olive oil. [...]

Just a quick post today, reflecting the confluence of two recent inspirations. Recently, I was reading the articles at the end of The Fat Duck Cookbook, and was reminded that sodium citrate is used to make processed cheese slices, a fact that I had previously come across with Linda’s Pliable Parmesan. Then, a thread on [...]

Peanut butter is a staple on my breakfast table, but I’ve long been frustrated by the standard array of options. Specifically, there seem to be two types of peanut butter that exist: processed (which is a complex blend of peanuts, oils from various sources, sugar, salt, and stabilizers) and all-natural (which contains nothing but peanuts, [...]

After posting about my sous vide pork chops last week, I got some great feedback, especially in the eGullet sous vide thread. On the whole, it sounds like other sous vide enthusiasts don’t cook pork chops very often. What they do cook is beef. Lots and lots of beef. I was told that if I [...]

This recipe is the fruit of a discussion on eGullet about ways to incorporate pumpkin into cocktails without ending up with sliminess in the glass. It occurred to me that the problem is essentially one of filtration: you want all the flavour of the pumpkin, without any of the particles. In other words, it was [...]