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This weekend, my husband, knowing how I feel about working with chocolate, suggested we make a batch of chocolates in order to get more experience. The result was these Dark and Stormy truffles. The centre, from Peter Greweling’s Chocolates and Confections, is a white chocolate ganache flavoured with vanilla, ginger, lime zest and Gosling’s Black [...]

Although it might sound a little strange at first, the idea of incorporating foam into a cocktail is an old one. Many recipes for sours include an egg white that, when shaken with the other ingredients, froths up to a nice head of foam in the glass, and smooths out the texture of the drink. [...]

Although most frequently associated with “health food,” juicers can be a remarkably versatile piece of equipment in the kitchen. They are used extensively in avant-garde cuisine to present familiar ingredients in unusual textures, such as Heston Blumenthal’s “Red cabbage gazpacho,” but they can also be used in more traditional cooking, either for their intended purpose [...]

When it comes to foams, the lightest style you’re likely to come across is known, very appropriately, as an “air.” This is another Ferran Adrià invention, and although he makes a strong distinction between “foams” and “airs” (I remember watching him correct his interpreter on this point at an event in Toronto a couple of [...]

On his blog, renowned food writer and “cook it yourself” advocate Michael Ruhlman has dedicated the month of January to the topic of home bread baking. I’ve dabbled in bread in the past: there’s something so romantic about the idea of taking such elemental ingredients – flour, water, yeast, salt – and making a foodstuff [...]

Although there are many culinary preparations that fall into the category of foam, when you say the word “foam” today, especially in the context of avant-garde cooking, what often comes to mind is a piece of equipment: the whipped cream siphon. The idea of using a siphon to make foams other than whipped cream is [...]

After letting my blended cider-and-red-wine vinegar ferment for a week, as recommended, I checked on it. It definitely smelled more like vinegar than wine at that point, but I decided to leave it for another week. A couple of days later, it was smelling sharper still, and I had some leftover wine, so I added [...]

After the indulgences of the Christmas season, January drinks should be more stripped down, even elemental. The Hot Toddy fits the bill, with the added bonus that it will keep you warm on a cold winter’s night. Although it survives today almost exclusively in hot form, toddies were once served either hot or cold. A [...]

Like everyone who reads widely on the Internet, I sometimes collect lists of interesting articles that don’t necessarily warrant a complete post, but are worth passing along, like the random assortment of meats and vegetables you find in your fridge that end up in a pot pie. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading lately, [...]

Foams, if you’ll pardon the pun, are the whipping boy of avant-garde cuisine. Those who fear “molecular gastronomy” deride them; those who practice it often downplay them. Anthony Bourdain once famously derided the godfather of avant-garde cooking, Ferran Adrià, as “that foam dude.” So what exactly is a foam? At the highest level, it’s a [...]