Kayahara.ca

Why cook stock in a pressure cooker? I mean, cooks have been making stock without one for more than a hundred years. Do we really need a new approach? Perhaps surprisingly, I’m not convinced that we do. My first problem came before I even put the lid on the pot: my pressure cooker is 8 quarts, [...]

One of the techniques I’ve been wanting to try from Modernist Cuisine is pressure-cooked stock. The first time I heard that pressure-cooking was a viable option for stocks was in a post on Cooking Issues (followed up a couple of months later by another post). It wasn’t until I got Modernist Cuisine that the other [...]

OK, so this isn’t a cocktail at all; it’s a whisky. Fall is whisky season, and sometimes all you need is a simple glass. I acquired this particular whisky last weekend while visiting the distillery, Kittling Ridge, for their “whisky weekend” event. Every fall for the past few years, they’ve released a new small-batch whisky [...]

I glossed over it before, but my first attempt to make mozzarella was not so much a success. There are ways to draw success out of failure, however. Enthusiastic, I had decided to make a full batch of mozzarella, and bought 4 litres of organic cow’s milk to that end. Using both Ideas in Food and [...]

After the success of my homemade goat’s cheese, I wanted to delve a little further into cheese-making. Unfortunately, I don’t have a curing chamber, so I’m limited to fresh cheeses. (For now…) That’s OK, though, because some of my favourite cheeses require no affinage. And I was recently reminded that Ideas in Food, a continuing [...]

(Part 1 is here.) I have never eaten at el Bulli. My request for a table during the 2009 season was met with a response of, “The demand that we have received at the first moment has again surpassed our limited possibilities for one season and we regret not to be able to full fill [...]

In the middle of service, there was a brief moment of panic. The fifth course, a simple mix of raw rhubarb, brown sugar and black pepper, had just been served to the first two tables. But somewhere between the kitchen and the servers, there was a miscommunication: the dish had been portioned out one per [...]

I’m just back from Ottawa, where I was lucky enough to be able to take part in Atelier Restaurant’s el Bulli tribute dinner, where 20 courses of food prepared using Ferran Adrià’s recipes were served to 20 lucky guests. I wasn’t one of those guests, though; this time, I had hands-on involvement in the kitchen. [...]

One of the many hats I wear is as a recipe tester for Michael Ruhlman on his last couple of books, first Ratio and now the upcoming Ruhlman’s Twenty. Throughout the testing process, hosted by the inimitable Marlene at Cook’s Korner, I got to see a number of the recipes in the book, but by [...]

I’m recently back from vacation in the Pacific Northwest, where I had the chance to try these Bittermens “Hopped Grapefruit” bitters at Liberty in Seattle. (Joel, our bartender that evening, was kind enough to both use them in a drink and let me sample them on their own.) I was already familiar with the Bittermens [...]