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Canada Day is the perfect excuse for a barbecue, and every year (barring unforeseen circumstances), we invite lots of friends over, grill up some tasty food, and serve some great Canadian beer and wine – the latter being especially pointed this year with the passage of Bill C-311. My grilling meat of choice for this [...]

When I offered my husband his choice of the various barbecue sauces in Modernist Cuisine and started listing them, he stopped me as soon I said “Kentucky.” “That one. You should make that one.” I looked at him. “Why?” “Does it have bourbon in it?” “Yeah.” “That’s why.” There are at least a handful of [...]

Since posting about my third round of home-roasted coffee, I’ve been trying to roast a batch – some smaller, some larger – once a week. I think I’ve gotten pretty good with the process by now: I’m no longer under-roasting, and have learned more or less where to stop it to get the roast I [...]

For the best flavour in my flour tortillas, I wanted lard that was not the highly processed, shelf-stable stuff you can find in bricks at the grocery store. I wanted real lard, rendered pork fat, something with flavour. (It seems like nearly every animal fat gets a special name once it’s been rendered: lard for [...]

My dabbling in Mexican cuisine continues, this time with flour tortillas. Despite the fact that I’ve been eating flour tortillas a lot longer than soft corn tortillas, I consider the masa-based variety to be more quintessentially Mexican, which is why I tackled them first. Or maybe it’s just because the flour ones are so much [...]

I’ve written about variations on the Corpse Reviver No. 2 before, but just recently happened across another one that’s worth mentioning: the Sunflower Cocktail. Created by Sam Ross of New York’s Milk & Honey, it’s a straight-up substitution – akin to a “minimal pair” in phonology – replacing only the Lillet with St. Germain elderflower liqueur. St. Germain [...]

I have many pet peeves, both culinary and linguistic. (Possibly too many.) One that falls into both categories is the word “chorizo”. Why is this a pet peeve? It’s because there are at least two types of sausage that go by the name “chorizo,” and they’re very different from each other. One, Spanish chorizo, is [...]

Making tofu is both labour- and resource-intensive. (I can’t imagine it would ever have been developed anywhere that water was scarce.) But that doesn’t mean it’s wasteful: after the ground beans have been steeped to make the soy milk for tofu, they still have lots of nutritional value, especially fibre! This leftover soy mash is [...]

Time to take another shot at making my own tofu. I followed the same process as before, but used less nigari this time. Not enough less, as it turned out: the tofu was still overcoagulated (though not as much as last time), producing a very fragile, somewhat crumbly result. I also tried pressing it in [...]

One of the cuts of beef used in the pho broth I made was new to me: beef tendon. I’ve eaten it before, and I know it’s used pretty widely in several East and Southeast Asian cuisines, but I had never cooked it at home. Tendon, being a type of connective tissue, contains lots of [...]