Kayahara.ca

It’s funny sometimes, the things that give me the impetus to move projects off of my “to do” list and drive me into the kitchen. In this case, it was Halloween. After trick-or-treating was over, our basket of treats held a few leftover Aero bars, which I had always thought my husband disliked. When I [...]

(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. [...]

I would be remiss in allowing to pass unremarked the end of the famous elBulli in its incarnation as a restaurant: its final service was this past Saturday night. Although I sadly never had the opportunity to dine at the restaurant, which was ranked number 1 in the world for 5 of the past 10 [...]

This one is just for fun, and is probably exactly the sort of thing that drives many anti-modernist cuisine types up the wall. For one thing, it’s a preparation that has scare quotes in its name! For another, it’s not exactly what you would call an… intuitive preparation. It is, however, exactly what it sounds [...]

Although beans were one ingredient I was looking forward to making in my new pressure cooker, they weren’t the main reason I decided to buy one: having recently acquired my copy of Modernist Cuisine, I knew there were going to be a bunch of preparations I would want to try that needed to be cooked [...]

Unsurprisingly, I came back from Ottawa with a renewed enthusiasm for playing around in the kitchen, and especially to tackle some of the projects I’d had less success with the first time around. First on that list: retrograde starch mashed potatoes. This time, I had a better idea of what was essential to the process [...]

In general, I don’t do a lot of restaurant reviews on my site; it isn’t what I intended Kayahara.ca to be about. But I’m going to make an exception in this case, because I’ve wanted to experience an Ideas in Food meal for so long that it would be artificially limiting myself not to sort [...]

In the realm of all things spudular, French fries are king, but mashed potatoes are a close second. As with fries, there are certain criteria that can be used to distinguish good examples of the genre from bad. Mashed potatoes, however, come in two acceptable styles, like peanut butter: chunky and smooth. Chunky mashed potatoes [...]