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It’s a well-known adage that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So naturally, ever since getting my new Vitamix high-speed blender, I’ve been looking for excuses to puree things. One of the benefits of a blender like the Vitamix is the size of the container: no more “transfer to [...]

Whether your cooking is devoutly traditional or boldly avant-garde, a blender is a vital piece of kitchen equipment. (Unless, that is, your cooking is so traditional that you use a food mill for everything.) Obviously, its main use is to puree soft foods and soups, but it can also be used to grind brittle foods, [...]

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 [...]

One of the fundamental skills of cooking is controlling the way that heat goes into (and, sometimes, comes out of) food. You can use a very gentle heat, like a controlled-temperature water bath, to warm the food slowly until the whole thing is the same temperature as the cooking medium. Or you can use a [...]

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 [...]

For years, the only way I’d ever experienced squid was in its fried form – a form that has long been a favourite of mine and my husband’s. So I still remember the first time I ever had grilled squid, because it was so different from my previous experiences and so, so delicious. It was [...]

If the noodles are the body of a bowl of ramen, the broth is its soul. There are lots of different styles of broths, from basic dashi to chicken stock to intense, pork-based tonkotsu, or any blend of the above. These are then seasoned with a tare or kaeshi sauce concentrate, which roughly determines the [...]

Interest in pressure cookers may be on the rise in large part because of their modernist applications, but in some parts of the world it’s never waned: cooks from Morocco to Mexico have long relied on them as a labour-saving device for preparing traditional dishes in a fraction of the traditional time. So it came [...]

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 [...]