Kayahara.ca

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 [...]

This story is getting a little old. Every time I go and try out an idea I’ve picked up from Ideas in Food, the results are so good, so much better than the alternatives, that I wonder why I ever bothered with any other approach. The latest episode in this series is dried beans. As [...]

Another take-home lesson from the Ideas in Food classes was the importance of brining seafood. I’ve long known that it was important to brine some fish, especially salmon and arctic char, when cooking it sous vide, to prevent protein from coagulating on the surface in unsightly white puddles of goo, but I’d never really considered [...]

If you’ve never have heard of Activa, or of the enzyme it contains, transglutaminase, you may nonetheless have heard the nickname it goes by in many kitchens: meat glue. But don’t call it that in front of Alex Talbot of Ideas in Food. He has two objections to the expression: first, it’s unprofessional. And second, [...]

In his 1998 Massey Lectures, entitled The Elsewhere Community, Canadian literary critic Hugh Kenner cites Ezra Pound as once having told him, “You have an ob-li-ga-tion to visit the great men of your own time.” I’ve tried to incorporate this thinking into my own way of living, so when I learned that Alex Talbot of [...]

On the heels of the cassoulet I made a couple of weeks ago, I’ve continued working with dried beans, trying to get a handle on the best way to cook them. It seems I’m not the only one who has dried beans on the brain. At this point in the winter, many storage vegetables are [...]

Although I clearly don’t mind using the occasional additive in my cooking, my collection of modernist food chemicals is still far from complete. So while everyone else I know has been busy making the macaroni and cheese from Modernist Cuisine, I’ve had to hold back, for want of carrageenan. (I do have the sodium citrate, [...]

I have long been a proponent of the Kitchen Scale Manifesto. I am a firm believer in weighing whatever can be weighed: it’s the best way to ensure your recipes come out consistently every time, especially with ingredients like flour, whose volume can vary enormously depending on how compacted they are. Not to mention that [...]