Kayahara.ca

When I made my bisteeya, I used phyllo for the pastry, cutting it into rounds to layer the pie. But traditionally, bisteeya is made using an altogether different type of pastry known as “warka” (and, transliteration being what it is, sometimes spelled warqa, warkha or ouarka). The original method for making warka is to take [...]

Moroccan cooking is underappreciated, in my estimation. While couscous and merguez have, to a certain extent, become pantry staples, and tagines are far from unknown to even the most novice foodies, the cuisine as a whole is underrepresented in North America. I’ve taken an interest in Moroccan food for a long time – longer than [...]

One of the stops on my road trip across the US last month was Kansas City. Naturally, this meant we had to sample the local barbecue, which we did at a couple of locations, namely Jack Stack and Woodyard BBQ. We tried a range of the offerings, including brisket, “burnt ends,” and pork ribs, as [...]

Having gone to the trouble and expense of making the Momofuku Milk Bar corn cookies, I figured I might as well make the Lucky Peach recipes that use them as an ingredient, too. After all, it’s not like I’m going to have a regular supply of these on hand at all times. The first of [...]

I’ve been meaning to make the corn cookies from the second issue of Lucky Peach for a while now, but they somehow slid to the bottom of the to-do list until this weekend. I had even bought the freeze-dried corn for them – the only ingredient that was halfway challenging to obtain – and there [...]

I’m about to leave on vacation – a two-week road trip across the US to the West coast – so naturally I had to clean out my fridge a little bit before my departure. Buried in the back, I found some quail eggs that had been kicking around for too long. Rather than just throwing [...]

I say it a lot, but that’s because it’s true: it doesn’t take much to metamorphose one cocktail into another. Just take an existing drink and swap out one component: a Daiquiri with Swedish Punch in place of the sugar becomes a Doctor Cocktail; a Corpse Reviver No. 2 with elderflower liqueur in place of [...]

(OK, so maybe it wasn’t a whole peck.) Lately I’ve been wondering about vinegar pickles. I have plenty of experience making fermented pickles, but very little making pickles with vinegar. Fermented pickles are straightforward – immerse any vegetables in a 5% brine; leave at cool room temperature for a couple of weeks – but the [...]

It’s become a common refrain that acidity is as important to balancing the seasoning of a dish as salt is. Just as salt, properly used, doesn’t necessarily make food taste “salty,” acid doesn’t necessarily make food taste sour; the word usually used is “brightness.” Acid is especially useful in balancing sweetness, which can lurk in [...]

One of the downsides to being a home cocktail enthusiast, rather than a bar, is that any time you open a bottle of fortified or aromatized wine, it can be hard to get through it before it spoils. To combat this problem, obsessives like me tend to curate recipes oriented around our favourite cocktail wines, [...]