Kayahara.ca

When I was growing up, one of my family’s favourite treats for the grill was the boerewors sausage from Florence Meats. It wasn’t a short trip from home, so my parents would tend to buy large quantities and stash it in the freezer. Sometimes, they would bring home another treat as well: biltong, which is [...]

One of the things that makes cassoulet seem so monumental is the variety of meats included in it. But there’s no reason you have to make them all the same day as you cook the beans. Then again, you can… and in this case, I nearly did. The “set it and forget it” sous-vide duck [...]

One of the most surprising and controversial discoveries I’ve heard of from the work on Modernist Cuisine is that duck confit doesn’t need to be cooked in fat. A team of professional chefs, when blind-tasting duck prepared different ways (including traditional confit, sous vide with a small amount of duck fat, and precision-steamed), couldn’t tell [...]

A couple of years ago, someone posted an interesting query to eGullet: Is there any kind of fare that Torontans (if that’s a word) call their own, like St Louis BBQ, San Francisco cioppino, or Brooklyn pizza? The answer on the thread was more or less unanimous: Toronto’s signature dish is, apparently, peameal bacon on [...]

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to do a series of posts on the dish that, to me, represents the pinnacle of brunch: Eggs Benedict. And with Canada Day taking place this week, what better component to start with than peameal bacon, a.k.a. back bacon or Canadian bacon. (Though there is some debate on [...]

One thing I’ve learned about sausage-making is that sausages are a kind of emulsion. This means that, like a hollandaise sauce, they can break if they’re not handled properly. The first time I tried stuffing sausages into casings, I did it by hand with a makeshift funnel. The problem was that you need to keep [...]