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One last dispatch from the “I love my new blender” files for now. Last week, I made these pork-and-potato tacos with guajillo chilli sauce. Like many Mexican recipes, it starts with you soaking dried chillis in hot water, then pureeing them with other ingredients (in this case, tomatoes and garlic), then “frying” the resulting puree. […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Although most frequently associated with “health food,” juicers can be a remarkably versatile piece of equipment in the kitchen. They are used extensively in avant-garde cuisine to present familiar ingredients in unusual textures, such as Heston Blumenthal’s “Red cabbage gazpacho,” but they can also be used in more traditional cooking, either for their intended purpose […]

It’s an established fact that new owners of temperature-controlled water baths will quickly develop an urge to use them to cook everything in their kitchen. Sure, we all intend them primarily for meat and fish, but before long we start looking for ways to make mashed potatoes, or lentils, or… custard. Ultimately, cooking custard sous […]

When cooking sous vide, it’s easy to get enchanted by improbably long cooking times, despite the energy expense. Tough cuts of meat cooked for 48, or even up to 72, hours at moderate temperatures have all the textural benefits of a traditional braise, but are supposed to be moist enough to serve as steaks. For […]