Kayahara.ca

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 [...]

Half a pound of green coffee doesn’t last that long, especially when you consider that it loses weight in the roasting process! Fortunately, I don’t rely exclusively on coffee I’ve roasted myself, so after I used up the beans from my first home-roasting run, I went back to store-bought for a few days. Last weekend, [...]

Continuing with my curiosity about fermented milk products, but lacking the time for a full-fledged cheese project, I decided to take on something a little more set-it-and-forget-it: sour cream. In the idyllic past, cows would be milked and the milk would be left to stand, allowing the cream to separate and rise to the top. [...]

It is one of my fundamental beliefs that most foodstuffs can be made successfully at home. The results may not be the best example of their type – there’s a reason specialist producers exist – but they are at least consumable and, with a little understanding of the physical and chemical reactions involved, often very [...]

Once you’ve made your damson gin and used it in a Modern No. 2, you’ll be left with the other half of your project’s materials: gin-soaked damsons. I’ve always struggled to use these up somehow. I find booze-soaked fruit to be fine in small quantities, but its appeal fades quickly. For some reason, the fruit [...]

I glossed over it before, but my first attempt to make mozzarella was not so much a success. There are ways to draw success out of failure, however. Enthusiastic, I had decided to make a full batch of mozzarella, and bought 4 litres of organic cow’s milk to that end. Using both Ideas in Food and [...]

After the success of my homemade goat’s cheese, I wanted to delve a little further into cheese-making. Unfortunately, I don’t have a curing chamber, so I’m limited to fresh cheeses. (For now…) That’s OK, though, because some of my favourite cheeses require no affinage. And I was recently reminded that Ideas in Food, a continuing [...]

So far, all the cocktail syrups I’ve discussed in my Summer Syrup Series have come from the classic bartending tradition. Today’s, however, is drawn from an altogether different branch of the mixological family tree: Tiki drinks. The Tiki tradition calls on a wide array of different syrups, from plain old simple syrup to orgeat to [...]

For my first real homemade cheese, I decided to make fresh (that is, unaged) chèvre. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, cow’s milk production here is heavily regulated by the Dairy Farmers of Ontario, which makes it difficult to find a small-scale, independent cow’s milk producer. Goat’s milk and sheep’s milk are [...]

On Friday, my cheese starter culture (“mesophilic aromatic B”), rennet and cheese molds arrived from Glengarry Cheesemaking and Dairy Supply. On Saturday, I picked up some River’s Edge goat milk at the Guelph Farmers’ Market. The nice thing about a farmers’ market is that, when I asked about the pasteurization temperature, I could actually get [...]