Kayahara.ca

When I was growing up, one summer treat I really looked forward to was visits to Dairy Queen. I favoured Blizzards (to this day, I prefer ice cream with mix-ins), but I thought dipped cones were fascinating, even though I never ordered them. How did they put ice cream – upside-down, no less – into [...]

With the return of warmer weather, I took some time last weekend to roast another batch of coffee with my heat gun. I do all my roasting outside so I don’t have to worry about containing the chaff, but that does kind of limit my options in the winter, even a mild winter like we [...]

It has long been a source of frustration to me that sushi is so much better known than any other aspect of Japanese cuisine. Even in a big city like Toronto, the ratio of sushi restaurants to other types of Japanese restaurants is about a zillion to one. Japan’s culinary traditions are so much broader [...]

I got a lot out of participating in last week’s Eleven Madison Park tribute dinner in Ottawa, but all of it was in intangible form. Really, there was only one tangible thing I wanted to take away, and I didn’t even manage that: a jar of Eleven Madison Park granola. The story goes that every [...]

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 [...]