Kayahara.ca

Every culture has its New Year’s Eve dishes that are traditional for bringing luck in the coming year: in my family it was mincemeat, in Italian culture it’s cotechino and lentils, and in Japanese culture it’s toshikoshi (“year-crossing”) soba noodles. Although they have a special name, there is no specific recipe for toshikoshi soba; you [...]

At times, I have a certain compulsion around food: when I read about an ingredient enough, I eventually have to try it, no matter the cost. (OK, within reason.) In this case, it was myoga, a Japanese ingredient related to ginger. Nearly every Japanese cookbook I have mentions it, but I had never seen it [...]

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 [...]

It would be hard to read the first issue of Lucky Peach and not come away with an increased appreciation – and appetite – for ramen noodles. From the instant noodles that students subsist on to the most obsessively produced restaurant ramen in Japan, the magazine lovingly explores every aspect of this bright star in [...]

Like everyone else, lately I’ve been reading the first issue of Lucky Peach, the new quarterly food magazine put out by David Chang and Peter Meehan, and it reminded me of the incredible flavour combination that is miso and butter. I find it so amazing that these two staple ingredients from two wildly different culinary [...]

Through my involvement with the Society for Culinary Arts and Letters, I’ve been lucky enough to get access to a review copy of Modernist Cuisine, the 2,400-page, 6-volume tour de force cookbook by Nathan Myhrvold and his team that’s being released next month. For my first foray into cooking from the book, I decided to [...]

When it comes to foams, the lightest style you’re likely to come across is known, very appropriately, as an “air.” This is another Ferran Adrià invention, and although he makes a strong distinction between “foams” and “airs” (I remember watching him correct his interpreter on this point at an event in Toronto a couple of [...]

In Japanese culture, it’s traditional to end one year and start the next with a bowl of noodles, specifically soba noodles, called “toshikoshi soba” or “year-crossing soba.” As Makiko Itoh writes in her excellent Japan Times piece on toshikoshi soba, how far back this tradition dates is unclear, but it’s certainly pervasive today. Because my [...]

In Anglo-Saxon culture, chestnuts are strongly associated with winter, especially Christmas, but in Japanese cuisine, they’re harbingers of fall. Many Japanese ingredients that are considered to be evocative of a specific season are featured in a simple rice dish, and chestnuts – kuri, in Japanese – are no exception. (Ayu, sweetfish, is a similar ingredient [...]

We’re just about to wind up our whirlwind tour of Japan, so I wanted to share some photos of the things we’ve been eating over here. The food has been almost uniformly awesome. Of course, we’ve eaten a lot more than what’s in this slideshow, but these are a good cross-section. Be sure to click [...]