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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 [...]

A few days ago, we had a chance to visit Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. Tsukiji is one of the largest fish markets in the world, if not the largest. One of its most famous features is the bluefin tuna auction that takes place nearly every day. Although I am opposed to eating bluefin tuna [...]

I’ve been cooking a lot of Japanese food this year, in preparation for an upcoming trip to Japan, and time and again I’ve come back to one observation: dashi is the heart and soul of Japanese cooking. Dashi is to Japanese cuisine what veal stock is to classic French cuisine, only more so. The most [...]