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Until now, I have always made oatmeal exclusively with rolled oats; although I know connoisseurs swear by the steel-cut variety, it always seemed like too much of a time investment for a breakfast food. (And yes, I know I’m saying this as someone who has cooked his own English muffins for eggs Benedict.) But if [...]

For the best flavour in my flour tortillas, I wanted lard that was not the highly processed, shelf-stable stuff you can find in bricks at the grocery store. I wanted real lard, rendered pork fat, something with flavour. (It seems like nearly every animal fat gets a special name once it’s been rendered: lard for [...]

One of the cuts of beef used in the pho broth I made was new to me: beef tendon. I’ve eaten it before, and I know it’s used pretty widely in several East and Southeast Asian cuisines, but I had never cooked it at home. Tendon, being a type of connective tissue, contains lots of [...]

I think I may be lucky that I didn’t eat any offal when I was growing up. As a child of North American culture, I fear I would have faced liver as an obligation to be dreaded. Instead, I can now approach the fifth quarter with a wide-open mind. And the contemporary culinary culture in which [...]

Autumn is undeniably soup season, not to mention squash season, which may explain why my speculation on soups made from caramelized vegetables other than carrots went so quickly from “I wonder if it would work?” to “What’s for dinner?” I started by seeding, peeling and dicing a small butternut squash, and weighing the flesh. I [...]

It seems that one of the most popular recipes so far from Modernist Cuisine is the caramelized carrot soup. This probably has something to do with the accessibility of the recipe: it requires no special ingredients, and the only special equipment it needs is a pressure cooker. (OK, there’s the whole question of the centrifuge [...]

Why cook stock in a pressure cooker? I mean, cooks have been making stock without one for more than a hundred years. Do we really need a new approach? Perhaps surprisingly, I’m not convinced that we do. My first problem came before I even put the lid on the pot: my pressure cooker is 8 quarts, [...]

One of the techniques I’ve been wanting to try from Modernist Cuisine is pressure-cooked stock. The first time I heard that pressure-cooking was a viable option for stocks was in a post on Cooking Issues (followed up a couple of months later by another post). It wasn’t until I got Modernist Cuisine that the other [...]

Interest in pressure cookers may be on the rise in large part because of their modernist applications, but in some parts of the world it’s never waned: cooks from Morocco to Mexico have long relied on them as a labour-saving device for preparing traditional dishes in a fraction of the traditional time. So it came [...]

Although beans were one ingredient I was looking forward to making in my new pressure cooker, they weren’t the main reason I decided to buy one: having recently acquired my copy of Modernist Cuisine, I knew there were going to be a bunch of preparations I would want to try that needed to be cooked [...]