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It’s easy to make puns on the word pho, but I’m going to resist the urge, especially since those puns tend to rely on a mispronunciation of pho, which should be more akin to the French word feu than faux. Naturally, the core of pho – as of any soup – is the broth. While [...]

I’ve wanted to make veal stock for a long time. I’ve probably wanted to make veal stock ever since I first read The French Laundry Cookbook. I definitely wanted to make it after reading some of Michael Ruhlman’s writings on it. And, recently, reading the Eleven Madison Park cookbook and seeing some of the recipes [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]