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Continue reading →: Beef Tallow Is the Fat Your Kitchen Has Been Missing
The jar sat on the counter for twenty minutes before I opened it. Creamy white, dense, faintly golden at the edges. I’d ordered beef tallow on something between curiosity and conviction, and now that it was here, my brain was doing the thing it does: running the whole kitchen through a new…
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Continue reading →: How to Enjoy Caviar: A Side-by-Side Education I Did for Myself (And Now You)
It was New Year’s Eve and I had lined up five tins of caviar on the kitchen counter like a very serious person who had made a very questionable decision with their grocery budget. No party, no occasion beyond the date on the calendar. Just a set of small mother-of-pearl…
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Continue reading →: How to Make a Crepe: Patience Is Key
The first time I tried to order crepes in France, I walked into a sit-down restaurant and asked the waiter if they served crepes there. He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just asked for ketchup at a wine bar. He pulled the towel from…
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Continue reading →: Pan-Italy: How to Make Carbonara Without Scrambling the Eggs
Carbonara found me in Rome on a Tuesday, in a trattoria with no menu posted outside and four tables inside. I had been walking for three hours. The bowl that arrived was the color of sunlight on plaster: pale gold, glossy, with a serious amount of black pepper sitting on…
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Continue reading →: The Pan That Makes the Omelette
There’s a scene in The Bear where Carmen stands over a burner, making dish after dish in a small carbon steel pan, hundreds of times, until the motion becomes automatic. It’s not dramatic. Nobody applauds. The point is that perfection, whether a silky French roll or a glossy Japanese omurice, doesn’t come…
