the recipes/cooking page

i have spent most of the summer developing this recipe, a way to eat basically the same thing every night (chicken and rice) while still keeping it varied. using the same basic process with minor tweaks to the seasoning sauce, you can get some pretty different flavors. besides that, this recipe is quick (30 min or less), easy (doesn't even require cutting anything), not very messy, and pretty healthy.

ingredients

• boneless skinless chicken thighs
• rice
• neutral oil
• shouyu (soy sauce)
• mirin
• saké ("cooking saké", which i call "faké", is fine too)
• sugar
• butter
• red miso
• lemon juice (optional)

1. start off by cooking one portion of rice, since it takes the longest. i have a rice cooker that can keep the rice warm for a while so i frequently start the rice way in advance
2. start heating oil (or an oil and butter combo if you're making one of the buttery sauces) in a small frying pan on medium heat, dry off chicken thighs (usually i use two), lightly season on both sides with kosher salt and freshly-ground pepper (yeah these were not included in the ingredients list, but you should always have them on hand no matter what)
3. when the oil is hot, add the chicken and cook for 3-4 min, then flip over and cook on the other side for another 3-4 min
4. once both sides of the chicken have been seared, add a splash of saké (about 1-2 tbsp) to the pan and cover to steam until the saké has boiled off, around 5-7 minutes. you can usually tell without lifting the lid when this has happened because the boiling sound will change, it gets higher-pitched
5. while the chicken is cooking, make the seasoning sauce. there are three options, but all three sauces start with a base of the "holy trinity", equal proportions saké, mirin, and shouyu. i usually use 1 tablespoon of each (which is what measurements below are based on), so i privately refer to it as "1-1-1 sauce". if you're particularly lazy, it may be possible to mix the three together beforehand in large quantities and store it in the fridge. from there, here are the three options:
   • TERIYAKI: add 1 tbsp sugar and mix together well, heating it up in the microwave a bit can help
   • SHOUYU-BUTTER: don't need to add anything else right away, but get about 2 tbsp butter ready to add to the pan too. you can also add a splash of lemon juice, but it's not strictly required
   • MISO-BUTTER: add 1 tbsp miso, 1 tsp sugar, and optionally a bit extra shouyu and saké, then mix together well. get around 2 tbsp butter ready to add to the pan too.
6. uncover the chicken in the pan, and add the seasoning mixture, plus butter if making anything besides teriyaki. cook for a few minutes to reduce sauce and coat chicken, you can spoon the sauce over or just keep flipping it around in the pan. at this stage i also retrieve the rice from the rice cooker, and make a bed of rice on a plate to put the chicken on
7. remove the chicken from the pan and place on rice, then continue reducing the sauce in the pan to desired consistency, if needed. be careful not to burn the sauce, you can remove it from the heat briefly or shake the pan to keep it from burning. the teriyaki is the hardest to get right, you want to caramelize the sugar and get the sauce to a nice sticky consistency, but it's easy to go a little too far and burn it, it will probably take a few attempts to get it just right
8. pour the finished sauce over the chicken and rice, and then you're done. i guess you could also cut the chicken into strips if you want to eat with chopsticks, but i just use a knife and fork

i found this recipe on suntory's japanese website, although it is highly questionable it gets a shoutout here for being exceptionally quick and easy to make, i threw this together quickly one morning when i was starving and only had a bit of chicken left in the fridge. it's pretty much just lightly-fried chicken coated in an intense umami sauce, J. K. L.-A. likes to drop what he calls "umami bombs" into his dishes, well the sauce in this is a damn umami NUKE. to tone it down, perhaps don't use umami-rich japanese mayo (kewpie) and go easy on the oyster sauce.

ingredients

• 2 chicken thighs
• 2 tbsp cornstarch (original recipe calls for potato starch but nobody has that here)
• 1 tbsp oil
• 2 tsp oyster sauce
• 2 tbsp mayonnaise
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp soy sauce

1. cut chicken thighs into bit-sized pieces and season with salt and pepper, then cover with cornstarch.
2. heat oil in a frying pan on medium heat and cook chicken until cooked all the way through, turning over to get good color on all sides.
3. in a large bowl, mix together oyster sauce, mayonnaise, sugar, and soy sauce.
4. when the chicken is done cooking, add it to the bowl and coat it with sauce, then it's done.

something i like to do at bookstores is flip through interesting cookbooks and take pictures of recipes i might want to make, which i do because cookbooks are usually expensive and you never know in advance if the recipes are any good, or you might end up spending $30 on a cookbook that has only one recipe you actually use. anyways, it’s stew season so i bought a large amount of beef at costco and started flipping through my camera roll looking for recipes, when i stumbled upon a recipe for “lazy hayashi rice” i had never tried from some vaguely japanese cookbook i don’t even know the name or author of. i followed the recipe in broad strokes but along the way i was forced to improvise a couple of ingredients and added a couple enhancements from j. kenji lopez-alt’s “new rules of beef stew”, then accidentally left it to cook a little longer than intended. when i sat down and ate, though, one thought immediately dominated my mind: THIS IS THE BEST STEW I’VE EVER MADE. it was so good that the next day, i discovered my culinary connoisseur brother had even STOLEN some of the leftovers in the fridge, an unprecedented trespass. with the remaining costco beef and while the memory remained fresh in my mind, i attempted to exactly recreate my steps and make it again to see if it hadn’t been just a fluke, and it turned out about as good again. so, for posterity, here's the recipe:

ingredients

• approx. 2 lbs costco beef chuck roast
• 2 kinda small yellow onions, sliced thick
• 5 packets of assorted ketchup saved from my brother’s delivery orders
• enough kirkland signature chicken stock to barely cover the meat
• 1 packet knox unflavored gelatin
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• about a tablespoon all-purpose flour
• ½ cup kirkland signature boxed cabernet sauvignon (reserve remainder for drinking)
• ¾ cup whole peeled tomatoes w/ basil
• 2 tablespoons Bull-Dog tonkatsu sauce (this was the exact brand the original recipe called for, which i happened to have)
• like 8 drops asian fish sauce
• kosher salt/freshly ground pepper
• some vegetable oil

1. cut beef into 3-4 large steaks, season w/ salt & pepper on all sides. heat like maybe 1-2 tablespoons vegetable oil in a round dutch oven on slightly under medium-high heat until shimmering, then add steaks 2 at a time and brown well on most sides. when done, put the steaks aside on a plate.
2. pour off all but 1 tablespoon of fat and return to heat, add onion and saute for about 3 min. add wine and deglaze bottom of dutch oven, scaping up all the browned bits stuck to the bottom, and reduce until nearly dry. stir in tomato paste and cook for about 2 minutes while stirring.
3. the original recipe called for “diced tomatoes” which you don't have, so instead take out some “whole peeled tomatoes with basil” and try to wash off the basil off. then, toss it into a pitcher and blend using an immersion blender to approximate “diced tomatoes”. to this, add the packets of assorted delivery ketchup, Bull-Dog tonkatsu sauce, a good amount of kosher salt, a bunch of pepper, at least a cup of chicken stock, and then one packet of gelatin. get the immersion blender back in there and give it a decent blend for good measure.
4. cut meat up into ~1.5in cubes and toss with flour in a mixing bowl.
5. add meat cubes and blended pitcher mix to onions in dutch oven, add enough extra chicken stock to almost cover meat, stir, bring to a simmer, and drop to low heat.
6. leave to play pump it up for approx. 2 hrs
7. return, give things a good mix, decide it isn’t thick enough yet, turn up heat by what you think is a not a whole lot but is actually almost to medium-low.
8. put 1 cup of rice in the rice cooker to cook, leave for "a bit" that actually turns out to be like 40 minutes (because you had too much wine and got distracted)
9. return, panic when you notice the heat has been higher than you thought for longer than intended, immediately remove dutch oven from heat, taste stew, realize it’s perfect.
10. remove from heat, carefully pick out all meat and transfer to bowl with slotted spoon. blend the remainder in the dutch oven into a smooth sauce using the immersion blender even though the onions are basically liquified already, also forget to add the honey the original recipe says to mix in at this point.
11. add meat back in, and serve over rice. leftovers can be stored in the fridge for up to a week and arguably taste better upon reheating.

the sausage egg mcmuffin may the perfect breakfast food, the only issue is that i’m too lazy and cheap and dignified to drag myself to mcdonald’s every morning. fortunately, there’s a quick and easy way to make a version at home that’s almost as good, using entirely ingredients from costco so that you can make a month’s worth with only a single shopping trip

at costco, purchase the following:

• 4 lb bag of tyson reduced-fat sausage patties (in freezer section by other breakfast products)
• 50 ct. deli sliced tillamook medium cheddar (exact cheese brand probably varies depending on region. for some reason costco bulk sliced cheese is really cheap, at the normal grocery store you only get like 10 slices for the same price)
• 24 pack thomas english muffins (or equivalent)
• kirkland signature eggs, unsalted butter, black peppercorn grinder (if you somehow have no pepper)

1. grab a sausage patty from the freezer and put it onto a skillet (no oil required), set burner to medium heat.
2. split english muffin in half, put a thin pat of butter on each half, then toast until edges are browned or slightly blackened
3. the egg was the toughest part to crack for me, how do you get a nice round egg patty that fits perfectly onto the english muffin? i used to just wing it and use a normal fried egg which made the whole process take a lot of extra time, however one day i decided to stop being lazy and looked it up, turns out you can actually do it fairly easily in the microwave! crack an egg into a ramekin or some other appropriately-sized round microwaveable vessel and then put it in the microwave. this next part will require some experimentation, every microwave is different and eggs are quite finicky, they love to explode in them. try messing with power levels and pauses (currently i microwave the eggs in a series of ten second bursts) until you stumble upon a combination that consistently cooks the eggs to your preferred level of doneness.
4. remember to flip the sausage patty at some point
5. when the english muffins are done, lay them out on a plate along with the slice of cheese and the sausage patty, which should be about done by this point too. now it’s time to start assembling, if you’re going for maximum accuracy start with the cheese on the bottom half of the english muffin, then the sausage patty, and finally the egg, which you can get sometimes get out of the ramekin just by flipping it upside down, otherwise you can coax it out with a fork or something. if you want your cheese super melted you can put it in between the sausage and egg instead. then, grind a bit of pepper on top of the egg and maybe sprinkle a little salt, and top it off with the other half of the english muffin. finally, before eating wait a little for everything to cool down and for the cheese to melt, a good opportunity to do some cleanup. if you’re really striving for authenticity, at this stage you can also wrap the completed sandwich in tinfoil or paper towels so it steams a little, ruthless perfectionist james “kenji” lopez-alt insists this is a vital part of the mcmuffin experience.

ingredients (for 1 portion)

• 160g rice
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp ketchup
• 1 tsp olive oil
• parsley (for garnish)
• mini tomato (for garnish)

1. crack the egg into a bowl, add worcestershire sauce and olive oil, and mix well.
2. add freshly cooked rice to the bowl and gently mix together
3. place onto an oval-shaped plate, top with ketchup, and garnish with parsley and mini tomato.

ingredients

• 300g pork shoulder roast
• yellow and red pepper, half of each
• salt
• pepper
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon grated garlic
• 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice

1. cut pork into bite-size pieces, then put into a bowl and add the salt, pepper, olive oil, dried oregano, grated garlic, and lemon juice. mix everything together and then let sit for 10 minutes.
2. cut the peppers into bite size pieces.
3. impale seasoned pork pieces and peppers on the skewers, alternating between the two.
4. heat up some more olive oil in a frying pan on medium-high heat, add skewers, sprinkle everything with some additional dried oregano, then cook rotating occasionally until most sides are well-browned.

ingredients (serves 4)

• 2 servings rice
• 1/6 onion
• 100g mixed vegetables
• 4 wieners (large)
• 2 tablespoons ketchup
• 2 tablespoons curry powder (japanese-style, e.g. s&b oriental curry powder)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce
• 350ml water
• 30ml apple juice
• 20g butter
• 100g camembert cheese
• dried parsley flakes (to taste)
• 1 onsen tamago

1. finely chop the onion, cut the wieners into 1cm slices, and wash the rice.
2. mix the washed rice, wiener slices, chopped onion, mixed vegetables, ketchup, curry powder, salt, soy sauce, water, and apple juice in a frying pan, then let sit for 30 minutes.
3. add butter to the pan and cook on high heat until boiling, then cover with lid, turn heat down to low, and cook for 15 minutes.
4. open lid to add camembert cheese on top, then replace lid and steam for 15 minutes.
5. turn off the heat, take off lid, sprinkle parsley flakes all over, and add onsen tamago to your liking. gently mix everything together and eat.

salt fat acid heat

samin nosrat

i thumbed through a friend's mom’s copy of this while holed up at his house for a few days during a snow storm. it probably could’ve just been named “salt” because it’s the first and longest section, it feels like takes up half the book or more. it's also the most memorable part, i'm not along in thinking that because i saw other reviewers saying the same thing. i'm fine with only half of the book being good because the salt section COOKED hard enough to justify the whole book, it was full of nonstop mindblowing revelations, turns out everything i thought i knew about salt was totally wrong, i didn't understand salt AT ALL before. it was like finally realizing i've been living my whole life with an enormous blind spot, maybe i’m just an idiot but i was always under the impression that the function of salt was to make things saltier, like how you add hot sauce to make things spicy. but since there’s only a few situations where something tasting salty is desirable like chips or popcorn, i didn’t pay much attention to salt, things like every restaurant table being equipped with salt shaker confused me a little, were there really so many people out there who wanted their food to taste salty? when i saw the step in many recipes that says "season to taste with salt", i skipped it without adding any salt, because my preference ("taste") was that it doesn't taste salty at all.

well, i could not have been wrong, salt is literally the most important ingredient in cooking, there's a reason it's used in nearly every recipe, it's practically a magical alchemic powder that if used right enhances flavor without leaving any trace of itself. rather than making dishes taste more salty, more often that not it makes other ingredients in a dish taste more like themselves, if a dish actually tastes salty then you've added too much.

cooking at home

david chang

this is basically a guide to "vibe cooking" at home, putting together dishes on the fly with whatever you've got on hand without worrying about a recipe, which chang claims is the ultimate and final form of cooking. to this end, the recipes in the book are vague and deliberately include imprecise handwavey measurements, chang trying to wean the reader off relying on exact recipes and instead trying to show his mindset when he's improvising meals. plus, most of the dishes he introduces are probably impractical for the average reader anyways, most require having on hand the idiosyncratic collection of sino-korean ingredients chang stocks his pantry with. overall, it's more of a "meta" cookbook, demonstrating chang's techniques and philosophy of improvisational home cooking, which you can then try yourself with your own food preferences.

this book also has a lot of great "finally someone's saying it" moments about the expectations other cookbooks seem to have of home cooks, like a takedown of the whole "Ask your butcher/fishmonger/cheesemonger/whatever for..." thing that crops up, chang acknowledges that nobody actually has any of those, even as a professional chef he goes to the grocery store when cooking for himself at home. there's also takes like "Frozen Vegetables Are Good, Actually, According to Science" defended by guest essays from "food scientists", reminiscent of good ol' J.K.L-A.

one thing that would take me out of it occasionally was this writing tic chang has where he cannot resist an opportunity to plug fashionable political causes no matter what he's talking about, which results in random passages like the following:

This dish started as a riff on gamjatang, a spicy Korean stew made with potatoes and pork bones, but I wanted some mala flavors, so I added Sichuan peppercorn. I soon learned that I was making some version of the big plate chicken you might see in the Xinjiang province of China, a primarily Muslim region where, as of this writing, over 1 million Uyghurs have been interned by the Chinese government. The stew is very spicy and saucy, with the Sichuan peppercorns and cumin seeds standing front and center.

something about the matter-of-fact tone and the immediate return to topic after the brief aside makes it unintentionally hilarious.

also, chang seems to struggle reconciling his conflicting viewpoints of "lol, home cooking is just vibes, it's a judgment-free zone, make whatever unholy fusion dish you want as long as it tastes good" and "We need to listen to and respect the expert cooks of ethnic cuisines who make things the AUTHENTIC traditional way!"

the food lab

J. K. L.-A.

i unilaterally borrowed this cookbook from a friend's house as i went home after having some wine. although there's no shortage of cookbooks around the house because of my brother's longstanding fascination with haute cuisine, the ones he buys aren't at all practical for beginners or home cooks because they're all by michelin-star gourmet chefs and make use of complex techniques, exotic ingredients, and expensive gadgetry like sous-vide machines, centrifuges, cyclotrons, etc. despite this cookbook being titled "the food lab: better home cooking through science", it is actually aimed at beginners and home cooks, and does not require any sophisticated labaratory techniques or equipment. but if you think about it, the kitchen is the closest thing in most houses to a laboratory, almost everyone has access to a dedicated culinary lab, and part of j. kenji lopez-alt's project is to show you what you can do with that. there's no need to take anyone's word for anything in cooking when you can always run an experiment in your own personal food lab, one thing he does throughout the book is the culinary equivalent of "mythbusters", putting traditional methods of making dishes to the test and seeing how they hold up against alternatives. as it turns out, he discovers that there is a lot of received cooking knowledge that's simply untrue, people have blindly accepted it for decades even though it's trivial to test out alternatives. he also applies the scientific method to refining recipes, cooking something a bunch of times varying just a single aspect, and seeing what has the best outcome.

lopez-alt's scientific method of experimentation is something you can apply yourself in the kitchen, though fortunately for the busy reader/cook, lopez-alt has already done a lot of legwork developing the recipes recorded in the book, the products of hundreds of experiments starting from first principles, no myth or method held sacred. these days there are many cash-grab cookbooks that seem a little phoned-in, but behind this one you can sense the kind of obsessive passion that can be trusted to deliver good results. indeed, every recipe i've tried from it has lived up to its description, whether it be "the best" or "really good", "easy", "fast", or "foolproof". people were even DEMANDING the coleslaw recipe from me when i made some for thanksgiving, and the massive amount of beef stew that was supposed to last me a week that i made with the addition of questionable "umami bomb" ingredients was so good it was gone in a day or two because my mom ate so much of it.

unfortunately, the tone of james "kenji" lopez-alt's writing is a bit, for lack of a better word, reddit for my tastes (as you might be able to imagine from the title, it leans heavily into "I F**CKING LOVE SCIENCE"), though the book came out a decade ago so now some of vintage reddit humor feels almost quaint, it's like a period piece capturing the "bacon mustache" era of reddit. it's a little jarring because the cookbook otherwise has very dignified typesetting and graphic design. also, the "science" angle gave lopez-alt the excuse to include a lot of tedious "scientific" explanations where he nerds out about what's going on at a molecular level during various processes in cooking, which isn't really required to execute any of the recipes and is about as useful as trivia.

modernist cuisine I: history and fundamentals

nathan myhrvold et al.

forthcoming