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"Food and Cooking"
Since red seems to be the traditional color for Valentine’s Day, I wanted to create a dish for my wife that would carry the red theme to complement the roses I sent to her work, while at the same time making something interesting enough to qualify as a “special occasion meal”, something not that easy in our [...]
As a genuine child of the 80s, I grew up with the Friday the 13th movies, so on Friday January 13th, I decided to create a meal in honor of my favorite killer Jason Vorhees, properly entitled Liver Alone!
It’s basically three different dishes in one, beef liver prepared in a spicy Chilean ají mixture, [...]
As most people who have The Modernist Cuisine books, there is always that first recipe you have to try to get a sense of all the possibilities in front of you.
Arguably the easiest one in the book is the Caramelized Carrot Soup, and thanks to the Modernist Cuisine team, [...]
One of the the advantages of sous vide cooking is that you can prepare several meals on the weekend and eat like a king or queen for the rest of the week. The reheating process is a snap and a really nice dish can be put together in a matter of minutes.
This dish is [...]
As the final dish in my series of four regarding abalone and uni, I had to come up with a good way to take care of the leftovers.
They were primarily irregular sized pieces of pressure cooked abalone, a few more sous vide scallops I had from my [...]
Palta Reina (queen avocado) is a classic staple of Chilean cuisine. Traditionally it’s a very simple dish made with half an avocado (minus a slice so it can be stable in the plate) with some filling, sometimes chicken-mayo, or shrimp-mayo mix. It’s a classic starter you find almost in any Chilean restaurant.
As the third [...]
This is my second post on a series of four that I have on abalone. There is no uni in this soup, although I admit I had some uni shooters while I was making it (uni, quail egg, chopped mint, chopped green onion, a dash of mirin, a dash of yuzu and a dash of [...]
Introduction
This is the first of a series of 4 posts where I attempt to successfully combine abalone and uni (sea urchin). My goal here was to integrate them in harmony and to make at least 3 or 4 completely different preparations with both ingredients.
Previous posts here will explain how I became such an uni [...]
Two weeks ago my wife and I had the chance to attend a cooking demonstration from Chef Masaharu Morimoto at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley.
I first knew of Chef Morimoto as one of the original Iron Chefs in the Food Network show Iron Chef [...]
Do I even need to say anything?
This is a 3 1/2″ center cut of USDA Prime filet mignon cooked sous vide in bay leaf butter at 130F for 1 hour, crowned with a generous slice of Sonoma Foie Gras cooked sous vide at 135F for 32 minutes, both [...]
In 2004, my home state of California approved a law that will ban foie gras production and sale in the state starting in July 1st, 2012.
In a way, it was pretty obvious that this was going to polarize the dinner table in foodie upscale Northern California, where we pride ourselves of being [...]
In my previous post I explained how I became a fanatic of Japanese food and how my “proxy drug” was Uni. Well, my next step in this escalation was Ikura, or salmon roe (which was my hook to attempt molecular gastronomy spherification as I’ll discuss on future posts).
Ikura is particularly interesting to me because [...]
Uni is Japanese for Sea Urchin. Back in Chile we call them Erizos, and they are served in large plates with finely chopped onion, cilantro and lemon juice. That’s how I got to know and love them.
When I moved to the US, I realized that they are not very common at all, and the [...]
In the Pastafarian Heaven, there is a strip club and a beer volcano, but they forgot to tell you that this dish is what they have for dinner every night. I’m not kidding when I say this is probably one of the tastiest dishes I’ve ever [...]
As I like to say, I’m a vegetarian by proxy. I enjoy quality meat any day, and Asian-inspired beef dishes are some of my favorites. In fact, just two blocks away from my office in San Francisco, I’m lucky to have Charles Phan’s The Slanted Door, one of the best [...]
It’s very rare that a simple side dish would be highlighted as much as a main dish, but this one is worth it for two reasons: it tastes fantastic, and it’s ridiculously simple to do.
This dish comes straight from Grant Achatz’ Alinea cookbook (page 357), one of the best cookbooks out there when [...]
I’m a big fan of raw oysters, in particular Drake’s Bay, Kumamoto, Tomales Bay and all the Hog Island varieties. However, I came across this blog a while ago where the author cooks them sous vide at 118 F for 20 minutes, which is one of the parametric measurments mentioned [...]
Introduction
Pheasant is a game bird that can be obtained in specialty stores from commercial farmers. This particular one we got from Mill Valley Market was organic and free range.
In spite of its small size, the meat has a very intense and deep flavor, and the bird seems to be more muscular [...]
Description
Rabbit is a sustainable, local and mostly organic protein that seems unappreciated and undervalued by the general population in the US. I can certainly understand the issue when rabbits are adopted as pets, and like most people, I do find rabbits cute as much as the next person.
However, in the European and Latin [...]
For this Halloween, I wanted to create some creepy-looking (but delicious) meal for my wife Kimberly and I, that I could start at 5 PM and have ready by 7:30 PM without too much work, but yet, making it interesting.
I settled for duck breast, as it has an intense red color when cooked sous [...]
