Food

Food

Cooking and the curious stories food carries with it.

Cooking

Chef Fatty (Website) — Seattle cook Charles on weeknight Asian cooking — 175 recipes he's tested himself, written on the principle that a recipe should explain its own mechanism rather than just list steps.
  • Recipes (Reference) — the full index, sorted by noodles, rice, chicken, beef, pork, seafood, and sides.
  • The Wok Buying Guide (Article) — what a wok is actually built to do, and why a $17 carbon steel one is the same steel as a $189 one.
  • The Stir-Fry Sauce Formula (Article) — stir-fry sauce as four dials (salt, sweet, acid, aromatic) you learn to turn, instead of one recipe you follow.
  • Pork Chop Temperature (Article) — why 145°F beats the 160°F everyone was taught, and why pink pork stopped being dangerous.

Reference

  • FoodSubs (Reference) — a cooking encyclopedia of thousands of ingredients and kitchen tools across 17 groups (733 flavourings, 260 dairy entries, 161 pieces of equipment), each with pictures, synonyms, pronunciation, and substitutions given as a ratio — a teaspoon of Tabasco for an ounce of adobo sauce.

Dishes & histories

  • Moo shu pork (Article) — the northern-Chinese stir-fry whose name poetically renames its scrambled egg “sweet osmanthus blossoms,” dodging a taboo on the word “egg” during Confucian death-anniversary rites.

Reading

  • Gastronomica (Website) — UC Press’s quarterly “Journal for Food Studies,” with peer-reviewed essays treating food as a lens on culture, history, labour, and politics, from wine microbiomes to cultivated meat.