Short essays and notes on food, history, and the kitchen.
Where ideas live before they cool into a book.
- Recipe NoteMarch 17, 2026 · Recipes · 7 min
Bánh Mì
Not a sandwich — a textural argument. Crunch, fat, acid, and fresh herbs in deliberate sequence, where every component exists to maintain contrast and every layer has a structural job.
- NoteMarch 17, 2026 · Japanese Cooking · 5 min
Why Japanese Cooking Feels Quiet but Precise
From outside, Japanese cooking looks minimal: one bowl, three sides, a restrained palette. From inside, it is one of the most rigorously calibrated cuisines on earth. Both impressions are true.
- Kitchen ScienceMarch 17, 2026 · Sauces & BBQ · 5 min
Why Wine Changes a Sauce
Wine in a sauce does three things at once — acid, tannin, aromatic complexity — and most home cooks only ever notice the first of them. The other two are doing more work than the recipe ever admits.
- Kitchen ScienceMarch 16, 2026 · Kitchen Science · 5 min
Why Cutting Across the Grain Changes Texture
Slice a flank steak the wrong way and a tender cut becomes leather. Slice it the right way and the same piece of meat is suddenly something you would order again. The cow has not changed. The geometry of the bite has.
- Food HistoryMarch 15, 2026 · Food History · 3 min
Beer Was the Salary. It Made Perfect Sense.
In roughly 2450 BCE, the workers constructing the pyramids at Giza received a daily wage of approximately ten loaves of bread and four to five ceramic jugs of beer.
- Recipe NoteMarch 14, 2026 · Recipes · 6 min
Cơm Tấm (Vietnamese Broken Rice)
Broken rice is not a substitute for regular rice — it is a different geometry, a different surface area, a different sauce-absorption rate. Cơm tấm is built around that difference.
- Kitchen ScienceMarch 14, 2026 · Kitchen Science · 7 min
How to Balance Salt, Acid, Fat, and Umami
A dish that tastes 'off' almost always needs one of four specific adjustments, not more cooking. The diagnostic is older than the cookbook that named it.
- Kitchen ScienceMarch 13, 2026 · Kitchen Science · 4 min
Why Eggs Cook to Eleven Different Temperatures
An egg is not one ingredient. It is two proteins on different schedules, plus a yolk membrane with its own logic, and the gap between them is where every great egg dish lives.
- NoteMarch 12, 2026 · Japanese Cooking · 4 min
How to Make Dashi Without Overcomplicating It
A fifteen-minute stock that anchors Japanese cooking, treated by most Western books as if it required reverence. The kitchen ratio that survives the working week.
- Kitchen ScienceMarch 11, 2026 · Kitchen Science · 5 min
Emulsion: The Hidden Structure of Mayonnaise and Hollandaise
Mayonnaise and hollandaise look like opposites — one cold and stable on the counter, one warm and trembling on the stove. They are, structurally, the same sauce wearing two different coats.
- Recipe NoteMarch 11, 2026 · Recipes · 6 min
Gỏi Cuốn (Vietnamese Fresh Spring Rolls)
Rice paper hydration is a one-second window. Soak it for three and it becomes a problem; fold it while firm and it finishes softening around the filling as you roll. The assembly is the technique.
- Tools & GearMarch 10, 2026 · Tools & Gear · 5 min
The Microplane and the Modern Sense of Aroma
A tool invented for shaving wood quietly rewrote the way professional kitchens handle citrus, ginger, hard cheese, and anything else that hides its flavor inside a cell wall.
- Kitchen ScienceMarch 9, 2026 · Kitchen Science · 5 min
Browning, Burning, and the Line Between Them
The line between brown and burnt is about thirty seconds wide. The skill is not avoiding it but knowing which side to live on.
- Recipe NoteMarch 8, 2026 · Recipes · 6 min
Bánh Xèo (Sizzling Vietnamese Crêpes)
A rice flour batter with coconut milk, diluted and turmeric-yellow, cooked in very hot oil until it shatters. Bánh xèo is not a crêpe — it is a crisp shell of dried batter that happens to be thin.
- Food HistoryMarch 8, 2026 · Food History · 3 min
The Original Silicon Valley Had No Computers
In 1688, the institution that would eventually insure the Titanic, the Apollo moon missions, and the cargo holds of the British Empire was founded not in a bank, not on a trading floor, but in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house on Tower Stre
- Recipe NoteMarch 7, 2026 · Recipes · 4 min
Takoyaki
Takoyaki is a savory Japanese snack made by cooking a batter filled with diced octopus in a special molded pan.
- Kitchen ScienceMarch 6, 2026 · Kitchen Science · 5 min
The Logic of Mirepoix
Two parts onion, one part carrot, one part celery, slowly sweated in fat. It is a recipe so old it has forgotten it is a recipe — which is precisely why it still works.
- Food HistoryMarch 6, 2026 · Food History · 6 min
Why I Write About Food as Translation
The History × Food Translation series is not, as the title might suggest, a series about food. It is a series about how meaning moves between bodies, eras, and civilizations — and food turns out to be the cleanest available test case.
- Recipe NoteMarch 5, 2026 · Recipes · 8 min
Bún Chả (Grilled Pork with Rice Noodles)
The dipping sauce is the dish. Bún chả is a study in balancing four competing forces — sweet, sour, salty, sharp — without letting any one of them win.
- Kitchen ScienceMarch 5, 2026 · Kitchen Science · 4 min
How a Kitchen Scale Changes Everything: Why Pro Cooks Weigh, Not Measure
A cup of flour can weigh 110 grams or 160 grams depending on how you scoop it. Volume is the quiet lie at the heart of most Western recipes.