I’ve been on a bit of pizza kick this month, and that’s been manifesting in me turning everything that could plausibly be a pizza into one. I stared off with sourdough. A good friend gave me a ball of homemade mozzarella, and I knew immediately it was destined to melt and blister on top of a pan pizza. I’d made sourdough pan pizza before, but I’ve always done something fancy with it. Read More…

This follow-up to the fermented fresno peppers has been a long time coming. A lot has happened since we last checked in: The peppers finished their ferment. Their brine was extracted. The garlic and peppers were pureed and became hot sauce, pepper paste, and pepper flakes. The hot sauce became buffalo sauce for some Super Bowl wings. Let’s get into it! Processing the Peppers A few weeks ago on the 24th, I cracked open the jar of peppers and strained out all the solids. Read More…

Earlier this month I encountered a recipe for socca (chickpea pancakes) with a chickpea and fennel salad atop it. It was the salad that originally caught my eye, but in the end it turned out that the pancake was the star. Shortly after that first experience I made them a few more times, distilling a recipe from the combined advice of the internet. Chickpea Pancakes Since I discovered these, they’ve become habitual: I keep chickpea flour on hand at all times, and I make these when I can’t think of anything else to make. Read More…

Time for some updates on the state of the denizens of the Fermentery! Fermented Peppers The peppers are coming along well so far, but they’re not quite done yet. I want to let this batch go for three weeks. Expect a report on the 24th. Garlic Dill Pickles My dill pickles turned out better than I could have expected. They softened a bit more than I would have preferred, so maybe the next batch will have some additional tannic elements (2 fresh bay leaves instead of 1 dried, perhaps). Read More…

Towards the end of last week I found myself with a little time to spare and running low on several of the pickles that I like to keep on hand. So I took a walk down to the market and brought home a bounty of different vegetables to start working on some old favorites and some new experiments. Fermented Peppers One of the first videos in Bon Appetit’s It’s Alive web series that captured my attention was the fermented pepper sauce. Read More…

This year I decided to host a small get-together on New Year’s Day to give a few friends an opportunity to recover from the night before by playing some casual board games and enjoying some good food. I’ve long felt that the best possible hangover food is shakshouka: eggs poached in a tomato, chickpea, and pepper sauce. It’s a little spicy, it’s got some bright acidity and a little smokiness, and it’s high in protein. Read More…

I’ve been a fan of panettone for about as long as I’ve been aware of its existence. What’s not to love? A soft, sweet, buttery enriched bread dough studded with candied citrus peel and dried fruits. It’s everything you wish fruitcake was. And yet it always seemed like one of those things that were just inaccessible—”people who make panettone have been working years on their techniques, maybe just leave it to the pros? Read More…

I recently found myself in posession of more squashes and root vegetables than I knew what to do with. In particular, I had around a metric ton of parsnips because I love them and I was sure I’d find something to do with them. At the same time, I found myself lamenting the lack of Waffle House in the Pacific Northwest. Sure, we’ve got diners—I can get a good waffle or a good fried egg—but nowhere else serves Waffle House hash browns. Read More…

I’d been thinking about making miso ever since first seeing the miso epsiode of It’s Alive. The most intriguing thing about the process is that it yields tamari—a type of soy sauce—as a byproduct of its fermentation. So while making some miso would be a months-long process, I could enjoy the fruits of it continuously throughout the process, and even have a view into the evolution of the flavor. The other interesting aspect of the whole thing is that the process can be done with any beans, so I could potentially make chickpea miso and tamari (soy-free soy sauce! Read More…

It all started with an innocent Slack message: Challenge accepted. Now obviously I couldn’t just let that continue to not exist (and realistically it probably did already exist, but I couldn’t be bothered to search for it). And if I was going to make a caramel filling for scones, I was going to make some dulce de leche—it’s got the right level of viscosity to stay in the center, and it fulfills the “roasty” requirement. Read More…

Okay, so I had some friends coming over, a big slab of pork belly I needed to use, and quite a lot of kimchi. The actual solution to this problem was probably to oven braise the belly and make sliders, using kimchi as a kind of slaw. But of course that’s not what I did. I had to go make it complicated. I’d been wanting to try braising pork belly sous vide for some time, and not content with generating only one dish to wash I decided to use my pressure cooker to make kimchi stew. Read More…