On our final day in Florence – a Sunday, we decided to explore the portions of the city situated across the river and away from the main attractions. We meandered down the streets drawn by steeples in the distance. As we turned the corner, in the courtyard behind the Santo Spirito Church we found an…
My love for capers slowly creeped up on me, a lot I imagine like those relationships where the couple start out as friends, and then realize they have something more in common, and soon amore. What are they? Capers are the unripened green flower buds of the Capparis spinosa (close kin to the cabbage family),…
So What is Miso? Miso is a Japanese fermented soybean paste made with soybeans, rice or barley, salt, and water. An all-purpose seasoning with a rich, hearty, often meatlike flavor and aroma. Miso can be used (like a meat stock or bouillon) in the preparation of soups, sauces, gravies, dips, dressings, and many other…
As I touched on in a previous post, salt is commonly obtained in one of two ways, from the sea or mined, and those methods go back millennia. Rock salt occurs in vast beds of sedimentary minerals, the last reminder of dried up lakes and seas. In the United States and Canada extensive underground beds.…
I love salt. As I child I considered pretzels mini salt licks and would suck on them until all the salt coating the outside disappeared, and only then would I consider eating those pretzels, or not. But, I have to say when the salt mania struck the culinary world with a vengeance, I stood on…
I had no plans to write about my experience at the Fancy Food Show that recently took place in San Francisco; I intended to incorporate what I discovered in future posts, but after receiving many requests to identify what I tried, I reconsidered. After all, is not food something of an ambassador of a county’s…
The history of soy sauce is a bit like the sauce itself, kind of murky. What is consistent is that the precursor to soy sauce is something called jiang. Jiang was a method of preservation popular with the prehistoric people of Asia involving preserving meat and fish with salt. This process produced a bi-product, a…
A recent post on Hungarian paprika hinted at the possibilities of paprika’s use expands beyond the political confines of Hungary. The bright red colour of ground paprika leaves a lasting impression for anyone visiting the spice markets from Morocco to Turkey to Iraq to Northern India. In these regions, the spice is prized as much for its…
I’d been cooking with fish sauce for a while and knew well its potency and pungency, but until I broke a bottle and liberally doused myself and had to suffer through folks quickly backpeddling to give me “breathing space” did I really get it – this stuff is strong – really, really, strong! No wonder the Vietnamese say…
Fish sauce are ubiquitous even though we may not always be aware of where they pop up – take Worcestershire sauce for example, or the Italian Colatura di Alici. In Asia, these sauces are considered core components in cooking and the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam all have their own versions of this wonderful condiment. …
