Michael Barrett @ Abouthalf.com

A friend of mine told me about a technique he had heard of for cooking hamburgers. The basic idea is that you cook your burger on a bed of kosher salt to create a salty crust on the outside of the meat. I thought this sounded like something I should try, so one day for [...]

Recently I admonished the Twitters to fear my salmon log. While perhaps laden with entendre, this does capture a bit of the prep-work I did over the last day and a half catering a friend’s bridal shower. I knocked off of work early to go shopping. I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing food [...]

I’ve wanted to try out sous-vide cooking methods for a while now. Once the technique was written up in the New York Times a few years ago, it has become the next big thing among home chefs. There are now home sous-vide ‘water ovens‘ which are within the price range of your average yuppie, but [...]

I was recently directed to this article by (national treasure) Roger Ebert: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/11/the_pot_and_how_to_use_it.html In it, Mr. Ebert writes about the humble, yet powerful, rice cooker. I had always shunned rice cookers. When people would talk about how great their rice cooker was I would snark “I have a rice cooker. It’s also called a ‘pot’. [...]

I’ve been learning about baking bread. This all started by reading (most of) the book Ratio – which is a fantastic book about the fundamentals of cooking. I bought the Kindle version of this book for my iPhone so I could read it on the train – which is great – but it’s also horrible [...]

Recently a friend of a friend generously invited me (and my friend) to join for a whisky tasting at his place. We each brought a bottle or two and our host took a stab at arranging our whiskies from sweet to peaty – we began with a couple of bourbons, moved to some Irish whiskies, [...]