You Could Pickle Anything in This And It Would Taste Marvelous

A delicious formula for making homemade pickles

Pickling vegetables is something that I’ve yet to get real excited about. Of all the "DIY" food movements, it’s one of the last to catch on. Why, I don’t know. Probably because a slab of homemade bacon is a lot more exciting than a jar of tangy vegetables. Which is no mark against the vegetables. Most anything next to a slab of bacon is bound to lose terribly.

But actually, pickling is...

The Kimchi Contest Results

And the best kimchi award goes to...

After a tasting of both kimchi projects, the results are in. We have a winner!

It wasn't easy to decide: there were things about Nick's kimchi that were better, and things about Blake's Kimchi that were better. We went back and forth about who should take the title. We tasted, waited, tasted again.

First, the recipes. Though our recipes were similar, there were some crucial diffe...

Homemade Kimchi Contest, Part II

Nick gives kimchi his best shot.

Though Blake was thrilled to jump right into this Kimchi-making process , I dragged my feet the whole way. It's not that I don't love kimchi. That's far from the case . It's just that I've been really happy with the jars of kimchi I've been buying from the Korean market. Uncovering the ways of kimchi, however enlightening the process may be, would sort of remove the magic from the who...

Homemade Kimchi Contest, Part I

Blake tries to make kimchi.

Nick and I are currently in the middle of a fierce kimchi-making contest , in which we've both set off to do our own research and exploration, make a batch of the best kimchi we know how to, and submit it for a taste test. Neither of us have made kimchi before, but we both love the taste of it dearly. Tired of paying for it at the store and intoxicated by the possibility that homemade kimc...

In Search of Dashi and Perfect Miso Soup

A better way to make Japanese soup.

Turns out, once you have all the ingredients, the process is rather straight forward and won't take longer than 30 minutes or so.  And since most of the ingredients besides the tofu are pantry items, whipping up a new batch of miso soup in the future should be a breeze.

Bonito smells like, well, dried fish, but it looks more like pencil shavings. They are the body behind the miso, and make the...