"You could give me dog-shit wheat, and I could still make it taste great." —Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] Just as tomatoes have spent the last few hundred years getting the flavor slowly sucked out of them, in favor of more convenient attributes like uniformity in size and color and resistance to the rigors of transcontinental shipping, wheat has undergone a similar process. Unlike tomatoes, which, discounting any Native American influence, have been bred for a mere few hundred years, wheat, a staple grain since the earliest civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, has had a 10,000-year breeding program. Modern wheat is designed for high yields, and to produce flours with consistently high protein contents. In the meantime,... More

[Photographs: Cooking Issues] Leave it to mad scientisty chef Dave Arnold to think, forget the oven, I'm going to prepare my Thanksgiving turkey in a double immersion circulator. Here's how it worked, as explained on the French Culinary Institute's blog Cooking Issues: He filled a stock pot with duck fat and butter, and jammed the cavity with herbs. He then used two circulators set at 65°C. A hose was attached to one of the circulator's spouts and pushed into the cavity of the bird so that hot fat was not only circulated on the outside of the bird, but also injected into the center. It was circulated for two hours, chilled in a blast freezer, and then packed it... More

My skål shot finally went up on the French Culinary Institute's blog Cooking Issues. It's part of Dave Arnold and Nils Norén's Skoal/Skål Project. I'm in good company. Cheers!... More

Alan Richman, "GQ" magazine food writer. Visiting Sweden? Hope to impress a Swede? Just want to appear worldly and stylish? The French Culinary Institute's Cooking Issues blog has been posting an ongoing series of photos it calls the Skål!/Skoal! Project that can school you in one small social custom. The series includes such food-world luminaries as Jeffrey Steingarten, Harold McGee, Wylie Dufresne, and Alan Richman (above), who has perhaps the most extreme skål to date. More pix after the jump.... More