The Elevated Culinary Edit

Fresh out of high school, a pastry chef told me to “learn to steal with the eye.” It took practice with laminated dough—and later, seven-sided tourné potatoes—to understand the value of that advice.  Fresh out of high school, I began my apprenticeship at an airline catering company where we made our own puff pastry and croissant dough amongst other things. It was there, in the temperature-controlled pastry room, that one of the pastry chefs gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten. Learn to steal with the eye. I took those words seriously. I watched how the chefs worked, asked questions and wrote things down. I tried to remember the details, including mixing times, the number of folds a dough should get, how they handled the dough and what they looked for as they worked.  There’s a certain kind of excitement and confidence that comes over you when you see others doing something with expert precision over and over again. It’s almost as if your hands are itching to give ...

A cup of flour can vary in weight depending on how it's filled. Weighing makes your baking formula easier to repeat, but upgrading your scale only makes sense when the one you own gets in the way. During my years as an apprentice chef, I learnt one of the most important tools available to the professional chef is the kitchen scale. In an industry where precision matters as a way of life, it’s crucial for maintaining high standards and controlling food cost. For the serious home cook, the kitchen scale is just as valuable.  Baking demands accuracy, but the need for exact weight matters well beyond pastry. I've used weight for charcuterie, menu costing, production planning and scaling food from an individual preparation all the way up to a 500-person gala dinner. Once the quantity gets larger, small inconsistencies stop being charming. Weight makes a formula easier to scale proportionally without adding the uncertainty of how firmly someone packed a cup.

Excellent home pizza does not automatically require a dedicated oven. The real question is when very high heat, short bake times and larger outdoor capacity justify the space. I’ve loved pizza for as long as I can remember, and I’m fairly sure Garfield had something to do with it. As a kid, I loved Garfield. Garfield loved pizza, so naturally I decided pizza was worth loving too. It probably wasn’t the most rigorous piece of culinary reasoning I’ve ever done, but the habit stuck. What changed when I became a chef wasn’t the enthusiasm. It was what I started paying attention to. Pizza stopped being simply something I wanted to eat and became something I wanted to understand: the dough, the heat, the way the base cooks, the way the rim expands and colours, and why two pizzas made from almost the same ingredients can eat completely differently.

A chef’s knife should suit the way you actually cook. Here’s how weight, balance, blade shape and maintenance determine fit—and where the WÜSTHOF Classic 8-inch makes sense. What Makes a Chef’s Knife Worth Keeping? A chef’s knife can be perfectly sharp, beautifully made and expensive enough to make you nervous, and still feel completely wrong once you start using it. That’s why I think choosing one has much less to do with finding the knife that wins somebody else’s comparison and much more to do with how it behaves in your hand. Weight, balance, blade shape and handle geometry all change the way a knife feels once you get beyond the first few cuts and start doing actual prep.

Stainless steel is not the easiest surface for every food. Its value appears when browning, fond, deglazing and pan sauces matter more than effortless release I think that some pans are useful because food releases from them easily, while others are useful because, it doesn’t until the right moment. If I’m cooking eggs, I’ll usually reach for a small nonstick pan. French omelettes, soft scrambled eggs and fried eggs all benefit from a surface that gives them very little to fight against. But if I’m searing a thick steak, a pork chop, skin-on chicken thighs or mushrooms—particularly when I want to build a sauce afterwards—I’m much more likely to reach for stainless steel. The difference isn’t about one pan being more serious or more professional than another. It’s about what I need the surface to do. With stainless, a little controlled sticking can be useful. It helps build colour on the food and leaves behind the browned deposits that can become the base of a pan sauce. That’s where st...

Good cookware storage is not about fitting the most pans into a cabinet. It is about making the cookware you actually use easier to reach, return and cook with. There’s a particular kind of cupboard that looks perfectly organized right up until you need something from it. All the pans fit, they’re neatly nested, the lids have been squeezed into whatever space is left, and the door closes without a fight. Then you decide to fry an egg and, naturally, the frying pan you actually use is at the bottom. Out comes the stockpot, then the sauté pan, then another frying pan you apparently own but rarely use. You retrieve the one you wanted, rebuild the stack and get on with breakfast. Nothing bad has happened. You’ve lost twenty seconds and perhaps muttered something unkind at a saucepan. But if some version of that happens every time you cook, the cupboard isn’t working particularly well. That’s what matters to me with cookware storage. I’m less interested in whether everything technically fit...