Well, it finally happened. After nearly a year of being a skeptical observer Chef Chris Gesualdi dragged me kicking and screaming into the big, scary world of Hydrocolloids. After poking and prodding around for a bit I realized something — it turns out it’s not so scary after all.

Hydrocolloids …

Foods that have been properly prepared by cooking ‘en sous vide‘ can be magical. Sous-vide, the cooking method itself, is not magic. The cooking process for sous-vide is mostly unattended, but doing it right requires as much attention and practice as any other method.

When it comes to cooking …

It’s Super Bowl week and I find myself thinking less about the match-up on the field and more about what I’m going to eat during the game. Recently I’ve been working on the Ultimate Make-at-Home Buffalo Wings. It’s the perfect recipe for your own Super Bowl party, guaranteed not …

ICE‘s first official class on sous-vide cooking is just one month away. Now that our sous-vide curriculum has a foundation of really solid technique, I’ve begun to introduce some of the methods to my students whenever we have a few extra moments in class. This week we worked on short …

If you stick your head into any classroom here at ICE you’ll see instant read thermometers crammed into the sleeve pockets of nearly every culinary arts student in the room. But peek into the kitchen of any of the nation’s top restaurants and you’ll see far fewer, in fact you …

What makes an attractive plate?

Seems like an easy question, but the more you think about the answer, the more complicated it becomes. After all, who’s to say what is or isn’t attractive? While beauty does lie in ‘the eye of the beholder,’ there are certainly ways of putting food …

Sometimes looking for answers in the kitchen leads me to more questions than I started with. I love it when that happens.

Like with my most recent round of sous-vide testing on lamb legs. Specifically yogurt-marinated, grilled lamb legs. Last week, my wife grilled yogurt marinated lamb for dinner… in …

We make our living behind the stove. Day-in, day-out chefs sweat it out in the kitchen, ensuring that others are well-fed and having a great time at the table. So you would think that on their day off chefs would stay far away from the kitchen and the thought of …

We made our way down the hall of an empty schoolhouse, shouts of Italian, then laughter followed by more shouting echoed through the hall. The men on the other side of the wall were either about to rip each other’s throats out or in middle of the funniest story ever …