"Can you eat those?" I was in a skiff with chef Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, floating on the Peruvian Amazon. While ...

It’s difficult to think of a product more symbolic of agrarian life than hay. As someone who has spent a fair ...

Cooks are not complicated creatures. A steady stream of in-depth articles, books, and television shows have attempted to ferret out our ...

There are times when Bay Area renditions of traditional European foods make me pine for the old country. Aioli is not ...

These are confusing days in the world of food. Michael Pollan recently reported in the New York Times Magazine that Americans have ...

Corn, once considered a wholesome vegetable that brought to mind the long, lazy days of summer, has become a popular scapegoat ...

Persistence is a virtue. Unless, of course, you’re talking about weeds: The biological ability of some plants to ceaselessly re-create themselves ...

Buried deep in the website of El Bulli, Ferran Adria’s legendary restaurant, is a revolutionary declaration: “All products have the same ...

  When it comes to describing food, the word simple is too often the default adjective of the simple-minded. In cooking, outward simplicity happens ...

Of all of the changes wrought by the industrialization of our food supply, one has gone mostly unnoticed: We’ve forgotten how ...

When I first moved to California from the East Coast in the late ’80s, “Going Back to Cali” filled the airwaves ...

Sweet is not a flavor. Like salty or sour, it describes a sensation, not a particular taste. Honey has a flavor, as does maple syrup—and ...

Few things capture summer's carefree spirit like a perfect piece of fruit. Eating berries off the vine, still warm from the ...

When a friend introduced me to a natural perfumer named Mandy Aftel a few years ago, I had no idea how ...

It's often been said that chefs must be a little crazy. Those who advance this theory usually cite the willful pursuit ...

Cooking isn’t the kind of job you leave at the office. Friends are often surprised by the frequency with which I cook ...

If there were a summer produce category called “Most Likely to Disappoint,” I would nominate heirloom tomatoes. Their bright colors, quirky ...

If you’re looking for a sign of the culinary times, you could do no better than the one prominently displayed here ...

Recently, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen, watching her toss a salad with a pair of restaurant-issue metal tongs. I ...

Sometimes epiphanies come in strange packages. Mine came swathed in parchment paper, handed to me by a cheesemaker friend at the ...

It’s hard to have a conversation about wine these days without hearing the French word terroir. Derived from a Latin root ...

Most people think of cooking as a creative profession. But when you (that is, I) spend your days yelling at your ...

I never thought that I could love a soy product. Admiration I could probably muster, certainly respect. But infatuation? Not a ...

I've never been much for technology, so when I bought a car recently that came with GPS, I imagined that the ...

Pig's feet at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco? It's true. Beef cheeks at the French Laundry? Absolutely. Duck testicles at Del ...

Cooks are by nature creatures of habit, especially when it comes to eating. For the many years that I have been ...

I was talking to my friend Eric Lau recently as he drove to Santa Monica, Calif., for dinner. He spoke happily ...