Round Up - Recipes, Links, and Recommendations

Korean Pantry Staples, A Cauliflower Recipe, 80/20 Cooking Updates, and more

Jan 09, 2025

Happy New Year, everyone!

I’ve been doing a ton of cooking over the holidays and have a backlog of articles and recipes I’m excited to publish this year.

I’m also planning a trip to Japan later this year— I’ll be using one of my favorite food travel books Rice, Noodle, Fish as a guide, but if anyone has specific Japan recommendations, please pass them along!

With that, let’s get into a few things I’ve been enjoying recently!

Myles

80/20 Cooking

If you’ve followed this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that I launched a cohort course in 2023 called 80/20 Cooking.

I’ve been working on a self-paced version of the course that’s a minimalist guide to learning the fundamentals of cooking. It consists of 12 lessons (a mix of written, photo, and video content covering the most important cooking concepts) and 15 recipes (technique-driven dishes designed to help you put the concepts in the lessons into practice). There will also be a Telegram group for you to ask questions and get feedback, and I’ve also built a custom AI chatbot into the course so that you can ask questions and get real-time answers about the lessons and practice recipes.

This course is focused on helping you master the highest-leverage skills in cooking. Here’s how I described some of those recently on Twitter:

1. Being present and paying attention to your senses. Great chefs cook based on taste, smell, touch, feel, and sound— not instructions in a recipe.
2. Learning how to use salt. It’s the most important ingredient in cooking and is the tool we use to bring out flavor in food.
3. Learning how to use acidity properly, and especially learning about the relationship between acid and fat (acid “cuts through” fat and balances its richness). Acid and salt are two sides of the same coin and together build and balance flavor.
4. Understanding different types of heat (direct, indirect, wet, dry) and how they affect food. As well as understanding Maillard and the relationship between moisture and browning.
5. Thinking in terms of techniques (individual actions that produce a specific result) and methods (specific combinations of ingredients and techniques). When you know these, you can string them together to create lots of dishes with lots of room for customization and no need for specific recipes.

All of these (and much more) are covered in the course. If you go through all of the material, you’ll have really good command of how to cook well, as well as a bunch of really solid, customizable dishes in your repertoire.

I’m putting the final touches on the course over the next couple of weeks. If you want to get an email when it goes live, you can subscribe for updates here!

High-Quality Beef Tallow

I’ve been saying for a long time that there’s room in the market for a high-quality, premium beef tallow brand. If you go to any nice grocery store, you’ll see tons of olive oils with beautiful branding, information on their sourcing, and single-origin offerings. Beef tallow is one of the best cooking oils, and there are only a couple of brands focused on quality.

Recently my friend Anthony launched a brand called Lineage Provisions that offers a regenerative, grass-fed and finished beef tallow that’s tested to be free of glyphosate and other contaminants. Their other products are fantastic, as well.

Fond, a bone broth company I really like, also just launched a line of regenerative beef tallow and pork lard. They have some cool flavored options, which is something I haven’t seen before.

If you cook with tallow as much as I do, I highly recommend checking out both.

The Best Coffee Mug

My mom got me this amazing double-walled glass coffee mug for Christmas, and I love it. If you’re a serious coffee appreciator like myself, I highly recommend picking one up. It’s got a beautiful design, keeps the coffee nice and warm, and (unlike some metal or ceramic mugs) glass doesn’t impart any flavor. This one from Chemex has a super cool look, but Fellow makes a nice version, as well.

Korean Pantry Staples

I’ve talked before here about my love for a brand called Queens SF that makes a bunch of artisanal Korean pantry staples. Their gochujang is the best I’ve ever had, and their chojang is incredible, as well. They’re not for sale on their website unless you’re local to SF, but you can check their stockists to see if they’re sold anywhere close to you.

Recently I was at a store here in San Diego and someone recommended I try another Korean pantry brand called Potluck. I picked up some of their ssamjang and I’ve been blown away by it. I’ve been making a simple braised beef, using either ssamjang or a mix of ssamjang and chojang in the braising liquid, and it’s amazing.

Roasted Cauliflower with Creamy Salsa Macha Sauce

This is a recipe I’ve been riffing on a bunch recently. It works great with cauliflower, broccoli, or Romanesco cauliflower. There’s been a ton of those at my local farmer’s market, so I’ve made this quite a few times. You can either toss the vegetables in the sauce like I do, or just use it as a dipping sauce for any kind of roasted vegetable.

If you want to get fancy, you can make both the mayo and salsa macha from scratch, or just buy a good store-bought version (I really like Chosen Foods for avocado oil mayo).

Ingredients

2 heads of cauliflower, broccoli, or Romanesco cauliflower
2/3 cup mayo
2/3 cup salsa macha
1 lime
salt
olive oil
red onion
cilantro

Process

Pre-heat your oven to 425°F
Mix together the mayo, salsa macha, juice of 1/2 of a lime, a bit of lime zest, and salt in a small bowl. Mix, taste, and adjust as needed with more salt or lime.
Cut the cauliflower into small florets. Toss with a little bit of olive oil and salt, and then spread them out on a sheet tray with plenty of room so they don’t steam.
Roast in the oven for 20-30 minutes until they’re cooked through and lightly charred.
Toss the roasted cauliflower in a bowl with some of the sauce until it’s well-coated.
Plate and top with diced red onion and cilantro.