Fermentorship

If you came from old fermentorship, the main continuity is the name. My experiments will be contained and each issue will have reliable, vetted, useful information only. Fermented foods will show up only when they've really earned their place in my kitchen over the years and are easy and reliable to make without special tools or containers. If you didn't come from fermentorship I'm a chicago guy who cooks a lot. I was professionally trained once but have been out of the business for a while now.

Each issue will be on a theme, subject or type of food. You'll get a couple pages of information with what I know about making that food well. Then some tested recipes. I intend to avoid the cooking blog storytime trope but sometimes you just have a good one you know.

I'm going to print it on paper and put a stamp on it and mail it your house because that's what feels good right now. Getting mail you actually want is fun, stick it in your bag carry it around for a few days read it whenever. It's a different rhythm and it fits with food somehow.

I focus mainly on two distinct approaches: practical improvements to things you might already be making, or easily could. And technique-focused introductions to things that can be intimidating but are flexible and open a lot of options once you do get comfortable with them.

I mostly cook without recipes. I use them when learning a new dish or trying to understand a particular chef's interpretation of a specific food. The recipes I write down for myself are templates: the ratio and technique to execute a category of food. What you'll get is the recipe-template, along with an explanation of how I arrived at it, how I use it to branch into several different variants, and where you can start modifying it to suit your tastes and needs.

I won't be nagging you about mise or knife skills or seasonality or quality of olive oil. I will generally assume you have a kitchen you're comfortable in and a way you like to cook and eat. The goal is that you can easily incorporate these ideas and techniques into your cooking not adapt your cooking to my recipes.

A lot of the food I cook is vegetarian or vegan so I will point out the ways you can shift recipes along this axis. When meat is genuinely a necessary part of a dish I let it stand as is, I don't have a vegan bolognese recipe to share.

I will not lie to you about cooking times but I will give you the hacks and prep break points. It takes 50 minutes to caramelize onions unless you use the baking soda trick but then the texture is paste: fine for sauce not for sandwiches. We will navigate the tradeoffs.

No email no web, issue 1 mails July 2026.