There is no shortage of things tearing us apart. Gay versus straight. White versus black. The Constitution, for God’s sake, has become a Rorschach test. I consider myself a reasonable man. Generous in my sympathies. Willing to sit across from almost anyone and find common ground.

Almost.

There is one flaw I cannot get past. I don’t even want to try. Not politics. Not religion. Not the various catastrophic choices people make in their personal lives, which are frankly legion. But there is something more fundamental than any of that. Something that reveals a person’s true nature with a clarity that a psychologist never could. A detail about a person that once you know it, you are done. The generosity simply drains out of you and it does not come back.

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It never surfaces in public. That is the insidious part. People keep it hidden, whether from shame or simple obliviousness is unclear. It emerges only in private, in homes, among people who feel comfortable enough to drop the performance. Som…

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You made goat milk yogurt. You opened the maker. It poured. Most people decide right there that they failed. They didn’t. Goat milk yogurt is supposed to be thin. What’s in the jar is chemistry, not error, and it happens to be the best possible start for a frozen dessert.

The runny is the milk, not you. Casein makes yogurt thick. It’s the protein that knits into a gel as the milk ferments, trapping water inside the network. Goat milk carries less alpha-s1 casein than cow milk does. Less of that protein means a looser net, and a looser net holds less water, so the yogurt stays soft. Fat does the rest. Goat milk fat globules are smaller and stay suspended through the milk. Good for digestion. Good for mouthfeel. Bad for structure. The gel never firms up the way cow milk’s does.

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The fermentation itself runs like any other. Bacteria eat lactose, make lactic acid, the acid drops the pH, the proteins coagulate. In goat milk the matrix…

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The tomato is a fruit. This is the kind of fact people deploy to seem clever at dinner parties. It is also true. And those people are not clever. We learned this at Holy Spirit in the 6th grade.

Botanically, the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is a berry. It grows from a single flower’s ovary and carries its seeds inside, which is the entire definition. By every standard a botanist recognizes, it is a fruit. The United States Supreme Court disagreed. In Nix v. Hedden (1893), the Court ruled the tomato a vegetable for tariff purposes, on the reasoning that people eat it with dinner and not for dessert. Law and politics beat science. They usually do. The ruling was Trumpian before Trump, and before RFK Jr.

History does repeat itself.

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The tomato belongs to the Solanaceae, the nightshades. The name sounds sinister and the family earns it. Its members include the potato, eggplant, pepper, and tobacco, alongside deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), which will kill you. The plants produce alkal…

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Pizza is the most popular food on earth and the most frequently ruined. Most of what goes wrong happens before a single topping lands, because pizza is a vehicle for sauce and toppings and the vehicle is dough. Get the dough right and the rest is assembly. Get it wrong and you have condiments on cardboard. Good dough disappears underneath what it carries, which is the entire trick.

So start there. Pizza dough is four ingredients. Flour, water, salt, yeast.

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Wheat flour contains two proteins, glutenin and gliadin. Add water and they bond into gluten, the elastic network that traps gas during fermentation and steam in the oven. More protein means more gluten potential. Italian 00 flour (the “00” refers to grind fineness, not protein content, a fact butchered by most pizza blogs) usually runs 11 to 12.5% protein. American bread flour runs 12 to 14%. All-purpose lands around 10 to 11%, though King Arthur’s clocks in at 11.7%, which is why it punches above its category. Protein dictates style…

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Tuna Noodle Casserole is a paradoxical dish. If you go for the standard tuna noodle casserole with the can of Campbell’s it’s white trash food right up there with spray cheese. Cream of mushroom soup. Noodles cooked to mush. Crushed Ritz on top. The whole thing arrives in a 9x13 pan like a war crime.

The dish has good bones. Pasta, fish, dairy, salt, crunch. A credible architecture. The original just leans on convenience products that were never very good and when mixed somehow get worse. Strip those out, and the casserole is worth eating.

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Start with the tuna, because most of what’s wrong with the dish starts there. Buy good water-packed tuna. Wild Planet or Safe Catch. The supermarket value pouches will not do. Good water-packed tuna is firm, pink, and tastes like fish that lived a full life. It also has the virtue of not bringing competing oil to the casserole. This is key. The oil is a deal breaker. The sauce is the only fat that belongs here.

And the oil is not a passive passenger. A…

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I’ve been cooking and taking pictures of my meals for years. I love food and the science of cooking. Welcome to my new series on both.

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Game meat has gone bourgeois, which is comic, because the new tech-monied country set (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk) cannot actually cook it. I cannot imagine they cook much of anything without their iPads open. The recipe is on YouTube. The technique is on YouTube. The reassurance that they are doing it right is on YouTube. They will pause a video three times to confirm what “sear” means and twice more to decide between two nearly identical olive oils.

God I hate them.

This particular ilk is scared of meat. Real meat. Anything that does not arrive via FedEx with “Hello Fresh” on the box or on a white styrofoam tray sealed in plastic wrap, barcoded, expiration-dated, softly lit by fluorescent overheads. A real butcher store is a foreign country and the butcher himself is its customs officer. They walk in, they freeze, they walk out with chicken thighs. The barcode is as close to game as they care to get.

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For everyone else, here is the recipe. It assu…

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I am a very good cook. Not bragging. Statement of fact. I love good food and for years in college and grad school couldn’t afford it. So I learned to make it.

There are spectacular teachers online. Julia. Martha. The mad one Jamie @antichef. The rigorous ones (America’s Test Kitchen). And one of my favorites Nicole McLaughlin at AllRecipes. All worth your time.

But the hard boiled egg has broken them. Crackpot theories, Instagram folklore, and a collective failure to understand tenth grade chemistry and physics 101. Let me fix this.

First, the egg itself. A good egg has an orange yolk, not yellow. This is not a health argument. It’s a taste argument. Pasture-raised hens eat insects and greens. Those carotenoids (specifically xanthophylls) concentrate in the yolk and produce flavor compounds that factory eggs simply don’t have. Science. Also your mouth.

Now the problem. The membrane. Every egg has two of them, thin keratin-fiber layers sitting between the shell and the white. When a hard b…

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