Technique is the first mastery and flavor is the second. So lets talk about what umami actually is, how it works and why once you understand it, you will be able to wield flavor with your pantry you never thought possible.

When I first started eating and cooking Japanese food, umami swirled around the cookbooks I read with no real explanation of how you get to it. It’s not simply saltiness, the Japanese Scientist who discovered it named is a “savory” taste. I call it “the taste that makes everything else taste better.” Countless cookbooks would explain it simply as “the fifth taste” behind salty, sweet, sour and bitter, but no one told me how to actually make it happen in my food. For a decade I thought umami was something only great chefs could conger.

Nope, its some very simple science.

Lets start with the basic mechanics of what umami is. It was defined by a Japanese scientist in 1913 as the “fifth taste.”

Read more

Here’s my case for why these five are absolutely worth your dollars and your fridge space:

Shio Koji - The Tenderizer + Flavor Elevator

This one’s a sleeper hit, I will never stop shouting about it. Quiet but transformational. Made from fermented rice, salt, and koji (a Japanese mold spore used in miso and soy sauce), it acts like a secret weapon in your fridge. A deeper dive HERE.

• Why it’s worth it: It does the job of salt, sugar, and umami all in one. One spoonful turns a blah chicken thigh into something incredible. Plus, it tenderizes like nothing else.

• Use it for: Marinades, sauces, salad dressings, glaze finishes. Sub it in wherever you’d normally season with salt it’s gentler, funkier, better.

What I buy:
- Liquid Shio Koji - what I use most
- Paste Shio Koji - the traditional option

Kombu - The Foundation of Umami

This dried sea kelp might look like a floppy piece of seaweed, but it’s a foundational flavor builder in Japanese cooking and your shortcut to depth in everything from soups to sauces.

• Why it’s worth it: It’s shelf-stable for a year or more. One strip makes a broth, infuses rice, or upgrades a pot of beans without lifting a finger.

• Add it too: Water to make dashi, cooking grains in the water, soups, and even soaking in soy sauce to make your own tsukemono (pickles).

What I buy:
- Kombu - large leaf

Shoyu (Japanese Soy Sauce)- The Backbone

Not all soy sauce is created equal. Japanese-style shoyu tends to be slightly sweeter and more balanced than its saltier Chinese counterparts. And it hits that umami note just right.

• Why it’s worth it: It’s a precision tool. You’re not just salting your food—you’re adding a layer of depth. Japanese shoyu is softer, rounder, more versatile.

• Use it for: Sauces, stir-fries, finishing glazes, marinades, soups. Once you taste the difference, you won’t go back.

What I buy:
- Usukuchi Soy Sauce - this is made for seasoning your food, like a salt
- Double Brewed Soy Sauce - this is the workhorse, stronger flavor

Mirin - The Balancer

Sweet rice wine (basically sake with a touch of sugar) that adds a low-key, caramel-like sweetness and helps sauces cling and glaze. It’s not sugar it’s complexity.

• Why it’s worth it: Mirin takes you from sharp to smooth. It balances salt, acid, and fat like a pro. A splash turns a harsh soy-based sauce into something elegant.

• Use it for: Sauces, marinades, broths, finishing veggies, stir-frying. And it’s shelf-stable—one bottle lasts ages.

What I buy:
- Hon-Mirin - miring is a low alcohol version of sake with more sugar for balance

Sake - The Brightener + De-Funker

Drinking sake is optional cooking with it is essential. Think of it like white wine with more umami. It lifts flavor, cuts richness, and makes proteins taste cleaner.

• Why it’s worth it: Sake neutralizes odors (great for fish), balances fat, and adds subtle depth. You’ll use it in small amounts, so it lasts.

• Use it for: Marinades, broths, quick pan sauces, or anywhere you’d use wine but want less acidity and more umami.

What to buy:
- Gekkeikan Junmai Sake is easy to find
- Sho Chiku Bai Sake is also readily available

Why These Together Are Next-Level

On their own? Strong.
Together? A full-on pantry system.
They layer into each other, build sauces without needing recipes, and turn leftovers into something you actually want to eat.

They’re the backbone of Japanese home cooking, but they’re not just for Japanese food. These are flavor infrastructure you’ll use them in pastas, roasts, stir-fries, grain bowls, dressings, even soups and stews.

Bottom Line:

They last. They do more. They make your food better.
And once they’re in your kitchen, you’ll stop reaching for 10 different ingredients and start building flavor like a pro with instinct, not instruction.

1. Flavor Bomb Efficiency

Use shio koji as a marinade:
1 tbsp per 1/2 lb of protein, marinate at least 30 min (up to overnight).
It tenderizes and seasons in one go.

2. Instant Umami

Build a finishing drizzle for veggies or grain bowls:
Shoyu + mirin + a splash of kombu dashi (see #6) in equal parts = sweet-savory magic.

3. Marinade Mastery

Fast & foolproof protein marinade:
Shio Koji (1 tbsp) + Sake (1 tbsp) + grated garlic or ginger (optional)
15–30 mins for fish, 2–4 hrs for chicken or pork.

4. Sauce Hack Gold (aka SSM)

Tare Sauce = Soy + Sake + Mirin
Ratio: 3:2:1 (Soy: Sake: Mirin)
Use for: grilled meats, rice bowls, stir-fries, or ramen eggs.
Simmer 5–10 minutes if you want it thicker or more developed.

5. Veggies Come Alive

Glaze finish for roasted/steamed veg:
Toss in 1 tsp shoyu + 1 tsp mirin per cup of cooked veg, optional sesame oil or chili crisp for flair.

6. Dashi Stock for noodles

5-Minute Kombu Broth:
2 cups water + 1 small (3-inch) piece of kombu
Let it sit cold for 15 mins (or heat gently for faster pull)
Finish with: 1 tsp shoyu + 1 tsp mirin

7. Balanced Salt, Not Just Saltiness

Sub shio koji where you’d usually salt:
Use half the salt volume and taste as you go. It’s mellow, funky, and makes flavors pop.

8. Make Boring Proteins Worth Eating

Glaze for quick pan-sear or broil:
Shoyu (1 tbsp) + mirin (1 tsp) + sake (1 tsp)
Brush on halfway through cooking for a glossy finish.

9. Gateway to Japanese-Style Cooking

Build a Donburi Sauce (for rice bowls):
3 tbsp soy + 1 tbsp mirin + 1 tbsp sake + pinch of sugar
Simmer 5 mins. Pour over rice + protein + egg.
Add pickles or greens if you’ve got ‘em.

You work in ratios here; 3-2-1, or 1:1, or a splash of this with a dash of that. Get the ratios in your muscle memory, and this stuff becomes second nature.

You got it; three one-pan, pantry-first frameworks using your shio koji / kombu / shoyu / mirin / sake crew. No recipes, just the bones. Let’s riff.

Each one is built for swapping, proteins, grains, veggies—whatever you’ve got. Want me to convert one of these into a meal prep system or freezer stash? Say the word.

enjoy!

Sarah

When I moved to Los Angeles after college, it was like a whole new world was opened up to me. Being from Columbia, Tennessee, and born in 1970, I was exposed to very little outside of my small Southern town when it came to food until I got out of college and got to LA. There’s really no better city in the world to be introduced to the rest of the world’s food. I don’t think there’s a single ingredient that I can think of that you can’t get somewhere in Los Angeles.

And that’s where it really started to click for me in my curiosity about food and cooking. First, it started with neighborhoods. Then it became about grocery stores unique to those neighborhoods. And then it became about ingredients. Ingredient-first cooking came very easily to me because my curiosity was so deep I just wanted to learn everything I could as fast as I could.

At this time, I was working in the entertainment industry, so weekends were all about food hauls and cooking like it was a sport. One of my favorite grocery stores in any country is a Japanese chain called Mitswa. It was right up the road from our house in Venice, and I was just mesmerized by this place. I had no clue what to do with much of the food and the ingredients available in that grocery store. But I started buying them anyway.

As fate would have it, on a camping trip with a bunch of school families, my husband and I met a young Japanese man whose name was Takashi, riding his bike down the West Coast of the United States and all the way to Argentina. Takashi ended up staying with us for two months, and he showed me how to use every single one of those ingredients. That’s how I got into Japanese food.

And in my tiny little kitchen in Venice, I absolutely would not live without a visual pantry to help me see what I had so that I could think and work through recipes in my head before I began. I created that pantry literally on a 6 ft by 8 ft wall using the Container Store Elfa system.

So before I even learned to really cook, my super-virgo ADHD personality needed a visual pantry. To many, this might be a cart before the horse kind of situation, but I would argue it’s the other way around. We’ve all become so barraged with recipes, so tied up in the notion that you have to have exactly this and exactly that to make something that’s delicious. I’m not saying that I don’t write recipes and I don’t use recipes. I’m just saying it’s not what made me a great cook.

I’ve tried to instill this concept in many of my girlfriends who are always saying, “I want to become a better cook.” If I could start a cooking school today, the first semester would be about the top ten techniques you need to know. The second semester would be about ingredients. Once you learn the basic techniques and the basic frameworks of dishes, that’s when you can really start to jam.

You can ask anyone who’s eaten at my house regularly, they’ve never had the same meal twice. And this is not because I don’t cook the same things. It’s because the way I cook is by using what I have and going ingredient first. Even if sometimes that ingredient is a steak, never in my life have I, two days back-to-back, had the same things in the fridge.

So this is not just an article about pantry. This is going to be an expanded portion of Obsessed that we’re going to build on for the next year. So now that I’ve introduced you guys to my pantry and to ingredient-first cooking, I am letting you in on just a few of the things that I think are essential in an ingredient-first kitchen. But let me preface with this; everything comes down to personal taste. If I recommend beans (which I will) and you don’t like beans, that’s cool! Doesn’t mean we can’t cook together.

Recipes are frameworks and visual pantry is ingredient-first cooking. That’s what we’re doing here.

Next week we start to dive deep, so this week I have two challenges for you:

1. Clean out and organize any pantry or drawers you have and make an inventory (yes it’s tedious, but you have an iphone, make it happen)

2. Choose one wild ingredient you have always wanted to try and drop it in the comments below

I will be taking those submissions and using them to show you guys my method and how I tackle ingredient first cooking.

So here are a few of my favorite things and a couple of PDFs to download and keep handy in the kitchen for yourself so you can build your visual pantry.

I have two PDFs for you today that you can download and print to keep in your kitchen.

1. ALWAYS HAVE ON HAND - this may seem basic, but it is for a reason.

2. ASIAN - THE LIQUID BACKBONE - I think this is a great place to start if you’re going to cook with me. Getting these flavors into your pantry and starting to play around with them will really accelerate your ingredient-first cooking.

Pantry Asian The Liquid Backbone

105KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Pantry The Basics Always Have On Hand

105KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

That’s it for this week. Albeit short, lots to think about…. till next week.

Sarah

So, in the spirit of AI transparency, I wanted to walk you guys through my process.

I run two restaurants. Over the course of the last few years, because of the sheer number of restaurants opening in Nashville and rising costs, it has no longer become profitable, and I work for free to run my restaurants and pay my staff. But it still takes up about 40 hours a week of my time. So I have decided to take my lived experience and share it here both as a source of income and a creative outlet for myself.

I have been asked to go from running a company with a marketing department to becoming the marketing department. I had to learn AI in order to get the work done. This may be incredibly unpopular with many of you, but I’m here to be honest. I am now able to run a marketing department that used to cost me $150,000 a year. I am now able to cross-check contracts and build budgets that used to cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyers and consultants. It’s amazing.

I have a very healthy relationship with AI. I use it as a CFO and as a CMO in my business, and as a partner to check facts and pull information the same way I would Google when I am writing for you here on this newsletter.

Like I said, AI may help me to get my thoughts into cohesive writing and in a timely manner, as I’ve promised you but A.I. has never made 700,000 gallons of stock or stood over a stock pot. That is me, and my lived experience, and there is no amount of A.I. or A.I. writing that can take that away. That is what I write about here.

None of us are here for the 1500th version of the turkey taco for Wednesday night. There many creators on Substack that will iterate on recipes for a quick weeknight meal. That’s not my jam. I am here to give you a fishing pole, not a fish, and that fishing pole has MANY interpretations.

I think you guys have started to learn that I am not all that interested in claiming ownership over recipes. I used to work in copyright law. You don’t pay for recipes here, your subscription is for my mileage in the kitchen, and my lived experience being share with you. I know that a recipe, as per the Library of Congress, is un copyrightable. I don’t consider myself an author. I consider myself a connector. A person with a tremendous amount of experience that I want share with others. That is what AI helps me and my wild ADHD to do here.

I have a open disclaimer in my About section stating exactly that I use AI to help me collate and form a newsletter based on my lived experiences and combined with pushing back against some of the ideas and norms that other people have on certain things.

I understand the panic for many people who make their living as authors, and I don’t have the answer to that. I felt this morning that it was really important that I spoke to all of you who have trusted me to be here and be honest about the fact that I have and will continue to use A.I. to help me express and collate what I believe to be still very valuable information if you want to cook with me.

My most recent post, A Cook’s Kitchen is available to subscribers to check for AI usage. Try it. Go to the AI scanner, and it will tell you that it was written 100% by AI. That is 100% wholly untrue. So do with that what you will. I hope you’ll stick around and we can continue to learn together.

Best,
Sarah

The cabinetry wasn’t very well thought out, there was no pantry, no hood, and I really didn’t like the countertops. But I had a limited budget and I had to make it work.

And because I didn’t have the dough to hire a designer and do a full install and a big reveal, I’m going to share this with you guys piece by piece because that’s how it’s happening. My goal with this post is to walk you through my thinking, give you all of my resources, and help you understand the why behind my decisions, even if your decisions are not the same.

In my first video last week about one measurement; thirty-two inches, the gap between my island and my range, and the comments turned into a renovation clinic. How tall are your counters? What’s on top of that island? Why not stainless? How did you vent the thing? Is the work triangle really dead?

So let me answer all of it here, at the table, the way I would if you were standing in my kitchen with a glass of wine while I got dinner going.

You have to understand one thing first: I’m not a designer. I’m a cook. Everything I know about a kitchen I learned standing in one — on a line, for hours at a stretch, moving the same few steps until my body stopped needing to think about them. That changes what you measure for. A designer measures for how a room photographs. A cook measures for the dish in her hands that needs somewhere to land.

Here’s what that difference actually looks like.

Measurements

Let’s start with the rule they keep trying to bury.

Every few months the design world announces that the kitchen work triangle is dead — the fridge, the sink, the stove, the three points you move between while you cook, supposedly replaced now by something called “zones.” One firm ran the headline “Top Designers Say the Work Triangle Is Out for 2026.”

It is not out. It is the oldest and truest measurement in the kitchen.

The triangle is just this: the three things your hands touch most, kept close enough that you can move between them without walking. The National Kitchen and Bath Association still publishes the spec, each leg of that triangle four to nine feet, all three legs adding up to no more than twenty-six. That number isn’t fashion. It’s the reach of a working body.

So why do designers keep declaring it dead? Because in a kitchen built big enough to photograph, the double island, the acres of counter — the triangle stretches past twenty-six feet and stops working. “Zones” is the workaround for a kitchen too large to cook in efficiently. It’s not a better idea. It’s a symptom. Every real cook still works the triangle; we just call it the line. The chef who tells you cooking is a “conveyor belt” — fridge to board to pan — is describing a triangle by another name.

Take counter height. Mine are thirty-six inches, all the way around — and here’s the part nobody expects: that’s the residential standard and the restaurant standard. Commercial prep tables run thirty-four to thirty-six. The pros and the catalog actually agree on this one, because a body bent over a cutting board is the same body whether it’s in my kitchen or on a line downtown. I kept thirty-six not because the catalog said so, but because this time the catalog happened to be right.

That’s the whole game with measurements. Some rules are inertia and some are earned, and a cook knows the difference. The triangle earned it. Thirty-six inches earned it. Forty-eight didn’t.

One more, because nobody counts it until it’s missing: landing area. The stretch of empty counter right beside the stove and the sink is the most important real estate in the room — it’s where the hot pan and the dripping colander go. Even the NKBA agrees, asking for fifteen inches beside the fridge, twelve and fifteen on either side of the cooktop, twenty-four and eighteen flanking the sink. A cook builds that landing before she needs it. A designer clears those same counters for the photograph. That is the entire argument in one detail.

Here’s the whole section on one card — what the standard says, and what a cook says:

• The work triangle — Standard (and today’s designers): dead, replaced by “zones.” A cook: alive and well. Fridge, sink, stove — each leg 4–9 ft, 26 ft total.

• Work aisle (island to counter) — Standard: 42″ for one cook, 48″ for two. A cook: 32″, when you’re the only one on the line.

• Counter height — Standard: 36″. A cook: 36″ — the one number everyone already agrees on.

• Landing area (counter beside the fixtures) — Standard: 15″ by the fridge, 12–15″ at the cooktop, 24″/18″ at the sink. A cook: as much as the room can spare beside the stove and sink — and never zero.

Surfaces

Let’s talk countertops.

I bought this house with the counters that are still on the perimeter today, and I’ll be honest: at first I wasn’t crazy about them. But the budget wasn’t there to tear it all out — and the longer I lived with them, the more I realized they didn’t need to go. They were already paid for, and they work.

Now a confession folded into a myth-bust, because half of us get this wrong — and I got it wrong out loud, on camera. For the longest time I called these counters quartzite. They’re not. They’re engineered quartz. In my defense, I didn’t choose this surface — it came with the house, and you don’t tend to check the birth certificate on a counter you inherited. But quartz and quartzite get confused constantly even though they’re opposites. Quartzite is natural stone — sandstone cooked under pressure until it’s harder than granite; it takes a hot pan but has to be sealed. Quartz is man-made — ground rock bound with resin, poured in a factory — so it never needs sealing and it shrugs off stains, but that resin means you do not set a screaming pan on it; it wants a trivet. Mine are the quartz: low-fuss, and they work — and I wasn’t about to rip out perfectly good counters just to feel more authentic.

So I kept the quartz everywhere but one place. I pulled the quartz off the island and put down a big butcher block worktop instead. That single swap did two jobs at once. One was practical: the wood let me tighten my work aisle — the thirty-two inches I’m always going on about. The other was pure feel — it warmed up a kitchen that was reading a little cold. Wood against the hard surface, warm against the cool. This house is a hundred and ten years old, and stainless can be stunning — I love a good stainless kitchen — but this space wanted to feel grounded, and all that cool, engineered surface wasn’t going to do it alone.

Which is also why I’m sitting out the current marble moment. The design world is deep in its love affair with dramatic, overwrought marble right now — the moody greens, the burgundy veining, the slabs that look like a thunderstorm. They’re beautiful. But choosing a trend-colored stone is, to me, like buying one loud pair of red pants and signing a contract to wear them for the next fifteen years: stunning for a season, a hostage situation by year three. And marble in a working kitchen is its own special trouble — it stains, it etches, it flinches at a squeeze of lemon. Who has time to be that precious about a counter you actually cook on. Not me.

Here’s the honest cook’s guide to the stone, stripped of the showroom talk:

Quartz — the engineered one, and what I actually have — is the low-maintenance workhorse. Non-porous, so it never needs sealing and it won’t stain. The catch is heat: the resin that binds it can scorch, so a hot pan always gets a trivet. Reliable and unfussy, which is exactly why it’s in half the kitchens in America.

Quartzite — the natural stone people confuse it with — is the tough, quiet all-rounder. Genuinely hard, heat-resistant, and it won’t etch; the only ask is that it’s porous, so it needs sealing. It does its job and disappears.

Marble is the beauty that keeps a diary, gorgeous, and impossibly fussy. It’s soft, it stains, and worst of all it etches: the acid in a squeeze of lemon, a splash of wine, a slice of tomato eats a dull mark right into it. It does stay naturally cool, which is the one real case for it, bakers love a marble slab for rolling pastry. But as an everyday counter you actually cook on, it records every sin, and who has the time for that. Pretty is not the same as functional.

Soapstone is the cook’s sleeper, and if I were starting from scratch it’s what I’d look hardest at. Non-porous, so it never needs sealing and it won’t stain; heat-proof and acid-proof — set a screaming pan on it and cut a lemon beside it and it doesn’t care. The trade is that it’s soft, so it scratches and darkens over time as you oil it. Basically, it’s the stone that behaves like wood.

And the wood is the part everyone asks about. Butcher block earns its spot for three reasons.

1. It’s affordable. Mine is a standard block from Lowe’s, and we sanded our own edge into it. Wood runs about twenty to sixty dollars a square foot; the stone around it costs three or four times that. I warmed the whole room for a fraction of what people assume.

2. It patinas. The thing you’re warned about “it’ll show wear” isn’t wear. It’s the record of every dinner you’ve made on it. It gets better, not worse.

3. And it’s antimicrobial, which isn’t a folk tale it’s research. Bacteria applied to wood get pulled down into the grain and die there instead of living on the surface the way they do on scarred plastic; people who use wooden boards come down with salmonella at half the rate of the plastic crowd. Would I break down a whole chicken right on this island? I genuinely could though I’d still bring a board out to do it. Day to day, all it takes to clean it is hot water and soap.

Now the maintenance, since I know that’s what you actually want. Every four weeks I coat it in Boos Mystery Oil food-grade mineral oil and leave it on overnight to soak in. About every six weeks I follow with Boos Board Cream, the beeswax-and-oil conditioner that fills the fine scratches and builds the sheen. Never olive or vegetable oil; they turn rancid. That’s the whole routine, and a scratch just sands out. (Exact products are down in the receipts.)

The truth is I didn’t choose wood for any of those reasons first. I chose it because it’s what my mother had. I grew up standing at a wood block while she cooked, and every time I set my hands on mine, I’m back in that kitchen. A kitchen should feel like yours. Mine feels like hers.

Venting and more

Nobody asks about ventilation until they’ve lived with a bad hood, and by then the walls are closed and it’s too late.

Here’s the only rule that matters, and it isn’t a number: the hood has to actually move air, and it has to move it outside. If you have any way to duct it out, take it. A vented hood pulls the heat, the grease, the steam, and the smell out of the house entirely. A recirculating hood runs that same air through a filter and hands it right back to you, a little less greasy, maybe, but the heat and the moisture and last night’s fish are still in the room with you. Recycled air is not the same as vented air. Always choose vented if you can. The rest, the CFM, the duct size, how far the hood should overhang, is a conversation between you and whoever installs it. What you can’t outsource is the decision to vent outside, and to plan for it before the walls close.

Mine is a thirty-six-inch Italian-made hood made by FUTURO FUTURO with serious power. And even though I cook on induction, which throws far less smoke and grease than a gas flame, I still wanted that muscle because steam and the oil off a hard sear have to go somewhere. This is actually my second one, in my last kitchen I had the same hood in white, hung over the island, and I loved it enough to buy it all over again. If you’ve been following me a while, you remember it. But the real story is where that duct had to go. We couldn’t run it straight up, so we vented out the side of the house and to keep that from reading like a compromise, we built a soffit across the entire top of the run so the whole wall looks intentional. That’s the part nobody tells you: half of ventilation is airflow, and half is solving the architecture honestly, so the fix looks like it was always meant to be there.

One warning that comes with real power, and it’s the thing almost nobody plans for: make-up air.

You’ve felt this without knowing what it was. You walk into a restaurant, pull the front door, and it resists you for a second then gives with a whoosh, a rush of air past your face. That’s a building under negative pressure: the kitchen’s exhaust is pulling more air out than anything is putting back, so the whole room inhales through the only opening it has, the front door. Their make-up air is out of balance.

A hood doesn’t make air, it removes it, and every cubic foot it blasts outside has to be replaced by air coming in from somewhere. In a tightly built house, a strong enough hood can’t find it. So it starts pulling air backward down every path it can: down the furnace flue, down the water heater vent, dragging combustion gases — carbon monoxide included — back into the room you’re standing in. A make-up air system is the fix: a dedicated intake that opens when the hood runs and feeds fresh outside air back into the house, so the pressure stays balanced and nothing back-drafts.

When do you need it? When the exhaust gets big — and there’s a point, set by your building code, where it stops being optional. Your contractor will know the number. But you can feel the principle without any math: if you’ve got a La Cornue and nine pans going under a six-foot hood, you need make-up air, full stop that much fire and that much suction will empty a house of air faster than it can leak back in. A modest home hood usually doesn’t. The catch is that make-up air is miserable and expensive to add after the fact, so you decide before the drywall goes up, not after. It is so much cheaper now than later.

And that’s the “more,” really everything that makes a kitchen work instead of just photograph well.

A cook’s kitchen is organized around motion. Tools live out, not hidden — my knives are on a magnetic strip and my everyday utensils hang on a rail, right where my hand reaches, because the empty styled counter is a fantasy for people who don’t actually cook. The trash opens at the prep zone so you scrape without walking. You light the work surface itself, not the mood, so you can see the true color of the meat and the green of the herbs. And you put outlets where you actually use them.

You design for the mess, not against it.

The two kitchens

There are only ever two kitchens. One is designed to be photographed. The other is designed to be cooked in. The photographed kitchen optimizes for the empty counter, the dramatic island, the hood that vanishes into the cabinetry, the marble that stops you at the door. The working kitchen optimizes for the hand, the body, for the thing you’re holding right now that needs a place to go.

I built the second one, on purpose, in a hundred-and-ten-year-old house I didn’t want to fight, with the quartz I inherited and kept, a piece of wood from Lowe’s, a triangle nobody could talk me out of, and a counter at the height cooks have used for a hundred years.

None of it took a designer. It took paying attention to how I actually cook: where I stand, what I reach for, what I set down. Build for that person — the real one, in motion and not the one in the catalog.

Your kitchen doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It has to work like yours.

All the links - can be found here.

— Sarah

PS: This weekend, cook one thing and pay attention to your feet. Count every step you take that you didn’t need to, to the sink, to the trash, to set something down. That’s your renovation list, written by your own body. No designer required.

The receipts (for the ones who, like me, want the source):

• The work triangle and clearances: NKBA Kitchen Planning Guidelines; the “triangle is dead” claim: Park Avenue Design

• Commercial prep-table height: Eat More Butter, Hunker

• Quartzite vs. quartz: Bob Vila

• Soapstone properties: Forbes Home

• Marble etching & staining: Armadillo

• Butcher block cost & care: Bob Vila, The Kitchn

• Wood’s antimicrobial edge: Dr. Dean Cliver, UC Davis, Discover Magazine

• Hood sizing & make-up air: Proline Range Hoods

The laziest thing I make all summer is also the thing people think took me all day.

It’s a pan of cherry tomatoes and whole garlic cloves, sitting in olive oil so low it never even simmers. I don’t stir it. I don’t watch it. I walk away, and in July, walking away from the stove is the entire point. 45 minutes later the garlic is sweet enough to spread like butter and the tomatoes have collapsed into something jammy and glossy and deep. People taste it and assume hours. It took a pan of oil I ignored.

This is confit, and I want to take the French off of it for you.

The word is doing all the intimidating.

Confit just means something cooked slowly in fat, a preservation technique older than refrigeration, invented by people who needed duck legs to last the winter, not by chefs trying to impress you. Strip the accent off and what’s left is a machine with three inputs: low fat, low heat, time. That’s it. That’s the whole framework.

Notice what’s not in there. No knife skills, the garlic goes in whole, the tomatoes go in whole. No timing anxiety, the difference between 45 minutes and 55 minutes is nothing, because nothing can burn in oil that never gets hot enough to bubble. No technique that requires you to be present. Frying is fat in a hurry. Braising is water and attention. Confit is fat with the clock doing the work, and it is the single most forgiving thing you can do to a vegetable.

And here’s why I keep a pan of it in my fridge from June through September: tomato + garlic confit isn’t a dish. It’s a mother sauce for lazy people. One pan on Sunday, and you’ve banked a week of dinners that each take less effort than deciding what to order.

But a flavor bomb is only as useful as the directions you can take it. So let’s season it.

Where you point it — three directions

The confit comes out of the oven tasting like the deepest version of itself: sweet garlic, concentrated tomato, red-gold oil. That’s a beginning, not an end. Tomato and garlic are a passport, nearly every cuisine on earth has stamped it, so the same pan can go three very different places depending on what you stir into the mash.

1. Soy + rice vinegar. This is the one from the reel. Mash the confit, loosen it with soy sauce and a splash of rice vinegar, and the sweetness of the garlic snaps into savory focus. Tomatoes are loaded with glutamate, the same umami compound that lives in kombu and parmesan and soy sauce speaks that language fluently. This is the direction that becomes the cold soba dip below, but it’s also the one I spoon over cold silken tofu or steamed rice when it’s too hot to think.

2. Anchovy + basil. The Italian passport stamp. Drop two anchovy fillets into the warm mash and they dissolve, nobody will ever find them, everyone will ask what you did. This is the oldest umami trick in the Mediterranean drawer: tomato brings the glutamate, anchovy brings the inosinate, and together they don’t add, they multiply. Tear in basil at the end, off the heat, and hit it with a few drops of red wine vinegar. This is the direction that wants to be pasta.

3. Fish sauce + lime + chili. The loud one. A teaspoon of fish sauce, a hard squeeze of lime, and a spoonful of chili crisp turn the mash bright and hot — closer to a Southeast Asian dipping sauce than anything Provençal. This is the direction for grilled anything: flank steak, shrimp, pork chops, a pile of charred green beans. It’s also the one that converts the confit skeptics, because nobody’s expecting a pan of “roasted tomatoes” to finish that spicy and alive.

Same pan. Three pantries. That’s the difference between owning a recipe and owning a framework.

What it becomes — four dinners

Under a roast chicken. Not on it under it. Spoon a thick layer of mashed confit across the platter, set the carved bird on top, and let the pan juices bleed down into the tomato and garlic. Every slice drags through the sauce on its way up. This is the move that makes a Tuesday chicken look like a pro and the confit does something a pan sauce can’t: it was ready before the chicken went in.

Pasta, with the emulsion move. Add the confit in a cold skillet, add your drained pasta and a ladle of starchy pasta water, and toss hard over low heat until the oil, the tomato, and the water pull together into a sauce that clings. This is the same emulsion that makes cacio e pepe work the confit is just a head start that took you zero effort. Anchovy-basil direction, obviously. Parm on top.

The cold soba dip. The reel, the reason half of you are here. Soy-vinegar direction, loosened to a dipping consistency, with cold-shocked soba (any asian noodle really) boiled, then rinsed under cold running water until the strands run slick and clear. You dunk, you drag, you eat standing over the counter. The exact ratio is below.

A warm vinaigrette that isn’t really a vinaigrette. Whisk a spoonful of the mash with red wine vinegar and a few tablespoons of the confit oil, that red-gold oil is liquid gold, don’t you dare pour it out and pour it warm over bitter greens, boiled potatoes, white beans, or a grain bowl. The tomatoes have already done the emulsifying work a mustard usually does. It’s the fastest route from “a pan I ignored” to something that reads composed.

One pan. A week of dinners. The stove came on once.

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The numbers that make it repeatable: the full confit spec, the temperature, the time, the oil ratio, and the storage rule that matters plus the exact soba dip ratio from the reel, and the measured versions of the chicken, pasta, and vinaigrette moves.

For about the cost of one bowl of ramen out a month, you get every recipe drop, the full archive, and the downloadable guides. Upgrade and bank the pan →

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A cucumber is almost entirely water.

Most cooks treat that as the problem. It’s the whole point.

Everything you’ve ever disliked about a cucumber salad, the puddle at the bottom of the bowl, the dressing gone thin and sad, the slices that taste like wet nothing is the water talking. And every good version of that same salad is somebody who understood the water and dealt with it first. That’s the whole game. Not the dressing. Not the garnish. The water.

So this weekend I want to walk you through two ways to deal with it. Two completely different doors into the exact same cucumber. The Japanese way.

One is acid. That door is sunomono.

The other is salt. That door is koji-shio.

Both of these are recipes, real ones, with ratios you should respect and steps you shouldn’t wing. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But each recipe sits on one simple idea, and once you understand the idea, you’ll make either one for the rest of your life without reaching for the page. That’s the difference between memorizing a dish and understanding it.

Let’s start where they agree.

Whichever door you go through, you salt the cucumber first. You cannot skip this. Slice your cucumber, hit it with salt, about a teaspoon for a couple of them, or roughly 2% of their weight if you’re a weigh-it person like me, and walk away for five to ten minutes. The salt pulls the water out and leaves it beading on the surface, and you pour that off. Now you have a cucumber that’s still crisp but no longer diluting everything it touches. Now it can actually absorb what you give it.

That single step is the difference between a home cook and someone who knows what they’re doing. Everybody skips it. Don’t.

Now you choose your door.

The acid door: sunomono.

Sunomono just means “vinegared thing.” It is the lightest, brightest, most summer-in-a-bowl food I know, and the whole dish rides on one Japanese ratio — the framework every cucumber sunomono is built on.

It’s called sanbaizu: three parts rice vinegar, two parts sugar, one part soy sauce. Three, two, one. Warm it just enough to melt the sugar, let it cool, and you have a dressing that will outlast the vegetable it’s dressing. Want it cleaner and paler — no soy, just vinegar and sugar with a pinch of salt? That version has a name too. It’s amazu, “sweet vinegar,” and it’s what most cucumber sunomono actually uses.

Learn that ratio and you own the dish. Salt the cucumber, pour off the water, dress it with sweet vinegar. Everything past that is yours to choose: wakame rehydrated and tossed in, a little hijiki, poached shrimp or crab or thin ribbons of octopus if you’re feeling like a restaurant, toasted sesame, a whisper of ginger. I have run this exact dish on a menu — cucumber, wakame, hijiki, the vinegar doing the singing — and watched people who “don’t like cucumber” finish the bowl and ask what was in it.

Almost nothing was in it. That’s the answer. Salt, then acid, in a ratio you’ll never have to look up twice.

The salt door: koji-shio.

Now put the vinegar away and go the other direction entirely.

Koji-shio — shio koji, same thing, “salt koji” — is fermented rice. Rice inoculated with the same mold that gives us miso and soy sauce and sake, then blended with salt and water and left to sit until it turns into a loose, sweet-smelling porridge. What makes it magic isn’t flavor sitting on top of the food. It’s enzymes. Shio koji is full of proteases and amylases — enzymes that quietly break proteins and starches down — which means it doesn’t just season a cucumber, it slightly cures it, tenderizes it, deepens it into something savory and almost alive. And once you’ve made a batch it keeps for weeks in the fridge, waiting.

The pickle could not be simpler. Take your salted cucumber — smash it, actually, whack it with the flat of a knife so it splinters into craggy pieces with more surface area — and toss it with a spoonful of shio koji. Then leave it. An hour on the counter gets you a quick, bright pickle. Overnight in the fridge gets you something deeper and funkier. No vinegar. No sugar. Just salt and time and a living ingredient doing the work while you sleep.

And that’s what I want you to actually feel this weekend, in your own kitchen, with your own hands.

Buy two cucumbers. Salt them both, pour off the water, and then send one through each door — vinegar and sugar down one path, koji down the other. If you don’t have koji yet, just salt that one hard and let it sit; you’ll still taste the point. Put them side by side and eat them back to back.

One will taste like a bright afternoon. The other will taste like it has a secret.

Two short recipes. One cucumber. And now you know what each of them is actually doing to it, which means next time, you’re not following anyone. You’re deciding.

That’s the whole thing.

— Sarah

PS — If you want the exact sunomono ratio scaled for a crowd and my full koji-shio pickle method with timing, both are in this week’s recipe, linked below for paid subscribers. This is the salt-pickling family I’m building out all summer the same logic that runs through the Stock & Broth guide: understand what the salt and the acid are actually doing, and you stop cooking scared.

I spent years of my life standing over bowls of hot ramen. So believe me when I tell you that the noodle dish I actually crave from June to September is the cold one.

The best part, a cold noodle bowl is easier than a hot one, not harder. There’s no broth to hold at a quiver, no timing the noodles to the bowl to the table. You cook the noodles once the only time the stove comes on, shock them cold, and everything after that is assembly you can do at your own pace, in a kitchen that isn’t trying to kill you with ambient heat. It’s the single most forgiving thing you can make in July.

But only if you stop thinking about it as a recipe.

A recipe for cold noodles tells you to buy these eight things and do these twelve steps, and the second you’re missing the imitation crab you feel like you can’t make it. A framework tells you what each part of the bowl is doing — so when you open the fridge and there’s no crab but there’s leftover roast chicken and half a cucumber, you build the bowl anyway, and it’s great. That’s the whole OBSESSED project in one dish.

So here’s the cold noodle framework. Four moves.

1. The noodle: choose wisely

Any noodle that’s good cold works: ramen, soba, somen, udon, even spaghetti in a pinch. What separates a great cold bowl from a gluey, clumped, sad one isn’t the noodle you buy.The key is to shock the noodle in cold water after you cook it.

Boil the noodles to just past al dente — a hair softer than you’d serve them hot, because cold firms them back up. Then drain and rinse them under cold running water, rubbing them with your hands until the water runs clear and the noodles feel slick, not sticky. You are physically washing off the surface starch that makes cold noodles glue themselves into a brick. Finish in a bowl of ice water for thirty seconds to get them properly cold, drain bone dry, and toss with a teaspoon of sesame or neutral oil. That oil is insurance — it keeps every strand separate while the noodles wait for you.

2. The sauce: pour-over or toss

Every cold noodle sauce is one of two kinds, and knowing which you’re making tells you how thin to build it.

Pour-over is a thin, seasoned liquid you spoon over the bowl right before eating. The dressing on a hiyashi chuka, the chilled tsuyu you pour over bukkake-style noodles. It’s loose because it has to find its way down through a pile of toppings to coat the noodles at the bottom. Think soy, rice vinegar, a little sugar, sesame, loosened with dashi or water.

Or, Toss a sauce that is thick, glossy, clingy, that you mix straight into the bare noodles before anything else goes on, the way you’d build a mazemen. It’s the opposite instinct: less liquid, more body, because nothing is going to dilute it and it needs to grab the strands directly. Sesame paste, chili oil, soy, a hit of vinegar and garlic.

Same five levers underneath, every time: salt (soy, miso), sweet (sugar, mirin), sour (rice vinegar, citrus), fat (sesame oil, chili oil, a raw yolk), and umami — which is where my whole ramen life comes back around. The best cold noodle sauces are built on a real backbone of dashi or cold stock, the same way a tare is. A flavorful liquid is the difference between a sauce that tastes seasoned and one that tastes deep. (More on that in the PS — yes, you can build that backbone with no stove at all.)

3. The pile: protein, crunch, cool, color

Clean out the crisper and let your bowl gets its personality. Don’t memorize topping lists. Hit four jobs:

A protein to make it dinner sliced ham or chashu, shredded poached or rotisserie chicken, a jammy egg, tofu, leftover steak. Something crunchy for texture against the soft noodle, cucumber cut in matchsticks, bean sprouts, snap peas, shredded carrot. Something cool and fresh to keep it summery, tomato, more cucumber, shiso, scallion, herbs. And color, because we eat with our eyes and a cold noodle bowl is supposed to look like a flag. Lay the toppings in neat rows or piles on top; don’t pre-toss. The arranging is the appeal.

4. The finish: aroma, acid, heat

The last three-second move that makes people ask what’s in it. A drizzle of toasted sesame oil or chili crisp for aroma and fat. A squeeze of lemon or a splash of rice vinegar for a lift right at the end. And heat, maybe chili oil, a smear of karashi (hot Japanese mustard), fresh chile, or chili crisp. This is the lane summer 2026 is obsessed with sweet-and-spicy, “fricy,” chili oil on everything, and cold noodles are the best possible home for it, because the cold makes you want the contrast even more.

That’s it. Noodle, sauce, pile, finish. Learn the four and you can build a different cold bowl every night of the week out of whatever’s in the fridge, and never look at a recipe again.

But you came here for two specific bowls, so —

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Two cold noodle bowls that live at opposite ends of the framework, so you can feel how the parts move:

A classic hiyashi chuka the rainbow cold-ramen bowl with a bright, pourable soy-sesame-vinegar dressing, the pour-over sauce in its purest form.

And a dan dan mazemen. A ramen or Somen tossed, built on a thick chili-sesame tare and the traditional toppings or just use what you have

For about the cost of one bowl of ramen out a month, you get every recipe drop, the full archive, and the downloadable guides. Upgrade and cook both bowls →

Two Cold Noodle Bowls

The first is a pour-over, the second is a toss. Make one this week and the framework above stops being theory.

One note for the stoveless among us (it me, this summer): the only heat either bowl needs is a single pot of boiling water for the noodles. A kettle and a heatproof bowl will do it, or buy fresh pre-cooked noodles and skip the heat entirely.

PS — the cold stock you didn’t know you could make

The thing that makes both of these taste like more than the sum of a few bottles is that backbone of dashi in the sauce. And here’s the part that fits a stoveless, sweltering summer perfectly: you can make dashi cold, with no heat at all. Drop a 4-inch piece of kombu and a small handful of katsuobushi (or just the kombu, for vegan) into a jar of cold water, leave it in the fridge overnight, and strain. That’s cold-brew dashi — clean, deep, and made while you sleep. It’s the same principle as cold-brew coffee, and it’s the gateway to understanding why stock is the framework under nearly everything I cook.

If you want the whole logic of it — chintan, paitan, dashi, the ratios, the why — it’s all in The Definitive Guide to Stock & Broth. Cold noodles are a great place to start, because the sauce is where you taste the difference.

Cook the noodles once, build the bowl your way, and go sit outside.

— Sarah

My mother had a Wolf induction range for 11 years. Gorgeous machine. Red knobs, serious presence, the stove you’re supposed to want. In those 11 years she called the serviceman 12 times. Twelve. That’s once a year of waiting at home for a repair window.

I had a Bosch induction range for 11 years over the same stretch. Number of service calls: zero.

So when I built my new kitchen, there was no agonizing. I went with induction and I bought another Bosch. The 36” 800 Series induction range, the industrial-style one with five burners, which runs about $6,100 (list price $6,799). The comparable Wolf 36” induction range lists at $13,690. Less than half the price, and in my experience, infinitely more reliable, and enjoyable to cook on. You can’t divide by zero service calls. That is the definition of bang for the buck.

And look how sleek and flush this range is. The cooktop allows you to move pans around easily, on and off heat, and the boost setting will take 2 gallons of water to a boil so fast you won’t believe it. But the real reason I keep choosing induction isn’t the price tag or the track record. It’s that induction made me a better, more technical cook. Here’s why.

The five reasons induction beats gas at home

1. Temperature control is the whole game. This is the one that matters if you want to cook more technically. Gas gives you a flame you eyeball. Induction gives you a number and the pan responds within seconds. Induction will hold your beautiful stock at a bare quiver instead of a boil. Keep a butter sauce from breaking. Temper chocolate on the stovetop. Drop a screaming-hot sear to a gentle baste in seconds flat. Every framework I teach gets easier when the heat is repeatable: the setting that held your stock at a perfect sub-simmer last Sunday is the same number this Sunday. You stop guessing and start knowing. That’s what framework / intuitive cooking really is.

2. It’s dramatically faster & more powerful. Here’s the dirty secret of the gas power arms race: BTUs measure the flame, not your food. A residential gas burner tops out around 18,000–25,000 BTU’s (British Thermal Unit) . BTU is the energy needed to raise one pound of water by 1°F. One BTU ≈ the heat from burning a single kitchen match.

For stove context: it measures the energy the burner produces, not what reaches your pan which is why an 18,000 BTU gas burner delivering ~40% to the pan loses to a 5,500W induction zone (≈18,800 BTU-equivalent) delivering ~85–90%.), and only about 40% of that heat ever reaches the pan the rest is warming your kitchen. Induction transfers 85–90% of its energy directly into the pan, which the Department of Energy puts at up to three times more efficient than gas. Do the math and my Bosch’s boost setting delivers more effective cooking power than the biggest burner on a pro-style gas range. True commercial burners run 25,000–60,000 BTU, but those are illegal in your house anyway without a restaurant hood and a fire-suppression system. Water boils in about half the time on induction, and a cast iron skillet preheats while you’re still patting the steak dry. And oh boy does it help you make great stock. The power was never the problem. The delivery was.

3. The air in your kitchen stays clean. A gas burner is open combustion inside your house. Stanford research found that gas and propane stoves push nitrogen dioxide to unhealthy levels, not just in the kitchen, but in bedrooms, hours after the burner is off and a related study found benzene, a carcinogen, in the emissions of 95% of gas stoves sampled. Induction burns nothing. I run my hood for steak smoke, not for survival.

4. Cleanup takes thirty seconds. The cooktop is a flat sheet of glass, and because it only heats the pan, spills next to the burner don’t carbonize into permanent lacquer. No grates to degrease, no burner caps to scrub, no toothpick in the igniter. A splash of stock wipes up with the same towel that’s already over my shoulder.

5. A cooler, safer kitchen. The surface itself stays relatively cool the pan heats, not the glass so there’s no open flame, no gas left on by accident, and far less ambient heat. In a Tennessee summer, the difference between a gas stove and induction is the difference between cooking dinner and surrendering to takeout from June through September.

The pushback I always hear: “but cast iron and induction?” Fantastic friends. Cast iron is magnetic. It is arguably the perfect induction pan. Which brings me to what’s below the paywall today.

What’s below for paid subscribers 👇

A shio koji sirloin, pan-grilled in the Smithey No. 14. An overnight koji bath that turns an affordable, lean cut into something outrageously savory, plus proof that induction and cast iron are the best sear you can get (even from a grill) finished with a garlic scape pesto you should make this week, while scapes are still showing up at the market. The pesto alone is worth it: it’s good on eggs, grain bowls, flatbread, and stirred into warm potatoes.

For about the cost of one bunch of farmers-market scapes a month, you get every recipe drop, the full archive, and the downloadable guides. Upgrade and cook the whole thing →

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Deep in kitchen renovation (hell) over here. I am impatiently excited about showing you this kitchen and getting back to work. I am taking what was a cheaply built show kitchen to help sell a renovated house into a mad efficient machine and workshop of a kitchen. This is the type of work that simply cannot be rushed, so I go another week without a working kitchen. But I am not leaving you high and dry. This week I am pulling out some oldie but goodies for a Summer Table.

Three recipes from last summer that most of you have never seen:
Lemon Roast Chicken with Blackberry salsa
Goma-ae Green Beans
Japanese potato salad

…pulled back to the front and rebuilt for maximum ease on your summer table…..

It’s starting to feel like summer. The farmers markets are teeming and I am simply twitching to get back deep into the rotation of my home kitchen. This week the oven arrived, but we had to upgrade the electrical, and then it didn’t fit in the cutout. BUT THIS WILL BE WORTH THE PAIN (I keep telling myself).

If I am being honest, moving back to my hometown was never on my bingo card, and I fought it HARD, but now that I am here and settling in, it is a strange kind of magic that I am ready to lean into. If this kitchen turns out like I hope, it’s going to be a whole new world for me and my work here on Obsessed.

I am going for a true workshop space that will allow mw to play and experiment more with more long term fermentations, and my personal challenge this summer, baking more. It’s never been my strength (but my Japanese Milk Bread is dialed in), so I decided my new oven gave me the perfect excuse to start to dive in. I am starting with my friend Roxana’s book Mother Grains.

So in lieu of a new recipe this week, I made you a playlist for a Summer Table.

A lot of you are new here since last summer. Welcome. What that means is there’s a whole archive of warm-weather cooking sitting behind you that you’ve never scrolled back to and some of it is exactly what you want to be eating right now. So I’m starting something: every so often I’ll pull an old summer recipe back to the front, dust it off, and hand it to you in its easiest possible form.

This week it’s a make-ahead summer plate. One roast chicken, two cold sides. All of it good at room temperature, all of it better the next day, none of it asking you to stand over a hot stove at 6pm in July. This is cookout food. Picnic food. Open-the-fridge-and-graze food.

Here’s the OBSESSED part, same as always: once you know what a component is actually doing in a dish, you know exactly which store-bought thing can stand in for it. The from-scratch cook and the smart-shortcut cook are the same person, one of them just has a pool to sit by. So this plate comes with the shortcuts built in. I’ll tell you the job, and then I’ll tell you the swap.

Here’s what’s on the plate this week.

THE MAIN:

I have a few food rules, and “no fruit in my savory dishes” is a strong one. Then I sat staring at a giant basket of farmers-market blackberries and the word “salsa” walked into my head uninvited. I broke my own rule, and I’m glad I did.

The salsa is the whole event. Tart blackberries, ripe tomato, raw chile, a double hit of lemon and lime, a sweet-tart-sharp thing that cuts straight through rich, salty roast chicken. The chicken is just the canvas, which is exactly why it’s the easiest part to shortcut on a hot day. (You already know what I’m going to say about not turning your oven on in July.)

SIDE #1

The izakaya classic. Earthy, nutty, salty-sweet, and built on one idea: ground toasted sesame is the dressing. It’s served cold, which makes it a perfect make-ahead. It’s also the most shortcut-able dish on the plate, there’s a bottle that does almost the whole thing, and a 30-second pantry trick if you don’t have it.

SIDE #2

One of my favorite potato salads of all time. Yukons for creaminess, the crunch of thin-sliced carrot and cucumber, and a dressing that is essentially two bottles you already have opinions about. There’s barely anything to shortcut here, because the flavor is store-bought by design — which is the whole point.

The full plate is below

If you want to actually cook this, the three shortcut recipes with exact amounts, the make-ahead timing, and a printable grocery list built to shop in one trip — that part’s for paid subscribers.

For the cost of about one farmers-market rotisserie chicken a month, you get every recipe drop, the full archive (dozens of summer recipes just like these three), and the downloadable guides. Upgrade and cook the whole plate →

Your printable grocery list

The full shopping list and condensed plan — organized by store section, built around the shortcut items — is the attached PDF. Shop it in one trip.

2026 06 05 Obsessed Summer Shortcut Grocery List

5.8KB ∙ PDF file

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PS — save the carcass

Whether you roast the bird or pick a rotisserie clean, don’t throw the bones away. That carcass is a chicken stock — a chintan — waiting to happen, and stock is the framework under nearly half of everything I cook. When you want to make the real thing, the whole method is in The Definitive Guide to Stock & Broth.

Make the plate once, eat off it for two days, and go sit outside.

— Sarah

I am writing this from Saratoga Springs NY, where my friend Rachel works in horse racing, and where I have laughed and cried hard and deep like you do with old friends. I’ve also eaten more potato chips in three days than I will admit to my doctor.

Rachel and I have been friends for thirty years. In that time we have never, not once, met a potato chip we did not like. Kettle, ridged, flat, thick, paper-thin, salt-and-vinegar, sour-cream-and-onion, the weird wasabi ones at the airport, all of them. There is a kind of friendship that survives because the two of you keep showing up for the same small, stupid pleasures, decade after decade. Ours is built partly on chips, and great stories. And fun chips (thats’s another story).

Which is what makes this week’s setting almost too perfect to be real. Because Saratoga Springs, where Rachel is currently living her horse-racing life, is the town the potato chip is supposed to have been invented in. And I am rocking a king sized hangover, so this all just came together perfectly for all of us. Some history and a wicked little appetizer or couch nachos on call with pantry items whenever you need it. I am giving you a version to take for highfalutin tailgating.

8 a.m. on the backstretch

If you have never been to a thoroughbred training track at 8 a.m., it is unlike anywhere else. The light is low and misty in upstate NY this particular morning. The horses come past you at a working gallop; the sound a four-beat drum on the dirt, that you feel it in your sternum before you see them. The exercise riders are tiny on their backs. Steam comes off the horses in the cool air.

And then all of a sudden the gossip is out; “Sovereignty is running on the back track.” So we make our way over to see last year’s Derby winner train. He was stunning.

The backstretch is the part of the track most people never see the stables and shed rows behind the grandstand, where the actual work happens. Grooms, hot walkers, trainers, exercise riders, the same people there every morning at 5:30am. Rachel knows everyone. She has the kind of working knowledge of this place that you only get from years of showing up

We watched one of Rachel’s young fillies breeze for the first time in a workout, and I pretended to know what she meant. Even though this women has become a beloved and permanent fixture in the business of horse racing, she has never been on a horse, and as a former Hunter / Jumper rider, I love to tease her about it relentlessly, because what else is a 30 friendship for. But don’t be fooled, this woman knows her race horses, and I am so filled with pride for her success, I take any chance I can to join her on the backstretch and see the horses train and feel the buzz of the barns. If you love horses, it never goes away. The sounds, the smells, the connection. We stood and watched a 2 year old being shoed; his groom so deeply connected to this horse that he could feel the slightest twitch and instantly knew how to calm him. I had a bond like that with my horse when I was young, and it chokes me up every time I see it.

You leave the track hungry the way you leave a long swim hungry, your body has been working a little just by standing in the cold air paying attention. There is a specific kind of breakfast that wants to happen after backstretch hours. Eggs. Something fried. Likely hot coffee that has been sitting in the pot since 5 a.m.

We ate. We talked, the way you talk to someone you’ve known since you were in your twenties; fast, in shorthand, no preamble. And then she says, “Oh and by the way, the potato chip was invented here.”

Um, what?

We pulled up the racing version. Vanderbilt, the dining room at the lake house, a fussy customer. I had a feeling there was more to it than that.

There is.

The legend

The story most people in Saratoga tell goes like this. In 1853, at Moon’s Lake House on the shores of Saratoga Lake, a wealthy customer ordered the house specialty, Moon’s Fried Potatoes and sent them back. Too thick. Too soggy. Cut them thinner. The cook, George Crum, sent out a second plate. Sent back again. On the third try, Crum reached for a razor, shaved the potatoes paper-thin, deep-fried them in lard, and salted them aggressively, intending the dish to be inedible out of pure spite.

The customer loved them. Other diners started asking for them. They became the house specialty. Saratoga Chips were born.

Crum was a real person, born George Speck in 1824, of Black and Native American (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican) heritage. He really did cook at Moon’s. He really did go on to open his own place, Crum’s House, on Malta Avenue, where he served Vanderbilt and Jay Gould and most of the Gilded Age summer set out of Saratoga.

That part is true.

The 1853-spite-chip part is where it gets interesting.

What historians actually find

The legend has problems. The Moons did not buy the Lake House until 1854, so the famous “1853” date doesn’t fit. And a New York Herald report from the same Lake House dated July 1849 already raves about “Eliza, the cook” there, whose “potato frying reputation is one of the prominent matters of remark at Saratoga.” Crisp fried potatoes were already a known thing at that restaurant four years before Crum is supposed to have invented them.

Crum had a sister, Catherine “Aunt Kate” Wicks, who worked the kitchen alongside him. Her obituary in 1924, when she was 103 years old claimed she was the actual originator of the chip. In one version of the story it is Kate, not George, who cuts the potatoes thin in a moment of pique. In another, she drops a stray peel into a pot of boiling fat by accident and has the eureka moment fishing it out. By the time historians went looking, at least five different people inside Moon’s had been credited with the invention at one point or another.

And the recipe itself? It predates Saratoga entirely. William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic published a recipe called “Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings” in its 1822 edition. “Peel large potatoes… cut them in shavings round and round, as you would peel a lemon. Dry them well in a clean cloth, and fry them in lard or dripping.” Sprinkle with “a very little salt.” That is a salted potato chip. In a London cookbook. In 1822. Thirty-one years before George Crum allegedly invented one in upstate New York.

The Vanderbilt-as-the-fussy-customer detail, by the way, has no contemporary source. It got grafted onto the story decades later because Vanderbilt was a real customer of Crum’s later restaurant, and the legend wanted a celebrity.

So what actually happened in Saratoga?

This is the part I like.

The chip was almost certainly not invented in Saratoga Springs. But Saratoga is, by any honest reading, where the chip became the chip where it got a name, a reputation, a place on a menu, and a tourist economy carrying it back to dining rooms across the country. People came to take the waters, eat at the lake houses, lose money at the track, and bring home a memory of those impossibly thin, salty, crackling potatoes. That is the part of food history I simply love. Not just who technically did it first, but who turned a household trick into a thing the world had a name for.

There is a version of this story where George Crum is robbed of his rightful invention by historians who can’t leave a good legend alone. I don’t think that’s quite right either. He was a Black and Indigenous chef in a Gilded Age industry that erased people like him by default. The Saratoga Chip story being attached to him even if the details are wrong is one of the few places his name survives at all. That matters. The myth is doing real work even where the dates don’t add up.

That’s the fun of legend and food, history never REALLY knows what happened. And it is, somehow, the most American food story I can think of.

The recipe, finally.

Here is what I want you to do with a bag to impossibly thin and crispy kettle style chips.

There is a Spanish dish called huevos rotos “broken eggs” fried eggs slid over crispy potatoes, the yolks broken with a knife so they soak into everything underneath. It is a tapas-bar staple. It is one of the great hangover foods of Europe. It is also the obvious move when you have a bag of thick kettle chips and want to make a serious couch snack - fancy tailgate - appetizer out of them.

This is huevos rotos meets nachos. The chips are the platform. The Spanish pantry does the rest. You eat it directly from the bag (we mix and put them back), on the back of the tailgate, with your hands, and hopefully a crisp white wine or a great lager.

P.S.

If you are new here OBSESSED runs free posts on Saturdays with paid recipes. You may have found me through my work with bone broth. The Definitive Guide to Broth & Stock is linked here for anyone who wants the framework that everything else in the system sits on top of.

This week’s post is a one-off, because I’m on the road and the road insisted. Back to the framework series next week.

Two requests:

1. If you make the Potato Chip Nachos, send me a picture. I want to see the broken yolks.

2. If you have a friend you have eaten chips with for twenty years or more — text them right now. Tell them you’re thinking of them. That’s the whole game.

Rachel, this one’s for you. Thanks for always being there when I fall, and for eating too many potato chips with me.✊

~ Sarah

Spring will do that to you. The light changes, the trees commit, and suddenly everyone you know is moving, quitting, graduating, getting married, getting divorced, packing a house. Last week we packed up and dropped boxes in the new house in Tennessee. A few days later we were on a plane to NYC to watch the kid graduate college. My parents flew in. My husband is working with my father’s company. We moved from Nashville to my hometown an hour south. My daughter is starting her real life in The East Village. Three generations, four transitions, one weekend.

And it’s not just us. Look around. The country is mid-rewrite. The economy is mid-rewrite. The way we work, the way we eat, who’s running things, who’s running for things. None of it looks like it did even two years ago. Everyone I talk to is either starting something, ending something, or trying to figure out which one they’re actually doing.

We’re in the Year of the Fire Horse a once-in-sixty-years event. Last one was 1966, which gave us the founding of NOW, the Cultural Revolution, Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister, and one of the most documented birth-rate drops in modern history because everyone got spooked by the energy of the year. The Horse sits dead center in the Chinese zodiac and marks climax, culmination, and the moment a long-building idea finally becomes the thing you actually do. The next five years are about cooperating, completing, and resting. The instruction this year is to gallop but to trade the excitement of starting for the discipline of finishing. Dazed

And we’re two years into Period 9, the twenty-year feng shui cycle that runs 2024 to 2044. Period 8 was earth, mountain, masculine, young men building empires you could see from space. Period 9 is fire, the Li trigram, the middle daughter. The element is fire. Older women take the headlines. Food preparation and eating culture becomes more important. Writing gains importance. If you wanted to design a twenty-year window for a fifty-something woman who cooks and writes for a living, this is the one you’d build. Michael Oon

So: a Fire Horse year, inside a Period 9 era, in a personal season of fresh starts. Move, build, complete, hand off. Got it.

I’m a downtown girl. Always have been.

When I’m in New York, I’m on the Lower East Side. That’s my map. Decades of it. The shops where I learned what ramen could be, the noodle counters I dragged my husband to at midnight, the back-of-the-menu Sichuan places, the Japanese groceries with the good frozen noodles, the bakeries you have to know about. The whole grid below Houston is where I became the cook I am. I didn’t learn this stuff in school. I learned it eating my way through those blocks, year after year, often by myself, sometimes hungover, always taking notes.

And here’s the kicker: my daughter just graduated college, and she’s moving into the exact neighborhood I spent twenty-something years eating through. The center of the map. She doesn’t fully know yet what she’s been handed, but she will.

While I waited for her arrival at her new apartment to unload, I took a quiet moment to walk around the hood, and found myself in a sea of memories and emotions. Rooftop parties. Late-night noodles. Bar hopping. Two things flooded in at once:

• I can’t believe it’s her turn. The envy of a fresh start.

• Will it even be the same for her?

This is what the Period 9 thing actually means in a real human life. You hand the map over. You stand back and watch what they do with it. You’re not the one starting anymore you’re the one who built the road. That’s not a demotion. That’s the assignment.

But this wasn’t a downtown trip.

This trip was my mom and dad, my husband, my daughter, the graduation, and the Upper East Side because it’s closer to her school, and because moving slower with my parents is the right kind of slower. So we stayed uptown. We ate uptown. And the downtown girl in me, who fully expected to be bored, has to report back honestly: it was fabulous.

Casa Tua at The Surrey. The Miami import on 76th and Madison. I walked in skeptical see-and-be-seen rooms are usually where food goes to die and was wrong. The pasta was actually good (however I did catch that the Chef added Szechuan Peppercorn to his Cacio e Pepe). The downtempo lounge loud music vibes of Miami set the tone.

2nd Ave Deli. Egg salad and pastrami. If I have to explain this to you, we’re not the same kind of person. The egg salad is the move nobody orders and everybody should, salt, fat, mayo, bread doing its only job. The pastrami is the pastrami. There are maybe four deli counters left in this country that understand the assignment, and this is one of them.

Aman Jazz Club. Underground, hushed, dark wood, live trio. The cocktail takes eight minutes and you don’t mind. My dad ordered a martini and didn’t check his phone once he was so happy, which is its own kind of miracle. This is not a place to eat. It’s a place to be quiet with people you love while someone else makes the noise.

The Mark Bar — the accidental caviar bar. We walked over to the Mark Hotel for a final final (what we call a nightcap in my family) and walked out having eaten caviar. This is how it goes at The Mark. You sit down for one drink, the menu appears, and forty-five minutes later you’re spooning Osetra onto a blini and telling your mother she has to try it. She did. She liked it. I’ll carry that one a while.

Here is MY LIST, with some of my fav Ramen Shops for you as well.

Here’s what I noticed, eating uptown with my family, when every cell in my body wanted to be downtown eating yakitori:

The Upper East Side eats like it has nothing to prove. The rooms are quiet. The menus are short. The pastrami has been the pastrami since 1954. Nobody is chasing the new thing because the thing is already here. As a downtown lifer I used to read that as boring. This trip I read it as confident, which is a different word.

There’s something about traveling with your parents at this stage of life that recalibrates the whole exercise. I didn’t need the meal to do anything. I didn’t need to discover anything. I didn’t need to file a mental report on the new place that just opened. I just needed to sit down with my mom and my dad and my husband and my daughter, in a quiet room with good food, and let the meal be the meal.

That’s not a thing I knew how to do at thirty.

My daughter is about to inherit my downtown. She’ll find her own counters, her own shops, her own midnight noodles. I’ll go visit her and we’ll absolutely tear through the LES like I always have. But this trip taught me there’s a whole other New York I’d been writing off for twenty years because I was too busy proving I knew where the good stuff was.

The good stuff, it turns out, is also a quiet table with the people who raised you.

So: Fire Horse says gallop, but finish what you start. Period 9 says the women are running this stretch, and the kitchen is the headquarters. Spring says everything is moving whether you’re ready or not. My family is mid-handoff in all directions at once, my husband working towards taking over my father’s company, my daughter taking over my spots in the city, me taking over whatever comes next.

If the universe was going to schedule a weekend to put all of that on one table, this was the one. Three generations, one quiet room, one good meal at a time.

I’ll be back uptown.

I am working as fast as I can to get my new kitchen up and running….be patient with me. It’s like pushing a rope. If any of you have lived in a renovation, you know.

xo, S

A few weeks ago we pulled shio koji out of the Ramen School pantry and dropped it into a Green Goddess dressing where it didn’t “belong,” because of course it belonged. This week we reach back in for miso.

Quick recap of the frame, because it’s the whole reason I taught Ramen School the way I did. I think about cooking in three layers: ingredient, execution, recipe. The ingredient is the thing — what it is, what it tastes like, how it behaves. The execution is how you deploy it — marinate, deglaze, whisk in at the end, brush on before the grill. The recipe is just one specific combination of the first two. It’s a snapshot. The ingredient and the execution are the toolkit.

Ramen School taught you the ingredients. The rest of this quarter is the executions.

Miso is maybe the most useful place to start — because it is not one ingredient. It is five. And most home cooks in the US are using one of them, or an imposter of one of them, for jobs it was never designed to do.

What miso actually is

Miso is fermented soybean paste. Cooked soybeans, a koji culture (rice, sometimes barley, sometimes just more soybeans), salt, and time.[^1] The soybeans carry the proteins. The koji carries the enzymes. The enzymes break the proteins down into free amino acids and the starches down into sugars over the ferment window. That is where the umami comes from, where the sweetness comes from, and why a long-ferment miso tastes nothing like a short-ferment one.

Miso is not a flavor. Miso is a spectrum.

Here is the shortest version of that spectrum that still tells the truth.

Shiromiso (white miso). Short ferment — weeks to a few months. High rice koji, low soybean, low salt. Pale beige to pale yellow. Reads sweet, gentle, almost dairy-like. Kyoto is the spiritual home. Saikyo miso is the most extreme of the whites — syrupy, cake-sweet, what you marinate black cod in before you broil it.

Shinshumiso (yellow miso). Medium ferment — six to twelve months. The all-purpose one, and what most American supermarkets stock. From Nagano. Balanced enough to go into a miso soup, a salad dressing, a marinade, or a soup base without picking a fight with anything else in the bowl. If you only own one miso, own this one.

Akamiso (red miso). Long ferment — one to three years. Higher soybean, lower rice, higher salt. Deep reddish-brown. Funky, savory, almost beefy. Sendai is famous. This is where miso stops tasting like a dairy note and starts tasting like a fifteen-hour stock.

Mugi miso (barley miso). Barley koji instead of rice koji. Rustic, slightly sweeter and more assertive than shinshu. From Kyushu and Shikoku. Harder to find in the US but worth the hunt — it pairs especially well with root vegetables and pork.

Hatchō miso (mamemiso). The big one. 100% soybean, no rice, two- to three-year ferment. Black, dense, almost fudge-like in texture. From Okazaki in Aichi Prefecture, where two producers have been making it continuously since the 1600s.[^2] It does not taste like miso — it tastes like the platonic ideal of long-aged savory. Half a teaspoon changes a braise.

Five pastes. Five different jobs. If you only have one in your fridge, it is almost certainly a shinshu (yellow), which is a perfectly good all-purpose miso but is doing the work of a scout knife when the job calls for a scalpel or a cleaver.

Picking the right one

The working rule is simple, and once you internalize it you stop buying the wrong miso:

Short ferment (white, saikyo) = sweetness and brightness. Marinades for fish. Salad dressings. Glazes for spring vegetables. Anywhere you want the background to stay light and the other ingredients to lead.

Medium ferment (yellow, shinshu) = balance. Miso soup. Miso tare. Miso butter. The recipe you’re riffing on when you don’t want to think too hard about which jar.

Long ferment (red, hatchō) = depth and funk. Braises. Ragùs. Cold-weather stews. Anywhere you’d otherwise reach for soy sauce, Worcestershire, or tomato paste to deepen the bottom end. Hatchō in particular is an ingredient I use the way Italians use anchovy paste: a half-teaspoon goes in, nobody sees it, the whole pot gets serious.

Mugi (barley) = when you want rustic, not refined. Bean stews, pork braises, a miso soup that reads countryside instead of Kyoto.

You don’t need five jars in the fridge. You need two: a shinshu and a red (aka). Those two can do about 85% of what you’d ever ask miso to do. If you cook a lot of fish, add a saikyo. If you cook a lot of braises, add a hatchō.

The heat problem

Every unpasteurized miso contains live lactic bacteria and active enzymes when you open the tub. That is part of what makes miso taste alive — a good miso soup has a bright, almost effervescent top note that cooked miso doesn’t have.

Heat kills them.

Specifically, miso loses most of its live-enzyme character above about 180°F (82°C). That’s why every proper miso soup recipe tells you to pull the pot off the heat before you whisk the miso in. The dashi should be steaming hot, not simmering. You whisk the miso into a ladle of the hot liquid first to slurry it, then return the ladle to the pot off the flame. Fresh enzymes, fresh miso, bright finish.

That is the raw miso execution. It is the move for soups, dressings, cold sauces, tare mixes, finishing spoons, and anything where you want the miso to taste like miso.

For marinades, glazes, and braises, you want miso to cook. You want the sugars to caramelize, the amino acids to Maillard, the funk to concentrate. Cooked miso is a completely different ingredient. Darker, deeper, less alive, but loaded with the kind of brown-savory flavor you cannot get any other way. The roast chicken recipe below is built entirely on this principle — on the fact that miso-butter, smeared on chicken skin and blasted at 425°F, turns into something that tastes nothing like the paste that went on the bird.

Raw miso and cooked miso are not the same tool. Both are useful. Know which one a recipe is asking for before you follow it.

The powdered miso move

Here is a trick I have almost never seen written down in an English-language cookbook, and it is one of the most useful things on my shelf.

Keep a small jar of powdered miso. [I use this one on Amazon.]

Powdered miso is just freeze-dried miso. It comes in a tiny container, it costs very little, it lasts a year on the shelf, and it does one very specific job: dry umami.

Read that twice, because it’s the whole point. I don’t use powdered miso for miso flavor. I use it for the free glutamate alone. A quarter-teaspoon dusted into a salt blend, a spice rub, a popcorn seasoning, a finishing sprinkle over roasted vegetables, a pinch inside a rolled omelet — the miso taste itself disappears into the dish, but the whole plate reads half a grade savorier. Nobody can identify why. Nobody needs to.

This is the shortcut that is not a shortcut. It is what a good ramen shop’s secret seasoning probably is. It’s what makes restaurant deviled eggs taste like restaurant deviled eggs. It lives next to my salt cellar at all times.

When you buy it, look for a pure powdered miso — no added seaweed, no bonito, no MSG. You want the miso doing the work alone. Brand matters less than purity of label.

Where it led this week

I wanted one new recipe that showed the cooked-miso execution at its most dramatic, plus two links back into the Ramen School archive for the raw-miso executions you already have.

The new one is miso roast chicken. Spatchcocked, rubbed with a miso-butter paste (shinshu for balance, a small spoon of red for depth), dry-brined uncovered in the fridge overnight, roasted high. It is one of the best roasted chickens I know how to make, and it is almost entirely a function of what miso does on skin at 425°F.

Then, because the miso work inside the ramen pantry is already this good, I’m re-linking two things you already have access to: the miso tare we built in Ramen School, and the miso ramen bowl build it anchors. The tare is the raw-miso execution, at concentration. The bowl is the reference point for what raw and cooked miso do side by side in the same dish.

Why you should play with miso

One more restatement of the thesis, because miso is a clean demonstration of it:

You don’t cook well by following recipes. You cook well by understanding what an ingredient does and then pulling on the thread.

Once you know miso is actually five ingredients, you stop asking “is this miso?” and start asking “which miso?” Once you know raw and cooked miso are two different tools, you stop ruining miso soup by boiling it and you start ruining roasted chicken by not giving it enough heat. Once you know powdered miso exists, you stop reaching for Accent and start reaching for the real thing.

That’s the move. Learn what the ingredient does. Then play.

This week’s recipes (for paid subscribers)

The whole bowl. Tare, stock, aroma oil, noodles, toppings. The reference point for what raw miso (in the tare) and cooked miso (in the aroma fat) do side by side in one dish.

Send me photos of the chicken. I want to see the skin. ✊

— Sarah

How I got here

I came to yuzu kosho the way most American cooks do, sideways on sake, at a yakitori bar. It was a little yakitori place in Torrance, California. The cook was working the binchō over the counter, and at some point a plate of grilled chicken came out with a tiny smear of something neon green on the edge of it. No fanfare. No explanation. Just there, the way a cook in Japan plates something when they assume you already know what to do with it.

I put a speck of it on the chicken. I put more. By the end of the skewer I was trying to figure out how to make the rest of the dinner about whatever that green paste was.

I came home and started putting it in everything. Then I started cooking with it wrong. Then, eventually, I slowed down long enough to understand what it actually was, and once I did, it became one of maybe five ingredients I cannot live without.

This week’s recipes are built on that understanding. So before we get to them, let’s talk about the paste.

What yuzu kosho actually is

Yuzu kosho is a farmhouse ferment from the mountainous regions of Kyushu most famously Hita in Oita Prefecture, though Fukuoka and Miyazaki make excellent versions too. It is, in its simplest form, three ingredients:

• The zest of a yuzu, the knobbly Japanese citrus that reads like Meyer lemon, lime, and grapefruit crossbred in a mountain orchard

• Chile peppers, green when the yuzu is green, red when the yuzu is red

• Salt, traditionally around 20% of the combined weight of zest and chile

Those three ingredients get minced down to a coarse paste, packed into a jar, and left to ferment at cool temperatures for a month or more. What comes out the other side is something that tastes nothing like the sum of its parts.

One language note, because it matters. The word kosho in standard Japanese means black pepper. In the Kyushu dialect, it means chile. The name of this paste is “yuzu chile” — not “yuzu pepper.” Every English-language menu that translates it as “yuzu pepper paste” is making the same small mistranslation, and once you know it, you see it everywhere.

The four-job seasoning

Yuzu kosho is not a chile paste. It is not a citrus condiment. It is not a salt replacement. It is all four of those things at once, which means when you add it to a dish, you are simultaneously adjusting:

• Acid — from the volatile citrus oils in the yuzu zest

• Heat — from the capsaicin in the chile

• Salt — around 20% by weight, which is considerable

• Umami and funk — from the lactic fermentation, which builds glutamate over the ferment window the same way miso and soy sauce do[^3]

This is the thing that makes it so powerful and so easy to misuse. Most seasonings do one job. Yuzu kosho does four. Which means the move you’re usually making in a dish — a pinch of salt, a squeeze of lemon, a flake of chile — yuzu kosho does in a single half-teaspoon.

Think of it as the Swiss-army knife of finishing seasonings. You stop reaching for three things. You reach for one.

The heat problem

Here is the mistake I made for the first two years I used yuzu kosho, and that almost every American cook I know has made:

We cooked with it.

Don’t.

The flavor of yuzu kosho is carried by volatile citrus aromatics — limonene, citral, and related terpenes — concentrated in the oil of the zest.[^4] These compounds are what make a room smell like a lime grove when you zest one lime. They are also fragile. Heat above roughly 150°F (65°C) drives them off into the air, and what you are left with is salt, chile, and a whisper of ferment funk. The thing that makes yuzu kosho unmistakable is gone.

The rule is simple:

Yuzu kosho is a finishing ingredient. You add it at the end, off the heat, or you serve it on the side, or you use it raw in a dressing, dip, or drink. You do not stir it into a simmering pot and expect it to survive.

The exception is that you can briefly warm it into a fat — a spoonful into melted butter right before plating, for instance. But that is a 15-second pass, not a cook.

Once you internalize the finishing rule, yuzu kosho stops being an ingredient you’re “trying to figure out” and becomes something you reach for every day.

Where it led this week

I wanted two recipes that would teach the four-job principle in two totally different registers.

The first is the egg salad I’ve been refusing to stop making. Yuzu kosho here does exactly what Dijon mustard, kosher salt, cracked pepper, and a hit of acid would normally all do in an American egg salad — except it does it in one ingredient, and it pulls the whole dish toward something you cannot quite place on a map. Not Japanese. Not Western. Something in between, and better than both versions I was making before. On shokupan (Japanese milk bread) it is genuinely hard to stop eating.

The second is a cocktail, which I almost never write about, because the bar is not usually where I live. But this one is too good to skip. A spicy yuzu margarita, with yuzu kosho doing double duty — muddled into the drink and mixed into the salt on the rim. The four jobs hit the same tongue at the same time. It tastes like something a very good bar in Tokyo would serve you and refuse to tell you how they made.

Both recipes are below for paid subscribers.

Why you should play with yuzu kosho

I’m going to repeat the thesis of OBSESSED one more time, because the yuzu kosho week is a clean example of it:

You are not going to cook well by following recipes. You are going to cook well by understanding what an ingredient does — and then pulling on that thread.

Once you know yuzu kosho does four jobs at once, you can start asking the useful questions. What other dishes am I currently using three seasonings on that this could collapse into one? (Deviled eggs. Tuna salad. Smashed cucumber salad. Grilled chicken. A vinaigrette for avocado. A dip for shumai. A smear under roasted carrots. A hit on top of scrambled eggs.) Where is the heat risk? (Anywhere I’d be tempted to stir it in early.) Where do I want it hidden, and where do I want the flecks of chile visible on top? These are the questions that turn an ingredient into a tool.

That’s the move, every week, always. Learn the why. Then play.

This week’s recipes (paid)

And if you make either recipe, send me a photo. I want to see the sandwich. I especially want to see the margarita. ✊

— Sarah

Hi all -

Moving into a weekly format → this newsletter will drop every Saturday morning, and each week it will include links to a few recipes. My goal is to expand OBSESSED a bit this summer as I am going to be redesigning my new kitchen! Very exciting. My jam, is and always will be going deep, so we are going deep into the what and why to building a great kitchen this summer.

Thanks for being here and have a great weekend!

Sarah -

Spring has officially made her way through the South and we are headed straight into the belly of Summer. I find myself in the spring starting to build my “Fridge Pantry” to prepare for the glory of summer produce.

A great Fridge Pantry consists of all kinds of flavors, fermentations and pickles that you can mix and match endlessly on dishes. Pickled Thai Chilis, Basil Bud salt, Pickled Shiitakes. Yummy things that flex. And a recipe with Parm Rinds that is going to blow your mind (Parm Rind Chintan). I used that stock to make risotto. The results is really something. We will be moving into an INGREDIENT THEME for a bit. Each week I will introduce you to a new ingredient and show you how to use it. Low lift kind of deliciousness. Flavors that make the most simple dish come alive with flavor. My favorite way to eat.

Life Update: After 16 years and 8 restaurant openings in Nashville my husband and I are relocating an hour south to be closer to family and get back to a more intimate, slower pace of life. We move in 9 days, and then begin the process of making a house a home. A new kitchen and a new garden, and hopefully a new pace of life. So content this next month will be a combo of ideas and fridge pantry recipes to get us ready for Summerpalooza. Tomato season loading………

This week is moving back into the “fridge pantry” vibes. Pay attention to the flavors makers in your kitchen universe first. Then you can make any vegetable or protein taste amazing.

I am and always will be a Green Goddess girlie. All summer I will have a version in my fridge. Never the same version twice. Think of Green Goddess as a framework more than a recipe. Use your Shio Koji here instead of anchovy.

Just when I think I have made every version of salsa verde / chimichurri that exists, I come up with another crazy idea. This time it was charred rapini, folded into the base of a chimichurri. The result is herbal, bitter, tangy, and everything you love about a chimichurri.

Garden season is ahead of us, and this is your reminder to pluck the buds off your herbs and pluck them in salt to make infused herbal salts. Endless options. My go to right now is Maldon Salt + Basil Buds.

Yes, after many requests, I am making you some playlists and turning you onto some of my favs. I was a Music Supervisor in LA for about a decade and habit dies hard. My music obsessions run DEEP (there are some epic stories).

I think we all have our “I discovered this during Covid” idea, music or book. Mine is musician Tom Misch. He was performing weekly “Rooftop Sessions” in London during the lockdown with Yussef Dayes (aka “FKJ French Kiwi Juice). I became obsessed. And here’s the fun thing about falling into a new genre….there are usually others. The Neo Jazz / Neo Soul scene is London is pretty amazing, and Tom is right on the top of that stack. Jordan Rakei, Katie Tupper, Cleo Sol, dive in I heard not long ago that Misch came to town (Nashville) to record with famed Producer Ian Fitchuck (Kasey Musgraves), and he didn’t call me for a bowl a ramen. It’s okay, really. Have fun down this rabbit hole.

Have a great week and hoard all your parm rinds!

Sarah -