James Gop

Japanese Knotweed and Garlic Mustard Garlic mustard, knotweed, and what it means to cook from a damaged landscape Every spring in the Northeast, the edges wake up first. Roadsides. Fence lines. The soft margins of woods. The neglected corners of gardens and fields. Before summer abundance arrives, you start seeing the early push of green again. Some of it is welcome. Some of it is not. Garlic mustard comes up fast. Japanese knotweed follows. Later on, wineberry will show itself too. Most...

Warm Bread, Cultured Butter, and Burnt Honey I think a lot about what makes a dish stay with someone. Not just whether it tastes good in the moment, but whether it follows them home. Whether they think about it the next morning. Whether some part of it lands deeper than flavor and pulls at something older. That matters to me more than novelty ever will. When I build dinners, whether it is something seasonal and restrained or something more atmospheric like Seed and Smoke or Afterglow , I am...

Most sweeteners arrive finished. Maple does not. Maple syrup begins as sap, and sap is mostly water. On average, maple sap is only about 2.2 percent sugar. Finished syrup lands around 67 percent. That means what people recognize as maple syrup only exists because nearly all of the water has been driven off. Depending on the sugar content of the sap, it often takes around 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. Maple is defined by subtraction That is the first thing worth understanding...