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Suya-Spiced Skirt Steak: Nigerian Street Food Meets the American Grill At night markets across northern Nigeria, suya sellers work a charcoal brazier in the dark. Thin-sliced beef threaded onto flat iron skewers, dusted with a peanut-spice blend called yaji, grilled fast and hot and eaten where you stand. No table, no plate, just newspaper and fire and the smell of...

Bistecca alla Fiorentina: The Steak That Florence Still Gets Right There are two inches of Chianina T-bone between you and the fire, and the fire is the only thing that gets a say. No marinade. No oil before it goes on. No seasoning until after it comes off. You put the steak on the charcoal and you wait. That is...

The fornaciai did not have a kitchen. They had a kiln. The terracotta workers of Impruneta, the hill town south of Florence that has made fired clay since Etruscan times, worked long shifts firing tiles at sustained heat with nothing to cook on except the residual warmth at the kiln's edge. They built their meal the way they built their...

Miso-Glazed Salmon with Jalapeño Corn Salsa and Avocado The miso marinade is from Japan. The jalapeño and corn are from somewhere along the border of Texas and Mexico. The moment you put them on the same plate, you stop asking where anything is from and start asking for seconds. How This Dish Exists In 1977, Nobu Matsuhisa opened a Japanese...

How to Sharpen a Kitchen Knife on a Whetstone A dull knife makes you work for everything. The onion slides, the tomato crushes, the chicken skin folds under the edge instead of parting. You end up using more force, which means less control, which is how accidents happen. The fix is not a new knife. It is twenty minutes with...

Ribollita: The Tuscan Peasant Soup That Gets Better the Next Day Ribollita means "reboiled." The name is not poetic. It is a description of what actually happens: you make a pot of vegetable and bean soup, eat half, and the next morning put the rest back on the fire. The second version is thicker, darker, and better than the first....