Chef's Journal

There is a version of weeknight cooking that runs on goodwill and optimism — the assumption that you'll have time, energy, and fresh ingredients at 6:30pm on a Tuesday after a full workday. Most of us have tested this assumption. Most of us have found it wanting.

Batch cooking is not a hack or a trend. It is simply the recognition that cooking has fixed costs — cleaning, heating, active attention — and that you pay those costs whether you're making one serving or six. The logic of batch cooking is to pay them once.

What actually happens on a batch cook day

The goal isn't to cook everything for the week in a single session. That produces a refrigerator full of identical, increasingly mediocre meals. The goal is to produce building blocks: a cooked grain, a seasoned protein, a roasted vegetable. Components that combine differently across the week.

In our weekly meal plan, two lunch recipes — the Korean Gochujang Chicken and the Mediterranean Kamut Bowl — are deliberately built to produce six portions each. Four go into the fridge for immediate use. Two go into the freezer. Eight frozen lunches from one Saturday afternoon. That's two complete family lunch meals during a future week that cost you nothing extra — no shopping, no planning, no cooking.

Eight frozen lunches from one Saturday afternoon. Two complete future family meals at zero additional cost.

The freezer is not a graveyard

Most people use their freezer as a place where good intentions go to solidify and then get thrown out six months later. This happens when food is frozen without thought for how it will be reheated. The fix is to freeze components selectively.

We freeze the wagyu sauce without the couscous. We freeze the pork mixture without the jasmine rice. We freeze the cauliflower bowl in full. The rule is simple: freeze what holds up, cook fresh what doesn't. Rice reheats poorly. Sauce reheats beautifully. Kamut freezes better than almost any grain because its large, dense kernel doesn't lose structural integrity the way smaller grains do.

The mental return

The underrated benefit of batch cooking is not the time saved during the week. It's the cognitive space recovered. Not having to decide what to eat for lunch — having already decided, already cooked, already portioned — removes one of the dozens of micro-decisions that exhaust us by Wednesday. A week with its lunches already solved is a measurably different week.

This is the investment the Saturday cooking session actually represents. Not the two hours in the kitchen. The five days of mental overhead that two hours removes.

The most common wagyu mistake at home isn't overcooking it. It's treating it like regular beef — and losing the entire point of what you paid for.

Wagyu cattle — the term simply means "Japanese cow" — are bred for a specific trait called intramuscular fat, or marbling. In conventional beef, fat sits primarily in seams between muscles. In wagyu, it infiltrates the muscle fibres themselves, creating a web of fat distributed throughout the flesh. This fat has an unusually high oleic acid content — the same monounsaturated fat found in olive oil — and, critically, a melting point below body temperature. It literally begins to liquefy when you hold a piece in your hand.

What this means in practice

It means three things. First: wagyu requires no added fat in the pan. The marbling provides its own basting medium. Using oil or butter is redundant and muddies the clean, rich flavour you're paying for.

Second: wagyu cooks faster than regular beef. The intramuscular fat conducts heat differently. Strips of wagyu sirloin need 60–90 seconds per side over screaming-high heat — no more. A thermometer should read 55–60°C internally. Anything above medium and you've cooked out the fat that made it interesting.

Third: wagyu should never be simmered in a sauce. The marbling that makes it extraordinary on a hot pan turns greasy and heavy when slow-cooked. This is why in our Moroccan recipe, the wagyu is seared separately and placed on top — never submerged. The sauce is there to flavour the couscous. The wagyu is there to be itself.

"The sauce is there to flavour the couscous. The wagyu is there to be itself."

A note on grades and budget

A5 Japanese wagyu — the grade with the highest marbling score — is extraordinary and genuinely too rich to use in a spiced dish. Its fat is so abundant that the subtle Moroccan spicing would be overwhelmed. Canadian or Australian wagyu, rated BMS 4–9, is the correct choice here. It has excellent marbling without the intensity that makes A5 a standalone eating experience rather than an ingredient.

If budget is a constraint, a 50/50 blend of wagyu and regular sirloin brings the cost from ~$56 to ~$43 for six portions while keeping meaningful marbling in every bite. This is not a compromise — it is a different, equally valid approach.

Firm tofu is approximately 85% water. This is not a flaw in the product — it's the nature of the material. The problem is that most recipes don't account for it, and the result is tofu that steams in its own liquid rather than browning in the oil around it.

The physics are straightforward. For the Maillard reaction — the browning reaction that produces flavour — to occur, surface temperature must reach above 140°C. Water on or near the surface keeps temperature capped at 100°C (its boiling point). You cannot brown food through a layer of water. You get grey, steamed tofu regardless of how long you cook it or how hot the pan is.

The press

Pressing tofu for 10 minutes before cooking removes a meaningful portion of that surface and internal moisture. Wrap the block in a clean cloth or paper towels. Place something heavy on top — a cast iron pan, a stack of cookbooks, a full kettle. The pressure squeezes water out of the sponge-like protein matrix. After 10 minutes, the surface is dry, the structure is firmer, and the tofu is ready to brown.

This single step is the difference between soggy tofu and crispy tofu. It is not optional. Recipes that skip it are hoping you won't notice, or were written by someone who doesn't cook.

The pan matters too

A non-stick skillet over medium-high heat, hot before the tofu goes in, with enough olive oil to coat the surface. Add the tofu and do not move it for at least 4–5 minutes. Moving it prematurely tears the crust before it forms. The tofu will release naturally when it's ready — it will unstick when it has browned. If you're pulling it, it's not ready.

Crumbled tofu — broken into irregular pieces rather than neat cubes — creates more surface area and therefore more browning. For dishes like the Vietnamese Lettuce Wraps, this is the preferred form.

Kamut — properly called Khorasan wheat — is one of the oldest cultivated grains in human history. Archaeological evidence places its cultivation at over 6,000 years in the Fertile Crescent region, making it contemporary with the early development of writing and the wheel. It was feeding people when most of our familiar ingredients didn't exist yet.

Modern wheat is the product of thousands of years of selective breeding to maximise yield and reduce growing cost. In that process, certain properties were optimised out. Kamut was never substantially modified. Its kernel is 2–3 times the size of a modern wheat kernel. Its protein content is higher. Its selenium content — a mineral critical for thyroid function and immune response — runs 2–3 times higher than regular wheat. Its flavour is noticeably more complex: a natural butteriness from higher lipid content, an earthiness, and a satisfying 'pop' of chew that smaller grains simply cannot produce.

Why it disappeared

Kamut is a difficult agricultural crop. Its large kernel requires more growing space per unit of yield. It doesn't adapt to the high-nitrogen soils of industrial farming as readily as modern wheat varieties. For large-scale commodity grain production, it lost out on economics. Bob's Red Mill and a handful of specialty producers kept it alive, primarily through health food retail channels. It's now available at Loblaws, IGA, and specialty stores in Canada — though not (yet) at Costco.

Why it's worth the extra effort

Two reasons beyond flavour. First, Kamut freezes exceptionally well — better than rice, better than couscous, better than most grains. The large, dense kernel holds its structural integrity through the freeze-thaw cycle in a way that smaller, starchier grains don't. For batch cooking, this is genuinely useful: a Kamut bowl reheated four days later from the freezer is still texturally interesting.

Second, it's a grain worth understanding culturally. Mediterranean and North African cuisines have deep relationships with ancient wheats. Using Kamut in a Greek or Levantine-influenced bowl isn't a trendy substitution — it's historically coherent.