The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Available Online: Japanese, Italian, Thai & Much More

My pile of night­stand books at the moment includes Tim Fer­riss’ The Four-Hour Chef (avail­able as a free audio­book here), a flashy tome meant in part to teach the sim­plest cook­ing tech­niques that yield high degrees of ver­sa­til­i­ty, impres­sive­ness, and deli­cious­ness. But its real inter­est lies in the sub­ject of learn­ing itself, and so it also cov­ers rea­son­able-invest­ment-high-return tech­niques for mas­ter­ing oth­er things, like lan­guages. As I read Fer­riss’ account of his own expe­ri­ence devel­op­ing strate­gies to quick­ly learn the Japan­ese lan­guage right next to so many pho­tographs of food and the prepa­ra­tion there­of, my brain could­n’t help but com­bine those two chunks of infor­ma­tion — and then pro­ceed to make me hun­gry.

I had a mind to go straight to Cook­pad, Japan’s biggest gen­er­al recipe site that we fea­tured back in 2013, when it had just launched an Eng­lish-lan­guage ver­sion. Now we have anoth­er rich recipe resource in the form of The New York Times Cook­ing data­base, an archive of 17,000 recipes, also acces­si­ble through its very own free iPhone app. Call up Japan­ese food, and you get a vari­ety of appeal­ing dish­es and sauces from the sim­ple and easy (chick­en teriya­ki, yak­iso­ba, egg­plant with miso) to the more elab­o­rate (squid sal­ad with cucum­bers, almonds, and pick­led plum dress­ing; and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s fried sushi cakes) to the new-wave (miso but­ter­scotch, Nak­a­gawa’s Cal­i­for­nia sushi, and Japan­ese burg­ers with wasabi ketchup). Above, we have a video that accom­pa­nies the Yak­iso­ba With Pork and Cab­bage recipe.

Have a look around, and you’ll see that the site also offers a num­ber of use­ful func­tions for those who make a free account there, such as the abil­i­ty to save the recipes you want to make lat­er and a rec­om­men­da­tion engine to give you sug­ges­tions as to what to make next. But still, even though sites like these guar­an­tee that none of us will ever go hun­gry for lack of a recipe, we can only do as well by any of them as our actu­al, phys­i­cal cook­ing skills allow. For­tu­nate­ly, the Times also has our back on that: as we post­ed last year, you can get a han­dle on all of that with their 53 instruc­tion­al videos on essen­tial cook­ing tech­niques. And so we real­ly have no excus­es left not to learn how to make Japan­ese food — or any oth­er kind. As for all those lan­guages, now…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cook­pad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launch­es New Site in Eng­lish

53 New York Times Videos Teach Essen­tial Cook­ing Tech­niques: From Poach­ing Eggs to Shuck­ing Oys­ters

Michael Pol­lan Explains How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life; Rec­om­mends Cook­ing Books, Videos & Recipes

MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once (Free Online Course)

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Har­vard Profs Meet World-Class Chefs in Unique Online Course

How to Make Instant Ramen Com­pli­ments of Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion Direc­tor Hayao Miyaza­ki

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.