Julian Fife's kitchen · est. with fire
Hi, I'm Julian.
I cook things and then chart them.
I'm a cook who can't stop logging things. Fife Spice is my corner of the internet for what happens in my kitchen: the recipes I keep coming back to, the ferments bubbling on the counter, and years of obsessively measured brisket cooks.
About
Measure it, learn from it, make it better.
It started as notes to myself. Somewhere along the way the notes turned into a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet turned into a dataset, and the dataset turned into this site. I've smoked 15 briskets and logged every one of them: internal temps, smoker setpoints, wrap times, the stall, and what I'd do differently next time.
The same energy goes into a sourdough starter or a living ginger bug. Cooking rewards attention, and writing things down is just attention you can go back and read. Most of what I make is not complicated. It's salt, heat, time, and paying attention to all three.
My recipes live in Recipeats, an app I built for exactly that. The brisket data lives here, because a spreadsheet deserves better than a spreadsheet. Poke around, steal a recipe, and go look at some brisket curves.
The nerdy part
One cook, fully logged.
Apr 8, 2023
18h01 · 22 temp readings
Live from the spreadsheet, so hover the curve. The flat climb in the middle is the stall.
What's cooking