About
A cook from Sioux Falls who went looking for the hard kitchens, and came back.
I'm Jarrett Kahler. I cook professionally in Sioux Falls, and once a month I teach what I know to people who want to eat better at home.
I grew up here, on the edge of the prairie, where dinner was honest and the seasons were not subtle. Like a lot of cooks from small cities, I left to learn. Culinary school first, which gave me the grammar. Then the fine-dining kitchens of Boulder, which taught me what the grammar was for: that a tray of herbs gets picked twice, that a sauce is tasted until it's right and not a second sooner, that the quiet discipline of a clean station is most of what separates a good night from a bad one.
From Boulder I went to San Francisco, to train in a Michelin-starred kitchen. That is a different kind of school. Nothing is approximate. You learn to work fast without hurrying, to see a plate before it exists, and to care about the thing nobody will notice because somebody will. In the years since I've staged in several other Michelin kitchens, each with its own obsessions, and I've carried a little of each of them home with me.
Home is the point. I came back to Sioux Falls to cook here, as a chef in this city, for people I grew up around. And I kept running into the same conversation at the pass, at the farmers market, in my own family's kitchen: people who love to cook, who feel like there's some trick they're missing. There usually is. It's usually small. And it's almost never a piece of equipment.
So this is where I share the small things. A recipe a week or two, written the way a kitchen would write it. A monthly class where you cook with me live and I can see your pan. And a short list of the tools that have earned a place on my board, because most of what's sold for home kitchens is noise.
About the name
Out here we get four seasons, and they're not gentle. A South Dakota winter can run from October to April; a summer afternoon can hit a hundred degrees with the wind coming off the fields like a hair dryer. You learn to cook against the weather. You also learn that the best meals of the year happen in the season that isn't on the calendar: the one you make inside, when the table is full and the stove has been on since noon.
That's the fifth season. It's the one I'm trying to teach.
Training
Now: chef in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and your teacher one Monday a month.
Free guide
The ten tools I'd buy before any gadget.
A short, opinionated guide to outfitting a home kitchen the way a cook would: what to spend on, what to skip, and the one pan that does most of the work. You'll also hear from me when a class opens, about once a week at most.
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The guide is on its way. While you wait, the Essentials page walks through everything in it.