7 Slightly Crazy Advanced Food Projects To Make This Weekend

We're planning to take on one of our serious kitchen projects this weekend. The "project" part can involve anything from sourcing a hard-to-find ingredient like fresh foie gras or infusing cake ingredients with cornflakes. We promise you that it will be worth it in the end. Commit to destroying your kitchen — pick one of these seven slightly crazy and very much advanced food projects and prepare to master some new tricks.

If your heart is full of adventure but is otherwise very healthy, I recommend these crunchy, gooey treats. The secret behind this culinary marvel lies in cooking the egg at precisely 64°C. This results in yolks that are malleable when cold but still "ooze" when hot. Breading the yolks while they're cold and still firm and then quickly deep-frying them to reheat produces an incredibly indulgent combo: a crunchy shell contrasted with a warm, molten inside.

While you'd typically make a layer cake using "normal" circular aluminum baking pans, isn't it nice to know you don't need them? That you can do it with a single cast-iron skillet? A tribute to baker Liz Lorber in Atlanta, who introduced me to Hot Milk Cake and got my wheels turning, this recipe also reminds me of my father.

My first real taste of American breakfast came at night. After evenings of high school–style wilding out, my boys and I would hit up the 24-hour diner, where whatever you ordered, no matter how massive the portion, came with a stack of toast. Somehow, it wasn't the over-easy eggs, sausages or hash browns, but that toast that became emblematic of American breakfast for me. The scrape of the knife as you buttered it, the smell of dairy melting on warm bread.

Foie gras is expensive, so you can make use of the parts surrounding the veins of the raw liver you have deveined to make foie gras butter. Foie gras butter can also be used to thicken a jus or gravy.

The crepe batter is a pretty precise recipe, and therefore will yield better results if measured by weight rather than volume. And know now what many a cook at Fat Rice has learned the hard way: The crepe is super difficult to master!

"One of the best bowls of soup I had in all of Vietnam was from the bun bo hue lady at Dong Ba," says Rob Newton, referring to the bustling central market, crammed with stalls, where one can buy jewelry, dried fish, cookware, hot soup, umbrellas, shrimp paste and much more. "Bun bo hue is soulful and rich and delicious and complex. It's spicier than most Vietnamese soups. It's just incredibly dynamic. I think it's one of Vietnam's greatest dishes."

This Catalan dish (pronounced rose-ay-YACHT), which artfully combines rich shellfish, toasty pasta, and plenty of aioli, is my favorite recipe in this entire book. It is easy and so unique — a perfect recipe for entertaining. The noodles are toasted and then simmered in the lobster cooking liquid before a quick turn under the broiler. Under that final blast of heat, the tips of the noodles curl up and char slightly, adding a pleasant bitterness and crisp texture to the dish.