Month: January 2012

Let’s Talk Pans

Regular reader and commenter Linda writes in with this very interesting question:

I checked your archives and did not see anything about equipment, particularly types of baking sheets and pans and which are better. I made your mother’s banana bread over the holiday break and it was absolutely wonderful! However, I used some new loaf pans and while the top was browned to perfection, I thought the sides and bottom were much too crispy and overdone. The same thing happened to a Tuscan Coffee Cake I’ve made every Christmas for the past several years when I baked it in my new cake pans. I’ve noticed that whenever I use my “new and improved” non-stick, heavy duty pans from reputable outfits such as Calphalon, they seem to overcook on the sides and/or bottom. When I use my ancient, inherited from mom and grandmother thin aluminum pans that I’ve used for decades, everything comes out perfectly.

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On the Entertainment Value of Spam

I keep vowing to get a plugin to more efficiently handle the spam that comes into the comment fields here on joepastry.com. It would certainly save me the ten or so minutes I spend every day scanning all the e-missives that come in for approval and deleting them manually. On the down side I’d lose out on a lot of good laughs. Granted most of them are of the sardonic variety, the how stupid they think I am? kind of laughs.

I emit those dark chuckles when I see spamsters trying to get around my spelling filters with emails that offer free “pron” twenty four hours a day. On the other hand these people may have simply read a few of my posts and understand all too well how consistent I am at spelling. I get tons emails from a guy who calls himself “Best Waterfilter” and many, many others from a young lady with the unfortunate name of “Cheap UGGboots.”

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What’s the difference between panettone and stollen?

I received several questions to that effect last week — oh and…I hope everyone out there had a terrific Christmas and a not-too-painful post-New Year’s hangover. My speculation is that most of the people who asked this question own Peter Reinhart’s excellent book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, for in it the panettone and stollen both employ the same dough, the main difference being that the stollen has twice the fruit plus marzipan.

Much as I respect and admire Peter Reinhart, I’m not down with his implicit assertion that panettone and stollen are the same thing under the hood. Reminds me of the time my uncle claimed that his new $25,000 Toyota was exactly the same thing as a $50,000 Lexus. Sure it had a dissimilar appearance and handled completely differently, but inside all the important parts were identical. Call me skeptical.

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