Did you know that the utility of our good friend scaccharomyces cerevisiae isn’t just limited to bread, beer and wine? Indeed it plays a critical role in chocolate production. Cocoa beans, you see, are a pretty bland and flavorless thing at the time of harvest. In order to become “chocolate” they have to undergo a […]
READ ONEvery so often a special type of person comes along, a visionary you might say, a dreamer, who sees the world not for what it is, but for what it could be. Whose vision for the world, while it isn’t heaven, nudges us just a little closer to it. One of those people is French […]
READ ONOf course, it would be just plain irresponsible if I were to discuss croissants and not talk about butter. What is a croissant after all, other than a butter delivery system? There are croissant recipes out there that are fully half butter (too much even for Joe). This week’s is one-third butter, which is about […]
READ ONI know, I know, laminated dough-making seems impossible. I felt the same way myself the first time I was asked to make it — 11 pounds at a time, rolled out in a giant sheet that covered an entire work table (the rolling pin was as long as my arm!). Yet a little moxie is […]
READ ONSpruce tip jelly, from who else? Carolyn Smith-Kizer at 18th C Cuisine.
READ ONIf you’ve looked over the instructions for this week’s recipe at all, you know that like puff pastry, croissant is a layered (also called laminated) dough. It consists of either 36 or 81 alternating layers of butter and dough, depending on the folding technique you employ. I know that sounds like a lot, but it […]
READ ONHands down the weirdest, and riskiest, type of starter I’m aware of is that which is used to make salt rising bread. Not a yeast-bateria combo at all but a one-bug show featuring a food pathogen called clostridium perfringens, it’s made from potatoes fermented in milk (though even tree bark can be used to start […]
READ ONIt was pointed out that I came out a little forcefully against fruit-based sourdough starters the other day. It was further pointed out that they’re a perfectly sound way of getting a yeast-bacteria tag team culture going. To that I have to say that I’ve never had success with that particular method, possibly because the […]
READ ONA question came in regarding a post from yesterday: if the starter recipe is just flour and water, where does the yeast come from? The answer: from the air. Though there’s some laying dormant in the flour, too. And there’s a little in the water…oh, the stuff is everywhere. But the difference between the yeast […]
READ ONCroissants are one of those classic foods about which there’s so much misinformation it’s impossible to know how it really came into being. What we do know is that the first printed references to croissants come from French cookbooks dating to the 1850’s. Yet croissants as we know them today (yeasty, buttery, usually savory things) […]
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