Though it’s not exactly baking and pastry-related, I can’t let the news of recent 1976 “Judgement of Paris” rematch pass without comment. The original event, now commemorated in a terrific book by George Taber, started out as just a bit of harmless fun to celebrate America’s bicentennial: an American vs. French wine tasting. Yet it […]
READ ONDon’t forget that anytime you’re fiddling with chocolate, you always want to let it firm up at room temperature. Putting ganache in the refrigerator prevents the cocoa butter that’s in it from crystallizing, and the end result, when it’s returned to room temperature, is greasy, filmy goo.
READ ONIf you had a look at the chocolatier competition story down below and saw that the theme was tea, you might be wondering how the heck you get tea flavor into a firm substance like chocolate. Grind up the leaves and add them to melted chocolate bars? Nope, too grainy. Add a little very strong […]
READ ONThe winners of the 2nd annual Next Generation Chocolatier Competition have been announced. Congratulations to Jin Patisserie in Venice, California! (And nice going on a very cool web site).
READ ON…try leaving the caraway seeds out. Though I love caraway, it’s got a very distinct flavor, one that’s strongly associated with rye bread. So much so that when people taste caraway, they think they’re tasting rye. This is probably due to the fact that Scandinavian ryes, which are both heavy in caraway but lighter in […]
READ ONAs good and authentic a rye bread recipe as we have to work with this week, there are a couple of dead giveaways that we’re dealing with “citified” rye. One is of course the leavening: it’s packaged yeast. No northern European peasant would have had anything like that to work with back in the day. […]
READ ONAbout time, is really what this post needs to be called, since rye bread is last week’s bread project. Just goes to show what a doughnut fanatic I am, once I get started talking on the subject it’s hard to stop. Case in point, the previous sentence. So where was I now? Oh yes, rye. […]
READ ONI finally finished Michael Pollan’s new book Omnivore’s Dilemma last night. I’m embarrassed to say it took me over a week. But then, given how much I enjoyed his previous book, The Botany of Desire, I didn’t want to rush things. Top-notch creative nonfiction is a rare and precious commodity, especially when the topic is […]
READ ONI’ve heard tell that the new fonts my trusty tech honcho and I put up can be hard to read in Windows, specifically when running Explorer. If this is so, please let me know and I’ll try to work something else out.
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