Great minds…
If, after Monday’s post about stale bread, you’ve decided to start a recipe collection, hop over to An Obsession with Food. It’s a stale bread smorgasbord!
READ ONAuthor: joepastry
Low Blow
One of the advantages of the blogging software I use is its ability to display the way in which some people arrive at my site. Hit a button that says “Referring Searches” and I can see some of the word combinations that bring joepastry.com up on the big google lists. Some are relevant like “Dobos […]
READ ONDown Hercules! Down!
A word to the wise on ciabatta: don’t let this bread overproof. Stick to a strict 30-minute timetable as the recipe suggests. I let mine sit for too long before putting it in the oven, and it developed too much gas. The result was a giant, brittle, hollow pillow. That’ll teach me to bake and […]
READ ONLotta Ciabatta
Making ciabatta again today (God love the home office). I’m getting seriously addicted to this bread, though you need a lot of excess flour around to manage it, which leaves my kitchen looking like the aftermath of the pie fight from the movie The Great Race. Still, it’s got a flavor and texture I could […]
READ ONGimme the Sweet Stuff
Like this week’s bread, ciabatta, pecan pie is a baked good without much of a pedigree. There are no known recipes for pecan pie that date back further than 1925. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: corn syrup, one of pecan pie’s primary ingredients, wasn’t in common use before that time. Though corn syrup […]
READ ONJoe’s Book Club is now up!
Or rather, it’s just over there to the right. Have a browse and give me your recommendations.
READ ONJoe’s Book Club
Some day I hope to compete with Oprah. Does that sound realistic to you? Thought not. But I was feeling a little guilty for getting after Martha Stewart the other day. She’s such an easy target. On top of that, I promised from the beginning to resist becoming just another gripey, navel gazing blog. My […]
READ ONThere and Back Again
An Italian cooking show, much like Italian cooking in general, is all about ingredients. Turn on Mario Batali and you’ll hear all about olive oils from Umbria, tomatoes from Naples, rice from the Po Valley, and cheese from Lombardy. Judging from TV shows like his, you’d think Italians did nothing but work on farms and […]
READ ONAbbondanza!
When I say ciabatta is only a fifty year-old bread, what I really mean is it’s only been fifty years that ciabatta has been eaten in its current form. That is, in small slipper-sized loaves (that’s what the word ciabatta actually means, slipper). Classically, bread in Italy didn’t come in such small iterations. It was […]
READ ONCiabatta at last!
There are three loaves of ciabatta proofing in the kitchen right this very second. I can hardly wait to bake’em! Though to be honest I had more than a little trouble handling such a slack, sticky dough. It’s been a while for me. But, a few times through the process is all it’ll take to […]
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