For all those who looked at the jelly doughnut recipe (or better yet made it) and thought to themselves “Gee, this looks an awful lot like French brioche dough” you get extra credit. It is brioche dough with a little less butter and a little more flavoring, which hints at this particular pastry’s European origins. […]
READ ONAh, the frozen ball of puff pastry scraps comes through again. This time in the form of cheese straws for as hastily assembled dinner party. Actually, I think scraps are better for cheese straws than the unadulterated dough that this recipe calls for. But that may just be me.
READ ONAlright, the all-out-biscuit approach was a flop. The pizza tasted like…well, a biscuit. The dense texture was close to the mark though. It really brought out the corn meal flavor. I wonder why 25% corn meal in a biscuit crust tastes so much more like corn than it does in a yeast dough crust. I’ll […]
READ ONWell, I tried it again and got the same result. Looks like Rose Levy Berenbaum is right (I hope none of you were placing bets). That means that either the pound cake in the Saveur photo is of a completely different cake, or a slightly smaller quantity of batter was baked in a 4-cup pan […]
READ ONThe outlaws were in town last week so I didn’t have a chance to make a pizza. But it did give me plenty of time to think. The way I see it, I’ve been talking pretty big about using the biscuit method to make pizza dough. Looking at the recipe though, I’m not satisfied. It’s […]
READ ONA pastry chef I met in a hallucination this afternoon had a good challenge to one part of my thesis on whipped dairy ingredients. She asked: Joe, Northern European herding tribes were whipping cream thousands of years before French cooks were whipping egg whites. How can you say the French were the first to apply […]
READ ONI just got talked into making appetizers for an event over at U of L. A reception for a talk on Afro-Cuban art. The only kind of savory Cuban pastry I can find however, other than the same-old-same empanadas that are kind of everywhere in Latin cuisine, are these, cangrejitos. There only seems to be […]
READ ONAll this talk about air bubbles and leavening has me wondering about egg foams. Specifically, how and when cooks started whipping up eggs (especially whites) and using them to raise baked goods. There’s surprisingly little published on this (ehem) critically important topic. But dammit I want to know! Somebody needs to lie awake at night […]
READ ONPound Cake isn’t called pound cake the world over of course. The French call it quatres quarts (or “four fourths” cake for those of us in the Anglosphere). That term again refers to the proportion of ingredients, which, as we can see from the below posts, canny bakers were fooling with even in the very […]
READ ONLord I’ve been turning out some lousy bread lately. Part of the reason is that I lost my recipe in the conversion last week, so I’ve been kinda free-wheeling it. The loaves have been coming out pale and gummy, with a vaguely raw-cereal taste, which means they’re under-proofed. It’s the pale-ness that’s the dead giveaway. […]
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