The ground seed of wheat grass. How complicated can it be? In fact flour is a much more complicated subject than most people think. Far from being a simple white powder we buy in five pound bags, flours come in a bewildering variety of types and styles. High gluten and low gluten, high extraction and […]
READ ONI refer you to Mexico Bob’s masterful post on the subject, here.
READ ONThis week I’m going to deliver on a promise that I’ve made to several readers over the past six months or so, and put up some posts — some “crib notes”, shall we say — on different types of flour. The content will be used to make up a new category under Joe’s Baking Basics […]
READ ONLast week’s posts really brought the crackling lovers out of the woodwork! I received all sorts of great stories and literally scores of recipes. Here’s one from reader Brigitta: Your blog post brought up old memories for me! My mother was Hungarian, and she would occasionally render her own lard. She did it on the […]
READ ONChef James L. from Tennessee points out that true Southern Cracklin’ corn bread is made from white corn bread, ideally White Lily if you can find it. Yellow will work too, of course, but for that extra touch of authenticity, well, you know what to do. Like all truly great things to eat, this is […]
READ ONWhat’s a great use for cracklings? Brothers and sisters, here’s one of the best: cracklin’ corn bread. Talk about a definitively southern bread, this one has it all: lard, corn, buttermilk. Pleasantly coarse and rustic, you’d have found southerners eating something almost exactly like this 150 years ago. To give it that extra country flare, […]
READ ONYou can start by piling some onto a piece of toast, adding salt to taste, maybe a drop or two of tabasco sauce, and consuming them greedily with beer. However it is possible to get a bit more creative…
READ ONTwo primary applications spring to mind: pie crusts and southern biscuits (though there are dozens more in baking and probably hundreds in cooking). What makes lard so desirable for pies and biscuits? Simply, because unlike butter, it’s all fat. Butter contains roughly 12% water, and that water causes trouble in a pie or biscuit dough. […]
READ ONThere’s something so elementally satisfying about the process of rendering lard, I…I don’t know how to fully express it. A sort of manly do-it-yourself pride combined with the boyish thrill of breaking a food taboo. As George Patton might have said: God help me, I do love it so. The obvious question is: why? After […]
READ ONI missed this announcement over the weekend, but the Nestlé company is recalling all of its cookie dough products due to fear that they might be contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. If you have any of them in your pantry, throw them away.
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