I let a reference to nitrogen pass the other day without expounding on it at all, something a truly committed nerd would never do. So in the interests of retaining my Member in Good Standing status at the local chapter of the Obnoxious Geeks of America society, I’m here to make up for the lapse. […]
READ ONSomebody out there doesn’t like me much. That fact was demonstrated plainly late Friday evening, when whoever-it-was launched a spam attack on the joepastry.com site, causing a server shutdown that took me (or really my tech hero Dave) the weekend to work out. I can’t imagine the mentality of someone who would want to torpedo […]
READ ONIt’s been a long week of science with precious little connection to the actual practice of baking. Just to show I haven’t totally lost touch with pastry reality, here are the eclairs I assembled this afternoon for one of the wife’s departmental meetings (thank God eclair shells freeze so well). Here’s to the end of […]
READ ONIt would be delightful to think that essential oils are simply gifts from nature to humankind. Sensuous, stimulating compounds concocted by Mother Gaia solely for our enjoyment. Indeed when you think about where essential oils are most commonly employed (in cuisine, in aromatherapy and massage) it certainly may seem so. Yet if the natural sciences […]
READ ONI know I said I wouldn’t ruminate any more until I got some real baking done, but what can I say: I lied. There’ve been just too many things quietly bugging me about Unhappy Meals the past few days, and I feel an urge to write them down. I could always do that myself in […]
READ ONI barely have two seconds to rub together these days (where did I ever get the idea that bringing a newborn and a recovering mother back into the house would make life less demanding?). But I wanted to muse for a bit on the subject of Buzz Donuts. These caffeine-laced items have been getting a […]
READ ONAlso in this weeks’ New York Times food section (I’ve been giving them an awful lot of plugs the last couple months, haven’t I?) a cover story/announcement that the father of popular food science and author of the landmark On Food and Cooking, Mr. Harold McGee, will be penning a regular column for the Times […]
READ ONSo if the world was abounding in mousse starting in the 18th century, why did it take so long to get to a chocolate version? One reason may be that up until the early 19th century, chocolate processing was a fairly crude science. It consisted of little more than grinding up fermented and roasted chocolate […]
READ ONThis week’s pastry combines two of my favorite things: the creamy luxury of fine chocolate and the brittle snap of hard, intractable science. A near and dear friend, and one of the world’s greatest living chocolate fiends, is headed down here to Louisville for the weekend. And I know what she’ll be expecting: a delicate […]
READ ONA very funny comment came in via email this weekend. Or at least I thought it was funny. The meat of it went like this: I don’t understand how you can be so inconsistent. Just Friday you defended commercial agriculture in one post, then talked about how you only like to use fresh, local produce […]
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