Product Review: The Brod & Taylor Folding Proofer

As home cooks and bakers get more sophisticated, they’re becoming increasingly frustrated by the limitations of their standard array of kitchen appliances, i.e. the contemporary quartet of refrigerator, freezer, oven and microwave. They see the results professional culinarians get from subtle manipulations of temperature and they want the same thing at home. Up until very recently, the vast majority of us have been completely out of luck on that front.

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What’s a good substitute for nuts?

…asks reader Suzanne from South America (she didn’t tell me where). Suzanne, there are a lot of good substitutes for nuts, since they have no real functional purpose in a recipe other than to add texture and/or flavor. Thus you can replace them with lots of things. More flour is the most obvious choice. Maybe supplement with a little flavoring of some kind and…problem solved!

But then most people miss nuts more for what they bring to a recipe texturally. For these folks there are all sorts of things to choose from: ground up granola, wheat bran, soy nuts, toasted chickpeas or other legumes…the list goes on. Head to a health food store that carries bulk “veggie” snacks and you’ll find all kinds of things. Suzanne says she already uses ground up stale cookies, which is genius.

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Can you freeze chocolate?

That’s an excellent question, reader Clare. It something that’s surely on the minds of many whose Valentine’s bounty exceeds their capacity to consume it. Yes, there are those people out there.

But to the question: can chocolate be frozen? The answer is that it can be, but it must be frozen carefully, and even when it is frozen carefully, it can still be damaged (at least cosmetically). The reason is because freezing accelerates the crystallization process. Certainly for water, but also for other key chocolate components like fat and sugar. It’s crystallized fat and sugar that’s responsible for the “bloom” one finds on chocolate that’s been stored for too long.

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This is turning into one of those projects…

Three more failed attempts at this ultra-simple bread and I’m starting to wonder if pão de queijo is possible without specially-ordered ingredients from Brazil. So far neither American-made tapioca starch nor Mexican-made manioc flour have performed as predicted/expected. Between the two the tapioca starch seems the more promising, but so far it’s not working in […]

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Hooch, South American Style

It’s popularly thought that the peoples of the New World knew nothing of alcohol before the arrival of corrupting Europeans. That may have been true of North America, but it most certainly was not true of South America. There the locals had been fermenting cassava mash into beer for thousands of years before white men […]

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Spam Spam Spam Spam

If anyone out there has asked a question lately that hasn’t been acknowledged, please re-send and I’ll get to it. I’ve been under attack from some very clever spammers who either custom-wrote emails specifically for each post (impossible to believe) or have devised a fiendish algorithm that auto-fills blanks in pre-written messages. Either way, then […]

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Where does pão de queijo come from?

An excellent question. I’ve received so much conflicting information on pão de queijo this week — from recipes to individual ingredients to history — I’m almost reluctant to post about it. But then a healthy dose of skepticism is required whenever you’re talking food history, since it’s often indistinguishable from myth.

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I Got Wood

Forgive the lack of posts today. I was driving through a local park this morning and noticed a large pile of branches with a “Take Me” sign next to it. Clearly the park crews had been cutting back dead limbs and were giving away the trimmings. It was a nice mix of small diameter hard wood, most of it very dry. Perfect brick oven fuel, in other words. Since I’m one of the few Kentuckians without a pickup truck, I’ve been making lots of trips back and forth between the park and my garage. But hey, free wood is free wood.

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OK, back to square one…

Two attempts and I can’t get a decent batter consistency. It ends up as a dough with the very absorbent, granular manioc flour…and a dough simply won’t puff up like it should. So I’m going to do what my trusted source made me swear I wouldn’t do: use tapioca flour. I can see no other […]

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