It occurred to me that this would be the perfect recipe for a week devoted to the subject of salt. These tantalizingly salty chocolate cookies are a type of sablé (“sandy”) cookie originally created by Pierre Hermé. The recipe was translated to English by Dorie Greenspan, and appeared in her book Paris Sweets. There, Greenspan […]
READ ONSalt also has some very interesting properties that impact taste indirectly. Notably, its tendency to give up some of its chemical energy as it dissolves. This happens whenever salt comes into contact with anything wet. In the mouth, it results in minute electrical charges being delivered directly to the taste buds. It’s a very minor […]
READ ONI mean, why not? There’s already a lively discussion going on about it in my in-box. So what they hey? It’s a pretty darn interesting subject. The chemical world is filled with all manner of salts. However the particular salt we think of as “salt” is sodium chloride (NaCl). It’s an inorganic compound, the only […]
READ ONCome on Joe, nobody ever did that. Oh yes, my friends, Lillie whipped her eggs the REALLY old-fashioned way, using a simple loop whisk and a flat wooden board. Well, it wasn’t totally flat. It had a shallow depression carved in the center where the liquid whites would sit before she applied her formidable elbow […]
READ ONReader Jacquie asks: Is there another dietary source of iodine other than salt? I tend not to add salt to things – mostly because I don’t care for the “saltiness” and I think as a culture foods are over-salted. (In part to mask the lack of taste from being grown in soilds lacking nutrients – […]
READ ONTalk about something that brings me back to childhood. Taking a bite of these put me right back in Lillie’s kitchen, where my twin sister and I would watch her whip up meringue by hand on a flat egg board (she didn’t own a mixing machine of any kind). Lillie was an ample woman, and […]
READ ONI was very lucky as a boy to live two doors down from the neighborhood baking queen. Her name was Lillie Lundstrom, a second-generation Swede whose cakes and cardamom rolls are still the stuff of legend on Lincoln Street. One of her lesser-known creations was this recipe for apricot bars, which takes the American concept […]
READ ONMexico Bob wrote in on the subject of salt. He wrote: What’s the big deal with salt. Salt is salt, right? Why do some recipes call for sea salt and others for Kosher salt, and others for pickling salt, etc? Can you really taste the difference? Bob, I think you’re right that salt is salt. […]
READ ONReader Laura asks this about lemon bars: Why can’t you just cook the curd in the pan to 196 degrees and then spread the fully cooked curd on the baked crust? That’s an excellent question that’s going to allow me to get good and geeky. It’s a fair thing to wonder. I mean, if I’m […]
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