A good question from reader Mack. A roux (pronounced “roo”) is a thickener. More specifically, it is a thickener made from a 50-50 combination — by weight — of white wheat flour and fat (butter, oil, chicken fat, beef tallow, any fat will do). Roux-making is usually associated with French cooking, though the earliest reference […]
READ ONSupposedly they’re called that because the sandy — or sablé, of which the World Peace Cookie is an example — was invented in the town of Sable-sur-Sarthe toward the end of the 17th Century. However I suspect the crumbly, vaguely gritty mouthfeel of the sandy also plays a part in the name. But what causes […]
READ ONReader Scott submitted that question last week and I forgot to get to it. As far as I know there are two different ways of making filo dough. One is to simply roll it, which is the way commercial manufacturers do it, starting with a fairly stiff dough and employing a machine that’s analogous to […]
READ ONIf you were to browse around the internet looking for spoon bread recipes, you’d see that more than a few of them are leavened solely with egg foams. It’s thought that most early spoon breads were leavened this way until chemical leaveners like baking powder came into broad use in the mid-1800’s. Why not just […]
READ ONA number of you have asked that in regard to the waffle recipe I put up. It’s a good question, especially since most of us have been trained to think of corn starch (flour) as a thickener versus a bread building material. But in fact corn flour does work well as a regular flour, and […]
READ ONFor that matter, what’s gluten? The next time you make a batch of bread or pizza dough, pinch off a little bit and work it between your fingers under the kitchen faucet for a minute. A good proportion of the dough, mostly water-soluble starch, will wash away. Yet a small rubbery ball will remain. That’s […]
READ ONInstant flours (like Wondra) are very interesting things, low-gluten wheat flours that are extremely handy for thickening sauces (especially gravy before a turkey dinner!). What makes them “instant”? Simply the fact that they’re cooked ahead of time so as to cause the starch granules to swell and gelatinize. Then they’re dried again. The process is […]
READ ONCan anyone tell me which ingredient in the below recipes qualifies as a “stabilizer”? It is of course the flour, which as the mix cooks will “gelatinize”, i.e. let loose its starch molecules, which will go on to inhibit ice crystal formation. What stops the ice cream from tasting “floury” you might wonder. For one […]
READ ONDid I remember to say it’s pronounced like “shoe”? No matter. Making choux is a simple process, mostly just stirring. The traditional method is to simply use a wooden spoon, though a lot of people use food processors nowadays. Me, I can’t tell much of a difference between the methods, so I figure, why dirty […]
READ ONFor that matter, what’s gluten? The next time you make a batch of bread or pizza dough, pinch off a little bit and work it between your fingers under the kitchen faucet for a minute. A good proportion of the dough, mostly water-soluble starch, will wash away. Yet a small rubbery ball will remain. That’s […]
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