Search Results for: pretzel

On Crispiness and Crunchiness – or – What? WHAT??

I’m personally fascinated by the subject of crispy and/or crunchy food. No question it’s an odd thing to take an interest in. However as many of you who’ve read my bio know, I work quite a bit with food growers, packagers and purveyors. And all of them — save for the beverage makers — are continually concerned with the property of crispness and/or crunchiness. It’s a highly valued property in food among human beings generally, and lots of time, effort and money has gone into studying it.

Why are human beings so terribly fond of the crispy/crunchy sensation? Every consumer group from health nuts all the way through to couch potatoes love it, creating huge markets for everything from bagged micro-greens to kettle chips. Indeed if one were to re-categorize foods in the supermarket based on their sensory characteristics alone, “crispy” would be the largest section by far, full of everything from asparagus to apples to bacon, chips, pretzels, tater tots, pickles, candy, cookies, microwave-ready edamame and frozen thin-crust pizzas.

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Baking Class Debrief

Reader Ruth wrote in to ask about the baking class I did over the holiday season at my daughter’s grade school. I meant to follow up on that but didn’t — so thanks, Ruth!

I may have mentioned that the organizer of these after school classes felt that baking was a subject better suited to older kids than to children my daughter’s age, and I had to agree. Fifth and sixth graders were much more responsible around heat sources and hot objects. I expected at least a couple of burns and/or cuts over the course of the six classes, but no one received a single injury. Which is not to say that they kids listened as well as I’d hoped they would. The science mostly passed right by them, and I frequently had to get, shall we say…insistent when it came to impressing the proper procedures on the group. I had only five, but lord, they were handful at times.

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What’s with the baking soda?

I was waiting for someone to ask that question. Thanks, reader Emily! Dulce de leche recipes call for baking soda for one simple reason: to help the mixture brown. Those of you who’ve stuck with me through past posts about caramel know that it takes a fair amount of heat for sugars to start caramelizing […]

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