Making the many pronouncements that I do (what can I say, it’s my nature), I frequently forget the increasingly international readership of joepastry.com. Clair writes in from France (Normandy, no less) to correct me about butter: In your buttermilk post, you say that “…butter isn’t made out of cream anymore. It’s made from leftovers from […]
READ ONHave to run up to Chicago on business later this morning, so this will probably be it for me for the week. I shall return, hopefully with much-needed work, but also with a full cooler of encased meats. Vienna Beef, here I come!
READ ONI’ve written about every other component of my panna cotta, a reader pointed out last night, can I write a little about buttermilk? Oh, but of course. For while there may or may not be much real cream around anymore, there definitely isn’t any real buttermilk. Why not? Because buttermilk is the fluid that remains […]
READ ONExceedingly simple, just the way I like it. Feels like it’s been an awfully long time coming, though, doesn’t it? First, let me thank several very talented pastry people who all wrote in with various tips on this dessert. They were all very much appreciated (though to be 100% honest, I went back to my […]
READ ONA lot less often than you’d think. Which is why I only go out in search of one when I need it. Lots of pastry preparations call for vanilla, few of which would benefit in any significant way from real vanilla bean. Cookies, bars, cake batters and tea breads fall into this category. Creamy things […]
READ ONI think there are probably half a dozen posts on this site that include this process in some form, but I receive so many requests for a separate tutorial on it, I’m going to go ahead and put one up. It seems a lot of people out there are having trouble seeding vanilla beans. The […]
READ ONGelatin can be destroyed (or rather ruined) by heat. As the temperature of the mixture that it’s in approaches the boiling point, the normally forgiving molecules that make it up clench into knots that can’t be untied. This is the reason one must always allow a panna cotta mixture to cool before dissolving gelatin powder […]
READ ONMy dairy snipe hunt on Friday yielded an unexpected benefit. At the top of my half-gallon of local (unhomogenized) milk was an inch-thick plug of clotted cream. And if you don’t know what that is, well…that’s a shame. Back in Devonshire, where I had the great privilege of attending school for a year of my […]
READ ONItalian food science writer Dario B. writes in from the Continent, to comment on the topics from the last two weeks: I read your blog from Italy (too bad we cannot comment the various posts). I want to confirm that here in italy “biscotti” are what you in the US call cookies (well, sort of, […]
READ ONAnd by overwhelming response, the consensus is that yes, there was a time when simple (or simpler) farm cream was widely available. Granted, most of the people who’ve sent me email the last day or two are from places like Vermont and Wisconsin, but even so, it seems clear that local dairies did once provide […]
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