High ratio flour is used almost exclusively by professional cake bakers, though it’s also found in store bought cake mixes. What makes this type of flour special is that it’s ground very finely and treated with either heat or chlorine (or both). What does that do? It allows the flour to disperse very, very evenly […]
READ ONThis recipe is taken from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, an outstanding book that I recommend to all. This dough needs an overnight rest. Basically you mix it in the evening, rush it into the fridge until the next day, let it rise 2 to 3 hours, then shape the loaves and bake. Quite […]
READ ONMr. Nick checks in to point out that it’s important to avoid spritzing hot glass surfaces, and it is. I remember the first time I tried this technique many years ago. I spritzed my oven’s light bulb, which then exploded, raining fine shards of glass down onto my unbaked bread (not good eating). It is […]
READ ONIt’s funny how many people seem to think their ovens are too cheap/old/junky to be improved by things like pizza stones and pans of water. The fact is, the junkier your oven is, the greater the difference these tricks will make. The first thing you want to do to make your oven more hearth-like is […]
READ ONI know, I know, you already know that you need to have your oven hot before you put food into it. But do you know that it takes a lot longer than you think for your oven to fully heat up? To get the most out of your home oven, you need more than hot […]
READ ONSo then, when last we left off I was talking about ovens and heat…wasn’t I? My thought was that since the vast, vast majority of folks out there don’t have brick ovens taking up large sections of their back yards, I’d demonstrate how to make your own home oven more like a big hearth. It […]
READ ONRegular reader and pain in my rear end, Nick R. from Washington, D.C., launched his brand new food blog today. It’s called imafoodblog.com and you can find it here. Nick is a smart and funny guy with an unusually tenacious personality, which means we should be able to expect some lively conversation from him, his […]
READ ONI sure know how to get myself in trouble. Yesterday’s post on food and politics really put me in the dog house. In fact it set a Joe Pastry record for angry responses. I can’t address them all, so in the interests of time, I’ll try to summarize the basic points of contention. First there […]
READ ONI can’t tell you how many people I’ve said that to over the past couple of weeks and it feels so good. The down side is that I really will be forced to say goodbye to one of my favorite baking topics for a while. But I couldn’t close without showing off my favorite fruitcake-related […]
READ ONAll you Catholics out there know that yesterday the Church celebrated the Feast the Epiphany, which marks the day when the Magi first laid eyes on the infant Christ. Once upon a time in the Christian world, this feast (which is technically observed on the 6th of January of each year) was bigger than Christmas, […]
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