I get tired of fancy magazines (and, ehem…blogs) calling for this ingredient, don’t you? For quite a while I thought it was just a fancy French-sounding name for sour cream, one that allowed my local Whole Foods to charge twice as much money for the stuff. But in fact it is a slightly different animal […]
READ ONFor the crème fraîche in the onion tart recipe, you mean? Nope. Sour cream can’t take the heat that crème fraîche can, and will break in the oven. So should you not have access to any, just substitute a lesser amount of heavy cream. It won’t have the same zing, but you won’t be disappointed.
READ ONSometimes I think God put puff pastry on Earth for one reason and one reason alone: so it could be made into scraps and those scraps turned into Alsatian onion tart. This appetizer is so rich and lovely — covered with caramelized onions, cream and bacon — odds are excellent your dinner guests won’t ever […]
READ ONThe most popular story on the origin of the onion tart is that it was originally a baked good with which the bakers of old would test the heat of their ovens. If they pushed the embers aside and put one down (among the still-burning embers) and it baked up in a certain amount of […]
READ ONA pro who knows weighs in on onion slice-ery: I read the piece on cutting onions, and as far as being more or less oniony, the less times you cut the onion (and the sharper your blade is), the less damage you’ll do the cell structure, resulting in less of the sulfuric compounds mixing and […]
READ ONAn onion tart isn’t an easy thing for me to quantify, since I generally just wait until I have a baseball-sized mass of puff pastry scraps in my freezer, then make one. I’ll give it a try though. About 10 ounces puff pastry About one cup caramelized onions (see recipe under the Components menu) 1-2 […]
READ ONAn email came in earlier today contesting my assertion that slicing an onion from pole-to-pole versus cross-wise results in any fewer irritant-dispersing cross-cuts of the onion flesh. I’m no expert on onion anatomy, but I was taught that cutting the onion from top to bottom, then slicing inward toward the center, yields a milder tasting […]
READ ONHere’s a good article from yesterday’s Toronto Globe & Mail on pairing wine with dessert. Very interesting stuff.
READ ONMembers of the allium family are unique in the vegetable kingdom in that they store much of their energy in short-chain sugars. Whereas most types of plants “lock up” sugars in the form of very long-chain starch molecules (which growing shoots later break down into usable sugar via special enzymes), onions store much of their […]
READ ONIf the onion is known for possessing any single quality, it’s of course the tear-inducing miasma it gives off when it’s cut. This is the onion’s defense mechanism against being eaten my large mammals such as ourselves. Its design is ingenious. Each cell contains not one, but four different offensive chemical compounds. Left alone, those […]
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