Culinary history, you mean? A lot of the myths you routinely hear about the history of food come, interestingly enough, from the legendary Larousse Gastronomique — which, if you don’t own, you might seriously consider picking up. It’s the grandaddy of cooking encyclopedias. Its focus is, of course, French food and ingredients, and it’s chock […]
READ ONTarte Tatin has a somewhat odd history, having supposedly been invented in 1888 at a hotel owned by two spinster sisters (the Tatins) in the town of Lamotte-Beuvronin, just south of Orléans in north-central France. It’s full and proper name is tarte des demoiselles Tatin, or “The Tatin Spinsters’ Tart”, but here in the states […]
READ ONHaving made a freezer-full of buttercreams this last week I have to say I’ve had enough of my mixer for a while. The good news is that I now have enough buttercream to see me through the holidays. Also, by happy coincidence, my advertiser, Foodbuzz, sent me a check for $50 yesterday, which will just […]
READ ONHaving made a freezer-full of buttercreams this last week I have to say I’ve had enough of my mixer for a while. The good news is that I now have enough buttercream to see me through the holidays. Also, by happy coincidence, my advertiser, Foodbuzz, sent me a check for $50 yesterday, which will just […]
READ ONThat was fast. Reader Linda writes in to ask whether chocolate buttercreams are the same thing as chocolate frostings. The answer is no. Chocolate frostings — milk, dark, and white — are more like ganaches than they are like buttercreams, which is to say they are chocolates made spreadable by the addition of fat or […]
READ ONPerhaps my favorite feature of real buttercreams, aside from their fundamental deliciousness, is the extent to which they can be manipulated. For the creative baker, there’s virtually no end to it. A complete catalog is impossible, though I’ll do my best to summarize some of the most common variations. Extracts are obvious, and there are […]
READ ONI’ve had several readers write in to ask that. In fact I posted them in my personal order of preference (for cakes) …Italian meringue first, American-style last.
READ ONYou know…cheese, bread, chocolate…buttercream? It’s enough to give a food-conscious Yankee a complex. However it’s really not such a bad thing when you consider that Americans (and other New Worlders) are and always have been consummate experimenters — forever ready to cast tradition aside and embrace the new. Sometimes this works out for the best […]
READ ONWhen you’re the father of two very small girls you ask yourself a lot of things, like: how many more games of “lost pony in the fairy forest” can I play before my masculine self-image completely implodes? By extension, you wonder what it might be like raising boys, whether your days of sipping tea from […]
READ ONOnce you see how this is made, you won’t wonder why American-style buttercreams have become the new standard — even in upscale bakeries — all over the world. OK, maybe not in the pâtisseries of Paris, but pretty much everywhere else. The reasons are primarily functional. Not only are the buttercreams in this family a […]
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