I could write up another complete post on the subject, but I don’t think I could do better that the “Old Ladies in Fist Fights” post under the Biscuit Method link to the right.
READ ONFor all you mixing method fanatics out there (and aren’t they just everywhere in our culture these days?) wondering what mixing category pie dough falls into, the answer is: the biscuit method. It’s easy to see the resemblances…the “cutting in” of fat by hand, the emphasis on minimal handling, this despite the fact that biscuits […]
READ ONI can already see the list of emails in my in box complaining about the complexity of this technique. Pie dough, at least for most people, should be a simple operation. All I can say is, first, that it’s really not all that complicated, and second, that this is the method that gives me the […]
READ ONBut then what if you lived in a city or a town? For that stripe of pre-industrial European pie lover, there were pie specialists — professionals to whom you could take your edible miscellany, and who for a fee would put it into a pre-made crust and bake it up for you. In France such […]
READ ONNowadays we take for granted that pie baking is an activity that happens in the home. We forget that home ovens are a rather new development, historically speaking. They’ve only been popular for 150 years or so in America, far less than that in Europe. Traditionally, European ovens were large communal affairs, operated by a […]
READ ONThis week it’s ice snobs. Put them both together and you have a bar and restaurant concept that practically prints its own money. Anyone wanna help me write up a business plan?
READ ONHave you ever seen the Tupperware episode of Public Broadcasting’s American Experience? Talk about a portrait of invention and entrepreneurship, if you want to find out what America is all about in one hour or less, this is your show.
READ ONIt’s well time we moved on to this week’s topic: pie. It’s fruit season after all, darnit!
READ ONThe below post brought to my attention that fact that not all my readers out there might know what baker’s percentages are, nor what a term like “hydration” means when talking about a bread dough. To answer the easiest part first, “hydration” simply refers to how much water a bread dough contains. As for the […]
READ ONReader Hans Fugal had this to say about my assertion that sourdough bread typically has smaller holes (i.e. a “tighter crumb”): I beg to differ. I routinely make sourdough bread with an open crumb and not a grain of commercial yeast. The higher hydration seems to be the key, and of course it gets tricky […]
READ ON