The word éclair means literally “lightning” in French. How and why this particular word came to denote an elongated single-serving pastry filled with custard nobody knows — and I mean nobody. Browsing through the typical food history reference, you get the impression they’re all eager for you to just move on to the next entry. […]
READ ONSince my “How-To” menu over on the right seemed a little rambling and incoherent, I decided to organize it into sub-categories like “Bread”, “Pastry”, “Components” and such. Now instead of looking confusing it simply looks pathetic (with about five entries under each heading). Just means I’ve got a lot more blogging to do, eh? This […]
READ ONHow’s that for a mixed image? But it’s true, I really think I’m getting the hang of this brick oven now, so much so that I’m confident enough to put up a post, How to Fire a Brick Oven over on the menu on the right. It’s rewritten/expanded version of one of the posts I […]
READ ONDid a test burn with some of this bright yellow osage orange (hedge apple) wood on Wednesday. The results were spectacular. Granted it took a good deal longer than I’d hoped (7 hours from start to finish…it’s very dense stuff) but you can’t argue with the numbers: 900-degree oven walls and floor and a 1000+ […]
READ ONHere’s something you don’t see every day, a newspaper article on how good life is: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121331500809069989.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries. Now back to the floods, war and famine…
READ ONWell if you scroll down and compare these shots to the ones in the post Intro to the Cement Doughnut you’ll see that I didn’t do half bad. True, where the crust is concerned, I don’t have the nice smooth skin and near perfect ring-shape of the Manhattan original, but I do have deeper caramelization […]
READ ONI’ve talked about the why’s of bagel boiling, but didn’t address all the additives that can, and often do, go into the boiling pot. Everything from sugar to malt syrup to baking soda to lye are used as additives, all of which have the effect of creating a darker, crispier crust. Why darker? Because sugars […]
READ ONGot a question last evening from a reader by the name of Dan, who asked: If high gluten flour is what helps give breads bigger holes, why do you use high gluten in bagels where the ideal is smaller holes? That’s an excellent question, for in truth the idea of making bagels with high-gluten flour […]
READ ONI don’t think I’ve ever made a bagel that’s a flawless torus, but nobody’s perfect. They’re crunchy, chewy, deep brown and taste great with cream cheese, which is all you need to get into bagel-maker heaven when you die. As I’ve mentioned previously, there are a lot of bagel dough recipes out there, and when […]
READ ONDon’t know how many of you tuned in for the Belmont Stakes yesterday, but the big story there was that Big Brown not only lost the Belmont Stakes, his jockey Kent Desormeaux declined to run him anywhere near his capacity for the last quarter mile or so. He simply eased him out of contention in […]
READ ON