It seems miracles do happen. In a bizarre but welcome about-face, the Chicago City Council voted yesterday (37-6) to reverse its 2006 ban on foie gras, clearing the way for goose and duck liver to be served throughout the city starting, well…now. Celebrations are going on at restaurants all over town, but nowhere are they […]

There are only a couple of simple rules to remember about water baths. First, that the water you put in them must always be hot, and second that you must never cover them. Why? While filling a water bath with lukewarm or even cool water seems to make sense (slow warming, right?), it actually leads […]

More than a few custard recipes call for the addition of a starch, usually corn starch, as a stop-gap against curdling. You frequently find it in pie recipes, flourless chocolate cakes recipes (which routinely instruct home cooks to bake them for extended periods at higher-than-ideal temperatures), and in custard filling recipes, especially pastry cream. How […]

So then what are the consequences for a custard when you overshoot the mark, as it were? Well you remember the earlier discussion of how proteins work, the way in which heat unfolds those long string-like molecules, making it possible for their free bonding sites to adhere to one another to create a liquid-trapping lattice […]

Custards, especially “still” or baked custards, have a reputation for being tricky things to make. I suppose that’s somewhat true. We’ve all had our share of soupy, over-cooked quiches, after all. But it doesn’t have to be this way assuming you a) follow your recipe and b) know your oven. For custard baking is a […]

If you’re an experienced custard maker, you’ve likely observed a difference in the makeup of firm or “still” custards vis-à-vis pourable “stirred” varieties. That is, that where one typically calls for whole eggs, the other calls for yolks. This has to do with the difference in the properties of yolk proteins versus white proteins that […]

I do hate to get snarky on this blog, and especially don’t like to call people out (Michael Pollan being a notable exception), but this fellow, Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill Restaurant in New York, must be the poster child for pampered city-boy agricultural cluelessness. He is by all indications a fabulously talented chef, […]

Reader Clara writes in with this question about making a flourless cake: Why do you use a double boiler instead of the microwave [to melt the chocolate and butter], as you’ve been known to do on other occasions? Is it the quantity of the ingredients? It seems that there’s always a risk to the chocolate […]

There are lots of amazing things about eggs, but this morning I’m most impressed by their ability to thicken things. All by itself a raw egg is a thickener. Add it to some sweetened half-and-half, put the mix in the blender, and in a few seconds they egg’s emulsifiers will render a nice thick egg […]