There was one heck of a spike in readership yesterday. I’m used to getting about 1,500 visits per day in my little corner of cyberspace, but yesterday’s numbers were off the charts (well over 5,000! Yowza!). The only problem is, while my tracking software can tell the difference between an actual visit and a robot, […]
READ ONThe rest of the country may be worrying over recession, but not New York’s top chefs, for whom the good times are a-rollin’. “It’s not my feeling that we’re in a recession,” says Ed Brown of Eighty One in this article by Frank Bruni. “The rest of the country? Maybe. But we’re in our own […]
READ ONAt least for a moment. One of the things I find interesting about southern biscuits is that their name has changed consistently over time to reflect the kind of leavening they’ve been made from. Originally they were known as “saleratus” biscuits, and in fact even though real potassium bicarbonate saleratus hasn’t been available in America […]
READ ONWater, cellulose, sugars (fructose, sucrose, glucose, maltose), oligosaccharides, starch (amylose, amylopectin), citric acid, malic acid, lactic acid, alcohols, aldehydes, ethylene, aromatic sulfur compounds, tomatine, furaneol, glutamic acid, carotenoids, lycopene, glutation, vitamin C, vitamin A, potassium, fatty acids and acyglycerols (one or more of the following: myristic acid, palmitic acid, stearic acid, oleic acid, linoleic acid, […]
READ ONCan you tell? Little Josephine turns four today and for her birthday she requested a hot pink cake with a rainbow on it. She doesn’t like buttercream (the only thing that makes me sometimes doubt my paternity) so it’s a poured fondant icing over yellow butter cake with a raspberry filling (she’s a berry girl). […]
READ ONSo far in my ramblings I’ve talked a fair amount about the how of chemical leavening, and spent almost no time on the why. However it doesn’t take terribly much reflection to see what a boon chemical leavening would have been to a burgeoning country like America. People living in remote areas or along the […]
READ ONBased on what I posted just below, you can see that there’s not terribly much to a biscuit. Sift, mix, pat, cut, bake — you’re outta there. Yet that simplicity belies a rather complex mechanism, one which if not treated just so will malfunction to the disappointment of all. It’s true that the biscuit is […]
READ ONIt takes some moxie to move to the South and then a couple of years later start telling people how to make southern biscuits. But then who’s going to come over and blog this for me, Paula Deen? I’m going for it. Recipes for buttermilk biscuits, the archetypal chemically-leavened foodstuff, can be found everywhere. There […]
READ ONA reader sent in this interesting comment over the weekend: I was just catching up on your blog and found it interesting that baking took off in the New World not just because of trees for fuel but also because of trees for potash . . . Oh yes indeed. As I’ve often pointed out […]
READ ON…are you going to get anywhere near the point this afternoon??? Evidently not. But that’s what makes me charmingly eclectic. The point will have to wait until Monday.
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