You hear it all the time where things like Danish and croissants are concerned: is all that butter strictly necessary? The answer is yes, yes and yes. Not only is butter crucial to the physics of mechanical leavening, it tastes, well, fantastic. It can in fact be argued that the entire raison d’être of laminated […]
READ ONWho other than an ignornant, coronary-ily challenged hillbilly would ever think to eat something as absurd as a “butter pie”? Why our dairy fat-obsessed cousins the French, that’s who. In fact they almost certainly invented the butter pie, which probably explains why the “butter tart” is such a popular sweetmeat in Canada. Only the French […]
READ ONHere is a basic formula for choux: 4 ounces (½ cup) butter 8 ounces (1 cup) water ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon sugar 5 ounces (1 cup) all-purpose flour 4 eggs
READ ONI’m flattered to have been nominated to compete in Culinate’s Death by Chocolate food blog competition. It is a contest by which I (and anyone who votes in the competition) can win a two-day trip for two to Napa Valley and Copia’s Death by Chocolate Festival on the 23rd of this month. Should you wish […]
READ ONProfuse apologies for my lack of posting yesterday. However driving back from Wisconsin on Thursday (yes, I drove) I ran smack into that massive storm system that swept through the Midwest this week. I made contact right around Bloomington, Illinois, and was finally blown off the road (not literally, thank goodness) in Urbana. Happily for […]
READ ONFound out I have to blow town on business for a couple of days. It’ll be a long overnight trip. Hopefully I’ll be putting up a post or two on Friday. Until then keep a-whackin’ that butter. – Joe
READ ONSo what other kinds of baked goodies are out there that employ mechanical leavening and mechanical leavening alone? Though you might not think it, pie crusts. True they don’t rise nearly as dramatically as laminated doughs, yet the whole concept of pie crust “flakiness” is a product of the same principle: large (or at any […]
READ ONSince it had been quite a while since I’d done a “project of the week” like I used to do, I decided to take the category down (it wasn’t getting much use anyway). In its place I’ve put up a new “Joe’s How-To’s” category, under which I plan to store photo-tutorials like yesterday’s on laminated […]
READ ONThe world’s first ice cream cone-making machine was patented. Invented by Carl Rutherford Taylor of Cleveland, the “machine for spinning or turning a waffle” was assigned patent No. 1.481,813 on January 29, 1924.
READ ONEvery laminated dough, be it puff pastry, croissant or Danish, begins its life as a thick slab of butter encased in a dough “envelope”. This 3-layer dough-butter-dough package is then flattened and folded however many times it takes to get the number of layers the maker is after. A folded flaky pastry for say, a […]
READ ON