So what’s going on in a starter bowl? The answer: lots of stuff. Beneath that happy, bubbly veneer there’s war is going on, between all manner of lower forms of life, all of them vying for supremacy. Sort of like the presidential primaries. Bu-dum-bum. Starters are not what most people think they are: cultures made […]
READ ON…to whoever it was who nominated me for the Bloggers Choice Awards! Of course I like to flatter myself that I’m not interested in these kinds of “prestige” awards. But gimme a break, who doesn’t love a little recognition? “Hey! That’s me!”
READ ONNo, not really. This starter goo just happens to look better in a rustic crockery bowl. This is what a homemade starter looks like when it’s ready and rarin’ to go: puffy with lots of big bubbles. This is not to say that a starter has to be in this kind of prime condition to […]
READ ONMicrobial (also called “biological”) leavening is the grandaddy of all leavening techniques. It dates back to when the first human mistakenly left his bowl of gruel sitting out while he rushed off to join the village mastodon hunt. The result was what we now call a “starter”. And while the biology of microbial leavening can […]
READ ONFundamentally, leavening is about introducing gasses of various kinds into baked grain pastes in an attempt to lightening them and make them easier to chew. I think we all know what you get when you try to bake up a simple mixture of water and flour without a leavening agent: a cracker. Hardtack is what […]
READ ONThis past October/November I spent many weeks going through the various mixing methods in detail. For the new year I thought it might be fun to do the same thing with the various leavening techniques. For while I frequently refer to the different forms of leavening in the day-to-day course of the blog, I’ve never […]
READ ONWell it’s the Monday after New Year’s, which means even the most committed couch potatoes among us have to admit that it’s time to hoist our holiday girth out of the La-Z-Boy and get back to work. It’s been fun, but then I’ve watched little Josephine’s new DVD, Dumbo, entirely too many times. She can’t […]
READ ONI don’t know what you did for Christmas dinner this year, but here at the Pastry household, turkey was the order of the day. It had been a while since I’d made a good old-school turkey dinner. No fancy dried fruit and artisan sourdough stuffings, no braised figs, no wild mushroom gravy. Just great-grandma Pastry’s […]
READ ONThe good folks at Apple are at it again with a new proprietary ordering process through which you’ll be able to select, order and pay for food at any quick-service restaurant via your wireless device (iPhone), then (ideally) pick it up at a special drive-through window when you arrive. It reminds me of a newspaper […]
READ ON…is to do more savory baking this year. There’s a whole world of savory tarts, breads, pies, pastries, custards and the like out there to explore. And it’s timely, what with all the pastry chefs that are opening their own full menu restaurants these days. The boundary between savory and sweet baking has never been […]
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