Neat as sorbet syrup is in terms of its ability to resist freezing completely, it would still freeze into a (mostly) solid block were it not for the ice cream machine. An ice cream machine performs two crucial roles in the sorbet-making process. Firstly, it freezes the syrup mixture quickly, and that helps create ice […]
READ ONReader Diane asks: Your Crumb Coffee Cake seems to be constructed similarly to the muffin method. I thought with the muffin method you are supposed to barely stir it after adding the wet ingredients. So whats’s with all the beating? I love that question! In fact the method I’m using for this cake is the […]
READ ONA good question from reader Mack. A roux (pronounced “roo”) is a thickener. More specifically, it is a thickener made from a 50-50 combination — by weight — of white wheat flour and fat (butter, oil, chicken fat, beef tallow, any fat will do). Roux-making is usually associated with French cooking, though the earliest reference […]
READ ONPart of the reason, as I said yesterday, is merely caché. Yet there are some other good reasons why many chefs prefer to work with flake salt. For one, it’s easy to pick up. And I mean that literally. Granules of table salt run from between your fingers like tiny ball bearings when you try […]
READ ONTrace impurities may not have much impact on the way a salt tastes, but the size and shape of the salt crystals definitely do. Again, not because the salt is any different chemically, but because crystals of varying sizes and shapes have different surface areas, and so dissolve at different rates. Salt grains come in […]
READ ONThe below pretzel recipe calls for either dipping your pretzels in a lye bath or simply painting them with egg wash. However there is another method that’s very commonly used. It involves poaching your pretzels in boiling water to which a large volume of baking soda has been added. Soda, as you most of you […]
READ ONReader Charlie writes in with these additional questions: 1) I don’t understand the starch mesh. Are the starch granules burst like in a gravy? If they aren’t heated to that point- aren’t they just swollen starches (individual)? 2) True heat would denature the proteins but wouldn’t over-heating then tighten these same proteins then tighten as […]
READ ONThat fantastic question from reader Frans. Fantastic because that word gets thrown around all the time when people talk about food science, but no one usually bothers to explain it. To be wholly accurate, starch doesn’t really “gelatinize” (it technically takes protein to make gelatin), it gelates, though the effect is largely the same. Which […]
READ ONRye isn’t a wheat at all, though it is a grass (Secale cereale) that produces a grain. That grain is useful in many of the same ways that wheat is useful, but truth be told, you’ve really gotta love rye if you want to make things out of it. Why? Because unlike rye’s housebroken cousin, […]
READ ONInstant flours (like Wondra) are very interesting things, low-gluten wheat flours that are extremely handy for thickening sauces (especially gravy before a turkey dinner!). What makes them “instant”? Simply the fact that they’re cooked ahead of time so as to cause the starch granules to swell and gelatinize. Then they’re dried again. The process is […]
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