I know I’ve tasted this somewhere before…

Odds are, you’ve eaten pain à l’ancienne before without even knowing it. It’s hard to overestimate the stir this recipe caused when it was unveiled by Peter Reinhart five or six years ago. Up until then, commercial bakeries and restaurants had to rely either on long dough fermentation or artificial methods to get comparable flavor, […]

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Anatomy of a Wheat Berry

So then…if amylase (the enzyme that breaks flour’s carbohydrate molecules down into simple sugars) is abundant in packaged flour, where does it come from? Well, amylase occurs naturally in wheat berries, especially when they germinate (or malt). Every wheat berry is essentially a seed, you see, containing an embryo (the germ) and its food supply, […]

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Weird Science

The cool and crazy thing about pain à l’ancienne is that it delivers almost all of the characteristics bread bakers seek — flavorful crumb, chewy texture, nice big holes and a deep brown crust — all with a minimum of effort and time. You simply mix up a dough of flour, yeast, salt and ice […]

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Learning to Love Disaster

The cardinal rule of any professional kitchen is: waste nothing. For anything edible that finds its way into the trash or down the drain is thrown away profit. Don’t throw out those radish tops! Put’em in with the salad greens and they’re mesclun. Make sure you refrigerate those pork trimmings! We’re making pâté de campagne […]

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The Low Pressure Pie

You can’t be uptight when making a galette. It’s just not that type of pastry. Unlike pies, galettes aren’t made in pans, so they have no set shape. Depending on how you roll your dough out, they can be roundish, squarish, pretty much whatever-sh. They may have no cracks or several, they may contain their […]

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For the Week of October 23rd, 2006

Ya gotta love those fall fruits, eh? And what is fall without a little warm pear something-or-other after a nice weekend dinner? This week’s recipe has become one of my go-to’s when the cry goes up from the starving faculty and grad students over at U of L. They can’t get enough of it, and […]

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Bullish on Greenspan

I finally had a chance to take a good hard look at Dorie Greenspan’s new book, Baking: From my Home to Yours over the weekend. If you don’t know Dorie like I know Dorie, she’s a cook, baker and author best known for her collaborations with others: Baking with Julia with Julia Child, Chocolate Desserts […]

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The Politics of Pastry

A very funny comment came in via email this weekend. Or at least I thought it was funny. The meat of it went like this: I don’t understand how you can be so inconsistent. Just Friday you defended commercial agriculture in one post, then talked about how you only like to use fresh, local produce […]

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Corn People

Corn gets a mighty bad rap in some quarters these days, and that seems unfair to me. For as far as I can tell, the most corn has ever done to us is prove itself incredibly useful. It must be, since we in America grow about 10 billion bushels of the stuff every year. We […]

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