I missed the first episode or two of the new Food Network series Ace of Cakes, and to be honest, wasn’t really looking forward to catching up with the third one. Most of what I’d seen of Duff Goldman (his fireworks-shooting cannon cake and other exploding delights featured on Sugar Rush) left me feeling pretty […]
READ ON…and the wife wants another version of the Chicago-style cornmeal deep-dish. Tonight I’m upping the percentage of cornmeal just to see what happens. My expectation is that it’ll be a little grainy and/or crumbly, but I have a solution for that: a soaker. What’s a soaker? It’s a time-tested technique for softening up coarse grains […]
READ ONWith so many peaches around, I can’t turn them all into cobblers, not matter how well my daughter eats. One alternative is once again: jam. Here I have to say that peaches test my patience every single year. Last year I got a half bushel of white peaches (clingstones) that were very firm and flavorful, […]
READ ONWhat about cobbler? Where did that name come from? There’s really not much information on it. Some say it’s named after tradesman cobblers (that is, shoemakers), sort of a “pie that the shoemaker eats”, but there’s not any direct evidence for it. One of the few printed references we have for cobbler comes from Washington […]
READ ONI haven’t mentioned it much, but real estate has been much on my mind the past couple of months. With another pastry in the oven and the timer ticking, we need a bigger place to live. Last night the missus and I left little Josephine with a neighbor and strolled down the street to look […]
READ ONI know that there are more than a few food writers who have ascribed the origin of the word pizza to the Italian word for point, which is indeed very similar: pizzo. The connection there is supposedly that pizza is cut into wedges, which are pointy on the ends. The problem I have with that […]
READ ONI can just hear a few of you out there rolling your eyeballs (yes, that makes a noise…sort of) at the idea that “pita” is related to the Greek word for “pitch”. Not being a Greek scholar, I can’t say proof positive, but it does makes sense if you consider where pitch comes from and […]
READ ONBased on the previous post and its comment string, I’m starting to think I should change the name of this blog to “Joe Meat”. Hm…maybe a spinoff or something. But for now my job is baking and pastry, and dammit, I’ve been delinquent the last ten days or so. So let’s now get to what […]
READ ONImagine my surprise and delight when I walked into my favorite Chicago hot dog shop this past Wednesday and found a brand new special on the menu: a duck sausage on a bun with fat pats of foie gras plopped on top. Was this heaven? No, just Hot Doug’s, a Northwest-Side hot dog shrine owned […]
READ ONI was called out of town on business Wednesday…had to make a mad dash back to Chicago only three days after I left it. But I’m back with plenty of good stuff to report. More soon.
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