Is this a Joe-style afternoon snack or what? Home made pretzels are another one of those things that will amaze you for their simplicity and make you wonder if you can ever be happy with the store-bought variety again. As you already know from the recipe below, my version calls for a stater. You want […]
READ ONA few football fan readers who don’t keep bread starters at home have asked what suggestions I have for them with the Super Bowl fast approaching. The easy answer is to go conventional and just find a likely straight dough pretzel recipe somewhere on the internet (King Arthur Flour has several good ones). However before […]
READ ONThis weekend the world, very quietly, lost its greatest humanitarian. And I mean that literally. Superlatives like “greatest humanitarian” come cheap nowadays. Heck someone probably used the term on the podium at the MTV Awards last night. However I’m pretty sure no one in attendance there had really saved more lives than any human being […]
READ ONGot that question over the weekend and it’s a good one. As it happens, white corn meal isn’t necessary, but it’s more traditionally Southern. White corn is to the South what sweet yellow corn is to the North. Both are varieties that are distinct from feed corn in that they’re considered to have a better, […]
READ ONThat’s another question that came in last night, and as it happens, it plays right into what I wanted to write about today. Spoon bread is a hill country and/or Southern thing because corn has always been the dominant grain in those areas. Why? Partly because wheat doesn’t do well in hotter climates, but mostly […]
READ ONWhy, an elf of course. More specifically a house elf, one which, provided it’s treated with respect and given the odd morsel of food, is wont to perform all manner of helpful household tasks. Like what? Oh, tidying up, milking the cows, churning the butter, that sort of thing. Quite the household convenience they are, […]
READ ONThis one was a bit of a tough choice. So much so that I resolve that if I have time, I’ll make two tarts this week. Tarts, not being as thick as pies, are minimalist affairs by definition. So my temptation was to go with something very light filling-wise (so as to let the butter […]
READ ONBread flour is much like all-purpose flour, save for the fact that it’s often made from just a single type of hard wheat (versus a blend). It’s high in gluten, as you’d expect (usually around 13 percent) and because of that it produces the highest, fluffiest and chewiest breads. Oftentimes millers will add special “dough […]
READ ON…is that it is trying to manipulate you. How? With lots of shocking images of industrial food production. They aren’t pretty, but then there’s no shortage of ugly things in the world of industry. Heck, there’s no shortage of ugly things in the world in general — one of them is blogging at you right […]
READ ONThe elephant under the carpet of the organic discussion is and always has been: land. There’s only so much of it on the planet we can grow food on. About a billion and a half sqaure hectares by UN estimates. That’s twice the amount of productive land that was being farmed 100 years ago, though […]
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