The thing about wood is, size matters. Or to be more accurate, surface area. To get a wood-fired oven ready for baking, you want to get as much heat into the masonry as you can as fast as you can. Because the thing about heat is, it dissipates. Even in a big 8-foot-tall mass of […]
READ ONWhich works fine for me, I’ll have their helping. Quiche is one of those things that when done well, sings like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The problem that real men have with quiche is that it’s been mostly presented to them in foil pie plates on block party buffet tables. You know the stuff I […]
READ ONI do hate to get snarky on this blog, and especially don’t like to call people out (Michael Pollan being a notable exception), but this fellow, Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill Restaurant in New York, must be the poster child for pampered city-boy agricultural cluelessness. He is by all indications a fabulously talented chef, […]
READ ON…but I couldn’t help but notice three very interesting items topping the news this morning, this story about big escalations in food prices, this one about food riots in places like Haiti, and this one about the rediscovery of the potato as a staple crop. What’s the common denominator here? In a word: ethanol. Of […]
READ ONIt’d be fun to hold a yearly contest for the least Irish version of Irish soda bread. For trust me ladies and germs, nobody — not even the Irish — want to eat the real thing. Taste it and you’ll understand why. Real Irish soda bread is dry, hard, mealy and packs a nasty alkaline […]
READ ONI try not to venture into politics much here on joepastry.com since, well, this is a baking blog. And anyway the blogosphere is already stuffed to the gills with wannabe pundits masquerading as a food experts and movie reviewers. However sometimes the bigger political subjects have direct application to the world of baking, and today […]
READ ONGot something of a nasty-gram last night (not entirely unexpected) that in essence said: you tell us to grow our own starters, bake our own bread, make our own pastry dough, ice cream, even soda water, yet you defend the industrial food establishment. What the heck are your politics? I’ve answered questions like this before […]
READ ONWatching a starter grow is a wonder…oh wait, I said that yesterday. It’s just that it is. Last night as I left mine contentedly bubbling away in its bowl, I headed to bed with a grin. “We have a lovely starter,” I mused to the wife. Distracted, she asked me a moment later what it […]
READ ONSo 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 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 […]
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