The little woman (the very little woman…she’s 4′ 11″ and maybe 95 pounds in hiking boots), just returned from a trip down south of the border. She was ostensibly there to conduct scholarly research, but her real purpose — being a Pastry — was to eat. She succeeded. Below are pictures of just a few […]
READ ONSomeday someone will write a book on the history of food coloring litigation. Well, no, I guess they won’t…but a very, very interesting read it might have been. For the battle over food coloring is a microcosm of a much broader fight that’s still going on: between small local food producers and big food manufacturers. […]
READ ONEver since I put up the post about assembling a plastic pastry bag, I’ve been besieged by requests for instructions on how to make a traditional paper pastry bag or “cone.” I confess I don’t use these much, though they’ve been the #1 tool of every professional or semi-professional cake and/or cookie decorator I’ve ever […]
READ ONI tell you, some days I am simply in awe of the power of the internet as a communications tool. Yesterday I put up a question from an American food researcher on an obscure baking topic — the origin of poolish bread preferments — and today I have a response from a preferment scholar living […]
READ ONGiven the technical breakdown of the last week, it’s taken me a while to get around to my penultimate photograph. However you can see that even using simple powdered sugar-and-water icings, the home baker can produce some pretty darn nice cookies. This is not to say the simple approach doesn’t have a few drawbacks. Note […]
READ ONJim C. (from the post below) had a special request when he emailed me over the weekend. He asked if I’d put a question out to the joepastry.com readership at large about poolish starters. That question is: is the “poolish” starter really a Polish invention? It’s thought to be, given how similar the words are, […]
READ ONHere’s an interesting addition to the food coloring discussion from reader Jim Chevallier: …in browsing your comments on colorants, I was reminded of a dismaying discovery I made when translating Taillevent’s medieval Viandier (as “How to Cook a Peacock” – surprisingly, one of my more popular tomes.) This was that the orchanet (alkanet) used to […]
READ ONWhew! That hurt. Nothing like a broken site to discourage readership. I think my numbers were down into the negatives over the weekend, if that’s possible. Thanks to all who wrote in from all corners of the globe to alert me to the fact that the site was in trouble. Fortunately, my host, whose upgrade […]
READ ONWith the controversy that sometimes surrounds food colorings, it’s easy to get lulled into the assumption that coloring food is a recent phenomenon. In fact it’s been practiced for millennia, especially among the Romans and Greeks who were renown for their manufacture of caramel color. Caramel color? Isn’t that what they put in soft drinks? […]
READ ON