How did the doughnut get its hole? The number one legend has to be the tale of New England sea captain Hanson Gregory. The year was 1847. Doughnuts, originally brought to American shores by the Dutch, were already well ensconced in our popular eating culture. They had but one engineering flaw: a gooey and undercooked […]
READ ONThere’s a reason why the cake doughnut and the military work together so well. Yeast-raised doughnuts are fussy things, requiring time and many steps to prepare. The dough must be mixed, kneaded, raised, rolled, cut, proofed and then finally fried. Cake doughnuts require far fewer steps, plus don’t need any special environmental conditions. It’s all […]
READ ONAs with so many foods from the age before mass production, it’s almost impossible to nail down the date, or even the year, the first cake doughnut was made. Yet as we look down the ingredient list we can narrow the time frame a bit. Cake doughnuts are chemically leavened (i.e. they employ baking soda […]
READ ONSo here it is: one of my top secret recipes. Cake doughnuts are a batter, not a dough. In professional shops, they’re made by a machine that drops ring-shaped quantities of batter into a vat of hot oil. They look like this, or if you have a bigger operation, like this. These so-called doughnut “depositors” […]
READ ONOh yes, my friends. I (and apparently more than a few readers, too) have been waiting a long time for this. Those of you who’ve followed this blog for a while know my weakness for that fried, torus-shaped device known as the doughnut. Even more than that, the somewhat dense, chemically-leavened, fried, torus-shaped device known […]
READ ONWhile I was gone, a reader by the name of Jim Chevalier chimed in on an old post about the history of croissants. The email went like this: Congratulations! You’re the first (other) person I’ve seen so far who bothered to check just WHO was besieger and besieged in Budapest (you would think the person […]
READ ONI cut a giant swathe through the lower Midwest last week, pitching business and eating just about everything in sight. Now I’m back home with a glass of alka seltzer by my bed, wondering what the heck happened. It was one of those rambling trips that featured all sorts of reality check moments. Tuesday night […]
READ ONSudden business opportunities necessitated that I pack up and hit the road with scarcely a moment’s notice. And since Monday evening, I’ve barely had access to the internet. So…please forgive the disappearance. I’ll do my best to get after it again tomorrow!
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This is a serious dessert mousse, friends. A chocolate experience so rich, velvety and decadent, a few tablespoons is really all that any one person needs. I usually chuckle when I watch Mrs. Pastry eat chocolate bars, because she nibbles them like a mouse, savoring every tiny morsel. However even I — a man known to wolf chocolate bars down by the handful — eat this only incrementally, off the tip of a spoon.
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