Author: joepastry

It seems PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has petitioned ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s to replace the cow’s milk they now use in their ice cream products with human breast milk. As if that company wasn’t already having trouble enough with its brand ever since it was acquired by Unilever back […]

Cinnamon is the archetypal “sweet” spice, though as I’ve written, in days gone by it didn’t always occur to people to eat it — at least in the Western part of the world. Though it probably arrived in the Mediterranean as early as tree thousand years ago, it was used as an embalming compound by […]

…but what about the cinnamon? What is it and where does it come from? It is, in a word, bark. The inner bark of the Cinnamomum tree which first sprung up in India, but which spread (or was spread) to China and other locales. Cinnamon is harvested by breaking off the hard, outer bark of […]

Does that count as a post?

Then brioche will indeed be a very challenging dough to make. But let that not concern you. The old school dough-and-melted-butter cinnamon roll recipes are, as I said, highly bankable. Take care not to overwork your dough and the rolls will be fantastic.

For one because it’s handy. Bakeries tend to like doughs that are multi-taskers, and is brioche ever one of those. You can use it for brioche (obviously), both loaves and têtes, monkey bread, doughnuts, cinnamon rolls, the list goes on. But then I suppose the question becomes why is brioche so darn useful? If I […]

Seems we have the beginnings of pro-Vienna culinary history movement going on among the readership. Reader Todd writes in to say: This email is in regards to the Viennese getting the short end of the recognition stick. My passion is coffee and I think most Americans think that the French and especially the Italians are […]

Reader Nick writes in to ask: I was reading your blog and saw the process you posted on making the envelope. I was wondering if you knew if that is the same method used for making vol-au-vent? In fact I didn’t. For those who may not know, vols-au-vent are light puff pastry shells usually filled […]

Apparently while I’m a decent baker, I’m lousy at physics (which I should have known already given the grades I once got in Sister Ellen’s classes). Reader Sandra (of Cornell no less) points out: Actually, the earth’s axis is *always* at 23.4 degrees to the orbital plane. It points “towards” or “away from” the sun […]