Nowadays we take for granted that pie baking is an activity that happens in the home. We forget that home ovens are a rather new development, historically speaking. They’ve only been popular for 150 years or so in America, far less than that in Europe. Traditionally, European ovens were large communal affairs, operated by a […]
READ ONThis week it’s ice snobs. Put them both together and you have a bar and restaurant concept that practically prints its own money. Anyone wanna help me write up a business plan?
READ ONHave you ever seen the Tupperware episode of Public Broadcasting’s American Experience? Talk about a portrait of invention and entrepreneurship, if you want to find out what America is all about in one hour or less, this is your show.
READ ONIt’s well time we moved on to this week’s topic: pie. It’s fruit season after all, darnit!
READ ONThe below post brought to my attention that fact that not all my readers out there might know what baker’s percentages are, nor what a term like “hydration” means when talking about a bread dough. To answer the easiest part first, “hydration” simply refers to how much water a bread dough contains. As for the […]
READ ONReader Hans Fugal had this to say about my assertion that sourdough bread typically has smaller holes (i.e. a “tighter crumb”): I beg to differ. I routinely make sourdough bread with an open crumb and not a grain of commercial yeast. The higher hydration seems to be the key, and of course it gets tricky […]
READ ONAbove is some of the first passable bread I’ve produced with the brick oven, a few basic white flour “sourdough” batards (I know, that word sounds fancy, it’s simply French for “bastard”, meaning a loaf that’s neither round like a boule [ball] nor skinny like a baguette). I put sourdough in quotes because the bread […]
READ ONI always though that book was a bunch of baloney. And unfortunately the French government is going about combatting the problem in exactly the wrong way: a fatty foods tax. Forget that fatty foods like runny cheese and foie gras are considered cultural icons, the very notion that a behavior as elemental as diet can […]
READ ONHere’s a novel way to avoid taking in calories while still spending all the money you’d normally associate with a glass of fine wine: a gourmet water bar.
READ ONGot several emails last night from various readers, asking about my remark on fermented foods and satiety, or the feeling of fullness (or at least the feeling of not being hungry, which is probably most precise). How exactly do fermented foods create that sensation? they all want to know. If I knew the answer to […]
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