So then what are the consequences for a custard when you overshoot the mark, as it were? Well you remember the earlier discussion of how proteins work, the way in which heat unfolds those long string-like molecules, making it possible for their free bonding sites to adhere to one another to create a liquid-trapping lattice […]
READ ONCustards, especially “still” or baked custards, have a reputation for being tricky things to make. I suppose that’s somewhat true. We’ve all had our share of soupy, over-cooked quiches, after all. But it doesn’t have to be this way assuming you a) follow your recipe and b) know your oven. For custard baking is a […]
READ ONIf you’re an experienced custard maker, you’ve likely observed a difference in the makeup of firm or “still” custards vis-à-vis pourable “stirred” varieties. That is, that where one typically calls for whole eggs, the other calls for yolks. This has to do with the difference in the properties of yolk proteins versus white proteins that […]
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 ONReader Clara writes in with this question about making a flourless cake: Why do you use a double boiler instead of the microwave [to melt the chocolate and butter], as you’ve been known to do on other occasions? Is it the quantity of the ingredients? It seems that there’s always a risk to the chocolate […]
READ ONThere are lots of amazing things about eggs, but this morning I’m most impressed by their ability to thicken things. All by itself a raw egg is a thickener. Add it to some sweetened half-and-half, put the mix in the blender, and in a few seconds they egg’s emulsifiers will render a nice thick egg […]
READ ONCustards run the gamut from sauces and flans to cheesecakes and flourless chocolate cakes. What all these preparations have in common is that they are semi-solid gels that use egg proteins to set what would otherwise be rather runny liquids (this is of course less true of something like a flourless, whose ingredients are solids […]
READ ONFlourless chocolate cake has a unique feeling on the tongue. At first it does feel almost floury and cake-like, but rapidly melts into a luscious, molten pool. The density of the cake (and all the fat) prolongs the sensation, meaning a little goes a long way (though not if you’re either one of my daughters…then […]
READ ONThat scene from Marathon Man, I’m sure, wrecked the livelihood of many a respectable dentist. Talk about a classic. Though it’s a pity such a realistic torture sequence could not have come later in Dustin Hoffman’s career, say after he’d done films like Ishtar, Outbreak, Finding Neverland, and Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. The scene could […]
READ ONThis cake is a prime example of Joe Pastry’s Inverse Law of Ingredient Dynamics, which states that as the number of ingredients in a given recipe goes down, the importance of the quality of those ingredients and the techniques by which they are handled goes up. There’s a great misconception out there that because a […]
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