One thing I forgot to mention is that ammonium carbonate is also a common smelling salt. For those of you who don’t know what smelling salts are, they’re the stuff that Moe used to revive Curly every time a tipped store shelf brought a long succession of jars, canned goods, bottled beer, cast iron skillets, […]
READ ONUnder construction, off to the right, is a new set of categories called “Joe’s Baking Basics”. They’re an attempt, not unlike “Joe’s How-To’s” to make this site more broadly useful as a reference tool. Much as I enjoy the ephemeral, sweeping nature of the blog format, it’s been pointed out that for those who don’t […]
READ ONAnd if it’s got nice big pieces of bacon baked into it, so much the better. Cornbread would have been one of the standard applications for chemical leaveners back in the day, since the ingredients were both inexpensive and very easy to transport. This recipe is a very sturdy version that calls for a high […]
READ ON…he’s probably a quack. That at least is my view of Dr. William Hay, the man who invented the so-called “Hay Diet”, modern versions of which are lumped under the collective name of nutripathy. I bring this up in answer to a question I received over the weekend as to whether the list of acid […]
READ ONMost days it’s a fair bet that should the biscuit bug strike, I won’t have any buttermilk hanging around in the fridge (and if I do, it’s usually been hanging around if you follow me). Happily, you don’t really need store-bought buttermilk to make buttermilk biscuits. As I mentioned, there is no real buttermilk around […]
READ ONA great cover story on the New York Times food section about fresh dairy products. Suspiciously appropriate once again.
READ ONThere was one heck of a spike in readership yesterday. I’m used to getting about 1,500 visits per day in my little corner of cyberspace, but yesterday’s numbers were off the charts (well over 5,000! Yowza!). The only problem is, while my tracking software can tell the difference between an actual visit and a robot, […]
READ ONThe rest of the country may be worrying over recession, but not New York’s top chefs, for whom the good times are a-rollin’. “It’s not my feeling that we’re in a recession,” says Ed Brown of Eighty One in this article by Frank Bruni. “The rest of the country? Maybe. But we’re in our own […]
READ ONAt least for a moment. One of the things I find interesting about southern biscuits is that their name has changed consistently over time to reflect the kind of leavening they’ve been made from. Originally they were known as “saleratus” biscuits, and in fact even though real potassium bicarbonate saleratus hasn’t been available in America […]
READ ONWater, cellulose, sugars (fructose, sucrose, glucose, maltose), oligosaccharides, starch (amylose, amylopectin), citric acid, malic acid, lactic acid, alcohols, aldehydes, ethylene, aromatic sulfur compounds, tomatine, furaneol, glutamic acid, carotenoids, lycopene, glutation, vitamin C, vitamin A, potassium, fatty acids and acyglycerols (one or more of the following: myristic acid, palmitic acid, stearic acid, oleic acid, linoleic acid, […]
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