Can you tell? Little Josephine turns four today and for her birthday she requested a hot pink cake with a rainbow on it. She doesn’t like buttercream (the only thing that makes me sometimes doubt my paternity) so it’s a poured fondant icing over yellow butter cake with a raspberry filling (she’s a berry girl). […]
READ ONSo far in my ramblings I’ve talked a fair amount about the how of chemical leavening, and spent almost no time on the why. However it doesn’t take terribly much reflection to see what a boon chemical leavening would have been to a burgeoning country like America. People living in remote areas or along the […]
READ ONBased on what I posted just below, you can see that there’s not terribly much to a biscuit. Sift, mix, pat, cut, bake — you’re outta there. Yet that simplicity belies a rather complex mechanism, one which if not treated just so will malfunction to the disappointment of all. It’s true that the biscuit is […]
READ ONIt takes some moxie to move to the South and then a couple of years later start telling people how to make southern biscuits. But then who’s going to come over and blog this for me, Paula Deen? I’m going for it. Recipes for buttermilk biscuits, the archetypal chemically-leavened foodstuff, can be found everywhere. There […]
READ ONA reader sent in this interesting comment over the weekend: I was just catching up on your blog and found it interesting that baking took off in the New World not just because of trees for fuel but also because of trees for potash . . . Oh yes indeed. As I’ve often pointed out […]
READ ON…are you going to get anywhere near the point this afternoon??? Evidently not. But that’s what makes me charmingly eclectic. The point will have to wait until Monday.
READ ONOf course you didn’t have to be a Colonial recycling specialist to make use of leftover fat and ashes. For those dirt poor and/or industrious types, there was always do-it-yourself soap making. Now me, I’m descended from city folk mostly. But living in Louisville as I now do I’ve heard more than a few stories […]
READ ONLast week’s posts on laminated doughs elicited a worldwide outcry from the mechanical leavening community, pointing out that there is more to mechanical leavening than just layered dough. It is very true, and my oversight, since soufflés, angel food cakes, meringues and other egg foam-based devices are all excellent examples of unaided mechanical leavening. I […]
READ ONThe first of the “Big Three” leavening methods is chemical leavening. It’s the latest of the three to arrive on the baking scene, having been invented right about the time of the First Industrial Revolution, some 230 years ago. As its name implies, it involves using chemicals to create “seed” bubbles (usually of carbon dioxide) […]
READ ONSo far in this lengthy and ongoing exploration of leavening, I’ve drawn fairly stark distinctions between the various types (microbial versus mechanical versus chemical, etc.). Yet as my recent detour into croissants has shown, leavening methods can, and often are, combined. Croissants employ laminated dough techniques yet they also contain yeast. This gives the crumb […]
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