These days (and I mean during Christmas time) you can find a lot of talk about sugars and sugar syrups in the popular press, much of it insinuating that somehow raw cane sugar and/or cane syrup and/or molasses are the real sweeteners, more authentic and/or more chemically or morally pure than white sugar and especially […]
READ ONFor all those who have friends or family members who, instead of receiving an actual gift this Christmas, would be interested in having a charitable donation made in their name, I highly recommend this organization: Kiva. Not a “charity” in the traditional sense, it’s a mechanism by which donors extend small loans to entrepreneurs in […]
READ ONSally C’s comment below references another general-purpose sweetner that was once common in the Midwest and southern states: sorghum syrup. But what exactly is it and where does it come from? Well, like wheat, sorghum is a grass that produces small seeds. About the size of millet, sorghum seeds are bunched together in a head […]
READ ONSally C. goes on to ask… Next question (and you’ve probably already answered it before… but I’m old and I forget) is cane syrup Karo Light Syrup? My dad and his family always had a jug of sorghum or black strap molasses on the table to use as sweetener. And he always used Karo Syrup […]
READ ONSo then, having given you the long answer about how molasses is made, I can now give you the short answer on what “sulphured” molasses is. If you remember last week’s posts on “sulphured” fruit, you’ll recall that sulfur dioxide gas is sometimes employed in the drying and/or candying process to shut down (actually bond […]
READ ON…from a longtime friend and reader (miss Sally C of Tip of the Iceberg) asking what “unsulphured molasses” is, since it appears in this week’s recipe. Good question, though to answer it I’ll need to dip in to some old posts about molasses and sugar making. I trust you won’t mind, and anyway this kind […]
READ ONIncluding umami. The fifth taste may have been discovered by a Japanese food scientist 100 years ago, but that might as well have been last week as far as the Wall Street Journal is concerned. Oh what the heck, they published a great article about it yesterday. Not only does the author, Katy McLaughlin, do […]
READ ONLittle Josephine’s first gingerbread house, and it’s a beaut. The lines, the proportions…a 3-dimensional music of icing and skittles. I couldn’t have been a prouder Pastry papa on Saturday morning. She of course was much more interested in Santa Claus. Or should I say she was fascinated. For of course it was the first time […]
READ ONAfter fruitcake, I can’t think of anything more Christmas-y than gingerbread. I meant to make some last year, though as longtime readers of joepastry.com might remember, I was interrupted by Mrs. Pastry’s sudden and unwelcome trip to the hospital, where she remained for some six weeks waiting for the metaphorical bun she was carrying to […]
READ ONNow there are the makings of one fine fruitcake (actually two, I cut the recipe in half). You may notice there are cranberries in there. The reason for that is I couldn’t find any figs at Kroger yesterday afternoon. I could have gone somewhere else, but I’d already spent enough time in the supermarket. The […]
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