It’s been a while since I’ve done a layered dough, and since layered dough is really the backbone technique of pastry making, I see no reason why we shouldn’t dive back in again. And while we’ve done quite a few breakfast breads over the relatively short life of this site, I don’t think we’ve ever […]
READ ONI think one of the things that discourages a lot of would-be pastry makers is the difficulty of getting new and lively presentations out of the same-old-same home baking forms. Let’s face it, there’s only so much you can do with pie plates, muffin tins and loaf pans. A great way to break up the […]
READ ONNever try to whip egg whites in a plastic bowl either. It’s probably the one thing tupperware isn’t good for. Fat is chemically attracted to plastic, as anyone who’s ever washed out a plastic measuring cup that’s been filled with oil can attest. It can stay greasy even after several washings. In fact plastic that’s […]
READ ONIt occurred to me last night that if there was ever a candidate for one of those faux-sourdough flavor enhancers, this bread is it. Being a bit if a purist in these matters (OK yeah I’ll say it: snob) I’ve frowned on such things in the past, but there are two types of flavor booster […]
READ ONAs promised, a late-day review of Mark Bittman’s greatest-thing-since-sliced- bread-except-that-I-hate-sliced-bread bread recipe. For what I put into this bread, I was very, very impressed. As you can see from the photos, it baked up almost too well. This is what I got baking it in my oblong 4-quart Le Creuset chicken roaster. Essentially a football: […]
READ ONRarely do food columnists get excited over a bread recipe, which makes it especially amusing that we find Mark Bittman positively hyperventilating over a new home baking technique in a front page article in this week’s New York Times food section. He writes: INNOVATIONS in bread baking are rare. In fact, the 6,000-year-old process hasn’t […]
READ ONIf you’re a chocolate fiend, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the current fashion for combining chocolate with hot chile flavors. My sense is that the trend was kicked off in earnest by a jalepeño chocolate cake recipe in Pierre Hermé’s chocolate book from a few years back (in much the same way everybody is on fire for […]
READ ONEver wonder where the word chocolate comes from? I know I did for many years. It sounds faintly Mesoamerican, yet according to the experts the original word for chocolate, both the solid substance and the drink, was cacao (supposedly pronounced “kaka-WAH” if you want to get finicky about it). Many linguists believe that “chocolate”, by […]
READ ONSo if the world was abounding in mousse starting in the 18th century, why did it take so long to get to a chocolate version? One reason may be that up until the early 19th century, chocolate processing was a fairly crude science. It consisted of little more than grinding up fermented and roasted chocolate […]
READ ONLots of food journalists write about the early history of chocolate. How Mesoamericans believed it was created by the gods, how they used it in sacred ceremonies, how quickly it caught on back in Spain and all that jazz. Yet European adoption of the strange brown bean wasn’t as speedy as most of those stories […]
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