On the sweet side, we could do candy, but then every food column out this week is about making candy. And not to be cynical, but you know as well as I do that no parent is going to let their child eat anything home made that comes out of the trick-or-treat bag. It’s one […]
READ ONThe great thing about ze galette is that there no right or wrong way to roll out the dough. As long as you can gather the edges up around the filling without there being gaping cracks, you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. Like last week’s bread, it a lackadaisical affair. There are […]
READ ONIf you’ve had a chance to try making pain à l’ancienne this week, you’ve undoubtedly noticed one thing: this dough is very wet. It sticks to everything including hands, bowls, implements, the table, you name it. Thus you must be prepared to spread plenty of extra flour around. You must also be prepared for imperfect […]
READ ONNothing quite like a quiet Sunday morning browsing the food sites looking for recipes. In fact I just got back from a little trip over to Saveur. I don’t know one food fanatic who doesn’t love that magazine…if only for their amazing photography. But they’re just so easy to make fun of sometimes. This recipe […]
READ ONOr is it fingers? I got so busy showboating in the last post that I forgot to answer the dang question! It was: do fruits start to degrade in nutritional value after they’re picked? From what I know the answer is no. Fruits are divided broadly into two types: climacteric and nonclimacteric. The first type […]
READ ONConsidering how many visitors I get on a given day, I must have one of the least commented-on blogs on the web. Yet all of a sudden I’m on a roll, having received half a dozen comments and three emails in a single week. Oh yes, I can feel it, Joe Pastry is about to […]
READ ON…the motorized marshmallow stick. And yesterday was my birthday. Dang.
READ ONOdds are, you’ve eaten pain à l’ancienne before without even knowing it. It’s hard to overestimate the stir this recipe caused when it was unveiled by Peter Reinhart five or six years ago. Up until then, commercial bakeries and restaurants had to rely either on long dough fermentation or artificial methods to get comparable flavor, […]
READ ONSo then…if amylase (the enzyme that breaks flour’s carbohydrate molecules down into simple sugars) is abundant in packaged flour, where does it come from? Well, amylase occurs naturally in wheat berries, especially when they germinate (or malt). Every wheat berry is essentially a seed, you see, containing an embryo (the germ) and its food supply, […]
READ ONThe cool and crazy thing about pain à l’ancienne is that it delivers almost all of the characteristics bread bakers seek — flavorful crumb, chewy texture, nice big holes and a deep brown crust — all with a minimum of effort and time. You simply mix up a dough of flour, yeast, salt and ice […]
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