Ladies and Gentlemen…
After a much extended hiatus, it is my great pleasure to announce that pigs in blankets have formally re-entered high society. I wonder where they held the debutant ball?
READ ONAuthor: joepastry
For the Week of September 4, 2006
Between my posts on foie gras and the little kerfuffle about the etymology of the word pita/pizza, last week turned out to be fairly controversial. This week I have no time for such nonsense. It’s half over for chrissakes, and my projects aren’t even up! For that reason I think I’ll forego a bread and […]
READ ONCobbler Debrief
As it turned out I decided to go the authentic route on this one and get all my ingredients from cans and boxes. Last week was a mighty busy week, donchaknow. I used canned peaches in heavy syrup and Bisquick, and it tuned out great. I just poured the peaches into a pie pan, eyeballed […]
READ ONWhat to do with all that pita?
Normally I freeze it, since that works extremely well. However there is much to be said for letting it stale. As I’ve often discussed, stale bread was the norm through most of human bread making history, and an entire family of recipes have evolved in the Arab world to make full use of it. Fattoush […]
READ ONPerfecting the Pizza
Something interesting occurred making the deep dish pizza crust (link to the right) Friday evening. By upping the proportion of corn meal I found I didn’t need quite as much oil to lubricate the dough. This is certainly a factor of surface area. A few drops of water in your palm is all it takes […]
READ ONVive la Différence!
Something that also impressed me watching Ace of Cakes was the notion that old school French icing tip techniques truly are dead. Everything, and I mean everything that the Charm City crew was producing were fondant-covered cakes. Fondant of course is a cooked sugar-and-water paste, almost dough-like in consistency, that can be rolled out in […]
READ ONAce of Cakes
I missed the first episode or two of the new Food Network series Ace of Cakes, and to be honest, wasn’t really looking forward to catching up with the third one. Most of what I’d seen of Duff Goldman (his fireworks-shooting cannon cake and other exploding delights featured on Sugar Rush) left me feeling pretty […]
READ ONFriday Night is Pizza Night…
…and the wife wants another version of the Chicago-style cornmeal deep-dish. Tonight I’m upping the percentage of cornmeal just to see what happens. My expectation is that it’ll be a little grainy and/or crumbly, but I have a solution for that: a soaker. What’s a soaker? It’s a time-tested technique for softening up coarse grains […]
READ ONMore ice cream topping!
With so many peaches around, I can’t turn them all into cobblers, not matter how well my daughter eats. One alternative is once again: jam. Here I have to say that peaches test my patience every single year. Last year I got a half bushel of white peaches (clingstones) that were very firm and flavorful, […]
READ ONAnd while we’re talking names…
What about cobbler? Where did that name come from? There’s really not much information on it. Some say it’s named after tradesman cobblers (that is, shoemakers), sort of a “pie that the shoemaker eats”, but there’s not any direct evidence for it. One of the few printed references we have for cobbler comes from Washington […]
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