I know Rachel Ray is given to hyperbole, but Waffles of Insane Greatness felt like a dare. Having made them for breakfast yesterday morning I can say one thing: the recipe is insanely easy. The egg whites don’t have to be insanely whipped, the batter doesn’t have to sit for an insanely long time, and […]
READ ONOur neighbor girls (ages 8 and 11) are prone to wander by every so often, especially in the summer. The older of the two has a knack for showing up whenever focaccia is about to go in the oven. She peers at the sheet pan, wrinkles her nose and says: “So you’re making that snot […]
READ ONI just get my new web site up and a new medium springs up for food and cooking information. I gotta get with the times. iJoe?
READ ONI’m a day late to the New York Times food section, which has a lengthy article on Andrew Weissman, chef at Le Rêve in San Antonio. In it, there’s a description a dish Weissman calls “Sunday Breakfast”, a Texas-French masterpiece consisting of: …a generous hunk of sautéed Hudson Valley duck liver, thickly crusted outside, remarkably […]
READ ONAh, the Taste of Chicago. I may be a Lousiville native now, but that can’t erase my sense of nostalgia for all those wonderful years sweating my money away at the Taste. It’s an event that harkens back to the bread and circuses days of the Byrne administration, when more and more public fairs masked […]
READ ONCultural exports always seem to find their way back to where they came from. First there was the British Invasion (the musical one, I mean), then Hong Kong action flicks. Now we have a Japanese fast food concept based on the cream puff. Those living in Manhattan and Northern California have known about Beard Papa […]
READ ONOne thing I wanted to add about this week’s bread recipe is that you can make it “quick” or “slow” according to your pleasure. This really applies to any yeast bread. I’ve diatribed before about how time translates to flavor, and even though most focaccia is considered nothing more than a vehicle for good olive […]
READ ONFocaccia is one of those foods whose true origins are completely lost to us. Have a look at some of the typical food reference books, and they’ll talk about focaccia and the Greeks, the Etruscans, maybe the Minoans, yadda yadda. But then pretty much everybody likes to trace pretty much everything back to the Greeks, […]
READ ONThis week’s pastry is a surprisingly versatile little number that can be reinterpreted as breakfast, lunch, dinner or dessert, according to your fancy: Waffles Next, I thought since it’s prime salad season (the greens available here in Kentucky are astounding), a flat, “compliment” bread would be nice: Focaccia And while I tend not to value […]
READ ONI praised natural leavening (sourdough) the other day for its slow, deliberate rising. Having made quite bit of sourdough bread over the last week, I found the pace gave me time to implement some dough-stretching techniques I’ve long heard about but never tried. What’s dough stretching? It’s pretty much as it sounds, a process by […]
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