Author: joepastry

We returned from Chicago on Thursday and by Friday afternoon I had a fever of 102. I’ve improved since then, though you really don’t get over the flu in a day or two. It generally takes a week. I can console myself in that I don’t live in a Dickens novel, where people who get […]

What a delight to discover, mid-way through my mid-winter break, that Joe Pastry made this year’s PBS top ten food blogs list! Quite a compliment considering all fabulous blogs PBS named. I’m in formidable company and I have to say it feels good! Thanks, PBS, I’ll do my best to live up to the honor in 2014!

The high temperature will be 7 tomorrow. Italian beef sandwiches are served piping hot and sopping wet, and thin crust pizzas are sliced cross-ways into squares. People drive 60 miles and hour ten feet from each other’s bumper down the highway and three cars turn left at the tail end of every yellow light. Is […]

Do I express too much appreciation for all my wonderful readers? Ah heck, you can never say thank you enough as far as I’m concerned. Thanks to all for helping to make this blog what it is, and me the luckiest baker on Earth! See you in 2014.

Another good question from reader Alicia. Sugar bloom is a different phenomenon, familiar to anyone who’s refrigerated or frozen chocolate for any period of time. Sugar bloom happens when moisture contacts the surface of solid chocolate. When that happens the sugar near the surface of the chocolate dissolves into the water and becomes syrup. In time the water evaporates leaving sugar crystals behind.

Why exactly does “fat bloom” happen when melted chocolate re-solidifies? So asks reader Wendi. That’s a great question and it all has to do with cocoa butter crystals. Chocolate is full of them, at least when it’s in solid form. That’s partly a factor of cocoa butter’s composition, which is unusually uniform. It’s made up of just three different types of fats (as compared to butter which can have dozens). The reason that uniformity makes cocoa butter so crystal-prone is because similar molecules tend to stack up on one another like LEGOs under the right conditions, forming solid masses.

That’s almost all of the time in my opinion. Expensive bar chocolate, to me, is the purview of candy lovers, not bakers. For bakers, chocolate is frequently just one component among many in a recipe, one that needs to be balanced against all the others. A sterling “grand cru” chocolate will be a hopeless distraction atop a doughnut, for example, and the doughnut will only undermine the qualities of the expensive chocolate. Sort of like washing down a complicated main course with a glass of Henri Jayer Richebourg, everybody loses.

The surfaces of my kitchen appliances especially. Posts may be a bit thin on the ground leading up to the holiday as I’ve got four different projects to knock out today alone! Add to that a record volume of pre-Christmas baking questions and things are hectic at Chez Pastry. But keep the questions comin’ if […]