Author: joepastry

It’s time for a French/Italian classic it seems to me. If you’ve ever seen a dessert that looks like a small heap of whole wheat spaghetti with a dusting of powdered sugar on top, that’s it. The pastry is supposed to resemble the southern, Italy-facing side of the tallest mountain in the Alps, indeed in the entire European Union. Chestnut cream over Chantilly cream on a meringue and/or sponge cake base. So if you’ve got your cleats on, we’re ready for the ascent. First we’ll establish a base camp at 10,000 feet…

Quite a bit of chatter these days about the all-vegetable, Bill Gates-funded artificial egg. This story and others prompted reader Rainey to ask if I had an opinion on it. I’d be very curious to test artificial eggs in a home kitchen, Rainey, since I have a strong feeling that their main utility will be in the packaged foods industry where manufacturers are forever looking to replace the functional characteristics of animal-based ingredients with vegetable alternatives that won’t spoil and won’t fluctuate as wildly in price.

My new friend Amy has started a blog that I can already tell will be on my daily check list: Cooking, Rationally. She’s been baking up a storm so far, which has been great for me as I’ve already learned a lot from her relentlessly methodical approach. Keep up the good work, Amy!

And speaking of great blogs to check out, have a look at the delightfully named Egg Beat by pastry chef Shuna Lydon. It’s an insider take on the pastry world and a whole lot of fun!

Whenever I make something Chinese that has wheat in it, several readers are always surprised. After all, Americans eat corn, Europeans eat wheat and Asians eat rice. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it, no? But of course that’s’ a vast oversimplification of the, er…realities on the ground. It’s true that corn is native to the Americas, wheat to Europe (or at least the near East) and rice to China, but none of them are or ever have been the be-all and end-all grains in the regions where they were first cultivated.

New World natives consumed not only corn, but the seeds of range of other grasses including quinoa, amaranth, little barley, wild rice and sumpweed. Likewise Europeans has access to a variety of wheat strains (spelt, emmer, eikorn) as well as barley, oats, rye and buckwheat. Asian peoples, in addition to rice, cultivated millet, buckwheat, sorghum and others. And all that was before these peoples began mingling and trading with one another.

It’s Whole Foods to the rescue. Adzuki beans, they were right there in the bulk section. Let’s see where this leads us, shall we?

Well I took my first stab at mooncakes today and determined that my textures were mostly wrong: dough too soft, filling WAY too runny. It was a sloppy mess. I corrected the dough for the skins, but the filling is a bit of a toughie. The canned bean paste that I can find here has […]

I haven’t written a book review in a while since writing book reviews takes time and effort and I’m lazy. However occasionally a book comes along that’s too good not to talk about and this is one of them: The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie by Paula Haney. Paula Haney, as the book title implies, owns the Hoosier Mama Baking Company which is not in Indiana as you might presume, but in Chicago. It’s a tiny little place. So tiny in fact that it would almost be more at home in New York where no one has any space, especially people who run kitchens.