Beignets offer a great deal of payoff relative to time spent planning and preparing them. As long as you have a fry rig ready to go, they can take as little as two hours from mixing to frying. Start by combining your dry ingredients in a mixer bowl and giving them a whisk (you can […]
READ ONWashington Irving wrote of eating beignets fried in bear fat in A Tour on the Prairies, a memoir of his adventures in the wilderness of America in 1832. An outstanding example of a classic food being adapted to locally available ingredients, don’t you think? Bet they were darn good, too. It’s safe to assume that […]
READ ON…is reader Ellie’s follow-up question. I don’t know the precise answer, however I can say with some confidence that it was a contest to determine who was going to be the boss in North America. The French would have loved nothing more than to push the British right off the edge of the continent. Given […]
READ ONNot really a baking question, but I’ll take it, reader Ellie! Cajuns are descendants of a group of French-speaking colonists known as Acadians. These people, a mixed bag of folks from almost every corner of France, originally lived along the east coast of Canada in a region that was called, not surprisingly, Acadia. They were […]
READ ONTroll around the web and you’ll find all sorts of overwrought beignet recipes, loaded down with eggs, butter, sugar, even evaporated milk. They’re all rather misguided to my way of seeing things. Though New Orleans beignets resemble doughnuts in many resects, they shouldn’t actually be doughnuts. Rather, they should be light and airy little frivolities […]
READ ONI don’t mean beignets as they’re known in France. I mean beignets as they’re known in New Orleans. Proper French beignets are more like what we know as fritters, batter-dipped items of various kinds, often fruits but sometimes vegetables. However the fruit was long ago disposed of in the cafés of New Orleans, and today […]
READ ONBEEG-nets. Oh, all right: ben-YAYS. These simple fried treats have been gaining in popularity lately, so now seems like a particularly good time to do them. Break out the peanut oil, gang!
READ ONSo many responses to the sour cream post, mostly by people who seem to believe that full-fat sour cream is some sort of abomination. You know there was a time when people used to go on holidays to places like Wisconsin and Vermont just so they could have access to the ultra-rich (and fresh) products […]
READ ONReader Nora asks: You say that fat is what thickens a fermented dairy product like sour cream, but yogurt is even thicker and has almost no fat. Can you explain that? I can. (I think). But first I should clarify that fat isn’t the only thing that thickens sour cream. Both yogurt and sour cream […]
READ ONReader Will writes: I read your posts on cultured butter with great interest since I’ve always heard about how far superior it is to conventional butter. But I couldn’t believe that it’s bacteria that I’ve been paying an extra three bucks a pound for. Is that really the only difference, and does the bacteria have […]
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