It’s awfully hard to date the pretzel. That’s because its main ingredients — flour, water, salt, yeast — are the basis for just about every bread product known to man. Its shape, on the other hand, is quite distinctive. Perhaps a little too much so. Why? Because in an effort to make themselves sound intelligent […]
READ ONOf all the baked goods I’ve written about, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a food-historical conundrum quite like the pretzel. No other foodstuff I’ve encountered has had so many — and so many bogus — origin stories attached to it. Part of the reason is surely because it’s so old. The pretzel has been […]
READ ONWell I certainly stirred up the ol’ hornets’ nest yesterday, didn’t I? Turned out there was a whole world of hurt in that shoe sale joke. (For me). I guess that’ll learn me, at least until the next time. Given all the stress of a big interview and lots of comments, I can’t tell you […]
READ ONIf I have any regrets about last week’s interview with Rose Levy Beranbaum it’s that I didn’t engage her more on the subject of Continental pastry-making and the relationship of American baking to it. I wish I’d delved a little deeper, since she had some surprisingly strong feelings on the matter. One thing that’s stayed […]
READ ONAnd so Joe’s Week of Rose draws near an end. Some of you loved it, some of you hated it, all of you have much more important things going on in your lives. Yet there is a question that’s still hanging out there: Joe, where did you end up? Which is to say, for all […]
READ ONI tend not to make a lot of bundt-style cakes, but I might need to change my habits because this was excellent. It didn’t take long for the girls, the missus and I to polish it off. Little 2-year-old Joan, who likes cake but has never been passionate about it, loved it so much she […]
READ ONFor all the years I’ve spent flipping through my egg- and vanilla-spattered editions of the Bible books, I confess I still find myself wondering: who was Rose Levy Beranbaum talking to when she wrote these? Professionals? Indeed just about every professional cake baker doing business today went to school (literally) on the Cake Bible. Yet […]
READ ONI know, I usually have some to offer. This week though, the historical pickin’s are a little slim. I can talk about bundt pans a bit of course. Now me, I instantly assumed that the metal bundt pan dated to about the 1870’s or 80’s, the time in American history when popular baking exploded and […]
READ ONThat question from reader Angela B. this afternoon, referring to the flour that RLB recommends for stick-proofing the bundt pan. In fact Rose’s top recommendation for greasing a baking pan is Baker’s joy, a top-of-the-line nonstick spray that has real flour in it. The trouble is that Baker’s Joy is frequently hard to find, and […]
READ ONSimply because you can only add so much lemon zest to a cake before the tough zest starts to compromise the texture. This cake calls for a whopping two tablespoons of zest, but Rose still wanted more lemon flavor, hence the oil. She says she uses lemon oils over bottled extracts but “there’s lemon oil […]
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