Celebrity chef and Thyme Lord Alton Brown is no fan of "unitaskers" -- kitchen gadgets with only one purpose. But maybe these Amazon offerings aren't so bad.
Category: Food
On this episode of Handmade, ceramicist Jono Pandolfi shows us how his team makes 300 handcrafted plates, mugs, cups, and other dinnerware for some of America’s best restaurants. You can read more about Pandolfi here: https://bit.ly/2N3x9KR
Directed by Chris Columbus. With Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Richard Harris, Maggie Smith. An orphaned boy enrolls in a school of wizardry, where he learns the truth about himself, his family and the terrible evil that haunts the magical world.
[contemplating Every Flavor Beans]
Dumbledore: I was most unfortunate in my youth to come across a vomit-flavored one, and since then I’m afraid I’ve lost my liking for them. But, I think I could be safe with a nice toffee.
[eats it]
Dumbledore: Mm, alas, earwax.
The real question one must ask, is how exactly would Dumbledore know it was earwax flavor unless he’d gone around testing earwax to have prior experience to know what that flavor was?!
Chef Yumi Chiba has spent her career trying to figure out one of sushi's most illusive specialities at her restaurant Anago no Uotake, Japan.
How butter, sugar, and salt create a near-perfect pastry experience
[Note: This recipe was first published on this site in 2005, when few people had heard of this pastry. I’ve reworked it substantially to make individual pastries (shown above), and that recipe is in my book, L’appart.] Is there anything more fabulous than something created through the wonder and miracle of caramelization?
Anyone who uses iPhoto probably remembers your first thrill of plugging in your digital camera and magically, with no effort at all, having your photos automatically downloaded for you. Then they're neatly filed on your computer so you can view, cut, or paste your memories until your heart's content. It's great for the first few times, but once you've hit a certain number of photos,
Andy Clark left Massachusetts in 1994 and wormed his way into one of the iconic bakeries of Boulder, Colorado. After that, he spent 15 years running bakeries for Whole Foods Market. All the while, he was squirreling away ideas and thinking of his own place, where he could focus on 30 great loaves a day, instead of 30,000 for The Man. The result is Moxie Bread Co in Louisville, Colorado, as warm and welcoming a place as I have ever had the pleasure to visit. We talked about bread, and grain, and about creating a welcoming experience. Oh, and perhaps the most decadent pastry I have ever tasted.
That pastry is the kouign amann, an impossibly delicious amalgam of yeasted dough, butter and sugar that comes originally from Brittany in northern France. All the write-ups of Moxie agreed that their kouign amann was out of the world, and I was somewhat miffed that I had never heard of the things.
Now that I have …
Notes
- Huge thanks to Andrew Calabrese for making the introductions and the arrangements. What a great day.
- Also to our family and friends in Colorado for their friendship and hospitality.
- Moxie Bread Co is, of course, online.
- To learn more about kouign amann, I turned first to David Lebovitz, for a recipe and some alleged history.
- Eater turned to David Lebovitz too, for its informative piece about The Obscure French Pastry Making it Big in America.
- There’s apparently even a National Kouign Amann Day, on 20 June. If I can find one, I’ll be eating it.
Ah! The kouign amann! I hadn’t heard of it myself until the last year or so when it turned up on an episode of the British Baking Show, but even there it was featured as a specialty and rare dish (in a technical challenge if I recall, which makes things harder if you’ve never seen or eaten one). I’ve yet to see any in pastry shops here in the LA area, but I have pulled off a few myself at home and they are quite lovely. Sadly most home bakers are unlikely to work with heavily laminated dough much yet a yeasted version.
For the lost, here’s a short segment from BBS with a quick introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S179EYnsGwM
Today’s guest, Michael Victor, has spent the past 16 years living in Laos and getting to know its farming systems and its food. To some extent, that’s become a personal interest. But it is also a professional interest that grew out of his work with farmers and development agencies in Laos. Most recently, he’s been working with The Agro-biodiversity Initiative, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The idea is to make use of agricultural biodiversity in a sustainable way to reduce poverty and improve the livelihoods of people in upland regions. One thing the project has done is to collect all the information it can about agricultural biodiversity and make it available online. When Michael visited Rome recently, I grabbed the chance to find out more about Lao food and diversity.
Notes
- The Pha Khao Lao website is available in English and Lao.
- I think that the restaurant Michael mentioned is Thip Khao in Washington DC. Duly noted for next time. Any reports gladly received.
- I seem to be way behind the times on riverweed. A couple of years ago even BBC Good Food had tried it. (Scroll down.)
- Banner photograph by Periodismo Itinerante from Flickr
Some interesting tidbits here, particularly about a society seemingly on the cusp of coming and greater industrialization. I can’t help but thinking about Lynne Kelly’s thesis about indigenous peoples and cultural memory. I suspect that Laotians aren’t practicing memory techniques, but because of technological and cultural changes they are loosing a lot of collective memories about their lifeways, food, and surrounding culture that have built up over thousands (or more) generations.
Food Forward fights hunger and prevents food waste by rescuing fresh surplus produce, connecting this abundance with people in need, and inspiring others.
I saw this organization featured on tonight’s episode of PBS NewsHour. Definitely worth looking into. I’m curious if they sell to the general public? Maybe interesting to set up a company that does garde manger?
I loved the discussion sparked by What Kind of Knife Do You Use? post. So when Knife Skills Illustrated: A User’s Manual by Peter Hertzmann arrived on my desk, I thought, what great timing. From knife anatomy and care, to proper techniques for cutting vegetables and meats, the book provides a comprehensive guide to that most essential kitchen tool. I spoke to Peter Hertzmann, a self-taught expert on Chinese and French cuisine and the man behind à la carte website, last week in Toronto.
Gone are the days when cooking skills were handed down through the family. Recipes, which were originally memory aids, have become a set of measures and rules to follow slavishly, whether we understand them or not. And while people have been inspired by up-beat and accessible celeb chefs, they're nearly all restaurant chefs rather than home cooks. The art of cooking, in short, has been lost. How to Cook Without Recipes is all about setting the home cook free. This wonderful little book will teach you to understand the recipes you follow, why they sometimes go wrong, and how to cook independently to make better use of them and invent their own. Glynn Christian begins by taking the reader on a fascinating journey through the history of recipes, and explains how a useful aide memoire became a set of shackles for would be cooks. He explains how to learn to taste, and to understand what ingredients go together, giving you the tools to create your own recipes. And if you still insist on using your cook books, he explains how to 'read' the recipes of the big names where you should take notice of them, and where you should do your own thing. How to Cook Recipes A cook book, in every sense, with taste.
Referred to by Peter Hertzmann in a paper about food communication.
Chef and food instructor takes a look at the history of recipes and how they're frequently misinterpreted.
(Hat tip to Jeremy Cherfas and his excellent Eat This Podcast episode Making sense of modern recipes: It’s not your fault; even professional chefs encounter problems for directing me to Hertzmann’s paper; some of my favorite episodes feature Jeremy interviewing him.)
Keep in mind that the paper which is highlighted and excerpted here is a draft version and not for direct citation or attribution.
recipe is simply ‘a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making something’.2 There is no guarantee implied or stated that the cook will understand either the statement of ingredients or the procedure. ❧
–November 24, 2019 at 02:41PM
Fourteenth-century recipe collections that have survived to today, such as Viandier pour appareiller toutes manières de viandes, Libre de sent sovi, Daz bûch von gûter spîse, and Forme of Cury, were written by professional cooks to use as an aide-mémoire for themselves or other professional cooks. ❧
–November 24, 2019 at 02:42PM
Le Ménagier de Paris, written near the end of the century was arguably the first cookbook written as a set of instructions for a second party to use when managing a third party, in this case, for the young wife of an elderly gentleman to use as a guide for household management including supervising the cook. ❧
It’s not indicated well here in the text, but this was written in 1393 according to the footnote.
Le Ménagier de Paris, 2 vols (Paris: the author, 1393; repr. Paris: Jerome Pichon, 1846)
–November 24, 2019 at 02:43PM
The suggested alternative cooking technique ignores that braising is performed slowly, with low heat, and in a steam environment. ❧
–November 24, 2019 at 03:15PM
Lincoln suggested that all volumetric measurements required an adjective such as heaping, rounded, or level.2 ❧
I’ve heard of these, but not seen them as descriptors in quite a while and they always seemed “fluffy” to me anyway.
–November 24, 2019 at 03:25PM
Kosher salt: This salt should in practice be referred to as koshering salt, its original purpose. U.S. chefs started using Diamond Crystal-brand Kosher Salt in the 1990s because it was the only coarse salt commonly available to them. Rather than specify a brand or coarseness in their cookbooks, they chose the unfortunate term of ‘kosher salt’. Kosher salt is not purer than other salts, and all kosher salts are not equal. When measured volumetrically, all kosher salts have different amounts of salt. Nonetheless, many authors insist on specifying a volumetric amount of kosher salt—‘1 teaspoon kosher salt’—but do not identify the brand being used.36 ❧
The only author I’ve known to differentiate has been Michael Ruhlman, but even he didn’t specify the brand and essentially said that when using “Kosher salt” to use twice as much as specified compared to standard table salt, presumably to account for the densities involved.
–November 24, 2019 at 03:38PM
This is to say, the ingredients and the quantities thereof are indicated by pictures which most illiterate persons can understand and persons with poor vision can see; and which are readily grasped by the minds of those who are not in the above classes. ❧
an early example of accessibility UI in a cook book.
–November 24, 2019 at 04:00PM
Further, as stated, by merely glancing at the pictorially indicated recipe of the present invention the cook can ascertain at a glance the required ingredients, can ascertain whether such ingredients are on hand, and, if not, the needed articles will be more easily remembered in purchasing the days supply of groceries, etc. ❧
an example in the wild of visual memory being stronger than other forms.
–November 24, 2019 at 04:02PM
The book goes closer to teaching the reader to cook than most modern books. ❧
My thoughts as well. Ratio is a fantastic cooking book.
–November 24, 2019 at 04:04PM
At least one, somewhat successful, cookbook has been published claiming to teach cooking without recipes.40 ❧
Bookmark to read in future: Glynn Christian, How to Cook Without Recipes(London: Portico Books, 2008).
The numbering of the annotations is slightly off here….
–November 24, 2019 at 04:05PM
Most modern cookbook authors claim to meet the conditions for a ‘good recipe’ as described by Elisabeth Luard:42
A good recipe is one that first encourages the reader to cook, and then delivers what it promises. A well-written recipe takes you by the hand and says, don’t worry, it’ll all be okay, this is what you’re looking for, this is what happens when you chop or slice or apply heat, and if it goes wrong, this is how to fix it. And when you’ve finished, this is what it should look and taste like, this is what to eat it with. But above all, take joy in what you do.
In reality, most authors fail to meet the above conditions. It would probably be better if authors tried to match the writing of earlier recipe authors from the first half of the twentieth century when less space was given to fancy illustrations and more words were given to how to cook. ❧❧❧
–November 24, 2019 at 04:09PM
Mount: A cooking technique where small pieces of butter are quickly incorporated in a hot, but not boiling, sauce to give bulk and a glossy appearance. ❧
A definition I don’t recall having ever seen before.
–November 24, 2019 at 04:17PM
The technical term for the zest is the flavedo. ❧
flavedo is a new word to me
–November 24, 2019 at 04:27PM
According to Michigan State University Extension, egg color is determined by the genetics of the hens. The breed of the hen will indicate what color eggs she will produce. For example, Leghorn chickens lay white eggs while Orpington’s lay brown eggs and Ameraucana produce blue eggs. An Olive Egger, a chicken that lays olive green eggs, is the product of a cross between a hen and rooster that are from a brown egg and a blue egg laying breed. An interesting tip is to look at the chicken’s ear lobes; typically those with white ear lobes produce white eggs.
TIL: the color of a chicken’s egg is highly correlated with the color of its ear!
- One 5 lb bag
- White Lily had been helping southern cooks make great biscuits since 1883
- 100% pure red winter wheat with a lower gluten content than typical flours
- Best for biscuits, pastries and quick breads
- A regional product not generally available in the West and Northeast
Purchased some red winter wheat with a lower gluten content to make some fluffier Southern-style biscuits for the coming holidays!