A Life in Baking, Pastry, and Libations.
When people think of vinegar, salad dressings and pickles usually spring to mind. Rarely does one think of fruit. But after staring wistfully at the couple hundred apple cores left from Thanksgiving pies, I researched fruit vinegars to use these fruit scraps that would otherwise be resigned to the trash heap. There are many ways... Continue Reading →
A chocolatier's worse nightmare.Watering down my chocolate goes against everything I’ve been taught. Should a few drops of water land in my chocolate, disaster! My chocolate is no longer fit for duty. As it turns out, mixing water into chocolate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. During the 1990s, Herve This and Heston Blumenthal noted that... Continue Reading →
I have this weird obsession with fruit consommés. I usually use the agar filtration technique to clarify fruit consommés but this technique can span three days and sometimes fruit does funky things when frozen and thawed. I had vacuum sealed a couple of bananas with vanilla bean and sprigs of lemon thyme to infuse the... Continue Reading →
For some inexplicable reason, the only way to buy popcorn kernels from my distributors is in 50 lb bags. 50 pounds makes a gargantuan amount of popcorn. (Or you could grind the kernels into cornmeal.) I went on a madcap adventure of popcorn mousse, popcorn ice cream, and popcorn pudding dessert specials. The endless popcorn... Continue Reading →
New Flours, New Flavors I’m bored with baking, baking with wheat flour that is. Last year, I stumbled upon a case of faro and chestnut flours in my work kitchen and played around with pound cakes, muffins, and sponge cakes. As wheat flour has formed with basis of baking traditions in the United States, it... Continue Reading →
I created this rose as one of several pieces for a culinary competition. I used three different bread doughs to sculpt and assemble the final piece but pate morte (“dead dough”) was my favorite decorative bread medium to work with. Because it uses no yeast or diary, pate morte is easy to shape and lasts... Continue Reading →
Buttery. Salted. Caramel. 