A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
This is the first of two posts about millet, a class of grains that doesn’t get much attention. The second post has information about millet production and use around the world (with charts and maps!) I can get quite nerdy about ingredients, so when one of my newsletters told me about an upcoming event called […]
(Updated 11/25/16: fixed broken links) One of the many useful things I learned from Elizabeth Andoh’s outstanding “Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen“, was the concept of enhancing a batch of white rice — nutrion-wise and taste-wise — by adding a variety of grains and seeds to the uncooked rice and water. You can […]
(Corrected below, 6/5/10; Updated, 12/26/16, fixed broken links) When you bite into a piece of bread from San Francisco’s Boudin Bakery, you’re biting a piece of the Gold Rush. Founded in 1849 at the beginning of the Gold Rush, the San Francisco bakery has been baking bread since then using essentially the same sourdough starter […]
Two years ago, I reported on a failed experiment: an unholy alliance between nutrition and cookies in which I added amaranth seeds (little nutritional powerhouses*) to chocolate chunk cookie batter before baking. The unpleasant results made me wary of such experimentation. Many months later, I received Robin Aswell’s “The New Whole Grains Cookbook” as a […]
(Updated 2/9/17: fixed broken links) “Teff is the smallest grain in the world,” said the sign on the wall in the Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurant. I had no reason to doubt it — I had never seen teff in any form other than a pancake the size of a manhole cover or in a tightly rolled cylinder. […]