A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
Now and then a food magazine contains a recipe that becomes a standard my kitchen. Even more rarely, a single issue will contain two standards. The May/June 1998 issue of Saveur was one of those rarities, with two recipes that I have made many, many times and consider critical parts of my cooking repertoire. The […]
One of my summer dessert favorites is zucchini bread, something that could be called zucchini cake if it was baked in a shallow cylindrical pan instead of a loaf pan. It’s something I seem to only bake in the summer when zucchini is at the farmers markets, even though it would take an exceptionally skilled […]
I have been baking bread for a long time, but never with a great amount of intensity (though during one period in the 90s I was baking frequently and had a personal “bread museum” that chronicled my efforts). In the early years, general cookbooks like The New Laurel’s Kitchen were my teacher, but their basic […]
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been baking a “war bread” for quite a while. My long-time favorite one-day bread is the oat bread in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. The original recipe is simple, delicious and nutritious, being a single-day bread that is enriched with rolled oats and oat bran. By […]
Pie Making Machine, US patent 2,200,347 My post about pie crust making with coconut oil promised a recipe for the crust; this post delivers it. The foundation of the recipe is something from Cooks Illustrated that was posted at Serious Eats. The recipe has quantities suitable for a two-crust pie, but since you might not […]
There are many wonderful things about savory pies: the contrast between a sharply flavored filling and a mellow crust, the crisp edges and soft middle, their portability, and their flexibility, to name a few. One of my favorite pies is an adaptation from a recipe in Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, the Moosewood Collective’s book about […]
When Mark Bittman wrote about Jim Leahy’s “no knead bread” in the New York Times in 2006, it caused a frenzy in the blogosphere, leading to hundreds of posts about attempts to make the bread. I tried it myself and deemed it to be bimbo-esque: beautiful but shallow. I recently started baking another kind of […]
Once I established a viable sourdough starter, I needed to find some things to use it in besides bread. I love baking and eating bread, but its not something that I can fit into my schedule very often. Pancakes are my first simple non-bread use for the starter. They take a little bit of planning […]
Emily Luchetti’s “Torta Regina” is not photogenic (in my kitchen, anyway, with the lack of fancy china) but is so delicious and different that it deserves a post. It has only four main ingredients (chocolate, hazelnuts, eggs, sugar) and two flavorings (orange and lemon zest). Although it is a “flourless cake,” it is not at […]
Alice Medrich, chocolate expert and cookbook author, wrote “Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts” during the height of the low-fat craze of the mid-90s. In the book, she tried to completely rethink her recipes to achieve deliciousness with fewer calories and less fat, instead of simply writing a pamphlet that consisted of a few […]