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 […]
“Let rise at room temperature” is a common instruction in bread recipes, with “room temperature” being around 70 °F (21.1 °C). For reasons that include San Francisco’s famous fog, this temperature can be hard to find in my apartment in Berkeley, California, and so my bread dough sometimes rises far too slowly. One day, I […]
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 […]
The famous vodka-containing pie crust recipe from Cooks Illustrated has been my “go to” crust recipe for a few years (you can find it at Serious Eats). The free form galettes that use it have been crispy and flaky on many occasions, thanks in part to techniques and recipes I learned from books like Lindsey […]
(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 […]
Last weekend, my complicated, high-maintenance bread baking project was saved by the ultra-simple no-knead recipe. After a week of messy twice-daily sourdough starter refreshing, I was ready to bake some naturally-leavened bread. Although my past loaves have been lackluster – dense and a bit too sticky – I hoped that this time it would be […]
After a few posts on creepy-crawlies, it’s time to give my readers something more universally appreciated: pie. This situation reminds me of something in Paul Bertolli’s Chez Panisse Cooking. The restaurant (a.k.a. “downstairs”) at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse has a prix fixe menu, so your dining fate is out of your control. Bertolli writes that whenever […]