I’m strongly considering printing and laminating the above photo so I can carry it in my wallet and periodically offer it as evidence.
I’ll start at the beginning. In some ways I hate quinoa. Not quinoa the food, but quinoa the fad. Like açaí berries, quinoa is a “super food” promoted by nutritionists as if everything that your body needs to be healthy could not possibly be grown in the province in which you live, but needs to come from the canopy of the Amazon rainforest, or an Andean plateau.
On the other hand, from a strictly gastronomical point of view I really like quinoa. It’s tasty: it has a nutty flavour, sometimes verging on peanut butter, often with a … Continue reading.
In the extremely unlikely case that you have leftover cornbread that is a couple days old and a bit too dry to be enjoyed, you have two choices.
Look deep into the tepid pond of your soul and ask, sweet or savoury?
If the response comes back sweet, you make cornbread pudding. If the answer is savoury, you make cornbread stuffing.
Leftover cornbread and the dishes made therefrom are quite different than stale bread and its children. As cornbread is a quick bread, the baker went out of his or her way to avoid gluten development, and no doubt added sugar and fat in the form of butter or buttermilk or sour cream. This kept the fresh cornbread tender, but … Continue reading.
Before the exciting conclusion of Custard Week, I want to take you on a quick detour to show you some applications for the custards we’ve been making. Let’s talk about choux pastry.
Choux pastry is a bit weird. First of all it’s weird because it’s not clear whether it’s a dough or a batter. Next it’s weird because it’s cooked twice, once on the stove, and once in the oven. Then it’s weird because when you cook it the second time it puffs itself up so that it’s entirely hollow. And finally it’s weird because its name is French for “cabbage pastry”. To my knowledge it is never eaten with cabbage, so I’m thinking that the name refers to the … Continue reading.
I admit that this post sounds like something from Martha Stewart or Canadian Living. I’m okay with that, because I love making these crackers, especially at this time of year.
Did you know that almost any loaf of crusty bread can be turned into a cracker?
For a fine, uniform texture use dense breads like European rye. For an elegant open texture use bubbly breads like ciabatta or baguette. The trick is figuring out how to slice them thin with the tools you have on hand, which is especially difficult for the open-textured breads. If you partially freeze the loaves you should be able to slice them cleanly with a serrated knife, or a meat slicer.
I say this without exaggeration: I hold stuffing as one of the greatest culinary traditions of the New World. I know the British and French and many others make similar dishes, but stuffing, or dressing, is an indispensable dish for the Thanksgiving table. Technically it is an accompaniment to the turkey. I often have to remind myself of this.
So. What is stuffing? Stuffing is bread. As the name implies, it was originally crammed into the cavity of poultry, absorbing the juice and fat exuded from the bird during cooking. While this method is still common in Canadian homes, it is giving way to “stuffing” that is prepared in a casserole instead of a bird. There are two reasons for … Continue reading.
The potato salad I grew up on was “creamy”,[1] that is, dressed with mayonnaise. While I remember that dish fondly, I now make a very different type of potato salad, one closer to those I ate in Austria.
The single biggest challenge in making potato salad is having well-cooked potatoes that still hold their shape, and the most important factor in this regard is the variety of potato used. It must be a waxy, yellow-fleshed variety. North American varieties like Yukon Gold are okay, but there are some European varieties, like Linzer Delikatess, that are quite simply made for German potato salad. They have the proper smooth, creamy mouthfeel, and a roughly cylindrical shape that means they slice into … Continue reading.
English muffins make the best toast: much crispier than standard pullman loaves, but not overly-crunchy like rustic artisan loaves. I think there are at least four reasons for their toasting superiority:
The dough is enriched with a small amount of sugar and fat.
The way they are shaped, as individual pucks instead of slices from a loaf. A typical slice of bread is cut from the interior of a larger loaf, so the two sides are from the soft, interior “crumb” of the bread. When you cut and toast an English muffin, one of the surfaces of each half used to be the exterior crust of the bread, making a crispier piece of toast.
I’ve been doing some all-grain brewing this spring. After the mashing process the malt has given up all its caramel earthiness to the wort, and you are left with several pounds of spent grain, or draff.
There are lots of ways to use this stuff up. Commercial breweries commonly sell or give draff to farmers as livestock feed. It can also be composted so long as you have lots of other, greener compostable material to balance out the mixture.
Draff is also commonly baked into bread. Realistically the home brewer will not be able to bake enough bread to use all of the spent grain – the bulk of mine still ends up in the compost heap – but it’s … Continue reading.
I call these egg noodles to distinguish them from the eggless, dried, commercially-produced pastas like spaghetti and macaroni.
Let’s get to it.
You’ve no doubt seen nonnas or professional chefs mix pasta dough together right on the workbench by mounding up all the flour and making a well in the centre for all the liquid ingredients.
This is more than a parlour trick.
If you were to combine all the ingredients in a bowl at once and stir them together, you would find that they don’t come together; the dough will seem much too dry, and will stay crumbly and separate. It takes the flour a while to absorb the moisture in the eggs and milk. Slowly incorporating in this … Continue reading.
When I was little we called these savoury pastries “scones,” our pronunciation rhyming with the word “owns”, but they are much more like American biscuits than British scones (the pronunciation of which rhymes with “lawns”).
For the sake of clarity I’ve taken to calling them biscuits. Whatever you call them, they are flaky quick breads made with butter, milk, and flour. A little salt and a little baking powder. That’s it.
My mom used to make a ham and cheese biscuit. She made her dough with milk soured with vinegar (buttermilk would have been used when she was growing up, but we never had this in our fridge). The dough was rolled into a sheet, covered with slices of ham … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
Before the exciting conclusion of Custard Week, I want to take you on a quick detour to show you some applications for the custards we’ve been making. Let’s talk about choux pastry.
