Fruit sauces can be easy or hard. I prefer easy, myself, especially when they’re just as good has the harder variety. The standard proportions for a simple fruit sauce are 2-1 fruit to sugar by weight, with an optional splash of lemon juice added to preserve color. These are best made in a blender with fruit from the freezer section. Here I have about six ounce of (mostly) thawed raspberries.

I put them in the blender.

Add the sugar and juice.

Turn the machine on and…there you go:

Fruit sauce.

If you want to pass the sauce through a fine mesh strainer, by all means feel free. It will give you a more velvety texture. Oh and, this also works with strawberries, pears, apricots, peaches, and probably several others that I’m forgetting just now.

In this case there are safeguards. First, the bain marie (the water bath). It not only keeps most of the custard insulated around the outside, it cools the pan via constant evaporation. What keeps the top from curdling? The toast of course, and in fact keeping the toast toasty is the reason the oven is set to 425 in the first place. I won’t lie to you, when you make this dish you’ll probably get a small amount of surface curdling between the slices. However the overall effect is well worth these few cosmetic defects.

This bread pudding doesn’t just look pretty, those toast points have a function: to make the dish something more than just a mass of wet, sweet bread. This bread pudding is actually crunchy in parts, and that keeps every mouthful interesting. Serve this plain or with a sauce of your choice. Caramel is a classic, but a fruit sauce (like raspberry) works great also.

Bread selection is key. You want a tight-crumbed white bread that’s not fluffy like a mass-market bread. You also want it a little stale.

See? It doesn’t bend, it breaks when I put pressure on it. That’s a good thing.

Trim the crusts and cut the slices in half.

Butter them lightly with soft butter.

Lay the triangles out on a sheet pan.

And toast lightly under the broiler on one side.

Arrange them in a 12 or 13-inch dish. Oval is nice.

Combine the vanilla seeds and milk in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer.

Meanwhile, combine your whole eggs, yolks and sugar in a large bowl…

…and whisk until pale in color.

Add the hot milk to the egg mixture in a steady stream, whisking all the while.

Strain the custard into another bowl, then slowly pour it into the baking dish. Use a spatula to keep the toast from floating around too much.

Put the dish into a larger pan (like a roasting pan) and carefully add boiling water. You want enough water to come half way up the side of the dish.

Press the toast down once or twice to help it absorb the custard. Bake in a 425 oven for 30 minutes. Serve it warm with a sauce of your choice. Or, cool it completely and refrigerate it, covered only lightly with foil, until needed. The toast will stay crispy for 24 hours. It’s excellent, maybe even better, cold.

Perhaps it was his teenage experiences peddling homemade chocolates by bicycle that gave Lenôtre a lifelong fascination with the concepts of finished food delivery and scalability of production. He built the first chain of bakery boutiques Paris had ever seen. He was the first Frenchman to put a bakery/café in a shopping mall, the first to create a national brand of frozen desserts and the first person ever to create an international chain of bakery franchises. For all that, he never abandoned his commitment to perfect quality and execution. In time he expanded into full-menu restaurants and catering. With the help of large-scale production facilities and — gasp — freezers, Lenôtre was able to deliver perfectly crafted meals to any size crowd virtually anywhere in the world. Need a seven-course French meal for 10,000 served hot in Japan? Lenôtre was your man. In 1998 he catered the World Cup in France, attended by an estimated 800,000 fans.

Of course none of this could have been achieved (at least, not in a country like France) had he not been a first-class practitioner of the pastry arts. At the level of craft he is often credited with introducing “nouvelle cuisine” concepts to pastry. That’s not strictly true if you buy in to the idea that “nouvelle” is all about small portions and hyper-artsy presentations. If you adhere to the idea that nouvelle cuisine means freshness, lightness, simplicity and creativity of presentation, then the label fits. His books are filled with recipes whose simplicity belies their sophistication and excellence. They are true treasures.

From my own vantage point, I think that one of the key things that Lenôtre showed the world is that modern tools, when used thoughtfully, can be wonderful things. That technology isn’t inherently evil, that newfangled machines can make better food available to more people, and that just because something is big it isn’t necessarily bad. No wonder that when Lenôtre celebrated his 80th birthday in 2000, his students made him a 35-foot-tall cake. Lenôtre died in January of 2009. He will be remembered as one of the century’s most creative and consequential chefs.

Is there an unsaid rule that bar cookies have to be heavy and gooey? Two weeks ago, we picked up a cup of coffee on our way to the park so that the little monkey could continue his path of destruction outside our apartment, and I fell for something in the bakery case called peach shortbread, cut into bars. But instead of being thick and intense, it was delicate, light and barely sweet — a thin layer of shortbread, even thinner slices of peach and the faintest sprinkling of streusel on top. I knew I had to share it.

And it wasn’t until I had jotted down “peach streusel bar” on my to-do list that I remembered a recipe for brown butter peach bars from that I found in a preview of The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook in The New York Times nearly three years ago, and have pined for since. (This recipe didn’t make it into the cookbook, but a rhubarb version — that looked almost as time-consuming and delicious — did.) Every summer, I swear, I’m going to summon the inertia to make them. First, you make a peach jam from fresh peaches. It involves a candy thermometer. It takes an hour to cook. Then you brown butter and freeze it until solid. Then you make a crumb base with this butter, bake it for 20 minutes and let it cool. Then you make a custard filling with fresh vanilla bean, and brown more butter. This filling is spread over the baked crust, the peach jam is dolloped over that, and you bake it for 30 minutes more. I have no doubt that nirvana ensues, in fact, a reader recently told me that she tried them and they were absolutely worth it. But I got tired just typing this paragraph and I realized it was time for me to admit that it might not be worth it to me, especially since so much of time right now is spent doing things like this.

… Read the rest of peach shortbread on smittenkitchen.com

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Who would ever want to watch that? And who, really, wants to read something like Food Rules? It’s nothing more than a preachy list of reasons — 64, to be exact — to feel guilty about what you eat. That fact alone, I would think, would give all but his most devoted fans reason enough not to buy it. Why should I pile on?

Have you ever made Krispy Kreme Bread Pudding? It’s just a big stinkin’ pile of Krispy Kremes with yummy cream sauce over it. Uh….yum.

Never made it, never eaten it, but if some were put in front of me I wouldn’t say no (I like Krispy Kremes). I’ll also confess to you that I’ve always harbored a secret desire to make this recipe, gratuitous as it is. But don’t tell anyone, OK?

I have never really understood the whole scald-the-milk-for-a-still-custard thing. I understand the neccessity for creme anglaise and pastry cream, but I don’t get the importance for baked custards. I scanned previous posts and didn’t see an answer to this. I have nothing in my notes from school. I have made bread pudding without this step and it has been just fine, but in professional kitchens I had to scald the milk, pour it over the eggs, and then strain it. Why?

That’s a question that may have no answer, though you often see it discussed in pastry forums. Why bother with this step? What purpose does it serve? In the case of the bread pudding recipe below, it serves the function of thoroughly infusing the milk with vanilla. But what if I were using vanilla extract? Would I do it? Umm…

My feeling is that scalding milk for still custards like quiches is a holdover from days when chefs used fresh-from-the-dairy (read: unpasteurized) milks. Which is to say it’s very likely a safety thing, not necessary anymore. Yet top chefs from many quarters still insist that scalded milk delivers a more velvety texture in a still custard than milk that’s straight from the bottle. Is that because hot milk helps to uncoil egg proteins? Does it change the milk’s composition in some way? It is simply because a warm mixture cooks more evenly when it’s put into the oven?

Both are at least plausible answers in the absence of an authoritative one. Until that answer comes, milk scalding will continue on as popular kitchen voodoo.

But what is staling exactly? Most people think of it as the “drying out” of bread, but that’s not the half of it. If it were, fresh bread kept in a tight sheath of plastic wrap would never go stale. I think we’ve all experimented with double and triple layers of Reynold’s Wrap long enough to know what a fool’s paradise that is. So what is it with bread that it starts to harden the moment it’s removed from the oven? It all has to do with the behavior of starch molecules. Surprised?

Starch is made up of two base components, both of them long-chain sugars, also known as carbohydrates: amylose and amylopectin. Both are made up of many many units of glucose, and that makes them similar. Yet those units of glucose are configured differently, which causes them to behave in very different ways. Amylose is built like a narrow bundle of reeds, with all of its glucose units (up to 1,000 or so) arranged in straight, parallel chains. Amylopectin, in the other hand, looks more like a shrub, with its glucose units (up to 20,000 of them) going off every which way.

Hundreds or thousands of both make up a typical starch “granule” (or single grain of flour) with the long straight amylose in nice orderly layers (starch crystals) and the amylopectin in big bushy heaps. Add water and heat to that scenario (dough making and baking) and things start to change. The bonds that keep the carbohydrate molecules bunched together weaken, and water molecules start getting in between them. The starch granule swells.

This continues until the finished bread is taken out of the oven, at which point the process starts to reverse itself. The carbohydrate molecules start to reorder themselves. It doesn’t happen quickly, but it does happen inexorably. The carbs, especially the amyloses, become re-attracted to one another and begin stacking themselves back up again in neat piles, making hard crystals once again. The water molecules are forced out from between them, and shortly evaporate.

So you see, bread goes stale not just because it’s dryer, but because its structure is also harder. If you own a microwave you’ve no doubt noticed that you can re-gelatinize starch to some extent with a little fast heat. But with much of the water already gone, the effect is fleeting, barely enough time to butter that scone and stuff it into your mouth!

Bread pudding is much, MUCH older. It goes back past the Romans, past the Greeks, probably even past the Egyptians who enjoyed a variant which (today) goes by the name of Om Ali, a mixture of milk, bread, raisins and nuts. Indian shahi tukra is a very similar thing, a preparation of fried bread sweetened with syrup and cream. You know, I’d be willing to bet that wherever you find bread-baking livestock-herding societies on Earth, you’ll probably find a traditional bread pudding-like dish. It’s that good an idea.