LoveTheJourney

Degrees? Fahrenheit? Yes, you read right, friends. This custard is baked at an insanely hot 425. That’s almost unheard of for a custard, hence all the folks who emailed me last night to make sure I wasn’t drunk. Why are custards usually baked low? Of course to keep the egg proteins from clenching up and [...]

The Food Network had the audacity (I am joking, a little) to air an episode of Barefoot Contessa in which she makes a “scalloped” dish with bread cubes, garlic, basil, Parmesan and the brightest most summer-bursting-forth, musta-tasted-like-the-heavens-above, thanks-for-rubbing-it-in-guys tomatoes over the winter, when there was absolutely nothing I could do to bring this dish into [...]

Clafoutis may be French, but refined it ain’t. It’s a rough country dish from the Limousin region, which is in the south-central part of France, near the mountainous Massif Central. No one knows just how long the people of Limousin have been making clafoutis, though it’s fair to say that the dish became famous all [...]

An interesting question from reader Jonah R. this past weekend, for indeed most traditional soufflé dishes have a ridged exterior. Most smaller ramekins have them as well, and they’re not just decorative, they have a function. That function is to increase the surface area on the outside of the dish, and more surface area means [...]

It’s baker-speak for “poking holes”, reader Kendra. Those holes let expanding gas and steam escape while the crackers bake in the oven. And that’s important for flatbreads and crackers, because otherwise they wouldn’t stay flat. They’d puff up into brittle little pillows, and zis, she is no good. Better that a cracker be flat, solid [...]

There are a lot of reasons to make shakshuka, an Israeli dish of eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce: It sounds like the name of a comic book hero. Or some kind of fierce, long-forgotten martial art. Or perhaps something that said comic book hero would yell as they practiced this elaborate martial art, [...]

Almost without fail, January — which is always too cold, too dull, and too overdue for an antidote for holiday excess — puts me in the mood for rice pudding and this year was no different. I played around with it all month. I made my standard. I made a “creamiest” version I found online [...]