LoveTheJourney

Chef Laura writes:
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 [...]

For all those who’ve put off getting their hands dirty with laminated doughs, kouign amann is a great place to start. Somewhere between a bread and a Danish, it only requires a couple of “turns” of the dough, and they need not be perfect. This is a rustic pastry, so your standards need not be [...]

Just when it seemed like egg producers were getting this under control…

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 [...]

Reader Ford also asks: Where does the name “Chantilly cream” come from? That’s an interesting story, Ford. I’m glad you asked because I completely forgot to mention it earlier in the week. Chantilly cream gets its name from the Château de Chantilly in northern France. That’s where it was supposedly invented by a fellow by [...]

I feel like I have been sitting on this leek bread pudding recipe forever, though it has technically only been six months — the New York Times ran this recipe from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home last October, when leeks were decidedly out of season and apparently, I’m really becoming someone who really digs [...]

Reader Jacquie asks:
Is there another dietary source of iodine other than salt? I tend not to add salt to things – mostly because I don’t care for the “saltiness” and I think as a culture foods are over-salted. (In part to mask the lack of taste from being grown in soilds lacking nutrients [...]

Come on Joe, nobody ever did that. Oh yes, my friends, Lillie whipped her eggs the REALLY old-fashioned way, using a simple loop whisk and a flat wooden board. Well, it wasn’t totally flat. It had a shallow depression carved in the center where the liquid whites would sit before she applied her formidable elbow [...]

Talk about something that brings me back to childhood. Taking a bite of these put me right back in Lillie’s kitchen, where my twin sister and I would watch her whip up meringue by hand on a flat egg board (she didn’t own a mixing machine of any kind). Lillie was an ample woman, and [...]

Reader Laura asks this about lemon bars:
Why can’t you just cook the curd in the pan to 196 degrees and then spread the fully cooked curd on the baked crust?

That’s an excellent question that’s going to allow me to get good and geeky. It’s a fair thing to wonder. I mean, if I’m going to [...]