LoveTheJourney

Thanks for that excellent question, reader Cindy! In fact the word “stale” is akin to “aged”, but in a good way. “Ripened” is more like what it means. We moderns, addicted as we are to perfectly fresh bread, would scarcely think of applying a world like that to a past-its-prime loaf. But the ancients (and [...]

Several questions have come in along those lines the last few days. “Dry butter” is a term that French pastry chefs frequently employ, usually in regard to the cultured butter they use for laminated pastry. I confess I don’t know what the technical definition of dry butter is in France (France being France, I’m sure [...]

Because nobody else is going to save you any, that’s for sure. It’s just too sweet and buttery. Tender on the inside and crispy around the edges like a croissant, it has a crackly caramel top that adds just the right je-ne-sais-quois (I wrote that in French because don’t know how to say it in [...]

I was going to write about how to modify ladyfingers before putting up the tutorial, but I think it’ll be easier to show the recipe first, then talk about adjustments. Ladyfingers are a lot easier to make than this series of photos might make them appear. They require a few steps, but the batter is [...]

I was fiddling with pita over the weekend and came up with this new formula. It’s much faster than the original version, assuming you have some refreshed and active starter hanging around. I put sourdough in quotations since a bread that’s not made with a starter that’s local to the San Francisco Bay area can’t [...]

Beignets offer a great deal of payoff relative to time spent planning and preparing them. As long as you have a fry rig ready to go, they can take as little as two hours from mixing to frying. Start by combining your dry ingredients in a mixer bowl and giving them a whisk (you can [...]

If there can be no clearer indication that this will be the Summer of Pie at the Smitten Kitchen — as if a 6-week onslaught of galette after pie smackdowns after savory tart built on a platform of tartlets crusted bettys and free-form pretties did not already lead us to that conclusion — my pastry [...]

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 [...]

You don’t have to own a dog to know how much they love peanut butter (I don’t, but my girls are working on me). This recipe should endear you to all your neighborhood canine buddies.
4 ounces water
4 ounces vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 1/2 ounces peanut butter
10 ounces flour
2 1/4 ounces [...]

I’ve been having some fascinating discussions with a few readers via email, all about Peter Reinhart and the evolution of his whole wheat sandwich bread recipe. The conversations began when three readers alerted me to the fact that Reinhart updated his recipe in his most recent book, Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day. Essentially, he [...]