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, [...]
Bread Pudding Recipe
Because so many bread puddings can get mushy, I like Gaston Lenôtre’s version the best. Not only is it classic Lenôtre — simple and light yet elegant — it delivers a range of textures from crispy to tender to soft. You’ll need:
6-7 ounces sliced sandwich bread, crusts removed and cut into triangles
about two ounces butter [...]
Why does aluminum ruin tomatoes?
Another very good and geeky question from reader Jerry. Aluminum is interesting stuff in that it’s at once the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, yet found nowhere in nature as a free metal (which is to say in its pure, elemental state). The reason for that is because aluminum reacts with lots of [...]
Slow-Roasting Tomatoes
Nary a year passes in which I don’t slow-roast at least a few tomatoes to stash away in the freezer. In the bleak month of February, their bright, concentrated flavors serve as a reminder of happier days past, and yet to come. Before I had a backyard garden, my standard operating procedure was to prowl [...]
Tomato Tarte Tatin Recipe
Look around a little and you can find recipes for full-sized tomato tartes tatin, however I think the original mini-tarts still work the best. The New York Times’ large version from 2008 calls for a pound of cherry or grape tomatoes, but I think that’s still too watery, and I don’t much care for the [...]
New Orleans-Style Beignet Recipe
Troll around the web and you’ll find all sorts of overwrought beignet recipes, loaded down with eggs, butter, sugar, even evaporated milk. They’re all rather misguided to my way of seeing things. Though New Orleans beignets resemble doughnuts in many resects, they shouldn’t actually be doughnuts. Rather, they should be light and airy little frivolities [...]
How to Make Strawberry Shortcake
Strawberry shortcake was a plated dessert in America before Americans even knew what plated desserts were. Here I’m continuing in that tradition, though I respect the single “big biscuit” approach that grannies all over North America have been employing for generations. You can adapt this recipe to make a single, large shortcake if you wish, [...]
How to Make 7-Layer Bars
7-Layer bars (aside from “dirt” pudding) are my favorite guilty pleasure. You can throw these together in as little as a few minutes provided you have all the ingredients on-hand. I find a parchment-lined baking sheet is the easiest when it comes to de-panning 7-layer bars. You’ll want to trim two sheets so they’ll lay [...]
Making Marjolaine Step 7: Building It
If I were to try to describe Joe Pastry heaven to you, it would go a little something like this: a warm spring afternoon, the kids and the missus are taking a nap. There’s a cold bottle of suds open, and a big ol’ pastry to build.
That was my Sunday, friends, and here’s what [...]
Making Marjolaine Step 5: The Cake
Earlier in the week I wrote that I was taking a “sponge cake” approach to my marjolaine. That term isn’t wholly accurate, since I think of a classic sponge cake as something quite fluffy, that employs egg yolks, etc. etc.
This “cake” isn’t that sort of affair. Compositionally it’s similar to a meringue, only with [...]