For several years, I’ve been using a digital scale to measure ingredients. At first I used it to convert restaurant recipes, which tend to be written in grams, into recipes for home cooking, where cups and teaspoons are preferred. Lately, though, I’m going in the other direction, especially when baking at home. I’m translating classic [...]
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A couple of weeks ago, I arrived at my friend Ashley’s home frazzled. I had promised her a pasta-making tutorial: butternut squash ravioli. Ashley would supply porcini sauce. I came with the pasta dough in hand, ensuring the dough was relaxed and hydrated before it was rolled into submission. What I didn’t have was my [...]
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Occasionally friends pass along a new-to-me recipe that I’m eager to try. Then the recipe sits in my email in-box as if I’m saving it for a rainy day. Yesterday, it rained. So at last I pulled out a recipe for pão de queijo, a cheesy Brazilian bread made with tapioca starch and Parmesan. I [...]
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I don’t write perfect recipes on the first draft (or the second, for that matter). Like any kind of writing, there’s the inevitable moment when you go back and read what you have written only to find that it makes no sense at all. So you revise. But writing recipes is, in one sense, easier [...]
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Before I fell hard for cooking—and fall I did, for everything from coulis to fish fumet (both made regular appearances on my favorite show, Great Chefs, Great Cities)—I was into baking. Particularly bread baking. Ask my sister—I made her babysit my sourdough starter once. “Feed it with flour and water twice a day,” I instructed. [...]
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People who like good food also like to make the quality v. quantity argument. Eat less but eat better. I wish the same approach would be applied to how we purchase kitchen equipment. Buy fewer but better gizmos. Scratch that—don’t buy any gizmos. There are too many examples of odds and ends that don’t have [...]
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It was barely 11 o’clock in the morning, but I was already dipping into raspberry chocolate jam. “I’m tasting something funny, something metallic,” I said. “Really?” said the voice on the other end of the line. “It’s very fudgy,” I said. “Like hot fudge. I wonder if you lose the raspberry flavor in the chocolate. [...]
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I’ll get to the dishes I made using the various cuts of pork from the Mado butchery session, but first I thought I’d mention a modest investment that any practicing cook should consider. It’s a digital scale. It’s not expensive. And it’s handy. I’ve been editing recipes from chefs for at least four years. One [...]
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