American recipes use volumes to measure dry ingredients. Outside the United States, the amount of flour or almonds in a recipe are commonly given in grams, not cups. One uses volume, the other mass. Credit (or blame) for this difference often goes to Fannie Farmer who used cups and spoons for measurements in her The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896). Farmer’s book was very popular. The first two editions sold over 300,000 copies.…
Deep, dark, caramelized sugar, just a touch before burning, taste wonderful. But getting the sugar to that point can be tricky. When I go without caramelizing for a while, I always feel unsure that I will be able to get the sugar to that perfect brown color. In those cases, I resort to a technique that is a bit slower, but foolproof (well, almost). In this post I’ll describe the method.…
Still two days to the deadline of TGRWT #16, chicken and rose water, hosted by Supernova Condensate, but a simple experiment I tried gave me a taste of what the flavor combination could be. I wanted to play with roasted chicken and rose water, so I took some warm chicken broth, added a bit of natural smoke to simulate the flavors of browning, and then slowly added rose water to the mixture.…
At Wired Magazine (in what once their blog) there is a collection of science inspired snacks. A bit late for me to serve at a Super Bowl party, but a good bookmark. Includes Pizza Pebbles by Wylie Dufresne and Greek Chips & Dip by Homaro Cantu.…
Lobster soup with vanilla and saffron, often requested at Michael Roberts’ Trumps restaurant, used one of his favorite secret ingredients — vanilla — in a savory dish, breaking with the spice’s traditional use. The credit for combining vanilla and lobster goes to Alain Senderens, one of the forces in French cooking pushing for new flavors and methods, but Roberts took vanilla to many other exotic places. Vanilla is native of the southern forests east of the Sierra Madre Oriental in the state of Veracruz in Mexico, where the Mexican Volcanic Belt has created towering peaks with deep valleys capped by waterfalls.…