The Twice Cooked Guide to Shortcrust Pastry

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Adam — No Comments ↓

It has begun, dear friends, to seem a bit absurd to me that every time I make a pie, tart, or pasty for the blog, I provide instructions for making shortcrust pastry all anew. As I browse back through the last few months’ entries, this habit, it seems to me, is responsible for taking up quite a lot of space.

And so I thought to myself this morning — I thought: why not write a shortcrust primer, instead? Why not work up a master recipe that will recount my shortcrust technique, its major variations, and maybe offer just a couple of tips for making it work? Continue reading →

Useful Lessons for Home Cooks from Professional Kitchens

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Bridget Sandorford — No Comments ↓

Bridget Sandorford is a freelance writer and researcher for Culinaryschools.org, where recently she’s been researching culinary schools in America. In her spare time, she enjoys biking, painting and working on her first cookbook. You don’t have to be a professional chef to cook like one. You can learn a great many things from the masters to become a star in your own kitchen — all without attending culinary school. There are so many resources online now — from YouTube to Continue reading →

Hiking the Bourbon Trail

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Adam — No Comments ↓

If my 2012, folks, began with the afterglow of visiting Spain — with dry sherry, fresh seafood, and melt-in-your-mouth jamón — it has ended with the afterglow of Kentucky. It has ended with the memory of bourbon, amber and oaky, filled with notes of caramel and corn, vanilla, char, and spicy rye — with a vision of giant copper stills, and the delicious smells of sour-mash fermentation and barrel aging firmly implanted in my nose. Kentucky — to clarify — Continue reading →

Lacto-Fermented Radishes

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Adam — No Comments ↓

Please don’t misconstrue what I’m about to tell you. I do in fact think that sour pickles are great. I make them. I eat them. Like many of you out there, they were my introduction to fermented foods. And I even have a recipe for them here. But the thing is: cucumbers aren’t really the best candidates for lacto-fermentation. Consider, for a moment, the properties of a good pickle: it’s tangy, salty, juicy, infused with delicious spices like coriander and Continue reading →

Thanksgiving Thoughts: Roasted Turkey

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Adam — 3 Comments ↓

Call it a gobbler, a motherclucker, even Big Bird (if you’re a certain, recently-former presidential candidate). I’ll know what you mean. Turkey is the centerpiece of almost every Thanksgiving meal. And it’s the centerpiece of stress — believe me, I know — for more than a few holiday cooks. For first-time turkey-cookers, the problem is its daunting size, its relative expense, the pressure — in front of friends and family — to get it just right. While for we who Continue reading →

Spicy Fermented Greens

Posted on October 7, 2012 by Adam — No Comments ↓

All this fermentation business seems to be going to my head. It used to be, when I would triage our incoming CSA bundle, I would think to myself: What gets eaten raw? What am I going to cook? And what scraps are going to end up in the compost? Now, I think: What can I ferment? Last week, when the CSA came a’calling, I found two things that really captured my imagination. We got two bundles of radishes, greens and Continue reading →

Lacto-Fermented Pickles

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Adam — 1 Comment ↓

I am tardy. Once again. In part because, over the past few weeks, my culinary focus has shifted away from recipes that are easily translated in words and pictures, and toward a massive experiment in — lacto-fermentation. My friend (and urban forager extraordinaire) Hana got me onto it when I visited with her last month. She handed me a big fat book and told me, in no uncertain terms: you need to buy this. The book, it turns out, was Continue reading →

Vanilla Coffee Liqueur

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Adam — No Comments ↓

I don’t talk about coffee much in this space. But it is actually quite an important part of my culinary life. Like many of my academic peers, I found myself drawn to it early on. A cup in the morning to get me going; another to ease into work; and a third (of course) to combat that inevitable classtime grogginess. Bitter and sweet, stimulating and relaxing, coffee has become a metonym in my mind for graduate education. In defense of Continue reading →

Ten Lessons from my Transitional Kitchen

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Elizabeth — 1 Comment ↓

I just made lunch in this kitchen. Chicken salad and steamed green beans. (Gone!)

Elizabeth is a folklorist, a teacher, a blogger (at www.breadandhoneyblog.com) and a culinary experimenter with a low boredom threshold. She and her partner have recently added a giant puppy to their household; he impedes the experimentation, but she loves him anyway. They used to live in a large, old house with a small, old kitchen in upstate New York — but they are moving out on the day this posts. Cooking always has an element of the chaotic and the Continue reading →

Special Bitter, and Floor Malted Barley

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Adam — No Comments ↓

So I’m making a new beer, probably next weekend. It’ll be a Special Bitter — largely minimalist in hops and grain, and as true to the style as it exists in Britain as I can manage. That means British hops, which I prefer anyway. And it means Maris Otter malt, which has, for the past half-century or thereabouts, been the (well-deserved) standard malted barley for beer in the U.K. Why has it been the standard, you ask? Because it’s good. Continue reading →

Twice Cooked

Cooking, Eating, Politics

Technique