People have been making ice cream far longer than the invention of electricity so there’s no reason you can’t make ice cream and sorbets at home without a machine! The advantage to using an electric or hand-cranked machine is that the final result will be smoother and creamier. Freezing anything from liquid-to-solid means you’re creating hard ice crystals, so if you’re making it by hand,…
Required reading from Mort Rosenblum: A New France, Sixth Republic—or Sarkostan? Let’s all wish Chef Grant Achatz well, and a speedy and successful recovery. Don’t tell me anyone actually likes the pigeons in Paris? No danger of a chocolate meltdown where you live? Stock up for your fix at Chocosphere in the US, and Seventy Percent, in the UK. …and where you’ll find others like…
In my never-ending quest to improve my French, I had some friends over for dinner last night and was asking them what the word ‘grue‘ meant. After consulting le dictionnaire français (aka: mon ma bible), the only definition we came across was that a grue was a ‘crane’—as in the long-limbed bird. Curiously, it’s sometimes used a slang for a ‘working woman’, if you know…
Each spring, as the temperature starts to gently climb in Paris day-by-day, most normal people spend their time figuring out how to maximize their time outdoors basking in the gloriously warm Parisian air. Around here, though, spring means only one thing: Eat all the chocolate I’ve got on hand because my apartment turns into the world’s largest bain marie, a sizzling oven capable of melting…
A reader recently wrote to ask, “How long does ice cream last in the freezer?” Oddly, I never gave it much thought since it doesn’t seem to linger too long around here. So I looked around and found the answer at the FDA website: 2-4 months. The most common problem when ice creams and other frozen desserts spend too long in the freezer is the…
Many people dream of turning their recipes or blog into a cookbook and I hope to answer some of the questions you might have about the process here. Below are some pointers that might help you out, but I’ve curated several excellent links from around the internet from experienced cookbook authors and editors whose advice I found particularly valuable and insightful. Interspersed in this post are a lot…
Every time I’m at G. Detou buying chocolate or whatever, I look at the tins of tuna lined up near the window. I’ve never picked any of them up, but I like looking at the pretty designs and graphic, stylized lettering. When I was there last week, I thought, “Why not try them out?” So I bought these two. Since then, they’ve been sitting on…
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked the age-old question: “How did you start cooking?” My usual wise-guy answer? “Well, I turned on the stove and put a pan on it.” In reality, I probably should acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Anna Maria Albergetti who got me on this whole obsessive measuring-thing, hawking those carefully delineated bottles for mixing up Good…
You might recall I recently posted the question: Is American Food Better Than French?* There were some very thoughtful comments on both sides of the piece de monnie, but in the post I laid a bit of blame on the French zeal for creating trendy food at the expense of sourcing local, fresh, and seasonal ingredients and I picked on les verrines as a current…
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