Walking into a kitchen or production location where nuts are being roasted tends to be a delight. The air is full of nutty, caramelly aroma’s. Taking it one step further and burning those nuts deftly removes all that pleasantness and…
In the past decade or so I have lived abroad in several countries. One of the aspects of living abroad is sharing (or telling about) the food from where you’re from. The Dutch stroopwafels (syrup waffles) so far have been…
Humans have been sweetening their foods for thousands of years. Whether it’s through honey, natural sugar syrups such as maple syrup, or by using sugar beet or cane sugar, it’s all done to sweeten our dishes. Which sugar you use,…
You can make a great cookie with sugar, butter and flour (that is, shortbread), you can make a delicate crispy almond tuile by adding some egg and almonds. But, your tuile (and a lot of other cookies as well!) become…
If you’ve never been to Chicago, chances are small you have come across Chicago-style deep dish pizza. It’s a pretty regional phenomenon and personally I haven’t seen it outside of the city, whereas in Chicago every tourist seems to ‘need’…
Cooking a pie in the oven is always a delicate balancing act. You don’t want the pie to dry out and become tough. But under cooking is probably worse, with raw liquid filling being left in the pie. Imagine how…
How cold does your freezer need to be for freezing that piece of fish in less than 2 minutes? How fast does your cooling water need to flow to keep a pipe full of soup at temperature? If you’re designing…
Long before that steaming cup of (Turkish?) coffee stands in front of you, or even before you buy that bag of coffee beans, your coffee beans have been through quite a bit. From plant to farmer to processor and finally…
The more you learn about different cuisines, the more similarities you can see between them. So, when recently learning about brick pastry, which is a very thin dough cooked on a flat griddle, I quickly learned that a lot of…
Have you ever seen those profiteroles or cream puffs with a speckled decorated top? The pattern on top almost looks like dried out earth, with a lot of cracks and spaces in between the darker spots of decoration? Note only…
Choux pastry truly is a little piece of magic. It starts out as a small little ball of dough, but turns into a light, airy and fluffy hollow ball in the oven! It makes delicious profiteroles, éclairs, cream puffs and…
So many cuisines have dishes that are made with super thin pastry. The very thin dough can be used for making anything from Middle Eastern baklava, Greek spanokopita, German strudel to Indian samosas. They’re all made with phyllo, or the…
