My sister really knows how to plan a weekend visit. Step one, consult with your local Trader Joe’s cashier for the inside scoop on good local tourist spots. Step two, go to the strange place recommended by said cashier and hand-feed goats with baby bottles. It’s over. She’s won. The place in question, Grant’s Farm, brings
Tag: butter
Pancake cooking: spotty or smooth?
Although the stereotypical giant diner pancake has a smooth, evenly-browned color, I tend to prefer the abstract art of uneven browning on my pancakes. It’s all about your pan and your fat, so it’s choose-your-own-adventure time, pancake edition. Throw a knob of butter in the pan, swirl it around, and top it with pancake batter–you’ll get that uneven
Chill your cookie dough
Does accidental science still count as an experiment? I’m going to rule yes, and go ahead and share the results of my totally unintentional study of how dough temperature affects cookie baking. In other words, I got distracted halfway through making cookies, stuck the dough in the fridge, ate a good amount of it straight
Biscuits: flaky vs. fluffy
Yes, we’re talking about butter again. You can’t really avoid it in baked goods (at least, I don’t want to), so we may as well embrace it and make it work for us. It sort of blows my mind that these biscuits have the same basic recipe. As far as ingredients and baking go, they’re
Fluffy biscuits and sausage gravy
We’re still on the biscuit train, and I make no apologies. This week’s recipe has the exact same list of ingredients as last week, but both the inside and the outside tell a completely different story from one to the other. I know I go on and on about butter here sometimes, but look at
Laminated biscuits
No, it doesn’t mean we cover them in plastic. Laminating in the kitchen refers to folding buttery pastry dough to create flaky layers–think puff pastry and croissants. As usual, it’s all about the butter. We want it cold and in thin pieces so that the dough has alternating thin sheets of dough and butter. The
Flaky biscuits and honey butter
There’s a barbecue place in Boston that does something amazing every Monday night: they stop serving up platters of dry-rubbed brisket and turn instead to noodle-filled bowls of ramen. Starting at 9 pm, Sweet Cheeks Q delivers precisely 100 bowls of whatever chefs Tiffani Faison and Dan Raia have dreamed up for the evening. I
Butter: browned, clarified, and ghee
This one is for my dad, who makes fun of me for carrying McGee with me whenever I travel and then peppers me with food science questions that I need to look up (immediately) in my reference book of choice. My favorite from my trip home in August revolved around clarified butter and ghee, partly
Pie crust: battle of the fats
Last week I wrote a whole post about fats in pie crusts and why they work and which one makes the best pastry and all that jazz. I even made you an explanatory table! But much as I love knowing exactly how the fats measure up by the numbers, even I have to admit that