Posted by Dorie Greenspan, April 24, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Illustration by Florine Asch
It's not just potato-chip makers that understand that if you offer us something salty we won't be able to eat just one—French pastry chefs know that trick too. And Arnaud Larher, whose pastry shop is in Montmartre, is a master of the add-salt-and-we'll-munch-away school. He's the chef who created the TV Snacks, irresistibly munchable, salty little butter cookies molded into lumpy, bumpy balls.
When I asked Larher how he came up with the idea to make a salty cookie, he said it came to him very naturally, since he grew up in Brittany, where butter is always salted. "I'm just continuing the tradition," he said.
I bet you could start your own tradition with these.
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, April 10, 2008 at 1:15 PM
Photograph by Alan Richardson
Here's my go-to cheesecake recipe, a classic that can be varied in almost limitless ways. (I've got 11 variations in my book, Baking: From My Home to Yours, and the only reason I stopped there was that it would have taken way too many pages to keep going.) It's an almost traditional New York Cheesecake—it's missing the lemon, which, of course, you could add—and it's tall and lush and, no surprise, creamy. I usually make it with a graham cracker or chocolate cookie crust, but if you'd like to make this for a Passover meal, you can easily omit the crust or use macaroon crumbs.
You'll see that I use either sour cream or heavy cream in the cake. The sour cream will give you a tangier cheesecake, more New York, I think, while the heavy cream is milder. As long as you keep the measurement at 1 1/3 cups, you can use whatever combo of the two you'd like. You can also add fruits or nuts, swirls of chocolate (melt some chocolate and mix it in with some of the cake batter) or flavor the cake with an extract or oil. Whatever you do, serve something light beforehand—the cake is rich and, even though everyone knows it, people still reach for seconds.
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, April 3, 2008 at 11:00 AM
While I have been known to exaggerate now and then, I've never gone overboard in my praise for this lemon cream (think curd); I just call it extraordinary and rest assured that I haven't gone overboard.
The recipe comes from Pierre Hermé, my pastry hero, and I think it's fascinating. It has all of the ingredients you find in a traditional lemon curd, but the way you make it changes the cream's texture—Pierre's lemon cream is tangier, lemonier and, I think, lighter on the tongue, than traditional lemon curd. The secret is in the way the butter is added. In a curd, all the ingredients, including the butter, go into a pot and you cook, cook, cook and stir, stir and stir and then, when the mixture cools, it's curd. With Pierre Herme's lemon cream, you cook and stir everything—except the butter—then, when the ingredients have thickened, you put them into a food processor or blender, let them cool a bit, then whir in the butter and keep whirring. Essentially, you make an emulsion. And, because the butter doesn't melt and re-firm, as it does with curd, the lemon cream is silky, luxurious and yes, extraordinary.
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, March 20, 2008 at 1:30 PM
I must be in a mini-mood—I just looked over my posts from the past couple of weeks and saw that everything was baby-sized. And here's another "small enough to hold in the palm of your hand" recipe. This one is for little bread puddings made in 6-ounce custard cups or ramekins. (Although, now that I think about it, I bet you could make these in muffin cups or, better yet, silicone muffin cups.)
I like to make these with prunes and to flavor the brown-sugar custard with allspice, but they're just as good with dried apricots and ginger (see Playing Around). Whatever dried fruit you use, make sure that it's soft and plump before it goes into your mixture. If your fruit is hard, you can either soak it in some very hot water or steam it for a minute or so, a process called "plumping." In either case, make sure to pat the fruit dry before mixing it into the recipe.
Maybe when the weather is more spring-like, I'll start feeling more expansive and break out the BIG recipes. For now, I hope you enjoy these little babies.
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, March 13, 2008 at 1:30 PM
Photograph by Alan Richardson
I’m still in Paris (yay!) and while I saw brilliant yellow forsythia when I was at the Sunday market, and while there are a few cherry blossoms out in the gardens that get full sun, it’s been cold and rainy all week—we even had snow for two seconds and a couple of hail showers—which means I’m still making hearty soups and substantial stews, one of which, a daube of red wine and beef cheeks, is simmering in the oven now. Between the chill outside and the breeze that comes through my ancient window frames, I don’t think my friends will find it unwelcome.
The daube will be familiar to my Parisian pals, but its accompaniment won’t—I’m going to serve the stew with a basketful of corn muffins. Of course, I’ll have to use frozen corn, but I can find really good cornmeal here, so it will be fine. And I might add a few herbs and a little bacon to the mix (the bacon here is fabulous), just to make it more savory and because there’s bacon in the daube. The way I see it, adding bacon to the muffins is like pulling an outfit together by wearing a scarf that picks up the color of your shoes. And besides, what isn’t better with bacon?
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, March 6, 2008 at 1:15 PM
By the time you read this, I'll be in Paris, where I hope I will have not have discovered that I left half of what I needed in New York. If so, it won't be the first time. For as much as I travel, I'm not a good packer—I'm always stuffing one last thing into a bag—and I'm not terribly organized. I pack at the last minute, which is how I end up taking more of what I don't need and sometimes forgetting that one vital something.
Knowing this about me, my husband wondered why, when nothing was packed and I was still writing to meet a deadline, I decided to make a banana cake. You'd have thought after all these years he'd be able to guess, since the reason is both simple and obvious: I had two over-ripe bananas languishing on the counter! And besides, nothing makes me calmer or happier than baking and a calm, happy me might actually pack better.
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