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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