... a spirited celebration of regional food and culinary craft, season by season, with original recipes by Susan S. Bradley
The most important element of Thanksgiving preparation in the OtherWorldly Kitchen is Brown Poultry Stock. I say this unequivocally, because it is essential to my Thanksgiving 24-Hour Gravy. Without this luscious, silky gravy, it’s just not Thanksgiving.
Have you ever had a dish haunt you for years and years? Or perhaps one particular component of a dish? Have you tried repeatedly to reproduce that dish and failed miserably every time? Have you feigned innocence with one after another server to see if you could wheedle out the EXACT instructions for making that elusive something? “This is delicious. What type of bread is it?” “Really? But it’s SO crisp. How long does it bake?” “Parmesan too, eh?”
Recipes can be inspiring, but there is nothing as satisfying as truly understanding the underlying formula and technique of a particular dish. Once you’ve got those under your belt, you OWN that dish and can riff it successfully and endlessly. That’s when the real fun begins.
Take the concept of dessert crepes (pronounced kr?ps in French or kr?pes in English) for instance, which are a type of very thin pancake. You can go straight to a comprehensive French cookbook, grab the basic dessert crepe recipe and process, and rely on that forever. Or, if you are more curious, you can gather 10-20 solid resources, compare the formulas and processes, and then hit the kitchen and test your way through them. When you are done, the entire world of desert crepes will open up for you and reveal its secrets. You will become the Zen master of dessert crepes.
I planned to do a short post on how to make a perfect scone and then several days into research and testing realized that like most great things, superlative scones are not so simple after all. This is not to say that they are difficult to make; just that there is a world of contradictory information available on the best way to produce them, plus dozens of basic formulas that run the gamut from doughs with no butter or eggs at all to doughs with large quantities of both. What is the bewildered cook to do?
There is really nothing easier than making a tender, flakey pastry crust. For some reason though, the very word “pastry” evokes shudders from otherwise competent cooks. It seems that everyone has, at one time or another, had difficulty with this basic dough. To take some of the mystery out of it, and hopefully some of the fear as well, here is a run-down on what actually happens in the pastry making process.
Is there anything in the world of food more appealing than a gloriously fresh pesto, with its vivid green color and bright, bold flavor? I can’t think of anything more wonderful in early spring than this sometimes chunky, sometimes smooth sauce with its heady aroma and visceral connection to the earth and all things leafy green.
With the proliferation of cocoa powders available today, how is a cook to know which is the “best” to use for any particular purpose?
To complicate the selection process, there are three types of cocoa: natural, alkalized (Dutch process) and super alkalized (black or onyx). Often, it doesn’t matter which one you use but when you are baking with chemical leaveners, it does.
When Columbus first set foot on the Caribbean island that is now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he was hoping to find black pepper, the world’s most costly spice. Instead he found the genus Capsicum which the native inhabitants called aji. Probably a little frantic that his expedition was going unexpectedly awry, he quickly renamed the spicy vegetable, pepper, and while he was at it, the Arawak natives, Indians, to support the idea that he had indeed found a western trade route to India.
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