Post Category → actual cooking
Time to gild the zucchini
Los Angeles Times/August 2007
All I was hoping for at lunch in the Nice-Cote d’Azur airport was something slightly better than the chicken or “beef” Air France would undoubtedly be shoveling out. What I got was a good table with a view of the sea (and runway), an even better rosé and the best idea for late summer cooking.Continue reading
Immersion blenders: Crazy kitchen power
Los Angeles Times/June 2007
Not long ago I watched a chef visiting from Italy make a showstopper of a dish, little pasta “hats” stuffed with beets, drizzled with a three-cheese sauce and garnished with twists of beet greens and cubes of beet gelée. He blazed right through this elaborate production not only with knives and whisks but with an immersion blender: puréeing Gorgonzola, mascarpone and Roquefort cheeses with cream for the airy sauce, dissolving gelatin in beet juice, whizzing beet juice and soy sauce into the inevitable foam.
And it was not the first such performance I had seen lately. The immersion blender has become so essential to chefs it could almost be considered a third hand, and not just because of the molecular craze. No other tool seems to work such immediate magic in emulsifying, aerating, puréeing and whipping.Continue reading
The fifth dimension
Metropolitan Home
In the age of molecular gastronomy, the whole language of cooking is changing fast. Tradition-flouting chefs are throwing around such terms as osmosis and desiccation and sous-vide, all of which are fine and kitchen-scientific. But the most important new word is actually as accessible to home cooks as it is to wizards of foam: Umami. Continue reading
Old, and new again
Metropolitan Home
Fresh ricotta is the overlooked bonus from the great American cheese revolution over the last 20 years. Continue reading
Low, slow and succulent
Los Angeles Times
A new oven is being billed as the greatest invention since the discovery of fire itself. This high-tech contraption, seemingly a cross between a furnace and a microwave, allegedly can roast a whole rack of lamb in 6 1/2 minutes flat. Which sounds impressive if all you want is chops on the table in less time than you would need to set it.Continue reading
Our brilliant blues
Los Angeles Times
David Gremmels and Cary Bryant could be considered the accidental cheese makers.
Three years ago they were scouting for blue cheese Continue reading
Soulmates: Pasta meets cheese
Los Angeles Times
Back in the last century, an Italian sommelier who became a friend spent a fair amount of time in my kitchen, much of it insisting that nearly every iconic American food was made not just first but better in the country of his birth. Apple pie? They had it at crostata. Grilled cheese? Mozzarella en carrozza was the Model A. Meatloaf? They call it polpettone.Continue reading
Coffee you can eat
Los Angeles Times
A few years ago the Italian coffee company Lavazza hired the world’s leading molecular gastronomist, Ferran Adrìa, to come up with coffee you can eat. Continue reading
In the spirit of spring
Los Angeles Times
When the retired carabiniere wedged next to me on the plane to Venice would not stop talking about the wild asparagus he forages in springtime, I figured I was on my way to the Easter promised land. Continue reading