Spring 2020
Bread Lab!
Book review of Bread Lab! by Kim Binczewski and Bethany Econopouly » More ...
Baking
Fall 2018
Modernist Bread
By Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya
The Cooking Lab: 2017
For millennia, bread baking has been more craft than science. Even the current trend in artisan bread rejects much of what modern science has wrought: the advances of manufactured yeast, dough conditioners, added preservatives and the overall industrialization of wheat and bread production.
“The bread zeitgeist is about being ancient, primitive, natural, and pretty much anything but modern,” writes Nathan Myhrvold in his recent 2,642-page … » More …
Fall 2017
Plum recipes
If you have great plum recipes, send them to us and we’ll post them here.
Read more about plums and how to grow them.
Plum Chutney
Yield: 2 pints
Ingredients
4 c. plums, seeded
1 c. brown sugar
1 c. sugar
¾ c. apple cider vinegar
1 c. seedless raisins
2 teaspoons salt
⅔ c. chopped Walla Walla sweet onion
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tsp. mustard seeds
3 Tbsp. chopped crystallized ginger
¾ tsp. chili powder
Directions
Combine sugar and vinegar in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. When the … » More …
Fall 2015
How do you make the best chocolate chip cookies in the universe?
Dr. Universe visits the wheat quality lab to learn about the properties of flour. » More ...
Winter 2011
Bread books and videos
More than four decades ago, The Tassajara Bread Book opened up with the following epigram:
“We need more cooks, not more cookbooks.”
Now we have a lot more of both, plus video. Here are few of the latest gems of the genre:
My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method,Jim Lahey (W.W. Norton & Company)
A bread one doesn’t knead calls to mind a cake mix with a slew of mystery ingredients and food science. But Lahey’s bread has only four ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast, and the yeast is a fraction of … » More …
Winter 2011
Wheat: A 10,000-year relationship
A while back, George DePasquale visited the ancient Italian city of Pompeii, not far from his ancestral home of Sorrento. Looking at a 2,000-year-old oven, DePasquale could easily imagine how its baker prepared and baked bread much as he does today at Seattle’s Essential Baking Company. He could feel he was part of a long, human continuum, “a river of history,” with “bazillions of people behind me, bazillions of people to come.”
But even the oldest rivers change, forming new channels, and sometimes doubling back on themselves.
… » More …