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Shayna Glick

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Is a $200 cookbook worth it?

by Shayna Glick, Posted Oct 7th 2008 @ 1:30PM

Photo of a dish from the Fat Duck restaurant that has vapor emmerging from it due to liquid nitrogen.

There's quite a bit of buzz about Heston Blumenthal's new cookbook, at least on the other side of the pond. One of the masters of molecular gastronomy and the owner of three Micheline star The Fat Duck, Mr. Blumenthal is renowned for his amazing, and amazingly complex food.

Now he's brought his molecular know-how to the masses...sort of. His new cookbook, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, is a huge, 516 page, 12 pound, £100 ($200-though I found it for about $145) monster. I quite frankly have a hard time believing that many people are going to be rushing out to get it, especially at this economically uncertain time. It's pointed out in both of the articles in the Guardian this week, that not only is the book expensive, but it requires expensive and hard to find ingredients and equipment. Both of those aspects make it less likely that anyone would do anything more than drool over the reportedly exquisite photography.

Still, I'd love to be able to get a look at the Big Fat Duck Cookbook. I wonder if my local library will be getting this tome? If I could take pictures and see what recipes I could make, I'd definitely be one happy cook. Unfortunately, I think the library is the only way many people would be able to get a look at it.

Filed under: Newspapers, Books, Celebrities

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Delicacies of the land: Taro cultivation in Hawaii

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by Shayna Glick, Posted Oct 7th 2008 @ 1:00PM

Delicacies of the land is a short film/music video that teaches us a little about taro cultivation in Hawaii. In Hawaiian culture, the taro, which is a plant with a starchy root used to make the traditional poi,is incredibly important. The root of the plant is referred to as kalo in the Hawaiian language.

This video is an informative few minutes long. It is half sung in Hawaiian with subtitles and half a lecture from Jerry Konanui, a well respected taro advocate and traditionalist. What struck me most about this film was the similarity of the plight of taro and that of most other traditional vegetables such as heirloom tomatoes. There are hundreds of varieties of taro, each one bred over the centuries to be perfectly adapted to different environments of the Hawaiian Islands, but 90% of the commercially grown taro is only one variety. But advocates such as Jerry Konanui are trying to reverse the trend and get people to grow more of the traditional varieties.

This post from Intelligent Travel also includes a short interview with the directors. They discuss the importance of taro to Hawaiian culture and the proliferation of genetic modification on the Islands, among other things. There are also recommendations of places to go if you're visiting Hawaii to find out more about the taro and the isses surrounding it.

Filed under: Farming, On the Blogs, Food Politics

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Basic baking concepts: Elasticity and extensibility

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by Shayna Glick, Posted Oct 7th 2008 @ 10:30AM

A large piece of bread dough with someone's hand stretching one side of it.

The magic of wheat flour is its ability to produce leavened bread. Wheat is the only grain that can do that because it is the only grain that can make gluten, the three-dimensional protein structure that can stretch and expand and hold air, then set when baked into glorious bread.

That stretchiness and ability to expand both have a name. Elasticity, the stretchiness, is the tendency for the dough to want to shrink back into its previous shape. It's like a rubber band: after you stretch it out the band snaps back into place. The ability to expand is called extensibility. The dough becomes more extensible, it will expand, as the gluten structure is allowed to relax.

The give and take between elasticity and extensibility is what makes yeast raised bread what it is. It is able to be worked into desirable shapes and to expand with the gas inside of it. Because of the elastic element, bread dough has to be rested several times during the process to allow it to be more extensible, but you don't want to get rid of either aspect. Without elasticity, the dough would simply be a slack mess, unable to hold it's shape. The two elements work together to form the bread that we've depended on for a good chunk of human history.

Filed under: Ingredients

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Tip of the Day: Tips for adding butter to bread dough

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by Shayna Glick, Posted Oct 7th 2008 @ 6:05AM

Your recipe calls for butter or another fat. Depending on the quantity called for, there are different times you should add it.

Filed under: Tip of the Day

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Would you bring your own bread to a restaurant?

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by Shayna Glick, Posted Oct 6th 2008 @ 7:00PM

A restaurant bread basket with some high end bread.

Have you ever taken note of the bread you're served at restaurants in the pre-meal bread basket? I suspect that unless you're a bread snob, the answer is no. As a self proclaimed breadie, I actually have had conversations about the bread at restaurants with other bread lovers. Some of my bread friends refuse to eat bread out, just like I had friends in art school who would cover the bad art in hotel rooms so as not to be exposed to the negative vibes.

However, I haven't met anyone who would bring their own bread to nibble on. According to the Guardian, that's exactly what bread scholar Steven Laurence Kaplan does. He even brings his own bread to very high end places in France, the bread capital of the world, because he says that even in France bread is an afterthought in restaurants.

I have had good bread in one restaurant, but that place is directly across the street from the best bakery in town. I agree that bread is usually an afterthought in dining establishments, but would you, or should you, bring your
own? Take the poll below to throw in your own two cents.

Filed under: On the Blogs, Ingredients

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