devlin

Recipe? Looks fabulous.

Consider the Oyster. Why? Well, it's fabulous writing. It's got one of the best opening chapters of any book ever written. And if the person isn't familiar with her, it's short enough to read fairly quickily. It's one of my favorite books.

Nancy Silverton's brioche sticky buns are the best things on the planet. You can find the recipe in her Pastries From the LaBrea Bakery and in Baking With Julia (Greenspan). JC's book also has Silverton's brioche tart with mystery sauce (I think that's what it's called, anyway something like that) which is delicious and is the dessert that moved Julia Child to tears on the show. "A triumph!" she exclaimed and then literally dissolved into tears and laughter. It's a wonderful moment. And it's a wonderful brioche.

Well I'm thinking his next show will have to explore music in greater depth. I mean what is Abba if not some genius mix of square dance and Irish step dance? Somebody should get Michael Flatley on that pronto. And Billy Joel? Don't even get me started. I mean, really, pure folk opera. Inner-city Aaron Copeland.

Desiderio, did you have any luck finding your recipe? I picked up 3 pounds of locally made ricotta this today to test a recipe Thanks in advance -- Warren ← Sorry for the deley my days tend to go very fast . Ok this is made with a pate sable for base . The filling : 1500 gr ricotta 450 gr sugar 300gr pastry cream 6 egg yolks 200gr pate a choux 6gr salt 200gr powedered gram crakers ( it says biscotti , you can use digestive , gallette etc),its for the purpouse to absorbe some moist . 150gr raisins 150gr candied orange diced 150gr chocolate chips or shaved, whtever you like rum flavor, alkermes flavor,grated citrus peel ( orange lemon )cinnamon, vanilla. You can use real flavor with dark rum and alkermes if you want , the rum flavoring might leave a weird acid backtaste sometimes. mix everything together leave the fruit and chocolate for last ( no need to over mix with the fruit and chocolate ). No you can either form a disc with pate sable ,precooked slightly,put some cream on the disc the put a disc of genoise brushed with some liquor syrup or milk ,then the rest of the cream to form a semisphere ,with other pate sable cover and seal the edges then either brush the top with egg wash or simply egg yolks and sugar and make some design if you have any pate left and bake . Now I suggest you use an oven plaque or a large baking sheet turned upside down and just blind bake the first disk on it then mount the rest direclty on it and bake ,so you dont have to mess with moving it around.Other option just use the pate sable for a regular base as for a regular crostata in a circula baking pan, blind bake it then pour the cream cover with more pate sable and bake it and that will be a classic crostata , with a very good filling though . ← Vanessa, yum. That looks as if it might just be the thing. I've been thinking about doing something like it, but too tied up with other things to experiment. So thank you so much for providing it here. I can stop tapping my foot now.

Della Fattoria in Petaluma California. It's a bread shop, well known, and I was surprised to find the espresso and cappuccino some of the best stuff I've had anywhere.

it really is great tasting and "exotic" if you will (though not exotic if this is what you grew up with ). italian espresso is COMPLETELY different. it uses a different method by use of an espresso maker or machine and extrudes the coffee (and making the foam) with pressure created by trapped water being forced up through the coffee grinds. equally as potent and good but a very different flavour. hmmm...too late for coffee now ← I know, I've a hankering now. I know espresso is made differently and that espresso can also produce crema, so I'm confused by the claim above. I make espresso (stovetop) every morning, and I used to make Turkish coffee regularly til my gut began to protest. For me, it's heaven. It manages somehow to taste just slightly chocolatey... just a hint of that flavor, and the cardamom is beyond wonderful. But my mother was Norwegian, and so it's a flavor I grew up with.

Yes, I was thinking as I was reading that you should definitely try the cardamom. Fabulous. But a question. If the only way to get the "crema" is using a tapered top, how is it that Italians manage espresso without it?

Desi, is it a secret? Will you share? I like Carol Field's recipe for this as well, but the wild card is always the ricotta. I've been trying for a long time now, off and on, to replicate the really beautiful ricotta cheese cakes you find all over Italy, with not a whole lot of luck. Or anyway not so much to my own satisfaction.

Scuse the redundancy above. Didn't see Zoe's response.

Since Bourdain himself has already noted there's no book, it looks to me as if it's simply an error. The photo at half.com is identical to the photo of the dvd at Amazon, and both say "hosted by" which suggests a film.

On the other hand, what a great film THAT would make.... But really, worried here. Read the news yesterday after your quick note and then the news last night and this morning and it just gets worse and worse. Hope you can get the hell out of there soon.

Okay, fabulous. I finally have a clue! That's exactly the sort of information I need. Thanks so much to the both of you.

Well, you two are providing both useful (I think) and confusing info. When you say "convection," I automatically think of a domestic convection oven. Something about the size of my small GE electric oven in my kitchen (or, as I refer to it, "my g*#damned toy oven"). So when you use the term "convection," are you actually talking about some monstrous commercial thing? And can you refer me to a particular brand?

I'm not sure anybody can make me more confused than I am generally about bakery equipment right now. It's all too new for me to even know how to ask very precise questions. But so far, it seems to me a deck oven's the thing. I do cakes and cookies in addition to hearth breads, and although the cookies might fare okay in the brick oven, the cakes need a more controlled environment and my client base is growing a little faster than I'd expected. Which is good. But I'm going a little crazy trying to keep up.

Okay, now you've asked a question I'm not sure I can answer. Here's what I need: an oven with capacity enough to bake many cakes at once. More than four. As many as eight to ten at once.

Jeanne, thanks for making me clarify a little further (I hadn't thought to do so). Yes, I'm looking for electric, not gas, and I'll be installing it in my home bakery. Thanks for the recommendation and the warning.

Having purchased my 30 quart Hobart mixer, I'm now in the market for a smallish deck oven for cakes and the like. I've never used a deck oven, so here are a couple of questions: Should I try to find a Blodgett? Other recommendations? Having only ever used the usual domestic oven, I'm unsure of the sorts of dimensions I should be looking for in terms of rack spacing for baking. What are the general rules of thumb in this regard?

Part of this is marketing. I decided very deliberately to emphasize the "rustic" quality of my breads and cakes, and although the cakes in particular might not look so fabulous on a web site, a fondant covered cake with piped flowers and ancillary decoration would be pretty discordant with this And so I don't even pretend to do elaborately-decorated pastries or desserts, and instead I emphasize artisan breads and rustic cakes and cookies. They're not beautiful in the way of traditional wedding cakes and the like, but when I uncover them and set them on a table for people, they elicit oohs and aahs anyway. One client noted a couple of weeks ago that she'd brought home some leftovers from a rehearsal dinner and because she'd had the rest of her weekend catered, having hired them months in advance, before she'd found me, she had a lot of the standard, pretty stuff set out for lunch and dinner. They went to the refrigerator instead and fought over my leftovers. And by then you know they had to look even more rustic than usual. I'm usually very skeptical when I see those gorgeous-looking cakes on a web site. There will always be a market for them. But there will always be a market for good desserts of all stripes, and people who really know good desserts will know the difference between simply pretty, not-so-great confections (not knocking all pretty desserts here) and the really fabulous and flavorful dessert that may not be traditionally beautiful. Frankly, anymore, I don't find those traditionally "beautiful" desserts very lovely anymore anyway. So much of it just looks cheesy. For me, it's sort of the disney land of the dessert world. Not intending to knock the art of making traditionally decorated desserts, not really. But it's just not my bag.

Well a big thank you to Mayhaw Man for bringing this up. I've actually never had fondant, but since I'm continually looking for cakes to add to my repertoire, I keep looking at fondant-covered stuff thinking I'm an idiot for not knowing how to make or use it. But I've never been much interested in pretty cakes. If you can make it attractive without much fuss, fine, but to deliberately add a thing you already know tastes godawful,... well, that seems near criminal to me . It's a big gripe I have in my own end of the business, bread baking. Too many times my husband and I are lured into a bread shop by the gorgeous shapes in the window and are invariably disappointed, usually in a very big way, by the actual breads. They're just obscene. And that's it, isn't it. It's food porn plain and simple, and not in a good way. It's should be pleasurable, not fake. It's like watching the feigned expressions of ecstasy and listening to over the top moans of pleasure.... Not that *I* ever watch porn. During our first trip to Italy a few years ago, we were taken in in much the same way, and there they go to great lengths to make elaborate, beautiful looking breads. And they taste no better than wonder bread -- maybe worse. It took us forever to find decent bread in Italy. And even friends we thought would have known better brought home a bag of gorgeous looking stuff and we had to force ourselves to choke it down. So, anyway, flavor always over pretty. In bread, cakes, the whole shebang. I feel the same way about so much of what I see in restaurants, the ostentatious display versus just good food.

Don't give up! The place you should start is definitely with your local (county) department of health. I understand completely that when you're just beginning the process it can all seem overwhelming and beyond confusing. It's a great idea to have a dedicated space, or a space that is in some way separate from your house. I had decided that was the way to go early on and didn't want to pay rent to somebody or buy a commercial building. At the same time we were looking to buy a house, I was also trying to figure out how to accommodate a bakery. The house we fell in love with on the spot fortuitously had an attached garage that was also separated from the rest of the house by a mud room, laundry room, hall and small bathroom. It was perfect, and it fit my own local public health department regulations for a home bakery. The book of regulations they sent me to start me off only confused the heck out of me. But my husband and I very gamely waded through the thing, as big as a phone book, and then I phoned them and asked if somebody could come out to look at the space and walk us through some of the issues. And so they did. Not a big deal, it turned out, and the visit was tremendously helpful. The only thing we had completed by then was the brick oven, and the rest of the garage was a mess of junk and ancillary debris and unfinished walls, etc. She walked us through the process, helped us put together what ended up being a really short list of tasks to complete, and voila. We finished it, invited her again, hoped we'd done everything we'd been required to do, and relief. We had. I was certified last month. What had seemed from the beginning a really mysterious, insurmountable, scary process ended up being pretty simple. Of course I'm speaking from hindsight. But I'm hoping it might help you feel less overwhelmed. Hang in there.

I'm just starting up my own business. Apart from the fact that the general biases are true in practically all professions, and I've experienced them myself, this thing this comment refers to is common and unfortunately true, and every time it happens I can scarcely believe that in this day and age it continues to happen. And it just happened last week when I was buying a mixer. It happens whenever my husband comes with me on these buying excursions, and I'm continually annoyed and surprised. I'm not a shrinking violet, and I'm not overbearing. I just want to get information, and I would prefer we all treat each other with respect and give each other the benefit of the doubt and not automatically assume that because somebody's a woman she must, 1) not be the actual buyer, and 2) be a total idiot about any number of things. So we're wandering around this guy's big barns full of used retaurant equipment, having made it clear that I'm looking for a commercial mixer, something between a 20 and 30 quart mixer and particular brands. It's my business. I'm the one who's done the research on mixers, and I'm the one who knows what I need, and the whole time this guy directs every comment to my husband. I'd ask a question, and he'd literally turn to my husband and direct his answer to him. At one point he starts in on how one of them works and in the middle of his comments, he says, "You know what I'm talking about?" and then without waiting for a response from either of us looks at me, and says, "I know he knows what I mean." Next time I'm just gonna wear a burqua and pass notes to my husband.

Fabulous.... Thanks a bunch Sarah. And again for your gorgeous butter cake.

I've never frozen cakes, and am wondering how you handle the cake after it's been frozen. Simply take it out for a couple of hours to thaw at room temp? And will the texture be as good as it would be if it hadn't been frozen?

Update: we finally got around to getting down that little road out here in the middle of nowhere where we'd been told we'd find an old place out of some guy's barn with used restaurant equipment. This was after checking out a used place downtown in Louisville only to be told they only very rarely find used 20 quart mixers. Anyway, the guy down this little road in the middle of nowhere (close to our place) has two barns jammed full of all sorts of used restaurant equipment and more mixers of all sizes than I've ever seen in my life. And behind the barn a space the size of half a football field with even more stuff. So we wandered around, got the spiels on all the Vulcans, the Reynolds's and the maybe 20 or so Hobarts in various sizes, and found a great old 30 quart Hobart for 900 bucks with bowl and attachments and the guarantee he'll give me a loaner should I ever need it worked on, which he can do himself. Runs beautifully.