with Greg Patent, Award Winning Cookbook Author
When I haven’t made up my mind what to cook for dinner, I usually let the vegetables in the market guide me. Recently, asparagus won me over. To me, it’s the queen of vegetables, and I felt that the queen deserved to be celebrated in […]
I am completely smitten with a smashing new cookbook on Russian cooking, “T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks” (2018, University of North Texas Press), written by Sharon Hudgins, a Russian scholar and former University of Maryland professor. Sharon and I have known each other for many […]
Here’s another baking miracle that performs its magic due to air alone—choux paste or pâte à choux. It translates literally as “the pastry for making little cabbages.” Cream puffs are, hands down, the most well-known choux paste descendant. You make the dough by beating flour […]
Greg Patent shows you how to bake a classic Australian almond and jam pastry, Bakewell Slice.
Last week I was thrilled to find Italian prunes at our farmers’ market, and I thought I’d repost my recipe for baking them in a galette. I’d always called these succulent fall fruits Italian Prune Plums. But I now have learned, thanks to my friend, John Keegan, that I have been wrong. Here’s what he wrote when I made my original post on October 14, 2013.
A long, long time ago, in the mid-1980s, my wife and I made a stop in Ketchum, Idaho, on our way home to Missoula, Montana. We got a bite to eat and then wandered about town to get the lay of the land. Always on […]
When peach season arrives in Montana, which is now, I rush into the kitchen to bake a galette. And what is a galette? It’s a sheet of thin, buttery pastry topped with fresh fruit. The edges of the dough—which may be ragged—are simply folded up […]
Fresh sour pie cherries are as precious as rubies. Bright and shiny like the gems they resemble, the sour Montmorency cherries have a short season (only 2 to 3 weeks in July) in western Montana, so I always pick some off a neighbor’s tree to […]
Once upon a time I came across a prize-winning recipe from the 8th Pillsbury Bake-Off called Starlight Sugar Crisps. The yeasted dough, rich with butter and sour cream, is rolled in vanilla sugar and makes an irresistible pastry. I decided to try turning the dough […]
Here’s the easiest way to make puff pastry I know. It goes against all belief systems about building layers of air between sheets of buttery dough to produce a crisp and flaky result. Classic puff pastry requires multiple rolling and folding of the dough. […]