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After the success of the other Bouchon Bakery recipes I tried, and in light of my efforts to bake bread more regularly in order to better understand the process, I thought it would be interesting to try the Bouchon Bakery “Master Recipe” for bread. Nearly all the breads in the book call for a pre-ferment, either [...]

My husband gave me a copy of Bouchon Bakery as a gift in December, bringing my total collection of Thomas Keller Restaurant Group cookbooks up to four. After opening it, I wasted no time in diving in. The book approaches baked goods, both pâtisserie and boulangerie (with a little confectionery thrown in for good measure) in [...]

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the value of repetition in the kitchen, of doing the same task over and over and over again. Repeating it until you’re completely sick of doing it, then repeating it some more until you can do it in your sleep. And, ideally, becoming a little bit [...]

Having gone to the trouble and expense of making the Momofuku Milk Bar corn cookies, I figured I might as well make the Lucky Peach recipes that use them as an ingredient, too. After all, it’s not like I’m going to have a regular supply of these on hand at all times. The first of [...]

I’ve been meaning to make the corn cookies from the second issue of Lucky Peach for a while now, but they somehow slid to the bottom of the to-do list until this weekend. I had even bought the freeze-dried corn for them – the only ingredient that was halfway challenging to obtain – and there [...]

While macarons may still be my favourite use for extra egg whites, financiers have recently become a close second. For one thing, they’re a lot less finicky than macarons – and while finickiness is much of the macaron’s appeal, sometimes you just don’t want to go to the trouble. Both are based on egg whites [...]

Amaretti cookies are essentially Italy’s answer to macarons. Their name is derived from the diminutive form of “amaro” (bitter), because they’re traditionally flavoured with bitter almonds (and currently with almond extract). Unlike macarons, which are usually sandwiched, amaretti are mostly served solo. They’re also baked to a crunchier texture, and can be crumbled and used [...]

As a fairly indifferent bread-baker, I never really got on the no-knead bandwagon, a trend that’s been around for a while now. Usually when I bake bread, it’s one loaf at a time, and I knead it in my stand mixer. No-knead recipes were a solution to a problem I just didn’t have. This isn’t [...]

Once you’ve made your damson gin and used it in a Modern No. 2, you’ll be left with the other half of your project’s materials: gin-soaked damsons. I’ve always struggled to use these up somehow. I find booze-soaked fruit to be fine in small quantities, but its appeal fades quickly. For some reason, the fruit [...]

As a predominantly savoury-kitchen cook, I don’t follow pastry trends closely – I pretty much completely missed the cupcake trend, for example – but more and more, I’ve been seeing rows of lovely, pastel-coloured French macarons in local bakeries lately. I know they’ve been trendy for several years in other cities, but trends are often [...]