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Last weekend was the annual eGullet chocolate and confectionery workshop, held this year at Niagara College in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. The first night of the workshop usually functions as a sort of “show and tell,” where the chocolatiers and confectioners who have gathered from across North America share samples of the treats they’ve been working on [...]

After making the beet fluid gel for my take on red velvet cake, I found myself with quite a bit of beet juice left over. Fortunately, I had a recipe handy to help me use it up: beet pâte de fruit. Or should that be “pâte de légume”? It may sound strange, but beet pâte [...]

Interest in pressure cookers may be on the rise in large part because of their modernist applications, but in some parts of the world it’s never waned: cooks from Morocco to Mexico have long relied on them as a labour-saving device for preparing traditional dishes in a fraction of the traditional time. So it came [...]

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a chocolate and confectionery workshop organized by Kerry Beal, The Chocolate Doctor, at Niagara College in Niagara-on-the-Lake. As you may know from some of my previous posts, I don’t consider myself to be an especially adept chocolatier, so I always relish the opportunity to get some practice [...]

This one is just for fun, and is probably exactly the sort of thing that drives many anti-modernist cuisine types up the wall. For one thing, it’s a preparation that has scare quotes in its name! For another, it’s not exactly what you would call an… intuitive preparation. It is, however, exactly what it sounds [...]

It always irks me when people make the sweeping declaration that “foams” are a fad that will soon fade. While this may be true of some types of foams – although even there, I’m not convinced – foam is a structure that cuts across all categories of food, savoury and sweet. Take, for example, the [...]

“Do you want to make the candied orange zest garnish?” my husband asked me, about our next round of truffles, filled with an orange butter ganache. “Why not?” I replied. “The devil is in the details, and candied orange zest will make them that much nicer. Anyway, candied orange zest is easy.” And so it [...]

I may still have a thing or two to learn about tempering chocolate, but I’m pretty good at sugar-based confectionery. Every year at Christmas, I make these lemon and rosewater jellies – a sort of faux-Turkish delight, since they’re set with gelatin rather than starch – from an old Bon Appétit recipe that’s inexplicably missing [...]