Michael Ruhlman's Blog, page 59

Salted Caramel

Originally posted on June 29, 2011 Been so busy recently have scarcely had time to post.  Just got back from taking James to camp   My chief videographer and dessert innovator. I was in Boston talking salt on Simply Ming.  I was in NYC working on confections with Bouchon Bakery head chef Sebastien Rouxel and putting [...]

Michael Symon's Pickled Chillis

Michael is currently on the West Coast touring colleges with his daughter.  After the college tour, he heads back home to Cleveland for a few days and then is off to Palm Beach, Florida.  The last leg of his trip leads Michael to New York.  While in New York, he will be preparing his Carolina [...]

Great Kitchen Tools: Scale

Among the most hopeful signs in cookbook publishing is Artisan's agreeing to lead all recipes in the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook, due out next fall, with metric weights (they will include volume measurements second). It's a baking book after all, and no other culinary craft is more dependent on accuracy of measurement than baking. Another hopeful [...]

Corned Beef: It's Never Too Late!

It's not too late to corn your own beef if you celebrate St. Paddy's day! I haven't yet and my wife, who has Irish roots, expects it on this day! Below is a recipe for a quick cure, which should work on most contemporary briskets which are an inch or two thick (it's all in [...]

Food Is Important

"Food is important," I said to the audience at Cleveland Public Library last Thursday night. It was my first line and it got a laugh. I was surprised and encouraged. When I say that to most groups of Americans, they look at me they way cows look up from their grazing. Not even a moo. [...]

Aebleskivers—Danish Pan Cakes

I love Twitter for maybe 50 or 60 different reasons and this post resulted from one of them. A year ago, Donna was poking around in an antique store, bought the above pan for no explainable reason and put it in the basement where it sat untouched for, well, a year. The other day, looking [...]

Penny De Los Santos, Chef Dan Barber @ Cle Public Library Thursday Evening

I'm very proud the Cleveland Public Library is bringing two extraordinary individuals in the food world to Cleveland, photographer Penny De Los Santos and Dan Barber, chef of Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills (former Rockefeller estate), to talk about what matters most to them. The event is FREE! [...]

How To Sell a Cookbook Part II

Two weeks ago, sparked by Dianne Jacobs's question about what defines a successful cookbook, I wrote this post So You Want to Write a Cookbook. But the questions raised intrigued me so much that I reached out to two editors I currently work with and respect, asking them specifically, what books that didn't sell well or make [...]

The Music/Food Connection

    Last night at, on the Broad Stage with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, I spoke about connections of music and food, in between selections from Puccini, Rossini, de Falla and Schoenfield. When Rachel Fine, executive director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, first wrote to request that I speak, I honestly almost flat [...]

Great Kitchen Tools

The best, I mean the very best and most useful kitchen tools, are almost always the simplest. Yes, you've got the kitchen workhorse, the standing mixer, the food processor (I almost never use mine), the hand blender (my favorite small appliance). But really what I love most? Two really sharp knives. A thick flat hard [...]