Michael Ruhlman's Blog, page 70

Update: Bouchon Bakery Cookbook

I've spent nearly a week in the Napa Valley working on the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook.  This will be the fifth book in a series led by Thomas Keller that began with The French Laundry Cookbook which is one of the best chef-restaurant cookbooks ever (do we need full dislosure here?). Forget the words I write—these [...]

Morels for Lunch

I've been in Napa learning about bread at Bouchon Bakery and hope to post about later this week—bread is endlessly fascinating, infinitely complex, and to dive deeper into the craft with a baker, Matthew McDonald, who has been working with yeasted doughs pretty much his whole life, is one of the happier circumstances of a [...]

The Amazing Morel

In the spring of 1996, a CIA instructor took us on a hunt for morel mushrooms. Why do you love these mushrooms, I asked him. "They're just too cool," he said  And they are.  Morel's are what mushrooms are all about. They've got that gnomish head, brain-like, peculiar, twisted. They're wild, what forager Connie Green [...]

Cookulus

Last week I asked what makes a great app?  Andrew Schloss, a cook, teacher and author of numerous books, offers his answer below. Andrew has created a truly innovative cooking app, called Cookulus.  His plans are to create a series of interactive recipes that can be used by Cookulus but for now, he and his [...]

What makes a great cooking app?

In the headlong rush to turn everything into an app, we have created amazing apps (shazam is truly amazing) and ridiculous apps (won't name names). The publishers of cookbooks and chefs are among them.  Some publishers (S&S, my last publisher) are not entering the market; smaller more agile ones are (Chronicle, by chance publishing my [...]

Chicken-Fried Pork Belly Caesar Salad

It is time again to bring out The Chicken-Fried Pork Belly Salad, which I created in August of 2007 in the midst of my fury at the chief icon of American restaurant food: The Chicken Caesar.  Today's post was sparked by Sam Sifton's NYTimes magazine column on the Caesar salad, addresses the fact that few [...]

Veal Stock and Guinness Bread

My second pick for innovative use of veal stock came in from Marc Barringer, Chef/Hopsitality Director, St. Michael's Episcopal Church, Grosse Pointe Woods and  Food Service Director, Lost Lake Scout Reservation, Freeman Twp., Michigan. He's also a freelance writer, innovative cook and classic jack-of-all-trades in the best cooks tradition (still a school crossing guard! God bless him!).  [...]

Homemade Pasta

How-to-make-pasta instructions almost always include putting flour on your counter or board, forming a well and cracking your eggs into the well.  I almost always wind up with egg white on my shoe when I do this.  It only dawned on me while working on the pasta dough ratio for Ratio that this well method [...]

How To Make a Foie Gras au Torchon

Great foie gras fun going on in this household ever since del Grosso asked me to write about the foie gras au torchon he and Pardus's created for Hudson Valley Foie Gras. It's an excellent product.  And it was fun showing people that serving foie gras doesn't require a Catholic-length production, but can be simple [...]

How To Make a Foie Gras Torchon

Great foie gras fun going on in this household ever since del Grosso asked me to write about the torchon de foie gras he and Pardus's created for Hudson Valley Foie Gras. It's an excellent product.  And it was fun showing people that serving foie gras doesn't require a Catholic-length production, but can be simple [...]