bakery

Visiting the bakery of New York’s guru of bread

Visiting the bakery of New York’s guru of bread

Jim Lahey was a hero to us and many other home cooks during the pandemic shutdown. That's no exaggeraton. He's the baker behind the ‶no-knead bread″ method that had us all making delicious crusty bread in preheated Dutch ovens. Mind you, he's also the baker behind the overnight cool-rise pizza dough recipe for home cooks that we've been using for the last decade. We're not foolish enough to suggest that Lahey invented the crusty Dutch oven bread or the wonderful pizza dough. But he did carefully craft recipes for home cooks. His fame rests on the propensity of the New York Times food section to spread them far and wide. Never underestimate the power of Big Media. The original bakery at 73 Sullivan Street in...Read More
Pizza by the square, just like in Rome

Pizza by the square, just like in Rome

The tavola calda at Panetteria Romana e Spaccio di Paste includes delicious pizzas topped with fresh vegetables. When we admit to people that we are food and travel writers, their eyes tend to get wide as they imagine that we sit down to multi-course gourmet meals every day on the road. But the truth is that we really like to find some local comestible that makes a handy light lunch or supper. In Rome, that's often a square of pan pizza (pizza al taglio) from one of the bakeries. We've read that more than 5,000 establishments in Rome offer pizza al taglio. Romans eat those slices for lunch and all through the afternoon as a pick-me-up snack. The crust for Roman pizza more resembles focaccia...Read More
From the capitol’s art to Sage’s artisanry

From the capitol’s art to Sage’s artisanry

In the course of our Green Chile Chronicles in Santa Fe, we visited a lot of bakeries to see what they might be doing with the state's signature vegetable. The upshot was that we ate a lot of biscochitos, the official state cookie, but mostly struck out on green chile baked goods. (More about those biscochitos later.) Then one day we took a different walking route returning from a visit to the state capitol building's astounding art collection. That's when we discovered Sage Bakehouse (535 Cerrillos Road, Santa Fe, NM; 505-820-7243; sagebakehouse.com). The artisanal bakery, a fixture in the City Different since 1996, even serves breakfast and lunch in a small cafe on the premises. Santa Fe has enough museums and art galleries to make...Read More
Cake celebrates a signature taste of Valencia

Cake celebrates a signature taste of Valencia

The whole idea of a Valencian orange is confusing. The area around Valencia boasts a staggering number of orange orchards. Most of the trees bear sweet oranges, but not what is called a Valencia orange in the U.S. That would be a creation of William Wolfskill, an agronomist who hybridized the juice orange in the mid-19th century. He called it Valencia because the oranges of that part of Spain were famously sweet. Of course, they were sweet. They were what we now call mandarin oranges. And most of the citrus varieties grown in Valencia today are mandarins or one of the many mandarin-pomelo crosses. Orange remains one of the signature flavors of Valencian cuisine. Fresh oranges appear throughout the meal from an orange-onion salad to...Read More
Why we miss Paris—and what to do about it

Why we miss Paris—and what to do about it

Two new cookbooks from Flammarion just might be the next best thing to being in Paris. We were last there in early February 2020. We cherish those last few days in the City of Light as the waning hours of our pre-pandemic innocence. Those poor Chinese people, we thought as we watched BBC's reporting from Wuhan. Poor world, we think now. There was no way we could fill our luggage with croissants, gateaux, baguettes, éclairs, and all the other delectables of French bread and pastry making. If only. Our photos remind us how ubiquitous great breads and pastries are in Paris. Getting chilled stalking the winter streets during the end of the Paris sales? The obvious solution is to pop into a cafe for a...Read More
Sixteen Bricks Bakery makes Cincy’s daily bread

Sixteen Bricks Bakery makes Cincy’s daily bread

Ryan Morgan is not a man you can easily forget. Neither is the bread that he creates at Sixteen Bricks Bakery (sixteenbricks.com). We'd been eating our way around Cincinnati for a couple of days before we had the chance to tour the bakery that supplies bread to many of the city's restaurants—both casual and high end—that insist on a high-quality product. Morgan revels in his role as the most unlikely of bakers. He left a career as a mechanic making medical equipment at Johnson & Johnson to help his mother in her struggling bakery. Not one to pull any punches, Morgan told us that the bakery turned out “some of the most garbage bread.” He shakes his head at the memory. “I don't know why...Read More
Indoor casual food alternative during Jazz Festival

Indoor casual food alternative during Jazz Festival

No one needs to go hungry or thirsty during the Festival International de Jazz de Montreal. Lots of festival food vendors are posted throughout the pedestrianized areas within the Quartiers des Spectacles. The kiosks scattered throughout the plazas between stages have plenty of pulled pork, pizza, poutine, giant hot dogs, beaver tails, ice cream, beer, and wine for sale. But sometimes it pays to look beyond the obvious and duck indoors to find some less predictable food. The Complex Desjardins is located on rue Ste-Catherine right in front of the Rio Tinto stage and across the street from MAC, the Musée d'Art Contemporain. The stage inside Desjardins is oriented to music for youngsters at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. College musicians perform at 5 p.m....Read More
Sentimental Journey: Old neighborhood tastes of Mile End

Sentimental Journey: Old neighborhood tastes of Mile End

Sometimes we pine for the old days of Montreal tribalism. Living on Le Plateau meant you spoke French at home and ate feves au lard every Saturday night. Growing up in Mile End meant you spoke English at home (with maybe a little Yiddish) and were by birth an expert on bagels. Mind you, the two neighborhoods are so close that Montreal Tourism lumps them together. Mile End extends east from Parc Mont-Royal to boulevard Saint-Laurent, and north from boulevard Saint-Joseph to the railroad tracks. Through most of the twentieth century, it was home to aspiring immigrants, including many Central and Eastern European Jews immortalized in the novels of native son Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). Nowadays, it's pretty cosmopolitan, filled with good...Read More
Butter tart: the apogee of Canadian pastry

Butter tart: the apogee of Canadian pastry

We're just back from a few days of boating on the Rideau Canal in Ontario aboard one of the new cruisers offered by Le Boat (www.leboat.com). Stops on the waterway are at villages where the men and women of Parks Canada operate the mostly hand-cranked 19th century locks so boats can pass. We spent a couple of days docked next to the locks at Merrickville, a town that couldn't have been cuter if Disney had invented it (and wouldn't be so historic if Disney had). Several people had told us that we really shouldn't miss the butter tarts at Nana B's (318 Main Street West, Merrickville, ON; 613-454-1380; www.nanabbakery.ca). When we walked up to the bakery from the village center on a Sunday afternoon, Nana...Read More
Marseille swirls with scents and sounds of North Africa

Marseille swirls with scents and sounds of North Africa

If we were placed blindfolded on bustling rue d'Aubagne, the scents of ginger, cumin, and mint and the liquid sounds of Arabic spoken around us would convince us that we were in a North African kasbah instead of the streets of France's second-largest city. That cosmopolitan worldliness is part of the allure of Marseille. It is a global city in the midst of the region that gave “provincial” its name—Provence. To locate an immigrant culture in any city, we always look for the food market. The main thoroughfare of Le Canebière assumes a North African accent a few blocks uphill from the Vieux Port. A jog east onto rue d'Aubagne suddenly immersed us in the immigrant district. A few streets up, a jumble of carts...Read More