I loves me a good dill pickle, canned with vinegar. But my inner Moishe gets all excited when I come across the original Yiddishe pickle, out of a barrel and with nary an added souring agent in sight, the way my grandmother used to make it. And there’s of course the additional benefit that mentioning… Continue Reading
Bacon Craze
I think that the bacon craze is a good thing. Who could not benefit from the pleasure of a nice slice of homemade or artesian made bacon? I do, however, think that it gets quite ridiculous at times. A colleague brought me in a bacon chocolate bar the other day. It was adorned with the… Continue Reading
International Bacon Day!
Mark your calendars and lock up your pigs! This is a new Stephenson and Duess favorite. It’s International Bacon Day! http://internationalbaconday.blogspot.com/ Its like a birthday or Christmas or Thanksgiving…or Valentine’s day for that special smoky salty bacon sweety… Saturday, September 7th. We are proud to say that we were planning a bbq that day and… Continue Reading
The magic 500
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with this very simple formula: 500 g flour 12 g salt 300 ml water 200 g starter (or thereabouts, it’s hard to measure starter to the nearest gram) When I first started exploring this formula, I started out with a mixture of 300 g bread flour,… Continue Reading
Home Cured Bacon and a Harley Davidson
Like Mr. Duess, I grew up in the country. Unlike Mr. Duess I grew up in the woods in northern northern northern Canada: The Yukon to be exact. I grew up with a secret swimming hole, fishing and hunting trips, a nice big dog, lots of motorcycles and fixing motorcycles. I would say, however, that… Continue Reading
Ham heaven
Both Mr. Stephenson and myself live on the outer edges of the old Portuguese neighbourhoods here in Toronto. I am a firm believer in the theory that the Portuguese are indeed the Fins of Southern Europe. I am certain that anybody who has ever listened to the melancholic tones of a Portuguese fado will agree… Continue Reading
Cock and balls
This, ad I hope you’re reading this Mr. Stephenson, is what happens when you rush things: I started out well. Got up this morning, fed the starter and mixed 100 g wholewheat bread flour with 100 ml of water for a soaker. The idea was to tease extra flavour and structure out of the wholewheat… Continue Reading
Caramalized onion tart with diced bacon and fennel
Could it be true? Dropping temperatures in late August, reminding us that summer won’t last forever. The perfect day for a caramelized onion tart for a late breakfast. This is sweet and savory all at once, the bacon and fennel coming together perfectly on the bed of caramelized onions. You’ll need About a cup of… Continue Reading
Review – The Professional Chef, The Culinary Institute of America
As a great man once said: Holy calamity, great insanity, all you ever gonna be is another great fan of me! We here are Stephenson and Duess have to start somewhere with our book reviews and what better place to start than on a book that we are great fans of – it’s a monolithic… Continue Reading
Makin’ Bacon. The movie. Part 2.
This is the video companion to the second part of our posting on Makin’ Bacon - Makin’ Bacon – Part 2. The Big Smoke. As food-wunder-geek Alton Brown said, “Until you’ve made your own bacon, you haven’t eaten bacon”. So kick back, light up a nice blow torch (don’t ask…just watch), and check out the… Continue Reading
Wax on, wax off, or the importance of repetition
I baked another rye sourdough bread today. 300 g bread flour to 200 g rye, 12 g of salt and 200 g of active starter. It came out great, apart from the slashing I tried, which caused the crust to break in unexpected places. Still, the flavour is there and I am finally beginning to… Continue Reading
Makin’ Bacon – Part 2 The Big Smoke
Alright. Where were we. Oh yes. Home made or artisan made bacon is simply the best thing ever. Once you’ve had it, it is not an easy thing to forget! We cannot say enough good things about the transformation that the humble pork belly makes when it is cured and then either smoked or simply… Continue Reading
The Other Bacon. Not a Pretty Sight.
Mr. Duess will love this one. While I was looking about on the internet to make certain that our very recently and most excellently produced instructional bacon video was the best bacon video ever made by a human being ever, I discovered a monstrosity of epic proportion and singular pertubation. Just to be clear, what… Continue Reading
Makin’ Bacon. The movie. Part 1.
After some toiling, we here at Stephenson and Duess are pleased to bring you our first full video tutorial. This is the video compliment to the “Makin’ Bacon” posting from last week and its about…well…making bacon. We’re quite excited to be bringing you videos here and we’re working towards making these tutorials a regular feature.… Continue Reading
Bread. The road so far.
I had been baking bread for years, on and off, with somewhat limited success. For a while I owned a bread maker and tried to convince myself that the resulting loaves where both tasty and healthy when they were really just crumbly and horrible. At other times the bread I made was flat and flaccid… Continue Reading
Fife Flour Sourdough
Mr. Stephenson is a huge fan of Red Fife, an old Canadian wheat that has recently been experiencing a bit of a renaissance, and rightly so. As I was out of rye flour, I decided to try and adjust my standard rye sourdough to Red Fife – Mr. Stephenson made a light but intensely flavoured… Continue Reading
Dinners at the food source
Here’s an article on eating at the source – in a field, on a farm, where the food came from. Check out the article here. A couple of questions developed in my mind as I read this. Does this event lead to a more direct connection to the food or is it a piece of… Continue Reading
Cooking Methodology – Making it your own
Home made pizza is one of those things that I think is difficult to master. There’s the 500+ degree oven and the whole pizza stone thing. There’s also the question of the dough. I just perused a very interesting methodology for making pizza dough that dives deep into all of the variables. If one was… Continue Reading
Dismembered chicken and the fat of the duck
Tonight a friend dropped by, with a cooler bag full of frozen organic chicken carcasses, duck fat and two pots of what he believes to be demi-glacé. He fell in love with woman from Istanbul and is following his heart to Turkey, where he will teach English for a year. That meant, amongst other things,… Continue Reading