Bread at its most basic is made with flour, water, yeast and salt, and once you've made bread a few times you can easily identify the proper consistency and add more flour or water as needed.
But making bread from scratch without a recipe, and with little to no prior baking experience, sounds like a recipe for disaster, so can The Try Guys make an edible loaf of bread when left to their own devices in BuzzFeed's Tasty Kitchen?
It's like the Great American Bake-Off only with less impressive results and with way more alcohol! (NSFW Language)
Girl Scout cookies are not made from real Girl Scouts, but the first cookies they sold were made by real Girl Scouts. The sole recipe, published in 1922, was for sugar cookies, simple and fairly cheap.
But simplicity was likely necessary, as the scouts baked the cookies themselves. According to the Girl Scouts, this recipe was distributed to 2,000 scouts in the Chicago area who likely needed something quick, simple, and inexpensive to sell. The ingredients for a batch of six to seven dozen cookies clocked in at 26 to 36 cents, which in today’s money is less than six dollars. The scouts could sell a dozen cookies for about the same amount, making a tidy profit.
Things changed over time, and the Girls Scouts eventually abandoned the baking part to focus on the business part of cookie sales. Read the story of the first girl scout cookies at Atlas Obscura.
Would you be able to bring yourself to drink any of these lattes? After all, they are masterpieces! Yeah, sure, but only after pictures are taken to preserve their beauty. Kangbin Lee is a professor in the Hotel, Restaurant, Cooking, and Confectionary Department at the Seoul Arts Center. He is also a latte artist who puts a rainbow of colors into lattes, in both 2D and 3D versions.
I can't imagine the drink would still be hot after the painting and the photographs, but a minute in a microwave will fix that.
If you were a kid in the 1970s, you probably remember the horrors of the health food craze, when carob was said to be a perfectly good substitute for chocolate. So what was wrong with chocolate? It was grown and harvested by mistreated farmers, enriching companies that did other nefarious stuff, and it was expensive. But the word going around was that it was unhealthy, especially the edible sweetened version, for having too much sugar and caffeine. So conscientious mothers made "healthy" cookies, candies, and desserts with carob instead, and we were all cheated of anything resembling the taste of chocolate.
In the nineteen-seventies, carob infiltrated food co-ops and baking books as if it had been sent on a COINTELPRO mission to alienate the left’s next generation. “Delicious in brownies, hot drinks, cakes and ‘Confections without Objections,’ ” the 1968 vegan cookbook “Ten Talents” crowed, noting, too, that it was a proven bowel conditioner. “Give carob a try,” Maureen Goldsmith, the author of “The Organic Yenta,” encouraged, but even her endorsement came with a hedge; in the note to her recipe for carob pudding, she confessed that she still snuck out for actual chocolate from time to time—though less and less often! No one under the age of twelve could stand the stuff. Not the candy bars that encased a puck of barely sweetened peanut butter in a thin, waxy brown shell, nor the cookies—whole wheat, honey-sweetened—studded with carob chunks that refused to melt in the mouth, instead caking unpleasantly between the teeth. My mother—who, to her children’s lasting gratitude, never compromised her pie recipes, even during her peak whole-foods years—told me recently that she was never that fond of carob, either.
Years after the backlash died down, people started to realize that carob was okay if you used it as carob. It's nutritious, has its own taste, and doesn't melt on a long hike. But treating it as chocolate caused youngsters of that time to hate it forever. Read about the rise and fall of carob at The New Yorker. -via Metafilter
There's a lot more to wine than just type, color and alcohol content, but you really don't need to know a whole lot more than that to enjoy wine. Wait, let me rephrase that- there's not much more to know if you want to enjoy wine casually rather than embracing the science and the culture like a vintner or sommelier.
Most of us started out drinking wine for that warm and fuzzy feeling the alcohol provides but soon found ourselves wanting to learn more about wine to enhance our enjoyment of the drink.
Since Valentine's Day is supposed to be all about love, wouldn't it be better to make your loved one something special that comes straight from the heart instead of giving them some store bought crap?
So instead of buying a silly card and some chocolates, make your loved one a sweet treat you can seal with a kiss- a 'pie envelope' that shows the delicious depth of your love.
Plus it's basically just pie crust, coarse sugar, and pie filling so it's easy to make, and when you're done you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor too!
When adventurous eaters want to put really weird tasting chocolate in their mouths they don't visit Willy Wonka, they visit Liam Burgess- the chocolate maker some are calling the Welsh Willy Wonka because of the bizarre flavors he comes up with.
Want to chew on a hunk of chocolate that tastes like an old book? Liam's got a chocolate bar for you that has all the flavor of an old leatherbound edition without all that pesky reading!:
“I’m not sure I want to put this in my mouth,” jokes the interviewer in the amusing clip below. Burgess reveals that ‘Old Book’ is made up of “leather essence, cigar tobacco, frankincense, patchouli, smoked sea salts” and maintains, “it smells [just] like an old book.”
Liam started his company NOMNOM Chocolate out of a camper on his mom's property at age 18, and now he has taken over "the Abandoned Chocolate Factory" in his hometown of Llanboidy and employs several of his friends full time.
And if you're keen to invest in Liam's wild chocolate adventure you can buy a "chocolate brick" in any flavor you'd like and help him build up his company brick by brick. And he does mean any flavor at all, because Liam and his team love a challenge!
Have you ever found yourself eating dessert and thought, "What this needs is more ketchup and mustard"? Me, neither. But if you're looking for something really different that you might serve as stunt, the Ketchup and Mustard Cake will do it. Honestly, if you want people to stop coming to your home just in time for dessert, it's worth a try. This is a real cake, with sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and spices, plus a half cup of ketchup. Well, okay, maybe it's like carrot cake, in that the spices overwhelm the vegetables. But then there's the frosting, made of butter, powdered sugar, and mustard. Really. Find the complete recipe at Shared, along with a video showing how it's made. -via Boing Boing
David Tran escaped Vietnam in 1978 and gave us Sriracha sauce. He concentrated on the product instead of building a successful company, but things happen. Huy Fong Foods is a wildly successful company in spite of their business practices -because the product is what consumers want.
Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out explains how Tran, the serious cook and laid-back businessman, achieved incredible success without advertiusing, patents, copyright, or even the original rooster. -via Laughing Squid
If you've ever used a 50-year-old cookbook, you might find yourself confused at an ingredient list that calls for a "box" or "can" of something. That something might have come in one size then, but is available in many sizes or altogether different packaging today. Recreating what people ate thousands of years ago is even more complicated. One archeological site that has an intriguing amount of information about food is Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Farrell Monaco works at the site, with its 35 bakeries complete with frescoes and burnt loaves of bread, frozen in time by the disaster. She chronicles her work with the Pompeii Food and Drink project at her site Tavola Mediterranea.
Each morning, Monaco picked her way across the site early, before it was beset by throngs of tourists. These walks, she says, stoked her imagination. She wondered about daily routines from 2,000 years ago, when the volcano was of little immediate concern and bakers and cooks fussed to fortify the busy city. What smells drifted from ovens in the morning? How did lunch taste? In pursuit of answers, Monaco decided to recreate a panis quadratus and bring the past into her kitchen.
Okay, let me start this post off by saying EATING LAUNDRY DETERGENT IS TOTALLY, COMPLETELY AND ABSOLUTELY STUPID.
January was supposed to be my month off. It was the month I was going to spend updating the website, getting my recipes for the year in order, and taking a little time off for me.
But noooo…humanity had to step in and decide this was the month that eating laundry detergent was going to get idiotically stupid.
You may've noticed some talk around the internet about young people eating packets of laundry detergent -specifically Tide Pods. It's a social media stunt, and it's dangerous. If you think those things are pretty enough to eat, you can make a treat that's just as pretty but also safe and edible, with the tropical tastes of mangos and coconut. Hellen Die (quoted above) figured out how to do it with a recipe that's part science lesson, since the ingredients include agar-agar and edible film. Get the complete recipe and instructions for Monkey Brain Forbidden Fruit at the Necro Nom-Nom-Nomicon.
A well-stocked kitchen should have a variety of cooking oils available so you always have the right oil for the job, but many cooks keep only a couple of oils on hand that they're familiar with, like vegetable, corn or olive oil.
The good news is oils don't cost much to try out, they can sit around for years without going bad, and they add the flavor your dishes have been missing!
I love the flavor almond oil adds to cakes, and vegetables sautéed in sunflower oil are pretty darn tasty, but my favorite non-basic oil is sesame oil because it works so well in both sweet and savory dishes, and a little dash goes a long way.
This chart created by myfitnesspal breaks down fourteen different types of cooking oils available at the market today, so you can make an educated choice and expand your horizons in the kitchen.
Did Chewbacca really become a vegetarian because the porgs are so cute? We may never know, but if you want to chow down on the little critters without the fishy taste, then check out this bento box version made completely of rice! Yeah, it's more art than food, but it will make a decent lunch for some Star Wars fan.
This Porg doesn’t require contemplating the roasting of Ahch-To’s cutest critters, and instead requires artfully shaping together heaping piles of delicious sushi rice—before presumably admiring your artistic talents for a few seconds and proceeding to devour it.
We know milk does a body good, especially the green milk of the thala-sirens of Ahch-To. In any real universe, it would taste a bit fishy, but in this recipe, it's sweet with a hint of vanilla and almonds. And you don't have to milk a sea sow- just buy some at your local grocer.
To make a thala-siren milkshake, you'll need to make your own green ice cream, which involves freezer time. Since you'll also need fancy silver sugar, you might want to file this recipe away for your next Star Wars party or film festival. May would be a good time for that, since it has both Star Wars Day (May the fourth) and the release of the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story (May 25). Get the recipe for thala-siren milkshakes here.
Food art is usually too pretty and too detailed to eat, and the more intricately detailed pieces are often made out of a combination of ingredients that don't taste as good as they look together.
But the fun fried egg art pieces cooked up by Michele Baldini are detailed enough to be impressive but not something you'd feel bad about eating, plus some of them actually look delicious.
Michele fries up the egg whites and yolks separately so he can use that splash of bright yolky color in fun ways in each piece, and he shares his breakfast creations with the world via his Instagram account @the_eggshibit. It's strictly for lovers of tasteful art.
