Baker Without Borders

This recipe, by food science guru Kenji Lopez-Alt, calls for topping a store-bought tortilla with tomato sauce, Parmesan, mozzarella, and basil, cooking it in a cast iron skillet, and then broiling it in the oven until the cheese is bubbly. It’s the kind of pizza meant for a quick weeknight dinner. I decided to complicate things just…

A good friend of mine, author of the food blog Sweet Little Joys, shared a delicious chive and Parmigiano-Reggiano popover recipe with me from the cookbook Back in the Day Bakery: Made With Love, by Cheryl Day and Griffith Day.  I made a few minor adaptations, swapping cheddar for Parmigiano-Reggiano and using a muffin tin rather than…

Jeera biscuits are a popular tea-time snack in India and Pakistan. At once salty and sweet, these shortbread cookies are infused with toasted cumin seeds (jeera means cumin in Hindi and Urdu.) When I visit my in-laws, who are originally from Pakistan,  I often bring a batch of jeera biscuits. We eat them plain, or…

This is a personal spin on one of my favorite brownie recipes: chocolate hazelnut truffle squares, from The Clueless Baker by Evelyn Raab. Ground hazelnuts replace flour in these decadent, chocolate-chunk-filled blondies. Because hazelnuts are high in fat, this recipe calls for less butter than typical blondies. In addition, there are more eggs than usual. The…

I was looking through my cookbook collection the other day, and rediscovered a favorite from my pastry school days:  The Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri, founder of the baking program at the Institute of Culinary Education. Sadly, the book seems to no longer be in print, but there are used copies available on Amazon. The recipes produce restaurant-quality baked…

Next stop in my random geographic coordinates series? The Philippines. Two years ago, when I was teaching elementary school students about breads from around the world, I asked the children if they had a favorite type of bread. A fourth grader shared that she had fond memories of eating pandesal, a popular Filipino bread roll, when she visited her mother’s family in…

My next pair of randomly generated coordinates took me to the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Having spent far more time traversing New York City than the globe, I first became acquainted with South Indian food at Tiffin Wallah, a restaurant in Manhattan’s so-called Curry Hill. I’ve been back repeatedly over the past 10…

I’ve been eager to bake with peaches since summer began. So I took a break from my geographic coordinates project the other day to prepare savory galettes filled with peaches and blue cheese. Read all about it in the Knockturnal.  

On one of the hottest days so far this summer, I set out to prepare a dish more suitable for below-freezing winters in Siberia. As part of an effort to prepare baked goods from all corners of the globe, I’ve begun randomly selecting coordinates on Google Maps and preparing a bread or dessert recipe from that region. The first location…

I’ve loved preparing breads and desserts from around the world for as long as I can remember, but often limit myself to exploring cuisines that have some connection to my own life. My mom grew up in Brazil, and I have fond memories of visiting my grandparents there one summer when I was 11 years old, so I’m…

In addition to this blog, I’ve been writing about my kitchen experiments on my friend’s website, The Knockturnal.  Over the winter, I shared my go-to pizza crust recipe and a simple, no-bake dark chocolate bark recipe. More recently, I chronicled my adventures preparing mosaika tourta, the Greek equivalent of tiramisu, and doce de leite cookies inspired by…

This month, I’m teaching students at the after-school program I work at how to bake breads from around the world. The biggest crowd-pleaser so far has been pretzel rolls, which have an interesting history (they were invented in the Middle Ages by European monks) and an unusual baking process. Before they go in the oven, the…