Cooking For Engineers®

These days when I reach for a spatula to turn food in a pan, I've been finding myself grabbing the GastroMax Slotted Turner more often than not. Tina bought this spatula for me after months (or maybe years) of listening to me complain about our various spatulas. After buying the GastroMax Turner, my complaining has stopped.

Twelve years ago, I wrote an article comparing plastic and wood cutting boards which may be why one of the most frequent questions that I get is what cutting board do I use in my personal life. For the last six years, I have been using cutting boards made by Epicurean Cutting Surfaces and my wooden cutting boards haven't come out of storage for years. Here's why I like the Epicurean boards.

Pears are pomes (fruits with distinct cores of seeds from the Rose family) which have been cultivated for thousands of years. Although they are cousins of the apple, pears are much more delicate. Once ripe, pears should be consumed within days even with the aid of refrigeration.

The baguette is at once the simplest of breads and the most difficult to perfect. It is the most demanding test of a bread baker's skill. In recent years the secrets of professional bakers have been drifting out to the general population of amateur bakers. Techniques can be gleaned from variety of sources. Bread baking cookbooks today do more then provide recipes; they explore and explain the process. Bread baking courses for amateurs are becoming more popular at professional cooking schools and even being offered by some bakeries. Articles appear in magazine and newspapers with a different take on some aspect of the process. This article will attempt to distill this wealth of information to present the techniques required to produce a professional looking and tasting baguette.