Posts Tagged ‘desserts’
David Guas Shows Al Roker How to Make Mini-Fried Apple Pies
D.C. pastry chef David Guas was on the Today show yesterday, showing Al Roker how to make a fried apple pie recipe from his terrific new cookbook, DamGoodSweet, which Y&H pondered a few days back.
Listen, I know morning TV has all the depth of pond scum, but is it too much for Roker to explain that Guas is a Washington-based chef who hails from New Orleans? Is that too complicated for the average morning news program zombie to absorb? I guess so, because Roker described Guas as a “pastry chef from the Big Easy.” He also called Guas’ book “DamSweetGood.”
Oy.
Later in the segment, Roker did get off one clever, if conservative, comeback when Guas told him to “Just fork it” (a reference to crimping his mini pies). The chef was letting his freak flag fly a little on morning TV, which Y&H salutes.
Roker’s response:
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David Guas Gets Sweet on His Native New Orleans
This weekend, I spent a bit of time with David Guas‘ debut cookbook, DamGoodSweet, in which the former pastry chef for Passion Food Hospitality recreates many of his favorite treats from New Orleans where he grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward, that area devastated by Katrina.
The book, just released yesterday, almost cries with nostalgia and delight for the New Orleans of Guas’ youth. In that way, it reminds me of a passage that Patric Kuh wrote in his great book, The Last Days of Haute Cuisine, about the glowing, photo-realistic prose of Elizabeth David’s post-World War II Mediterranean cookbooks:
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Vegan Treats: Desserts That a Butter Man Could Love?
No animals were harmed in the making of these desserts.
Last Friday, we here at Y&H Central sampled some new seasonal desserts created by Danielle Konya, founder of the Pennsylvania-based Vegan Treats, a bakery that employs the nuclear option when making sweets. VT uses no butter, eggs, cream, or cream cheese. Konya, after all, is an ethical vegan, with a strong pro-animal/environmental philosophy behind her bakery:
Clearly, there’s nothing appetizing about the needless suffering of ten billion animals a year for their flesh, milk and eggs. And there’s really nothing tasty about aiding in the destruction of our environment for a cupcake. After all, the more one learns about the milk and egg industry, the more sickeningly un-sweet desserts made with them become.
Vegans don’t often inspire a lot of cuddliness, particularly among editors. Erika Niedowski, assistant managing editor here at the paper, wasted no words: “I don’t think vegans deserve dessert at all,” she e-mailed me after our tasting. “I mean, what do they need dessert for, they’ve given up everything else. (Maybe a poached pear, but not anything more.)”
She may be joking.
Niedowski, however, did like the same dessert as all the other City Paper testers who sampled them (including me): Konya’s caramel pecan cake, a moist, not-too-rich confection studded with little pieces of pecan for texture. I’d order the cake even if I had non-vegan options.
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Dish of the Week: POLLYstyle Pecan and Cranberry Rugelach
By and large, I’m not so fond of packaged sweets, which tend to cater to the lowest-common palate and its taste for sugar, sugar, and more sugar. But Polly Brown’s handiwork is different. The former pastry chef at Teaism has developed a thriving business selling treats to a number of shops and cafes under her POLLYstyle brand. Her honey grahams usually get all the hype.
But lately on my trips to the Modern Times Coffeehouse at Politics & Prose, I’ve been buying Brown’s lean, sophisticated take on that Jewish cookie known as rugelach, often served around Hanukkah. Brown’s version comes stuffed with cranberries and substitutes pecans for walnuts, the more common nut in rugelach. The cranberries add a nice element of tartness, while the pecans lend a sort of nutty richness and crunch to the bite-sized snack. The sweetness levels taste minimal to my palate, even with the dusting of cinnamon on top, and if there’s cream cheese in the dough, it’s subtle enough to escape detection.
The result is one of the most balanced treats — sweet and tart, crunch and softness — that I’ve had in awhile, even those sweets that don’t come wrapped in cellophane.
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Bibiana Hires Central’s Pastry Chef Hernandez
Bibiana has hired Douglas Hernandez, pastry chef at Central Michel Richard, to handle the desserts at the forthcoming downtown osteria/enoteca from Ashok Bajaj. Bibiana will have its “soft” opening on Monday, Sept. 7.
Hernandez has been with Central for more than two years, says Mel Davis, spokesperson for the celebrity chef. At Central, Hernandez has been in charge of executing Richard’s justly famous dessert menu, whether his clever, crunchy take on the Kit Kat bar or the chef’s luxe version of a banana split.
Homemade Twinkies at Wagshal’s Deli
When a friend told me that Wagshal’s Delicatessen was selling its own version of America’s iconic junk food, the Twinkie, I got all excited. Perhaps now, I thought, we could eat a cream-filled cake that wouldn’t require an entire book to catalog (and rationalize) its ingredients.
Maybe we’d even get a cream-filled snack stuffed with, you know, real cream.
The Twinkie at Waghal’s — not cheap treat a $1.29 per spongy log — does indeed include dairy product in its creamy filling. So says an employee at the deli, who tells me there are also no artificial ingredients in the snack. (Let me just say this for the record: The good folks at Wagshal’s would never ever call their sponge cakes “Twinkies,” lest lawyers representing the Evil Twinkie Empire make an unannounced visit for trademark infringement.)
Solid Gold: Iranian Ice Cream in Vienna
After gobbling down a number of dishes at Friends Kabob, a Persian/Middle Eastern newbie along Chain Bridge Road in Vienna, I really wanted to sample the “carrot juice and ice cream float,” which I thought sounded like either a forerunner of those modern, savory-savvy desserts or just plain wrong. I didn’t get a chance to find out which. The guy behind the counter said he could not float my boat. He was out of the dessert.
He suggested I try instead the Iranian ice cream, which he said included a mixture of butter and saffron. Containers of this golden, straw-colored treat were sitting in a cooler to my right, next to the cash register, so I fished one out and happily paid the counterman $2.99 for my dessert.
I popped the plastic lid and immediately noticed that freezer burns pockmarked my dessert around the edges of the waffle-cone square plastered to the top. My plastic spoon could barely burrow into the rock-solid sweet, requiring me to hold the utensil near its small scoop and apply geological-like pressure. The bite that I eventually extracted was surprisingly gooey; it pulled away from the container in a taffy-like manner.
Yes, the Economy’s Bad, But Has It Really Come Down to Serving Candy for Dessert?
To be fair, The Liberty Tavern, one of my favorite dining spots in Clarendon, did have little dry chocolate mousse cups on their Sunday brunch dessert bar, but the majority of the sweets on the table were commercial candies, including Tootsie Rolls, Necco Wafers, Whoppers, Mary Janes, and, ugh, Pixy Stix.
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Food Tats: Cupcakes Are the New Skulls
Mike Licht over at NotionsCapital got way too much of my attention this afternoon with his recent post on food tattoos (scroll down to the bottom of the page to read it). Says Licht: “Cupcakes are big this season, on hips, shoulders, calves, bums, and bosoms.”
He’s not kidding. But what’s interesting is how this unstoppable craze is expressed in skin art.
Michel Richard Cookies for the Holidays: Not Good Enough?
My friend Lou is a terrific home cook, particularly with desserts. Get a load of his red-wine poached pears—the treat that was almost too gorgeous to eat. (Almost.) As you can see from that one example, Lou doesn’t take shortcuts, even when it comes to a cookie-baking contest for a holiday office party. The dude really wants to win.
Lou e-mailed me yesterday, saying that it “might be an interesting column” if I’d ask “big shot chefs/pastry chefs in town to divulge or come up with their great Christmas cookie recipe.” Little did I know that Lou was working me for his own ends. I found that out this morning when I called him on the way to work, informing him that the Post had just devoted its Food Section to holiday cookies. None of the paper’s recipes, he thought, would win him the office-party bake-off.
He wanted something more fanciful. He wanted something more elaborate. He wanted something from Michel Richard. I reluctantly agreed to contact the city’s master chef for a recipe. By day’s end, Richard’s PR coordinator Mel Davis e-mailed me a couple of cookie recipes (you can see them below the jump). I forward the recipes to Lou for review. His response:
They “look like fantastic cookies but they’re just cookies. I need something that’s gonna wow ‘em. Any thoughts on what I could fill them with (a la sandwich cookies) that’s holidayish?”
Tough crowd.
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