Posted February 21st, 2017 by Harry Flager & filed under Uncategorized.
If you want to start a lively debate, put a savory chef and a pastry chef in a room and bring up Pacojets. Invented in Switzerland in the 1980s and made available to the U.S. market in 1992, a Pacojet is “a dynamic professional kitchen appliance that makes it easy to prepare high-quality dishes while… Read more »
Posted July 5th, 2016 by Harry Flager & filed under Uncategorized.
While the last few posts I’ve written have been singular in focus (palm sugar, mochi), this one is a grab bag of techniques. Not only did staging in Asia introduce me to a variety of foreign ingredients, but also many new ways to treat already familiar foods. Pandan (a.k.a. Asian vanilla) Pandan, the ubiquitous… Read more »
Posted April 26th, 2016 by Harry Flager & filed under Uncategorized.
Before working for Dana Cree, I knew mochi to be a chewy topping for frozen yogurt or a thin veil wrapped around adzuki bean paste. The Blackbird pastry kitchen offered a primer on microwave mochi, as I watched chef Cree apply flavored pieces to her legendary bubblegum dessert and sous-chef Krystle roll out sheets of… Read more »
Posted February 28th, 2016 by Harry Flager & filed under Uncategorized.
What I’ll always remember about Singapore is the haze. Unbeknownst to me, my month of staging would directly coincide with the peak of Indonesia’s palm sugar harvest. As I stepped off the plane, directly across the Java Sea thousands of acres were being burned and the jet stream was dumping all of the residual… Read more »
Posted December 23rd, 2015 by Harry Flager & filed under Uncategorized.
This is the second installment in a series of posts I’m writing on my experience staging at a few restaurants in Southeast Asia. Last time, I talked about the technical similarities between French dough lamination and flaky Asian pastries. Below, I focus on a different doppelganger, this one embraced around the world. The restaurants I… Read more »
Posted November 24th, 2015 by Harry Flager & filed under Uncategorized.
The internet is a wonderful thing. Art forms that were once inaccessible to most people have become readily available. Interested in listening to an obscure Italian opera? That’ll be twelve bucks in iTunes. Need to scroll through the entirety of Monet’s impressionist collection? Google Images has you covered. Food, however, remains inconveniently tangible and requires… Read more »