Monthly Archives: September 2011

Snickerdoodle Fix

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: September 29, 2011

Snickerdoodles/photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

It turns the stomach, the kind of email Marlene sent me over the weekend. Marlene who runs the cooking site CooksKorner said that one of Ruhlman's Twenty recipe testers, Matthew Kayahara, had done a 4x recipe of the cookies in the book (page 161), the basic cinnamon-sugar cookie, and it was badly out of whack. Indeed, when Marlene checked what was in the book, she found that the published recipe contained three times the amount of granulated sugar it should have. It's a book writer's nightmare. It also reminds me what a great thing an ebook is or an app that updates on your device automatically. But there is some small recourse. I can announce the error here and publish a correction. Here it is, the tested and true snickerdoodle recipe, based ...

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Posted in baking, Books, Desserts, Ratios, Recipes | Tagged cookies, snickerdoodles, twenty | Comments closed

The Lessons of Pork Belly

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: September 27, 2011

Crispy Pork Belly with Caramel-Miso Glaze/photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman

These are some of the pix we didn't use in the new book, Ruhlman's Twenty, and I wanted to share them because they make me hungry for pork belly. But when I sat down simply to mention this dish, Crispy Pork Belly with Miso-Caramel Glaze, it surprised me with all the lessons it has wrapped up in it. First of all, it's a delicious dish (I was delighted that Rob Misfud, in his review of the book in Toronto's Globe and Mail, tried it and loved it—while it's not difficult, it's more involved than most of the other recipes in the book). But go below the deliciousness and you will see it's a lesson in braising, in understanding the nature of pork skin, of the power ...

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