Friday, May 2, 2008

Zack recommends: Saveur

For my birthday this year my parents got me a subscription to Saveur. My buddy Jay recommended it and said it was better than most of the other ones out there and more up my alley.

And he was right, it's blowing me away. The theme of the first issue I received was butter. The Second issue was pasta, more specifically Bolognese, a sauce I love to cook. Some of the recipes are very complex, other are simple, but it's the writing that blows me away.

The feature on the City of Ragu and Bologna was some of the best food writing I've seen. Sadly, it's not online, but I felt as if I could almost smell the city and the foods. At some point I will make all the Bolognese recipes feature in the issue, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

The one recipe I did make is this pound cake recipe, which was a bit of an adventure. It just looked too good to pass up. Now I don't own a tube pan and when I went to buy one all they had were silicon bundt pans. I know silicon is supposed to be great to bake with, but I wasn't feeling good about it.

The assembling of ingredients went fine. I places the bundt pan on a cookie sheet I let it cook for an hour and it wasn't done. Ten minutes late I checked it again and the toothpick came out clean. I let it rest for 15 or 20 minutes and removed it without an issue.

The pound cake was going to be the case for strawberry shortcake, which I soaked in a little balsamic. Time was growing short and we needed to be out the door in a bit so I was trying to figure out how to transport it when I noticed the center was all gooey. The middle hadn't cooked all the way. I blamed placing it on the cookie sheet because the heat didn't have a chance to cook through the center of the pan.

So what did I do? I cut it out. I took a knife and cut out the portion that was gooey and sliced up the rest of the cake. It worked and what we had was quite excellent. Though I didn't tell my friends what happened. I told them I had trouble getting it out of the pan.

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