Don’t tell me, you haven’t heard of Hervé This? The man who decodes all the chemical and physical processes taking place during cooking or baking, from beating egg white to browning meat. Isn’t everybody talking Maillard these days? I keep one of his books (a paperback version with dog-eared pages) in my tote, so I can entertain myself while taking the tram, waiting at the doctors’ or simply when I have a spare minute. Welcome side-effect: My culinary knowledge is about to grow with every page I turn, at least in theory. I’m far from reaching the final pages, but getting ready to put theory into practice.
…and let me tell you, that’s one hard nut to crack, it’s driving me crazy. We are in the midst of developing my book’s layout and it’s anything but a piece of cake! Take a big bowl of your personal style and ideas, throw in a few cups of knowledge from the publishing pros and add a pinch of common sense… sounds simple enough? Yeah right. My head is spinning from all the brainstorming, nevertheless I’m very lucky to work with an incredibly knowledgeable and passionate team – last week one of them even dreamed about my final book cover! Is that a good sign?
If you had ever stood in front of my cookbook shelf – actually shelves would be more appropriate, but using the singular form makes me feel a little less cookbook fanatic – you couldn’t have helped but notice a large section dedicated to Italian cuisine. Beyond argument, the Italian cuisine was omnipresent over the last years and not surprisingly among the most popular cookbook themes. Old classics and new bestsellers have occupied the bookstores’ windows, every celebrity chef chipped in and gave his or her view on Italian cuisine, more or less compelling. You’ll find a plethora of books dedicated to pizza and pasta, traditional family cuisine or even vegetarian food. The influx of titles raised my doubts about whether new publications could possibly generate more than a shrug of my shoulders. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Italian cuisine and I am almost positive that I could live on Vitello tonnato, Minestrone, Lasagne and Tiramisu only, probably for the rest of my life. But how many different interpretations of Italian food does a cookbook aficionado really need?
Food photography is usually about good timing and taking photos of ice cream can be a tricky thing. If you believe that there can hardly be anything more challenging to shoot than an already runny sorbet, these little homemade lollies will proof you wrong…
Any ideas what they consist of?
Thanks for playing along!
Frank and Maike got it right, these lollies in fact did consist of dark chocolate and olive oil. Ever since I fell in love with this rather unusual combo a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but give this quite simple recipe [from Molekularküche] a go.
