Food Minia

I've made the famous no-knead bread a few times now, and while the concept is great, the reality is I'm always a little disappointed with the results.  Even though there's no kneading involved, it's still a multi-step recipe that can take 20+ hours to finish, and while the texture of the ensuing bread is great for a home cook, it's kind of lacking in flavor.  So I'm pretty excited to have found a recipe for bread that only takes 4 hours from start to finish, still has great texture, and is packed full of flavor. I pretty much followed this Genius Recipe from Food52 for Dan Leader's 4-Hour Baguette but I applied some of the concepts I learned from Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast and added some diastatic malt powder .  According to the King Arthur Flour website, the malt powder promotes "a strong rise, great texture, and lovely brown crust".  You can certainly make this bread without it; I just used because I still had some left from  mak...

Back in January I found an incredible deal for airfare to St. Thomas so I went ahead and booked it along with four nights at the Marriott Frenchman's Reef using my points.  Even though the weather forecast the weeks up to the trip showed a lot of possible rain, it turned out to be beautiful and sunny every day we were there! Sunrise at the Frenchman's Reef On our third day, my friend Sooyun and I took the passenger ferry from Red Hook to Cruz Bay in St. John and hiked the Lind Point Trail to Honeymoon Beach.  After some relaxing time on the beach, we continued over to the Caneel Bay Resort for lunch.  Little did I know I was about to have one of the best sandwiches I had ever eaten.  We almost didn't order it (I was craving a turkey sandwich, and Sooyun almost ordered something else before I reminded her about the rum pork on crispy banana bread sandwich she had pointed out earlier), but after tasting it, I'm so grateful we did.  I think it was that perfect bala...