Regular’s Ingredients [3 of them]:
Cultured pasteurized grade A cream and milk, enzymes.
…

Fat Free’s Ingredients [12]:
Cultured Lowfat Milk, Modified Corn Starch,Whey Protein Concentrate, Propylene Glycol Monoester, Artificial Color, Gelatin, Sodium Phosphate, Agar Gum, Xanthan Gum, Sodium Citrate, Locust Bean Gum, Vitamin A Palmitate.

When something as simple as Sour Cream is re-constructed in a science lab, something is definitely lost (and a helluva lot of chemicals gained).

Last year around this time my sister and I got together to do some Easter baking with the intention of writing up a post on our adventures for this site.  As with many of my intentions for this site, this post kept slipping through the cracks and just didn’t end up getting written up in time for a proper Easter post, and now that it’s come back around again, I figure I ought to get something up.

Our family has Ukrainian heritage on our father’s side, and while we got to experience a lot of the wonderful Ukrainian Easter traditions through our Baba (grandmother) as we grew up, much of that has faded away as we’ve all grown into our own lives and adopted our own traditions.  This delicious traditional Easter bread is a vestige of our heritage that has survived and been passed down.  Our version turned out a touch lopsided, but it was yummy nonetheless!

Mom’s Easter Bread

¼ cup warm water
2 tsp dry yeast
½ cup sugar
1 tsp salt
4 cups flour
1 cup milk, room temperature
2 large eggs, well beaten
1/3 cup butter, melted
Glaze:  1 tbsp water
White from 1 large egg

Sprinkle the yeast on the ¼ cup warm water and leave for 3 minutes.
Add sugar, salt and 3 ½ cups flour.
Stir the yeast mixture; slowly pour into the bowl and stir in.

Add the 2 beaten eggs to the milk.
Slowly pour the milk, eggs and melted butter into the bowl.
Knead.
If the dough is very, very sticky, add the remaining ½ cup flour, a little at a time, until the dough is just a little sticky.

Place in bowl and brush all over with melted butter and cover with a damp tea towel.
Place bowl in oven with light on and let rise for 1 ½ hours.
Remove dough from oven and pound it on a floured board until it is flattened.

Divide the dough in half and roll each half  into a rope about 28 inches long.
Twist the ropes loosely together, braid fashion.
Place the twisted dough on a greased cookie sheet and bring the ends together so they won’t separate during baking.
Return dough to oven with light on and leave for 40 minutes.

To Make the Glaze:  Stir together the water and egg white.

Remove the dough wreath from the oven and brush it with the glaze.  Heat oven to 325°F.  Bake wreath on the middle rack for about 28 minutes.

I cringe when I see the Chicken Caesar because it represents an embrace of the misinformed and unimaginative American diner, who for better or worse continues to shape our menus.  I’ll have a salad, the reasoning goes, because it’s healthy (let’s disregard what it’s slathered with), and I’m hungry so let’s pile on some chicken breast, the skim milk of the protein world.

Serious Eats has a Food Lab feature on how to make Ricotta cheese, where they dispel some myths about temperature and level of difficulty, and confirm something anyone who has ever heated milk on the stovetop already knows:

As milk heats, the proteins and fats on the top surface begin to coagulate, forming a sort of “raft” on the surface. Once it starts getting close to its boiling point, water vapor forms, getting trapped underneath this raft. As soon as enough pressure has built up, the raft goes the only way it can: up and over. This tipping point can occur in a matter of moments, and in fact, it has been independently proven by several renowned chefs and scientists that milk will only boil over when your back is turned.

True dat.

[via This Is Why You're Fat]

Improperly beaten egg whites (both under- and over-beaten) aren’t aerated adequately, and as a result, the final product is dense, flat, and a big disappointment, especially if your arms are aching from beating those eggs by hand. But it’s not hard to get it right, especially if you know a few tips.

However beautiful the shinogi line of a charcoal-forged Santoku, and no matter how solidly made the vintage steel of a French chef’s knife, I have to admit that after years of collecting the world’s finest knives I have settled on one that has more in common with the knives found in the average American’s kitchen.

Over 10 weeks, 16 volunteers on a strictly controlled diet, including high levels of fructose, produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. Another group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.

Lay off the soft drinks people - that stuff is poison!

Since bacon seems to be the focus of our post lately figured this would fit in!

I thought I would smell like bacon.

I’ve been using Bacon Soap for a week, and really, I smell a bit savory, but I don’t smell anything like bacon. No more than any other person that’s been cooking pounds and pounds of bacon in a short period of time, anyway. Not smoky, not salty, not … bacony.