vanilla bean tagged posts

Cold Brewed Coffee

The summer is around the corner, or maybe where you live it is already there... or it has always been there. The botom line is that the hot, steaming cup of coffee is not appetizing during this time of the year. You need something to wake you up and refresh you. The last 2-3 years a new caffeinated beverage joined the market. It is the "Cold Brew". It is a welcome alternative to the hot coffee and it is not iced coffee, hot brewed coffee that was chilled and served over ice.

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French Toast

French toast is my choice of breakfast when I want to treat myself to something awesome. Something Amazing something great. It is one of the quickest things to put together requiring only a few ingredients that you can find almost in every standard household. Usually made with stale bread, but now I don't really wait fro bread to go stale. I just go for it. And so will you. Before we get to that though, we need to learn about its history. Origins etc. It is been a while that we felt with historic facts in this blog but, we are back to it. You missed it?

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Masticha Cheesecake

The cheesecake is indeed an american classic. I never considered myself american or even close to the culture it represents till the moment my oven rolled out one of these beauties! It is a desert that sums up the american spirit. Many reasons for that. First of all it has a bunch of american ingredients, cream cheese, Graham cookies and butter. The all american cooking fat. Also the idea of a cake that has a base that can be tailored to anything sweet and savory it is an all american classic. An all american classic. But most of all it is the basic custard filling that is the heart and soul of the american country desert cooking.

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Dulce de Leche – Milk Jam

Dulce de Leche is one more fine contribution to my culinary education from the south of the border school. It is fine sauce and since the previous post was about cheesecake, the finest dairy concoction, I thought of staying in the same mood. Diary stuff. Dulce de leche was a way of preserving milk in a similar way that jams and preserves are to preserve fruit. I assume that this is the way dulce was envisioned and started. It probably originated rom the la lecheda, a warm sugar and milk beverage, drunk in Argentina. As a sauce dulce de leche resembles caramel but since the major sweetness comes from lactose, the  milk sugar, it is not as overwhelming and the flavor is a little more delicate. 

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