Author: Ben Starr
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Cooking with Tobacco
As popular as tobacco is in this world, and has been for centuries, it’s a little strange to me that we don’t cook with it more often. Granted, I don’t smoke cigarettes (though I’ll enjoy the rare cigar or pipe on special occasions), but tobacco has a wonderful, deep, earthy, hay-like flavor which can be…
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Tobacco Chocolate Ice Cream
Tobacco is little-used in cooking, which is a shame, because it has a marvelous flavor. Tobacco contains nicotine, a stimulant that is deadly in the right dose, most folks shy away from cooking with it. But the National Institutes of Health has done plenty of research about nicotine toxicity, and I published an article that helps consolidate…
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Homemade Chevre (Fresh Goat Cheese)
The pungent, goat-y chevre you get in the grocery store is an acquired taste. I’ve definitely acquired it. But many people haven’t. Part of the reason it’s so pungent is that it’s old. The longer goat cheese sits, the more pronounced its flavor becomes. This flavor is caused by an enzyme called “lipase” that exists…
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Buttermilk Sweet Potato Ice Cream
At FRANK recently, we did an Americana menu, and needed to conceive an ice cream to go with our bourbon pecan pie. Chef Jennie suggested a sweet potato ice cream, but that just sounded too sweet to me. After all, pecan pie is very sweet, and to pair it with a super-sweet ice cream would…
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How to Find Chanterelles
It’s official…Chanterelle season has started. How do I know? Because I found one yesterday. The Chanterelle season in the US normally begins in early June in the southern areas along the Gulf coast. North Texas doesn’t usually start seeing them until later in June, but the recent flooding has brought them early. Northern climes may…
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I am Indiana Jones…er Colorado Jones, at least
While most of you have discovered my blog because of cooking, I was a travel writer long before anyone called me “chef.” Because I have an insatiable thirst for adventure. One of my favorite places in all the world is a little town in Colorado called Glenwood Springs, perched at the west end of a…
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Come Forage with FRANK!
There has been a lot of interest in our foraging habits since the article about us in Edible Magazine came out this spring. It is foraging season in Dallas right now! With the unusual weather patterns we’ve had over the past month, it’s shaping up to be an epic year for morel hunting in North Texas. We…
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A FRANK Tale: Passion
(Most images in this post are courtesy of Stephanie M. Casey at Real Fine Food, a blogger who often attends our dinners to photograph and blast them onto social media. Find her on Facebook and Instagram also. Thanks, Stephanie!) FRANK has been getting an uncomfortable amount of press recently, and while we shouldn’t complain…(all the…
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REAL Red Velvet Cake (with no food coloring or beet juice)
I’m gonna shoot straight with you. Red Velvet Cake grosses me out. I look at it, and I feel compelled to run to the nearest toilet. It’s not because I’ve had a bad experience with it. To be perfectly honest…I’ve never tasted it. (Well, except for the one my friend Chris made with beet juice. …
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Quick Sticky Buns
Over the last few years I’ve migrated away from commercial yeast and toward my sourdough starter. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t even keep yeast around anymore. This means my breads have gotten infinitely better…but also take infinitely longer to bake. There’s no such thing as “quick sourdough” anything. So while I have…