Pies Pies, What Wonderful Pies!

I forgot to mention on Thanksgiving that my favorite bakery in Rhode Island has pies available for the holidays. The Village Hearth in Jamestown makes the most bestest pies that you can buy. If you're in the market for someone else to make your holiday dessert, there's only one place that you need to go. They're a bit pricier than other places, but trust me, these are pies, and pies are important. Spend the extra cash and get some good pies to follow up a good meal. And if your meal is bad, wash the taste out with pie.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Black Cat Espresso

Black Cat espresso is the flagship product of the now officially world-class cafe, Intelligentsia. Because of its fame, widespread availability, and quality, I think that calling it the bar by which other espresso blends are measured is not an exaggeration. I'm a big fan of Black Cat and buy it quite frequently and this product review has been something of a late comer.

First thing that someone coming from Starbucks or grocery store coffees will notice is how light the roast of Black Cat is. I'm not entirely sure what it was, but for whatever reason, America has grown accustomed to super-dark coffee roasts. This has benefits and detriments, of course. Dark roasted beans can make anything taste acceptable, so that's good, but it does that by erasing the terroir of the beans, which for good beans is bad.

The best espresso roasts are loaded with sweetness, chocolate, caramel, with the roasting process creating not char, but the flavor of lightly toasted bread. You don't ruin this with a dark roast! Go try local roasters and their espresso roasts. You'll find that many of them, if not most, will have espresso roasts in the city to full-city range, with some even including roasts as light as half-city. Again, the exaggerated flavor of the espresso process brings out everything the beans have to give, so more so than any other process, espresso demands good beans.

Black Cat is a case study in this. It's rich and smooth, and even when you screw up shots it tastes pretty good. When you get it right, it tastes amazing. I must admit to preferring my espresso a bit richer than Intelligentsia shot for. They obviously want a bit more complexity, which they openly admit, whereas I am totally happy to have espresso marked almost exclusively by chocolate and caramel. This is not a knock against it, obviously, since they are skilled roasters shooting for a specific flavor profile and they achieve that goal with aplomb.

That being said, there is one thing that pisses me off about this roast and that is how easy it is to screw up. It's a very light roast and this means that your espresso machine is going to be hyper-finicky with it, frequently side-channeling and wanting you to change your grind level from day to day. It can be a major pain. It's aggravated if you have an already pissy machine, like my La Spaziale Vivaldi II.

But that's my problem, and yours if you choose to use BC, and the only thing that is a true knock against the beans are the price. They are rather expensive at well over $1 per ounce. You can buy them cheaper from other retailers (Like NeedCaffeine.com) than through Intelligentsia... for some reason... but it's still far more expensive than other famous blends, like Stumptown's Hair Bender or local blends like that which can be had (in Rhode Island) from Updike's Newtowne or New Harvest.

To put a point on this whole discussion, Black Cat is a high-quality espresso. It's worthy of its fame, and, while expensive, tastes fantastic. You would be well-served to drink this if you like espresso.

Black Cat Espresso: Highly Recommended

http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/about/black-cat-project

PRODUCT REVIEW: Breyers Extra Creamy Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Sandwiches

Holy crap, these are terrible. The ice cream texture is icy, the ice cream flavor is artificial, the cookies taste like some kind of floury mess with fake chocolate chips in them.

The chocolate chips are NOT fake, though. They just taste terrible and waxy. The cookie is the way it is, I assume in an attempt to prevent them from becoming too hard when frozen. So, instead of just using real cookies that taste good and accepting that people might have to chew a bit, we have this mess. It tastes and feels like a cookie in which the baker accidentally added too much flour and then also baked the cookie for about half the necessary time.

Everything about this sandwich is bad. It's only redeeming quality is that it is not poisonous.

Breyers Extra Creamy Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Sandwiches: NOT RECOMMENDED

PRODUCT REVIEW: Immaculate Bakery

I am on a seemingly endless quest to find foods that are made with food, as opposed to some substance that has been turned into another substance via the wonders of science. This means no hydrogenated oils. No artificial sweeteners. In their place I want eggs, butter, sugar, and other things that can be bought in bulk in the baking aisle.

Sadly, this eliminates nearly ALL pre-made baked goods. Pepperidge Farm, while remembering many things, have forgotten how to make cookies without hydrogenated oils. Pillsbury, among others, are a veritable chem lab in a cookie. While I recognize that most of these ingredients are totally harmless and have been true wonders of the chemical age, they taste inferior. Butter tastes better than hydrogenated oils. Sugar tastes better than HFCS.

So it was with great interest that I tried Immaculate Bakery products. I'm covering all of their items in this review since they are pretty consistent across their line. I first tried their chocolate chip cookies. They are without doubt the best pre-made chocolate chip cookie dough on the market. As are the sugar cookies, the biscuits, and scones. They are moist, sweet, flavorful, and taste as close to home-made products as anything I've tried from the freezer.

As far as taste and especially texture goes, their cookies are leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, as are their joyously simple ingredient lists. Everything about them is better. Their crescent rolls are better, but not to the degree of the cookies, and their cinnamon buns make Pillsbury buns taste cloying in comparison.

If you are going to buy pre-made cookies, biscuits, or scones, Immaculate Bakery is your best choice.

Immaculate Bakery: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

http://www.immaculatebaking.com/