Beranbaum's Best Buns

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Reader Oriana (Doughadear) sent me a link to this article from The Washington Post. Oriana said she made them nearly every week, although she has never actually used them as hamburger buns, and takes them along when she visits someone's house.
This was quite a recommendation. Hamburger buns are not that exciting. They're fluffy and soft--even the whole wheat ones--and pretty flavorless. The hamburger patty, along with the condiments, is what gives the hamburger its great all-American taste. The bun is just there to keep your hands from getting too greasy. At least, that was my opinion before I tasted Rose's hamburger buns.
They're made m ostly of all-purpose flour, with just 1/4 cup of whole wheat flour, a soupcon of honey (one teaspoon, to be exact), and some olive oil. The recipe also gives the healthier option of adding 3/4 cup of toasted mixed seeds to the dough, and I think I'll try that next time, but I wanted the unadulterated bun this time.
After the dough rises, you cut the dough in eight pieces, if you want normal-sized buns, shape them into balls, and flatten them slightly.

After about an hour and half, they puff up nicely and begin to look like the real thing.

If you are so inclined, you can brush them with a little milk or water, and scatter some sesame seeds on top. I did half and half. After just a little over 15 minutes in the oven, they look like real hamburger buns and smell like bread, not like soft cotton.

They look good, they smell good, and they're sturdy enough to stand up to a bread knife.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. (What on earth does that mean, anyhow?) These buns are delicious! They're not the afterthought to a piece of grilled meat. In fact, if you couldn't finish the whole hamburger, you would probably jettison the meat and finish the bun instead of vice-versa. The small amount of whole wheat is enough to give them some sturdiness, and they have a real crust. It's hard to imagine a sandwich that wouldn't be markedly improved by this bun, which really gives a whole new meaning to the word. I highly recommend these buns; if you don't like hamburgers, try them with something else. Or try them just as bread. But try them.
Thanks to Oriana for the tip.

Rose's Ricotta Loaf

Saturday, March 22, 2009

I've been thinking with great nostalgia lately about opening Rose's Bread Bible for the first time, and making my first successful bread, which was actually my second attempt. All the nostalgia made me want to go back and make a bread I've already made instead of trying another new one, so I just opened the book at random and happened on Ricotta Loaf. I remembered loving that bread the first time I made it, so I was happy. Then I remembered that Rose's blog has a recipe for Ricotta Bliss, which she says is the ricotta loaf perfected, and I remembered that that version was awfully good too. I dithered around for a while trying to decide whether I should make the original, perhaps slightly inferior, loaf or the new, improved one. I settled on the loaf from the book, which was actually even better than I remembered.
It's one of the easier breads in the cookbooks and one of the quickest to mix up. You put everything in the food processor except the water, pulse it a few times, add the water, and then process for about a minute. I suppose a bread machine is easier, but it couldn't be much easier. The dough is lovely, smooth, and supple. It looks rich because of the egg and butter, and I guess it is (for the same reasons), but the ricotta makes me think it's actually a very healthy bread.

Even though it's made in a loaf pan, you get to slash it down the middle, which I love to do. And Jim loves to take pictures of the result, so it's a win-win situation. I suppose I could always do it with every bread that I bake, but I don't unless there are explicit instructions to do so.
Once the bread is done, you have the option of brushing it with melted butter. I didn't, because I was telling myself it was a very healthful loaf of bread and the melted butter might have required me to abandon that illusion.

What a lovely mid-afternoon treat this turned out to be! I had mine with lemon curd--because it's a fruit, you know. Jim had his with butter. I hope he doesn't go to hell, on account of being so much less virtuous than I am.

Rose's Ricotta Loaf
--adapted from The Bread Bible, by Rose Levy Beranbaum

3 1/2 cups (500 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
2 T. (25 grams) sugar
1/2 T. (4.8 grams) instant yeast
1 cup plus 1 1/2 T. (250 grams) whole-milk ricotta
7 T. (100 grams) unsalted butter, softened
1 large egg
1/2 T. (10 grams) salt
1/2 cup (118 grams) cold water

1. Put flour, sugar, yeast, ricotta, butter, egg, and salt in bowl of food processor and pulse about 15 times. With the motor running, add the cold water. Process for about one minute.

2. Put dough in lightly greased bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Allow to rise until doubled, 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

3. An hour before baking, preheat oven to 375. If you have a baking stone, preheat that at the same time, and preheat a cast-iron skillet or baking pan on the lowest shelf of the oven.

4. Shape the dough into a loaf and place it in an oiled or buttered 9" by 5" loaf pan. Cover the dough loosely with oiled plastic wrap and allow it to rise until almost doubled, about 45 minutes to one hour and 15 minutes.

5. With a sharp knife or razor blade, make a long 1/2-inch slash down the middle of the bread. Mist the dough with water and set the pan on the preheated baking stone. Add 1/2 cup ice cubes into the pan on the bottom shelf and close oven door.

6. Bake 40 to 50 minutes. Turn bread around about halfway through baking for more even browning. If bread is getting too brown on top, drape a piece of foil loosely on the top.

7. Unmold bread and place on wire rack. Brush with melted butter if desired. Let cool before slicing.

Artisan Five-Minute Deli Rye

Last Saturday, some friends invited us to a Pinot Noir tasting party. The idea was that we would see if we could tell Oregon Pinot Noir from northern California Pinot Noir (we couldn't) and to see if there was a clear favorite among four different wines (there wasn't). I was supposed to bring bread. Since I know that Fred, who would be the wine pourer, is a big fan of caraway rye bread, I figured if I brought him a loaf of caraway rye, he might pour extra-big glasses of wine for me. I think my ploy worked, but I don't remember.
I really wanted to bake Rose's rye bread recipe, which is the best I've made, but I was going to be gone all day Saturday and I didn't think I could work it into the schedule, so I settled on the Five-Minute recipe, which does have the advantage of giving you a lot of flexibility.
The recipe is supposed to make four loaves of bread, but they would be very small one-pound loaves. I scooped up nearly two pounds of dough for my first loaf.

The bread is supposed to be brushed with a cornstarch wash to make it nice and shiny, so I was envisioning a fat, brown, gleaming loaf of caraway-speckled bread.

I learned that if you mix up cornstarch and water but forget to heat it to a boil, it doesn't make the bread shiny. In fact, it seems to have the reverse effect. At least, something made this bread refuse to brown. I finally took it out of the oven because it had been baking for over twice as long as it was supposed to; even allowing for the fact that it was bigger than the recipe's one-pound loaf, it still was behaving oddly.

Not only did it have a dull matte finish, but the little slashes I made on top of the bread expanded so that the bread looked like it had exploded. My poor bread was kind of an ugly duckling. But I covered it in plain brown wrapping and sneaked it inside the Beiers' house; then I sliced it before anyone could see its oddity. It tasted pretty good though. Curiously, the more wine we drank, the better the bread tasted.
A few days later, I made another loaf. This time I took out 1.2 pounds and made a torpedo-shape loaf. I used my LaCloche bread baker, and I remembered to boil the cornstarch wash.

I think this is more what it's supposed to look like. And the slashes looked more normal too.

By now the dough had been in the refrigerator for about a week, so it had a little more tang, but it was by no means funky.
I'm always a little apprehensive about looking at the dough that's been hanging out in the refrigerator for a while--afraid of what I might see. So far, I've seen nothing but bread dough. Which is what I saw on Sunday, a week and four days after I made the original dough: a small amount of normal looking caraway rye dough. In fact, it was small enough that I thought a loaf of bread would look pathetic, so instead, I made four rye dinner rolls.

I thought the rolls were the most successful of the three variations I made, even though there were only a few of them. They were the prettiest--the cornstarch wash actually worked and the slashes didn't deform the bread.

The sad news is that Loaf #1 is gone; Loaf #2 is gone; and Rolls #3-6 are gone. I've been so busy at work that I haven't had time to make more bread, so I'm reduced to having my morning toast with store-bought bread, which makes me glum. I hear my mother's voice reminding me that the starving children in China (I know that some mothers talked about the starving children in India or Africa, but my mother's were always in China) would be grateful for that bread, and I get that whining about not having homemade bread is unattractive, but still. I hope I have time to make some of the real stuff this weekend.

Deli-Style Rye
--adapted from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
3 c. (709 grams) water
1 1/2 T. (14.4 grams) instant yeast
1 1/2 T. (25 grams) salt
1 1/2 T. (15 grams) caraway seeds
1 cup (130 grams) rye flour
5 1/2 cups (771 grams) all-purpose flour.

1. Mix the yeast, salt, and caraway seeds with the water in a large mixing bowl.

2. Mix in the remaining dry ingredients with a spoon or a stand mixer, using the dough hook.

3. Cover (not airtight), and allow to rest about two hours, or until the dough rises and starts to fall.

4. Refrigerate in a container (not airtight) and use within 14 days.

5. When ready to bake, cut off the amount you want to use (one pound will make a smallish loaf. Shape into whatever shape you want, and allow to rest and rise, 40 minutes to an hour, on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper.

6. Preheat oven to 450, with baking stone placed on middle rack.

7. Paint the top crust with cornstarch (mix 1/4 teaspoon cornstarch with a small amount of water to make a paste; add 1/2 cup water, stir, and bring to boil). Make cuts into top of loaf with slashing knife, razor blade, or serrated bread knife.

8. Place baking pan on hot stone. For a better crust, either pour 1 cup boiling water into another baking sheet on another rack, or put about 1/2 cup ice cubes on preheated baking sheet or skillet on rack below the bread.

9. Bake about 35 minutes for one-pound loaf, longer for a larger loaf, and less for rolls.

10. Let cool on cooling rack before cutting.

Bara Brith - a Lazy Bakers Project

Sunday, March 1, 2008

Bara Brith is a Welsh bread that was suggested by Jeannette, who is Welsh herself. I never heard of it, and I have a hard time remembering its name. I keep wanting to call it B'nai Brith, which is something else altogether. And Jeannette has never made it herself, despite being Welsh, because she buys it at bakeries, like normal Welsh people do.
I had a few other projects ahead of this one, so I wasn't planning to try it for a while. And I got an email from Jeannette, saying she'd given this recipe a try and wasn't that impressed with it, so that moved it down a few places. But, quite by accident I discovered that March 1 (today!) is St. David's Day, so of course I had to make Welsh bread on St. David's Day.
As you may know, St. David is the patron saint of Wales, so St. David's day is a big deal. Men are supposed to wear leeks on their lapels (yes, that is correct), although apparently some wimpy men are now wearing daffodils instead of leeks. I asked Jim if he would be willing to have his picture taken wearing a leek, but he demurred. How about just a scallion? No, definitely not, he said.
Jeannette said that the recipe she had found needed something to give it more flavor--more rising time, or something. So I started looking around to see if I could find other recipes more like what she had in mind. There was a lot on the internet that didn't look especially good, but I found something interesting right in my own back yard. My newest cookbook--How to Bake, by Nick Malgieri, has a recipe for Bara Brith ("speckled bread" in Welsh) and variants for Barm Brack (speckled bread in Irish), as well as Selkirk Bannock (you-know-what in Scottish). Malgieri's version, from Maura Laverty's Traditional Irish Cook Book, has a sponge, a rise, a rest, and another rise--enough steps, I hoped, to develop some taste.
An immediate problem was that all recipes for Bara Brith call for something labeled "mixed peel." I figured this was something like what we generally call candied fruit, and put only in fruitcake at Christmas because we (Americans) don't much like it. It's not readily available in non-fruitcake season, although in Great Britain, the biggest consumer of mixed peel, it's apparently around all the time. I could have ordered some, but not in time for St. David's Day. I could have made my own, which I (briefly) considered. Or I could substitute. I decided to add some dried cranberries to the golden raisins and currants called for. Once I'd decided on that, the rest was easy.

First, I mixed up the sponge--just milk, water, yeast, and bread flour. While that was bubbling, I covered the dried fruit with boiling water, drained it, and set it on paper towels to dry.

Everything but the fruit is mixed together, and the dough does a first rise sans fruit, which is then added and mixed in after the dough has doubled in size.

It's a little hard to get an even distribution of the fruit by kneading and folding it--if I did it again, I think I'd just mix it in right away.

Jeannette's recipe made a big free-form loaf, but Malgieri says you should put it in loaf pans for an authentic Barm Brack. (Jeannette, is he just making this up?) I'm pretty sure that Malgieri is not a Welsh name.

Supposedly, the bread takes 45 minutes to bake. I baked it for 30 minutes, and it was very brown and completely done.

I had to pick off some burned fruit from the outside of the bread, but everything that was hidden inside stayed moist and tasty. In fact, this was a much better bread than I was expecting. It's quite lovely--very tender and soft, with a buttery, spicy taste--almost like a fruited, spiced brioche. British recipes call for something called "mixed spice," which we also don't have. Malgieri's recipe specifies a mixed of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice--if you wanted to do a mix, you could probably use a pumpkin pie mix.

You can see that the fruit isn't quite evenly mixed in, although that's not a critical error.
I know it's not comme il faut to use another recipe when we're all supposed to be doing the same project, but, after all, this is a No Rules Club. Happy St. David's Day!

BARA BRITH

SPONGE
6 oz. whole milk
4 oz. water
4 tsp. instant yeast
7.7 oz. bread flour

DOUGH
4 oz. golden raisins (or Sultanas)
3 oz. currants
2 oz. dried cranberries (or mixed peel)
3 oz. unsalted butter, softened
2.5 oz. light brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 tsp. ground cloves
1/8 tsp. allspice
2 large eggs
15 oz. all-purpose flour

1. Make the sponge. Heat milk and water until just warm. Pour into a small bowl, whisk in the yeast, and stir in the flour. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, 30 minutes or so.
2. Combine fruit in a saucepan, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Drain fruit and spread it in a single layer on paper towels.
3. Using a paddle attachment, beat butter with sugar, salt and spices until soft and smooth. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Mix in spounge and flour. With dough hook, knead until dough is smooth and elastic, about five minutes.
4. Put dough in oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Allow dough to rise until doubled, about one hour.
5. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Distribute the fruit on the dough and knead it in evenly. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest for 30 minutes.
6. Divide dough in half and shape to fit two 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 loaf pans. Let rise another hour until doubled.
7. Bake at 400 until well risen and golden brown, 30-45 minutes.
8. Unmold and cool on rack.

While I am talking about Nick Malgieri, I must give a quick mention of another recipe from this book--his pecan chocolate bars. I had investment club at my house, and I wanted something delicious enough that we would forget the drubbing we've been taking on the stock market lately. These bars, with cocoa, bittersweet chocolate, caramel, and tons of pecans, were just the thing! We even bought some new stock at a bargain price, and were all quite cheerful at the end of the evening. There was also some wine involved.

King Arthur Pain de Mie

Monday, February 16, 2009

I didn't get around to baking anything this weekend, but, fortunately, as a state employee I get President's Day off. Pondering what bread to bake next, I was looking through more whole grain breads when I said to myself, Hmmph. I want white bread. So I made really white bread. Not only does it have white flour, but it also has potato flour and milk and powdered milk. All manner of white things.
You can call this sandwich bread if you want. But you can also call it pain de mie , which sounds ever so much better and more hoity-toity than white sandwich bread. The recipe is from King Arthur's website, and I chose it because I had some potato flour that I've had for a while and is probably getting to the point where I should either use it up or throw it out. Before I started baking bread, I thought flour lasted forever, so I would have had no qualms about using 20-year old flour (not, I hasten to add, that the potato flour is anywhere close to that), but now I wouldn't dream of doing such a thing.
I had to do quite a bit of searching to find my old pain de mie pan. I got the pan used on eBay.com during the period that I was buying a lot of baking equipment. I remember balking at the purchase of a new pain de mie pan. They're quite expensive, and I figured that I'd never use it again, so I could only bring myself to spend a few dollars, plus shipping. I fell in love with it when it arrived--it's heavy and tall and looks very French.

This is an easy bread to mix up, except that my friend June put a curse on me. We went out for dinner on Saturday--June and I, and our husbands too--and at some point June asked me if the bread I made with the dough hook turned out grainier than the dough I kneaded by hand. I looked at her as if I didn't know what she was talking about (because I didn't), and said I had never noticed such a thing. And, I said, it doesn't make sense because the dough hook kneads more thoroughly than you can knead by hand. But this dough turned out to have little lumps in it. Because that's never happened before, I can only think that it's June's fault, and that she must have put a hex on me or my dough hook. At first I thought there were only a few little lumps, and I tried to carefully pick them out by hand, but then I saw that there were many. If I don't blame June, I blame the potato flour for forming what looked like little mashed potato lumps.

I love baking in this lidded loaf pan! The top presses down on the bread while it's baking, so it turns out almost square. I think that the idea is that the crumb becomes more compressed this way, which is why it's called pain de mie, which means bread of crumb, more or less. I grew up thinking it was called a Pullman loaf, which is not as French or romantic. I could look up why it's called that (because it was served on a Pullman car?), but I think I'll leave that for another time.
I was feeling a little insecure about this bread, because of the lumps and all, so I decided to make up for the lumps by taking its temperature so at least the bread's lumps would be the proper temperature.

The trouble with sticking the thermometer in the middle of the bread is that it leaves a hole. I don't like the idea of a hole in the middle of the bread, which is why I don't usually do it, and it turned out to be 190 degrees on the first testing, so it was a letdown anyway.
For a plain white loaf, this is seriously good bread. The little potato-y lumps that I was so concerned about disappeared in the baking, leaving nothing in their wake but a fine, delicate crumb. I didn't make sandwiches, but it's clear that this bread would be perfect for sandwiches, and even better for grilled sandwiches. It will probably make excellent toast, a hypothesis which I will test tomorrow morning. And yet...I have to admit that this plain white bread, good as it is, just doesn't have the complexity of the whole wheat bread which I've been dissing. The lesson seems to be--enjoy the bread you're eating now.

Whole Wheat Bread

Saturday, February 7, 2009

You know how I'm always saying that all you have to do to cook is know how to read? Well, maybe I'm not always saying it, but I sometimes say it, and baking this bread taught me again that all you have to do to screw something up is not read the directions. Aside from baking scones, sticky rolls, chocolate babka, and sour cream coffee cake, I've been on a healthy-eating quest this year, which meant that I had to up the whole grain quotient in the breads I've made. This one is from one of my Christmas books, Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman.
This book is unusual because it's really directed at least as much to the professional baker as the home baker, and each recipe tells you how to make, say, 25 loaves as well as 2 or 3. No, that's not the mistake I made--even in a caffeine-deprived state, I would think something was amiss if tried to mix up 20 pounds of flour.
But the book's ingredient sections for individual recipes are divided into three sections: Overall Formula, Pate Fermentee (or Levain), and Final Dough. This is too much information for me. What do I care about the overall formula? I just want to know how to mix things together.
I made the Pate Fermentee Friday night--no problem.

And by Saturday morning, it was nicely bubbling and ready to mix in the rest of the dough.
That's where I was done in by the Overall Formula section. So instead of mixing in 1 lb., .6 ounces of water, I poured in 1 lb., 5.8 ounces. As I kept pouring, and pouring, and pouring, I finally said doubtfully to myself, this seems like an awful lot of water. So I looked at the recipe again and saw my mistake. So there I was with a pound of whole wheat flour, a pound a bread flour, and a ton of water. I thought of possible ways to rescue the situation, but they were all too messy and complicated, so I just dumped the whole mess out.
And it was a mess. Have you ever tried to put a couple of pounds of gluey glop in the garbage disposal?
I was so disheartened that I almost gave up on the idea of baking bread this weekend, but there was my pate fermentee, cheerfully bubbling away, so I decided to give it another go. This time I used a blank piece of paper to cover up the "overall formula" section so I couldn't even see it, but I was feeling quite put out with Mr. Jeffrey Hamelman.
By the time I'd put the two loaves in bannetons and they'd risen nicely, I was feeling more kindly toward Hamelman and decided he probably didn't pull the wings off flies after all, and might be a perfectly lovely man.
I slashed one banneton and put the other in the oven without any cutting, hoping that it would stay in one piece, and it did. I liked the looks of both of them; really, I'm not sure which is more attractive.





When we ate our slices of still-warm bread, though, I was a bit disappointed--very nice and all, but still, it was just a piece of whole wheat bread.
As I was leafing through the book, I came across a section where Hamelman was rhapsodizing about bread: he said that bad bread tasted good when it was warm, but good bread didn't really come into its own until the second day. Oh, please, I thought. It's not like it's fine wine. But when I had another piece of bread on the second day, I thought he might be on to something: I could taste the slight tang from the pate fermentee and detect the sweetness from the honey. But maybe I just didn't want to claim a loaf of bad bread.

Jeffrey Hamelman's Whole-Wheat Bread

For Pate Fermentee:
8 oz. bread flour
5.2 ounces water
.2 oz. salt (1 tsp.)
1/8 tsp. instant dry yeast

For Final Dough:
1 lb. whole-wheat flour
8 oz. bread flour
1 lb., .6 oz. water
.4 oz. salt (2 tsp.)
.13 oz. instant dry yeast (1 1/4 tsp.)
1 oz. honey

1. The night before baking, mix the pate fermentee. Mix yeast, water, flour, and salt until smooth. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let stand for 12 to 16 hours.
2. When ready to make the bread, place all ingredients for final dough in the mixing bowl of a stand mixer with a dough hook. Mix on low speed about three minutes. As dough starts to come together, add the pate fermentee in chunks. Mix for another three minutes on medium speed.
3. Put in bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise for a total of about two hours. After one hour, remove bread from bowl and fold it over. Put back in bowl and cover with wrap.
4. Divide into two pieces and shape into rounds. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes. Shape into round or oval loaves, or place into floured bannetons. Cover with plastic and let rise another 1 1/2 hours. (The dough can also be put in a loaf pan or shaped into rolls).
5. Transfer the risen loaves onto a baking sheet lined with parchment, or place directly on baking stone. You can add steam either by pouring a cup of boiling water or about 1/2 cup of ice cubes into a pan on a lower shelf of the oven. Bake in a preheated 450-degree oven for 30-40 minutes. Turn heat down by 25 degrees if bread starts to get too brown.

Vermont Cheese Bread

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Today was ChiliFest at the State Public Defender's Office. My friend Cathy is the unofficial Social Director of our office, and every now and then, she just has to have some kind of party. Today was a chili pot luck, with Ngoc bringing Havana chili, Andrea whipping up a turkey chili, Jodie with a healthy eggplant-based chili, and Cathy herself bringing a giant crockput of your regular hamburger and kidney bean variety. Ben was supposed to be responsible for the white chicken chili, but his kids were being difficult last night, and he opted to get some sleep instead of stirring chili. Probably not an unreasonable choice. Sara made corn muffins, and I brought cheese bread. There were plenty of desserts: a chocolate-coconut bundt cake, and bars galore (in Minnesota, there is a separate category of dessert called "bars," which is pronounced sort of like "barse.") All potlucks in Minnesota have barse for dessert, and ours was no exception: Toll House, lemon cheesecake, ginger, and brownies. The non-cooks had the option of bringing drinks or condiments.
I turned to the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book again, and I was impressed with the results. I made the dough Tuesday night and it sat in the refrigerator until this morning. At 7:00 a.m., I dumped it out on the counter.

The master recipe is supposed to make four loaves, so I cut it in half, figuring I'd make one loaf for ChiliFest and another one this weekend. When I divided the dough in half, though, I realized that it made very small loaves, so I changed my plan: I'd bake both loaves this morning and bring the leftovers home for us.

I've had mixed success with the method where you slide the bread from the pizza peel directly on the hot baking stone, but this time it worked, and I didn't burn my hand in the process either.
However, once the breads were in the oven, I realized that I'd completely forgotten to slash the breads with my cute little French knife, so when I turned on the oven loaf to see how they were doing, I saw that they had developed slashes au naturel.

I blame this on my having only one cup of coffee, which was half decaf; this clearly did not provide enough caffeine to get me through an entire recipe without a mistake. And I had even spent a considerable amount of time deciding what slashing pattern I would use. Aha, I thought to myself, in a glass-half-full kind of way, this provides me with a challenge--can I go through the entire day without announcing to everyone that I had screwed up the bread? Almost. I told only one person, and she seemed completely uninterested in my mistake. For the rest of the day, if someone said something about the bread, I just smiled and said not a single word about how it was supposed to have been slashed decoratively.
Oh, and that plan to bring home the leftover bread? It didn't happen. As some of you may know, the fact that something is eaten when it's brought into the communal kitchen in an office doesn't necessarily mean that the food is good; it just means that it was there. But in this case, the bread actually was good. The extra-sharp aged cheddar gave the bread a distinctive, delicious flavor, but it wasn't gooey and greasy as some cheese breads are. It was a perfect complement to four different kinds of chili, but would be good with almost any soup and would probably be an excellent sandwich bread too.
I'm going to include a shortened version of the four-loaf recipe, but I'll put in a plug for buying the book, especially if you, like me, just like to read cookbooks. First, all the recipes are based on a particular method, and it's useful to read about the method before tackling a bread. Second, you may have better luck with some recipes than others. The first bread I tried from this book was too salty, because I hadn't followed my own advice and read through the entire method before trying a recipe--all the recipes advise the use of kosher salt, and I used table salt; two teaspoons of table salt is a lot more salt than two teaspoons of kosher salt. The second recipe, a rye bread, was fine but not spectacular. A buttermilk bread that I tried next was excellent, as have been the brioche and cheddar breads. That's a good enough percentage to justify purchase of the book, I think, especially if you relish the idea of having bread dough on the ready in the refrigerator.

Vermont Cheddar Bread
3 c. lukewarm water
1 1/2 T. instant yeast
1 1/2 T. kosher salt
1 1/2 T. sugar
6 1/2 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
1 c. good quality sharp, aged Cheddar

1. Mix all ingredients, either by hand, or using the dough hook of a heavy-duty mixer. You don't have to knead; just make sure all flour is incorporated. This is a wet dough.

2. Cover, not airtight, and let rest at room temperature about two hours. Dough should rise and start to collapse. Refrigerate in a covered (but not airtight) container, and use within 7 days. (I made the bread on the third day and it had a very slight tanginess).

3. On baking day, cut off a one-pound, grapefruit-sized piece of dough. Dust with flour and shape into a ball. Allow to rest and rise on a cornmeal-covered pizza peel for one hour.

4. Preheat oven to 450, putting a broiler pan or cookie tray (with sides) on the bottom of the oven or the lowest shelf, and a baking stone on the lowest or next-t-the-lowest shelf--depending on where the pan is.

5. Just before baking, slash the bread with a razor or sharp knife. Or not.

6. Slide loaf directly on the hot stone. Pour one cup hot water into the broiler tray and close the oven door. Bake for about 25 minutes.

Tunisian Spicy Breads (Touarits)

Sunday, February 1, 2009

See, this is what I mean about breads. They can be a little on the brown side, not quite as brown, some thicker than others, some thinner--they don't care. They all taste good, not like some finicky coffee cake.
These filled Tunisian mini-breads are the first thing I've made from Savory Baking from the Mediterranean, by Anissa Helou. As far as I know, they're the first and only Tunisian anything I'ver ever made, but if this is any indication of Tunisian cuisine, I may hunt down some more recipes.
The savory little breads are made with a simple all-semolina flour dough (I used King Arthur's durum flour because it's so much finer than any semolina I've seen at stores). It only has to rest for a while, which can be done while you're making the filling, so you can think of this just a few hours before you want to eat them.
The lovely golden dough is divided in half, and each half is rolled out to a 1/4-inch thickness.

(For someone who fears pastry, I've been doing a lot of rolling out dough lately). I used a biscuit cutter to make 3-inch rounds, then filled half of the rounds with a spicy mix of sauteed onions, red peppers, tomatoes, chili peppers, harissa, cayenne, and salt. With the chili peppers, harissa, and cayenne, it sounds like it would be crazy hot, but each little bread has only about 1 teaspoon of the mixture, and the bread itself modifies the heat of the filling.

The filled circle is topped with a plain one, the edges are pinched to seal and brushed with olive oil. Then they're popped into a 400-degree oven.

There is no picture of these in the book, and I have absolutely no idea what touarits are supposed to look like (they're a "Tunisian spin on r'ghayefs," if that clarifies things for anyone.) But I liked the way mine looked. And I definitely liked the way they tasted. We ate them for dinner, with a salad that wasn't at all Tunisian (greens, pears, goat cheese, and almonds), but it worked out well. They would also make a wonderful appetizer, but you would have to limit people's intake, or they would gobble them up and then not eat your dinner that you worked so hard on.

A word about the cookbook: although I loved the bread, I have a few complaints about the cookbook. First, the ingredients are given by volume, not by weight, and I think they've been translated because there are some weird amounts (1/3 teaspoon?). The water for the dough is not listed in the ingredients; instead, it's listed in the directions, in two different places. The filling instructions tell you to saute the onion over medium-high heat, but if you cooked everything until the red pepper is soft, as you're supposed to, over medium-high heat, it would be a charred mess. Also, there are very few pictures, and the ones that are there are blurry, in black and white, and not particularly helpful. Nevertheless, there are recipes in this book that I've never seen anywhere else--including this one--and if you're interested in expanding your bread horizons, you might want to give this book a try.

TUNISIAN SPICY BREADS
adapted from Savory Baking from the Mediterranean

Dough
3 1/3 teaspoons active dry yeast
3 1/3 cups (473 grams) fine semolina or durum flour
1 1/2 t. fine sea salt or kosher salt
1 1/2 T. olive oil, plus extra for brushing the breads
1 egg
1 cup water
All-purpose flour for kneading and shaping

Filling
3 T. olive oil
1 medium onion, finely copped
2 medium tomatoes, finely chopped (I use cherry tomatoes in the winter)
1 medium red bell pepper, finely chopped
2 small serrano peppers, seeded and finely chopped
1 t. harissa (available in some supermarkets and in specialty groceries)
1/2 t. cayenne pepper
Salt

1. In mixer bowl with dough hook attachment, combine flour, yeast, olive oil, egg, and salt. Gradually add water and knead for 2-3 minutes. (The kneading can also be done by hand).

2. Cover bowl and let dough rest about 15 minutes. Knead another 2-3 minutes, until dough is shiny and smooth. Cover dough with damp kitchen towel and let rest while you're making filling.

3. For filling, heat oil in saute pan over medium heat. Add onion and cook until golden. Reduce heat to medium-low and add tomatoes, bell and serrano peppers, harissa and cayenne. Salt to taste and cook, stirring occasionally, until bell pepper is soft. Remove from heat and set aside.

4. Divide dough into two pieces and shape each into a bowl. Let them rest, covered with plastic wrap, for 15 minutes.

5. Preheat oven to 400. Roll out one ball of dough to 1/4-inch thickness. Cut out as many circles as possible. (I used a 3-inch biscuit cutter). Place about 1 teaspoon of the filling in the middle of half of the circles. Top with plain circle, and pinch the edges to seal. Place on baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

7. Repeat with second ball of dough. Then gather all scraps together and cut out more circles until dough is gone.

8. Brush with olive oil and bake for 12-15 minutes until crisp and golden. Cool on wire rack. Best if eaten warm (they can be reheated in a 200-degree oven).

Sour Cream Coffee Cake

Saturday, January 31, 2009
Our last Saturday coffee-and-doughnut hour for the year, and the last Saturday I have to rouse myself in the middle of the night to bake a not-doughnut something. (Sometime I will try doughnuts, I think). I asked for suggestions, and I got some good ones. Melinda thought I should make some "easy-peasy" homemade Danish. I asked her what planet she lived on. Oriana sent me a good-sounding recipe for bran muffins, which actually did look easy, and I could have made them ahead of time, but I feared two hours of jokes about bowel movements if I made something with bran (or prunes for that matter). Maura sent me some fabulous recipes, one for sunny-side-up apricot pastries made with homemade puff pastry, which she also described as easy. This makes me realize that many people have a different definition of "easy" than I do. Maura also sent me directions for baking dozens upon dozens of kolache, which she herself has done--with multiple fillings. I wish that Maura would become my personal baker. Finally, she suggested sour cream coffee cake, which seemed perfect. Besides, I love it. Now Maura said she'd had good luck with the recipe from The Silver Palate, and I should have just used that recipe, no questions asked, but I started thumbing through cookbooks and decided to try the recipe from The New Best Recipe, which had four eggs, a cup and a half of sour cream, and nearly two sticks of butter, plus pecans, brown sugar, and cinnamon. How could I go wrong?
I didn't exactly go wrong, but I didn't exactly go right either. The Best Recipe coffee cake is mammoth, and I took it out of the oven after an hour because I feared burning. It might have been perfect if I had kept it in for just five minutes more, but it was ever so slightly underdone. That is, it was not perfect. If I'm going to get up at 6:30 on a Saturday, I want perfection!

The batter was lovely, rich, and silky, and it gave me high hopes. It was easy to layer the batter and the streusel, but it ended up nearly filling the bundt pan. (The directions said to use a tube pan, but not one that came apart, like an angel food cake pan, so the bundt pan seemed the only option).
In making the streusel, I came scarily close to using curry powder instead of cinnamon, probably because I was operating on only one cup of coffee, so I spent quite a bit of time trying to imagine what a curry powder streusel might taste like and wondering if I could possibly convince people that I'd done it on purpose, and it was all the rage in New York. I decided no.

One reason I like baking bread better than anything else is that it's not so fussy about the precise moment it's done. Five minutes either way, and no one's the wiser. But pastry and cakes--they're spoiled children. Take them out one minute too soon and they're squishy and spongy. Leave them in one minute two long and they burn or dry out.

The directions for this coffee cake are to bake for 50 to 60 minutes. Usually my convection oven, even set 25 degrees lower than recommended, gets things done early. I checked the cake after 50 minutes, and a lot of batter clung to the knife. Eight minutes later, it seemed to be good.

After it cooled a bit and I up-ended it on a plate, I had my doubts. It just didn't look quite solid enough. But I'd passed the point of no return, and I figured that everyone else was on their first cup of coffee so they wouldn't be that observant. Just don't mention that it might not be quite done, I instructed myself. Apparently I routinely ignore my instructions because I announced that it wasn't done to anyone who would listen. They didn't seem to care.
It was our neighbor Doug Logeland's birthday on Saturday, so he got a candle on his slightly underdone coffee cake.


Cook's Illustrated Sour Cream Coffeecake
Streusel
3 3/4 ounces unbleached all-purpose flour
5 1/4 ounces sugar
3 1/2 ounces dark brown sugar
2 T. cinnamon
2 T. cold unsalted butter
1 c. pecans, chopped

Cake
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups sour cream
1 T. vanilla
11 1/4 ounces unbleached A-P flour
8 3/4 ounces sugar
1 T. baking powder
3/4 t. baking soda
3/4 t. salt
12 T. unsalted butter, softened, cut into 1-inch cubes.

1. Streusel: Place flour, sugar, 1/4 cup of brown sugar, and cinnamon in a food processor and combine. Transfer 1 1/4 cups of this mixture to a small bowl, stir in the remaining 1/4 cup brown sugar, and set aside (streusel for inside cake). Add butter and pecans to remaining dry ingredients in food processor. Process for about 10 pulses. Set aside (streusel for top of cake).
2. Cake. Put oven rack to lowest position and preheat to 350. Grease 10-cup capacity tube or bundt pan. Combine eggs, 1 cup sour cream, and vanilla in medium bowl.
3. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in mixer for about 30 seconds at low speed. Add butter, 1/2 cup sour cream and mix until moistened. Increase speed to medium for 30 more seconds. Decrease speed and incorporate egg mixture in three additions. Increase speed and beat for one minute and mixture becomes aerated and pale in color.
4. Add 1/3 of batter too pan, and smooth evenly. Sprinkle with half of streusel filling. Repeat with batter and streusel. Top with remaining batter, spread evenly, and top with the streusel topping with the nuts.
5. Bake until cake feels firm to the touch and toothpick comes out clean of batter (sugar may cling to tester), 50 or 60 minutes. Cool cake in pan for 30 minutes, then invert on plate. (You can also re-invert so streusel will be on top).

Cinnamon Pecan Sticky Rolls

Saturday, January 24, 2009
It's below zero again in Minnesota (that is below zero on the Fahrenheit scale for readers who don't live in the U.S.) I figured that the intrepid band of coffee-breakers who were willing to trudge over to our house this morning deserved something special for their trouble, so I made fresh-from-the-oven caramel rolls.

While I was considering how to make these rolls without getting up at 3:00 a.m., I remembered Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which I haven't used for a while. I am going to go out on a limb here, and say that these rolls are probably worth the cost of the book. They will give you a (possibly undeserved) reputation as a baker. I heard, "Where did you get these rolls? You made them? That's amazing!" so often that my store of modesty was quite used up. Granted, these people have an interest in encouraging me to keep providing them with food, but this was genuine enthusiasm.
The 5-Minute-a-Day method requires you to make the dough ahead of time and keep it in the refrigerator until you want to use it. The authors, Zoe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg, say you can keep most of the doughs in the refrigerator for up to 14 days. The brioche dough, which I wanted to use for the pecan rolls, could be kept for only five days, so I mixed it up Wednesday night, let it rise for a few hours, and stuck it back in the refrigerator. That part was easy.
You really can't make these rolls in five minutes, however. No step is really hard, but it is time consuming. I still had to get up a 6:30 (a.m.!) (on a Saturday!) to make sure these rolls were ready on time.

This is the dough as it's dumped out of its plastic container. It doesn't look that promising, does it?
But it rolls out nicely.

As I roll out the dough, I realize that I'm a sucker for any recipe that asks you to roll out the dough, strew good things on top of it, and roll it back up, jelly roll fashion, although I've never made a jelly roll. I don't think I've ever even seen a jelly roll in the flesh, but without it, how would we know what cookbook authors were talking about when they instruct, "jelly roll fashion." I guess if they didn't exist, someone would have to invent them.

In this case, the aforementioned good things are butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pecans. Usually this kind of roll just has you sprinkle cinnamon and sugar over the dough, but in the 5-Minute method, you cream the sugar and spices with the butter. This makes it harder to spread, and there's already so much butter in this recipe that I'm not sure that more is needed, but I have to say that nobody complained that there was too much butter.

Now you roll it up, you know how.
You cut slices off the roll and put them in a pan that's already been prepared with butter and brown sugar, creamed together, and then covered with pecan halves. More pecans than would be on anything that you might buy.

At this point, I had to punt. The recipe uses 1 1/2 pounds from 4 pounds of brioche dough. But I cut the brioche recipe in half, and I decided I might as well just turn all the dough into rolls. This gave me two pounds of dough for a recipe based on 1 1/2 pounds, so I increased all the ingredients in the pecan roll recipe by about 25%. This process overtaxed my math skills, so I'm going to give you the proportions in the original recipe, not as I fiddled around with them. The recipe says to put the rolls in a round cake pan, so I used an bigger oblong pan, figuring it would be about right. I was left with a lot of leftover dough, so I had to quickly grab a smaller cake pan, cream so more butter and sugar for the caramel part, and cut smaller rolls. I didn't tell anyone that these were makeshift, inferior rolls.

Then they had to sit for about an hour. I was so happy that I'd read the recipe the night before and allowed for this period of resting time. Otherwise, I might have had to lock the front door and hide when people started to arrive. As it was, I pulled the big pan of rolls out of the oven seven minutes before Robert, our first guest, arrived.

They looked nice and brown and fluffy in the pan, but inverting something like this is always an iffy proposition. There was so much butter that they could hardly stick. The worst that happened is that some buttery caramel sauce puddled out on the counter before I could completely get the rolls out of the pan.

Joe, our neighbor from across the street, told me they were the best sticky rolls he'd ever had, and he's had many. (Joe's wife Lela is the one who flattered my scones last week. I love Joe and Lela).
One more week of doughnut open houses, so I have to think of one more breakfast treat to make. I should have saved either this recipe or the chocolate babka as the final piece de resistance, because I'm not sure what I can bake next week that will be up to snuff. Any ideas?



BRIOCHE DOUGH (full recipe, makes about 4 1-poundloaves)


1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
1 1/2 tablespoons instant yeast
1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
8 large eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup honey
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
7 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

Mix the yeast, salt, eggs honey and melted butter with the water in a 5-quart bowl, or lidded (not airtight) food container.

Mix in the flour, using the dough hook on a mixer, or just use a spoon, until all of the flour is incorporated.

Cover (not airtight), and allow to sit at room temperature for about two hours



STICKY PECAN CARAMEL ROLLS

Makes 8 rolls.

1 1/2 lb. premixed brioche dough

Caramel topping:

6 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 c. brown sugar
30 pecan halves For filling:
Flour for rolling dough
4 tbsp. salted butter, at room temperature
1/4 c. granulated sugar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 c. chopped and toasted pecans
Pinch of ground black pepper

To make caramel topping: In a large bowl using an electric mixer on medium-high speed, cream together butter, salt and brown sugar. Spread evenly over bottom of a 9-inch round cake pan. Scatter pecan halves over butter-sugar mixture and set aside.

To make rolls: Dust surface of refrigerated dough with flour and cut off 1 1/2-pound piece. Dust piece with more flour and quickly shape into a ball by stretching surface of dough around to bottom on all four sides, rotating ball a quarter-turn as you go. Using a rolling pin, roll out dough to 1/8-inch thick rectangle.

To make filling: In a large bowl using an electric mixer on medium-high speed, cream together butter, sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg. Spread mixture evenly over rolled dough and sprinkle with chopped pecans. Starting with long end, roll dough into a log, jelly-roll fashion. Using a serrated knife, cut log into 8 equal pieces and arrange rolls over pecans in cake pan. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest and rise 1 hour at room temperature. Twenty minutes before baking, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake about 40 minutes, or until golden brown and set well in center. Remove to a wire rack. While still hot, run a knife around inside of pan to release rolls and invert rolls immediately to a serving dish.