Adventures in BreadLand

Day Off!

2012-02-06T18:53:00.001-08:00

Well, not a day off, but kind of a “working vacation” at the Shoresh First (hopefully annual!) Food Conference yesterday.

I was covering it for the Canadian Jewish News, but I let someone snap this delightful shot of me kneading some authentic flour-and-water-only half-whole-wheat matzah. There was a timer present, and indeed, the whole process was complete in under 18 minutes.

Tons of fun!

I attended two other sessions: “Kosher Curds” and “Is Kosher Meat Fit to Eat?” Tons of food for thought – it was kind of obvious that this was a pilot run, as some aspects weren’t as well-thought-out as others (I don’t think anybody thought to invite the mainstream kosher organizations here in town), but what a great concept! I really hope they do it again next year.

Rye Onion Swirl Loaf: An awesome bread I forgot to blog!

2012-01-30T21:21:00.001-08:00

This is from last week… Tuesday?

I wanted to have a plain meal, with tinned comfort-food tomato soup and awesome bread. And I had a dream, not a literal dream, but an in-my-head-so-close-I-can-almost-taste-it dream of a savoury RYE bread full of ONIONS. No poppy seeds, not a pletzl. FULL of onions, like almost to bursting. And not just an ordinary loaf – a ROUND loaf.

Luckily, I had everything I needed just sitting around. I modified this Sourdough Rye Bread recipe, using some sourdough but the full amount of yeast for the yeast version, and cutting the rising time by about ten hours.

While the dough was rising, I caramelized two regular supermarket yellow onions, using my no-fail, idiot-proof caramelization technique: cast-iron skillet, little bit of oil, salt the onions, let them sweat until translucent, then just keep dumping water in and simmering on medium-low until the water was gone. Repeat a few times, boiling water off each time, until onions look and smell delicious.

When the dough was as risen as I had time for (I got a late start – oops! To my credit, I was at work all morning, not passed out in a casino.), I rolled it out flat on the table, without measuring or anything fiddly like that, and sprinkled the onions over top. Probably should have cooled them first, but no visible harm done!

Rolled it up and SQUASHED it into the prepared Pyrex Bake A Round. Despite the instructions to use only solid fat to grease the Bake A Round, I used PAM Spray, because it’s easier. No pictures of how I stuffed this long floppy roll into a rigid glass tube, but it wasn’t funny, for a few seconds there. I used wax paper and kind of finessed it a bit… then removed the wax paper, which I swear is the work of the devil. (I can’t believe my mother used to bake cookies on it; does that mean we grew up eating wax???)

(note to self: next time, make the rectangle skinnier and TALLER than pictured here, so it will roll up nice and fat to fill up the Bake A Round right away)

Anyway, I let it rise as long as I could, but it really only filled up the top part of the tube when I stuck it in the oven to bake. One of the drawbacks of the Bake A Round is that I can’t get my thermometer into the middle of the loaf, just into one end or the other. So far, these “end readings” haven’t let me down at all, though.

Here’s the loaf, just coming out of the oven. Mmm…!

And just like last time, with a little prodding from a silicone splatula, it popped out of the tube beautifully!

Let it cool a bit and… SLICE!

Apart from the tendency of all swirl loaves to fall apart a bit along the swirl, this was absolutely, 100%, the bread I had dreamed about.

Of course, this would work in any loaf pan, and I kind of feel bad because I have two beautiful new cast iron ones – Lodge, even! – that my sister bought me for my birthday. I did use them for challah once and they were PERFECT… held heat, distributed it, released perfectly. And they are lovely to look at as well.

I have many amazing breads in mind for you, little loaf pans, never you fear…

(Omg, did you know they have cast-iron cookbooks??? Oy, vey… and I need a new new hobby like a hole in the head!)

Anyway, life has been nutty here lately and I forgot to blog this but I saved the pictures and discovered them again tonight, so here you go. Hope I’ve inspired you to go off and… in the spirit of Black History month, perhaps*, “have a dream” of your own.

* No trivialization of Black History month intended or implied, though frankly, I believe black people should be part of WORLD history and that’s how I’m teaching it to my children rather than having a special day or week or month. Okay, I’m also teaching my children that there is no such thing as “black” people – we are all tinted in most of the shades of the rainbow except the more blue-purply shades, because Hashem likes every colour. But I also realize that if you wanted to read my bizarre and half-baked opinions, you’d be over on my real blog instead of sitting here, drooling over my bread!!!

Note to Self: YEAST!

2012-01-23T21:48:00.001-08:00

3 pm on a winter Friday afternoon is NOT the best time to realize the challah that has been lovingly rising since late the previous night actually contains NO YEAST.

I was lying down with GZ when I realized… I started visualizing me getting out all the ingredients the night before: salt, sugar, flour, water, oil, eggs… nope, definitely no yeast. Eeeeeek!!!

I basically threw GZ down on the bed, raced to the computer to Google “forgot yeast bread help” or something like that. Yay – a solution!

I took the FULL AMOUNT of yeast called for in the recipe, added a bit of sugar and enough water to make a thin paste. (note to self: use a bowl next time, not a teeny tiny container, because it WILL bubble up)

5 minutes later, it was bubbly – ready to go! I smeared the paste everywhere and kneaded it in as well as I could (the site I found suggested not overkneading the dough, but how the heck do you do that without the finished bread being full of yeasty-pasty blobs???).

I left the now-yeasted bread to rise for all the time I had, which was literally about 40 minutes. Formed super-fast 3-braid challahs and one pull-apart (Elisheva: “just throw them in the pan!”) and let them rise for all the time I had, which was literally about 15 minutes. Then bake, and bake, and bake some more.

I was prepared for disaster, but actually, they did rise quite a bit in the oven. Not much on the table, which meant they were not the most beautiful loves… but at least they were loaves. And in fact, at the Shabbos table, in the actual eating, they weren’t THAT much worse than my regular challah.

So… lessons learned, notes to self. I have made challah without sugar, salt, oil, and now, yeast. Just when you’re starting to feel cocky… well… at least I managed to save the day!

The LAZIEST Challah Ever

2012-01-15T14:09:00.001-08:00

Question! What do you do late Thursday night when you are ravaged by a painful – ahem – something-or-other, not a single mixing bowl or counter is clean, you and your lovely spouse are both exhausted… but your mother is expecting Delicious Challah for Twenty in less than 18 hours???

(to his credit, the lovely spouse did offer to BUY challah the next day… and to my credit, I didn’t throttle him)

Answer: a large heavy-duty no-name zippered freezer bag! The zipper isn’t essential, but the heavy-duty probably IS.

This formula is based on the Blender Challah recipe I discovered a while back, but I lovingly stuck it into my ever-evolving Breadsheet (TM) so that I can scale it up or down – it even tells me, based on the quantities I’ve selected, how many loaves it will make, in this case, approximately “3 x 680g challahs, 0 x 450g challahs, and 6 x 60g rolls.”

(my default challah now is the 680g size, or, since I use a 4-braid, the 4x170g challah)

So here’s how I did it – and you can, too!

Lazy No-Bowl, No-Utensil, No-Knead, No-Fuss Blender Challah
You will need: blender or food processor with steel blade, bench scraper, large or extra-large heavy-duty freezer bag, preferably zippered, as it has to be able to take some kneading and sloshing. Also, you’ll need lots of TIME – the trade-off in bread baking, I’ve found, is that fast bread is labour-intensive, but slow-bread can be lazeee… so this is NOT a last-minute recipe. You will have to start it by Thursday evening if you want challah for Shabbos.

NOTE: cup measures are given only so you’ll know about how much it takes – they are approximate, and not meant for baking!

1. Place in the bag:

802 g flour = 6 approx cups

2. Place in the blender / food processor: (No, a food processor is NOT a utensil… but thanks for asking!)

401 g flour = 3 approx cups, for blender
711 g water = 3 approx cups, for blender

3. Turn on blender and mix until smooth. Add:

189    g sugar or honey, for blender
156    g oil, for blender
7.5    tsp salt, for blender (yes, this says tsp; for some reason I haven’t converted this to grams yet)
20    g yeast, for blender (I think this is just over 2 Tbsp; reduce or increase as desired)
150    g = 3 large eggs, for blender

4. Pour blender mixture carefully over flour into freezer bag. Seal bag and squish flour and flour-water mixture well until flour is completely damp. Set aside 10 minutes.

5. After 10 minutes, squish the bag again, moving the mixture around really well to ensure that the liquid and flour are evenly distributed.

6. I probably shouldn’t tell you to leave this sitting out overnight, because it has eggs in it. Allow to rise at your own discretion; it can be fridged after it has risen substantially, but with mine, I left it about 10 hours and it was delicious.

Here it is sitting out in the bag on Thursday night. It has just barely crossed the line between batter and dough. I love that line!

7. After the dough has risen, lightly flour a clean surface (you’ve had 10 hours to clear a surface, hopefully!) and dump the dough from the bag onto the flour. It won’t want to come out at first, but will hopefully surprise you with how cleanly it eventually pulls away.

8. Time for the Stretch n’ Fold! Grab your bench scraper – and no, it doesn’t count as a utensil; it’s just an extension of your own hand. If you haven’t done this step before, refer to my visual step-by-step instructions. Stretch the dough out and fold it once in each direction. Then, plop it back in the bag. This step strengthens the dough without adding (much) flour, so you’ll get luscious, moist challah. Leave the dough to nap for 45-60 minutes.

Here it is AFTER the first S n’ F. A well-behaved, or rather, slightly-better-behaved folded lump of still very moist dough.

9. One more Stretch n’ Fold! Stretch it out and fold once in each direction and plop back in the bag for one more 45-60 minute nap. Even WITH this stretching and folding, it will be very wet dough, but it should be well-enough behaved by now, if you’ve done these two S n’ F steps, that you’ll be able to shape the loaves after this final rest.

10. When forming challahs, oil each piece of dough lightly as you pull it off and/or weigh it out. Form challahs as you normally would, but because this dough is so light, you’ll want to work quickly and use a light touch.

Hmm… ten steps??? Sure doesn’t sound like super-easy, lazy Friday, wracked-with-pain recipe for challah success. Just trust me. Most of the steps are simple, plus, if your family only knew the sacrifices you were making for them, they’d fall at your feet and beg your forgiveness.

Mmm… kichelicious!

2012-01-14T19:30:00.001-08:00

Drat. As with almost every other erev-Shabbos baked delicacy I try out, I didn’t get a chance to take a picture when they came out of the oven; by now, of course, 26 hours later, they are ALL GONE.

I made BOW TIES!!! Also known as kichel, also known as egg kichel and also, obscurely, as “eyer kichel.” Around here, people sometimes call them “nothings,” perhaps to differentiate them from the type of pasta (which I’ve also made) which is also called bowties. The ones generally called “nothings” are sometimes baked in a square shape with no sugar on top, but there are exceptions.

They were super-easy, too, thanks to Joan Nathan’s recipe from A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking (I found the recipe, improbably, at the Calgary Public Library blog (I thought we were the only Jews in Calgary when I lived there!), but it doesn’t tell you what to do with the flour; for that, I had to use Google Books (search for Kichel or just look at Page 100).

Rolling out the super-sticky dough; you do it onto the sugar, so nothing sticks.

You can see how soft & sticky this dough is from my finger-tracks in the residue left in the bowl (above).

Finally, sprinkle the dough with sugar (you’re supposed to roll it in a little bit with the rolling pin), and slice into little rectangles. I think they’re supposed to be 2” x 3/4”, but I just eyeballed them into what size I thought they were supposed to be, and after a lifetime of kichel-eating, I was right.

The last step was twisting and loading them onto two baking pans, but I was in a hurry and stuffed them all onto a single pan, which they barely fit. Next time, I’d use two, because they kind of stuck together and weren’t able to dry out completely (I did flip them halway through baking, which helped).

My mother was the one who got me started on the kichel-baking kick this week, nostalgically trying to recreate my Bubby’s “eier-kichel” recipe (in German/Yiddish, “eier” means egg). She used the recipe with that name from Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, a new book I’ve heard nothing about. But the author, Gil Marks, refers to them as “Ashkenazic Egg Cookies,” which sounds like nothing joyous to write home about, and indeed, my mother’s turned out exactly like cookies – they had the right flavour, but none of the POOF of a proper kichel.

My Bubby made hers big and round like a giant cookie, or like a UFO, and when she baked them, they would puff up incredibly, magically… sugar-blackened (often slightly scorchy-tasting) little bellies popping off the pan with a secret cave of airy egginess in the middle. It wasn’t light or heavenly; none of her baking was that. But they had a satisfying familiarity that I would love to recreate.

A few of the obvious differences between Marks’s and Nathan’s recipes -

Marks’s egg cookies:

call for baking powder, which sounds like heresy to me (my mother said, “I didn’t have double-acting, maybe that’s why they didn’t puff up?” but I assured her that the regular stuff she uses IS double-acting, and told her that baking powder sounds like something they wouldn’t have used in the alte heim. (old country)
beat the eggs and sugar FIRST before adding the flour
calls for cinnamon “if desired”
calls for regular old all-purpose flour
adds the flour with just a cursory “stir”
are rolled out and baked right away after mixing.

Nathan’s bow tie cookies:

are very simple – eggs, oil, salt, a bit of sugar, flour
oh – but she does call for a tiny bit of vanilla; very tiny, I think 1/2 tsp for 2 1/2 cups of flour.
calls for high-gluten flour; Canadian all-purpose would probably do, but I used bread flour, just for fun (actually, I thought it would be neat to brag that I’d made the challah with all-purpose flour and the dessert with bread flour, but then realized that was too geeky a thing to brag about)
beat the eggs, oil, flour, everything together for a LONG time
are supposed to be mixed with a paddle mixer, which I can understand because the mixture is so sticky it was creeping up the beaters on my cheap mixer and would have jammed the motor if I hadn’t transferred the mixture to the food processor, where I finished it in a laborious 45 seconds that almost burnt out my motor.

Oooh, I just discovered ONE last kichel that nobody ate. This isn’t the most spectacular specimen, but it will give you some idea! The rest really did look like something you could pick up at a bakery.

From searching on Google, it seems like a lot of people associate kichel with Pesach. Believe me, that’s a horse of a totally ‘nuther colour. We don’t eat gebrocks at Pesach and don’t like matzah meal fakery at any other time of the year, so no… that’s not what I’m looking for at all.

What I’d do differently next time: bake them at leisure, let the dough sit the whole hour (I only gave it half an hour because Shabbos was coming!), use two separate pans so they have a bit of room to spread out and dry out more. Also, I want to try baking them in my Bubby’s circular “UFO” shape.

But I’m super-impressed, because, for some reason, this is something I had never even thought you COULD bake at home.

Next up: Cheesemaking!!! If the kit I ordered arrives this week (note that the rennet in that kit is kosher but I don’t know about the starters, so I ordered kosher “mesophilic starter” from the site as well; I just don’t want everybody clicking over and assuming EVERYTHING there is kosher).

Anyway, I won’t blog that here; cheese, containing no flour at all, seems to fit better on my regular blog. But if I find a way to combine homemade cheese with flour… boy, then I’ll have something to blog about here.

Test-Driving the Pyrex Bake-a-Round

2011-12-25T19:54:00.001-08:00

I have taken one giant step forward in my Ongoing Quest to create the perfect round and malty bread, which will sustain me through the winter! And I also got to test-drive the newly-toivelled Pyrex Bake-a-Round baking “pan.” (which is really just a tube in a rack)

Here’s the Bake-a-Round, all greased up (with shortening, per the instructions, NOT Pam, though I don’t know why) and ready for action.

I decided to use this British Malt Loaf Recipe, for authenticity. I figured it’s from the Flour Advisory Bureau. Even their name is FAB; how bad could the bread be? I liked the fact that most of the ingredients were scaled, and quickly switched my scale to pounds and ounces so I wouldn’t have to convert. I also appreciate its use of the word “whilst.”

(I doubled everything, because it didn’t sound like very much.)

Ingredients for Malt Loaf

(bastardizations of the original, for necessity or preference, shown ~~with strikeout~~ below)

75ml (2 1/2 fl oz) hand-hot water
~~200g (7oz) brown flour or 100g (3 1/2 oz) wholemeal flour and 100g (3 1/2 oz) strong white flour~~ – I don’t have whole wheat, so I subbed 3oz spelt, 4oz bread, then doubled these to get 6oz spelt, 8oz bread flour.
2.5ml spoon 1/2 tsp) salt
2 x 15ml spoons (2 tbsp) malt extract – YES!!! I have this!
2 x 15ml spoon (2 tbsp) ~~black treacle~~ dunno what treacle is, but I suspect it’s molasses; I used molasses.
~~25g (1oz) margarine~~ we’re out of margarine, so I used oil, but ran out halfway, so I only ended up with 1.5oz instead of 2oz of oil.
~~30g (1oz) dark soft brown sugar~~ we’re out of brown, so I used white and a bit of extra molasses
~~100g (3 1/2 oz) sultanas~~ sultanas is British for raisins; I omitted these!
~~Honey or golden syrup to glaze~~ because I baked this in the Bake a Round, I didn’t glaze it.

Yeast:
2 x 5ml spoons (2 tsp) conventional dried yeast + 5ml spoon (1 tsp) sugar
or 15g (1/2 oz) fresh yeast
or 1 x 5ml spoon (1 tsp) fast action easy blend yeast – YUP, I used regular instant yeast.

How to make Malt Loaf

Stir the dried yeast and sugar into the water and leave until frothy, or blend the fresh yeast with water, or mix the easy blend yeast with the flour.
Place the flour and salt in a bowl, add the sultanas.
Warm the malt, treacle, margarine and sugar until just melted and the sugar dissolved, and stir into the flour with the yeast liquid. (Note: if using instant yeast add to dry flour and warm the water with the malt mixture).
Mix to a soft dough.
Turn onto a floured surface and knead until no longer sticky (about four minutes), adding more flour if necessary.
Shape and place the malt loaf in a greased 500g (1lb) loaf tin. Cover the dough and leave to prove in a warm place until doubled in size - about one and a quarter hours.
Bake at 220°C, Gas Mark 7, for 30 minutes until browned and the malt loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.
Cool the Malt Loaf on a wire rack. Whilst the loaf is still hot brush the top with honey or syrup.

Actually, I just dumped the wet stuff, yeast, salt, sugar, etc., into the bucket and stirred in the flours until it was kneadable. I might warm the wet things a bit more first next time.

Makes 1 Malt Loaf

Flour Advisory Bureau
www.fabflour.co.uk

Once mixed, the dough just kind of sat there in the bucket.

After a LONG wait, I blobbed it into a ball and rolled it up, then jammed it into the tube. It was easy enough to insert, but didn’t keep its shape – the whole loaf sagged down to the bottom more than I’d expected.

Oops – forgot to cover the ends with tinfoil, so I did that after a bit.

Time for baking (still not very risen, but a bit bubbly, at least!

Popped it into a 425° oven, which turned out to be too hot for a loaf this big and sweet. After a while, it got very dark, but it still wasn’t done. After another long while, it got BLACK on the bottom, and was as done as it was going to be, so I pulled it out.

I thought getting the loaf out of the Bake A Round was going to be tricky, but it turned out the loaf wasn’t coming out because I still had the tube in the rack. Once I lifted it slightly out of the rack, the loaf pretty much slid out, with the help of a silicone splatula. (splatula = more like a bowl scraper than the pancake turning thing most people call a spatula)

Looks like a disaster, I know, but – cooled and sliced, it actually ended up tasting delicious. My mother said, “tastes like it should have raisins in it!” Thanks for that vote of confidence. Everybody thought it was very sweet indeed – probably too sweet to serve at supper alongside potato-corn soup, which I did.

Also, the loaf had a weird “split” down the centre, which you can kind of see here, probably due to the overly high baking temperature. I would bring it down next time, probably to 400 or maybe even 375, to give it time to rise and bake through without excessive browning.

It didn’t slice particularly well, and I did wait until it was only warm, not hot. The crust crumbled tremendously. I think perhaps a bit more kneading next time will give it less cakey crumbliness and more bready strength. And less sugar, because it really doesn’t need all that treacle/molasses, plus sugar, on top of the malt, unless you want a really festive or breakfasty loaf.

So, to sum up, for the future:

no added sugar
all white flour to maximize rise / gluten until the recipe is perfected
use the full amount of oil
knead more
longer rise time before forming loaf?
lower bake temperature

Nevertheless, I feel good about this recipe. I really feel like I’m on my way!

(filing this under barley because that’s what malt really is!)

New Baking Toy!

2011-12-19T23:33:00.001-08:00

Actually, this is more than a New Baking Toy – it’s Step 1 in a however-many step plan to bake the perfect Malt Bread, exactly as I remember it from childhood, or as near as makes no nevermind.

Here’s the toy…

Bought new in box on etsy for not too much money, and shipped BEAUTIFULLY packed – I’m very impressed.

The actual malt bread I’m thinking of is NOT the “malt loaf” popularly known by the name Soreen in the U.K. That looks icky; it’s full of fruits and whatnot. What I’m searching for is authentic Canadian malt bread, such as that turned out every day in the Dempster’s factory and sold without a hechsher in supermarkets very near my home.

The bread itself is sweet, but not too sweet. It has a definite malt taste, and – I’m thinking now – perhaps some molasses as well. It has a dark colour, but that could easily just be caramel colour… which I don’t have. Definitely no fruit, no puréed dates or raisins or whatever else British people think belongs in a malt loaf.

As for the Bake A Round, this cool pyrex pan creates perfectly round breads, apparently with a lovely, crisp, artisan-style (shudder) crust.

It’s a fascinating shape, although the true malt bread is more like this round, bumpy shape:

In the U.K., where – again – everybody knows about such things, this is known as “milk loaf.” And it is baked into those beautiful swirly round lines in a “milk loaf tin.” Here’s one I found on eBay – at $40, actually not all that expensive.

But for now, I’m happy with my Bake A Round. Ted’s off work tomorrow, so I hope I can go toivel it and get started baking delightful, crispy, eventually malty loaves.

(oh, just remembered – Step 1 was actually buying the malt syrup; that’s probably an important one…!)

I should be going to bed…

2011-12-19T23:23:00.001-08:00

But isn’t this a beautiful braiding pattern for a round loaf???

Definitely something to try next Rosh Hashanah!

Sharing the dough!

2011-12-18T23:12:00.001-08:00

Yay! You may remember this photo from my Rosh Hashanah sourdough Pan de Calabazas this past year.

Well, I sold my editor at the Canadian Jewish News on an article about “kosher sourdough baking” – in which I reveal the stunning truth that “kosher sourdough baking” is pretty much the same as any other sourdough baking.

Read it here.

Scottish Shortbread – so awesome, I had to blog it!!!

2011-12-18T23:07:00.001-08:00

Forgive me, I know it’s not bread, but it’s that time of year again, when I bake up a storm for the sake of in-laws far and wide – hopefully wide, once they’ve tasted my yummy bakies!

So last year’s shortbreads were GOOD, but I wanted to kick them up a notch.

And, at the recommendation of Shoshana at Couldn’t be Pareve, I invested last week in a little bottle of LorAnn’s Buttery Sweet Dough bakery emulsion.

(What a cute store, by the way; they’re on the Internet, but they’re right here in Mississauga, only about 25 minutes away when it’s not rush hour. I wouldn’t say this is the best baking store in the GTA, but I had a great time browsing when I went in to pick up my emulsions. Oh, yeah… I also bought some of this Princess Cake & Cookie bakery emulsion. Oh, and on an impulse, a bottle of this Red Velvet emulsion, which includes the deepest, darkest red food colouring you could possibly imagine, with which I baked the most wonderful pure-buttermilk Red Velvet cake and… oh, never mind; on with my tale.)

So I had the right stuff, with the emulsion, but I wanted a killer recipe to go along with it.

I know REAL shortbread has corn starch. The corn starch package used to come with this recipe, but that’s what I made last year and it lacked – oomph. Plus, in cups and I’m a scale snob, so… fuggedaboudit.

Found this maple-pecan shortbread bars recipe, thought about it for a second, then thought – nope; I’m looking for authentic.

A pretty obvious Google search yielded this Scotch Shortbread (by weight) recipe from Cooks.com. But honestly, I don’t trust that site, or any other site that doesn’t have reviews. Plus, this recipe uses regular sugar, and I really like the sandy, fine, almost melty consistency when I use icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar, to you in the U.S.A.).

At the other end of the spectrum, in terms of reliability, I found this basic shortbread recipe that was very well-reviewed at King Arthur Flour’s website. If this site was that trust exercise you’re supposed to do when you’re team-building, I would fall backwards into its arms any day.

But no corn starch! Waah! What’s a girl ~~with a craving,~~ I mean, parcels to fill, supposed to do??? Well, duh: you MERGE the recipes.

I stuck the King Arthur recipe into a spreadsheet and tweeked the Scotch recipe from Cooks.com up and tweeked the King Arthur recipe down until I had a recipe that calls for the same amount of butter as the King Arthur and the same amount of sugar and cornstarch as the Cooks.com recipe.

Betcha you’re worried I’m not going to share it with you now! But I am…

AWESOME INTERFAITH IN-LAWS SHORTBREAD (by weight)

227g butter (8oz, 2 sticks, 1 cup) – salted works well for this
113.5g confectioner's sugar (4oz, about 1 cup)
salt, a light sprinkling, if butter is unsalted
85g cornstarch (3oz, about 1 cup)
2 tsp Butter Sweet Dough emulsion (or vanilla extract, or almond, or whatever you like)
170g cake & pastry flour (= 6oz, about 2 cups)
small amount of regular granulated sugar, for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 300°F
Spray a 9” x 13” x 2” (33cm x 22.9cm x 5cm) baking pan with spray oil. (I used aluminum pans, that’s how I know exactly what size it is!)
Cream butter with sugar in a large bowl until well-mixed. If using unsalted butter, sprinkle a bit of salt on top while mixing and ensure that it’s well-blended. The King Arthur folks say, “with no liquid in the recipe, it's impossible for added salt to disperse itself fully through the shortbread dough; you end up with unpleasantly gritty bits of salt in each bite.” So be it.*
Add cornstarch and emulsion/extract and mix well.
Add flour and mix well. You should NOT need to add water, but it may take a minute or more for everything to come together. This is a very stiff, “cookie-dough” type dough.
With slightly damp hands OR plastic wrap over the top, press into prepared baking pan. My favourite way, once it’s spread out a bit in the pan, is to take another pan exactly the same size (it’s easy if you use aluminum!) and press it on top. Then, I run my fingers around the inside of the SECOND pan, ensuring that the dough is spread evenly throughout the FIRST pan. For some reason, you can feel how even it is really well through another pan. I do this trick for press-in quiche and piecrusts, too. Peel the second pan off carefully so it doesn’t stick.
Poke the pan full of cookie with a fork in pretty, even rows so it doesn’t blow up like a balloon – or something.
Bake at 300°F for 35-40 minutes. Don’t let it get brown, but you do want to make sure it’s set properly in the middle, so a degree of golden at the edges is perfect.
Remove from oven and sprinkle with granulated sugar.
Allow to cool slightly, but remember to cut it after about 10 minutes, or at least, while it’s still quite warm. If you wait too long sitting writing a blog post about how amazing it is, and the thing cools off, it will crumble when you cut it.

* I like how they describe the salt I’m throwing in as “unpleasantly gritty” but one person leaving a 5-star rating for this recipe mentions how they love to “add 1 TB chopped fresh rosemary and then sprinkle with a light dusting of sea salt before baking. I love the mix of sweet and savory.” My salt is unpleasant – hers is somehow artistic because she tosses in a few pine needles?!?

Whatever you do… remember: baker gets dibs on the less-desirable end pieces! Save the pretty middle bits for holiday gift-giving. Or, what the heck, bake up another batch for them… it’s pearls before swine, anyway!

Pass the Pita, Please!

2011-11-28T22:06:00.001-08:00

Not pita exactly, since this is basically the same way I make any flatbread. Roll it, pat it, and toast it in my wonderful cast-iron skillet. Dry – no grease or anything on the pan beyond the olive oil we apply to store the pan.

I used the basic “50% spelt” recipe from Artisan Pizza & Flatbreads in Five Minutes a Day. Not sure I love the cookbook, since there seem to be many many sauces and dips and not so many actual bread formulas, but I have it out from the library for a while longer, so I will keep exploring.

The reason I wanted spelt – other than the fact that my mother and sister picked me up a big bag of nice, fresh spelt a couple of weeks ago – is that I was preparing these “pita” for an “Egyptian feast” to tie in with our ancient history studies.

Spelt may not be Emmer and Einkorn, but it’s a bit more authentic, and it adds whole grain without weighing down the taste and texture of the bread. As far as I’m concerned, the words “delicious” and “whole grain” don’t usually belong in the same sentence… but spelt is where I (sometimes) make an exception.

If there’s one thing my current challah technique has gotten me REALLY good at, it’s rolling out millions of little circles.

Here, I stretched one out on my special suede flatbread pillow (anyone know what this thing is called???):

Only to realize that the skillet was smaller than the pillow diameter. Doh!

Puff! So beautiful…

Ted suggested, because we always run out, that I should make 16, instead of 12 like I usually do. Here they are!

(For the first time ever, we had leftovers…)

Mmmm…. the falafel themselves were from a mix, by the way. Delicious, easy; I have made them from scratch, but the mix is just as good, and foolproof.

For more about the feast, including the special “ancient” Egyptian dessert that Naomi helped me make, click here.

Six Word Saturday: 1 Cheshvan, 5772

2011-10-29T20:24:00.001-07:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Hate to brag – but delicious challah!

Only my second time succeeding with Maggie Glezer’s “My Sourdough Challah”… but BOY did it turn out well! Hate to brag, but this was delicious challah – and beautiful.

I still have no idea why my sourdough challahs were losing their braids last year. But now, they are totally fine.

I even got to pass along some starter to a friend – along with the lower middle challah (a 1-lb’er; I had to keep the two big ones and the “baby” for our own Shabbos)!

Why, oh, why???

2011-10-26T21:12:00.001-07:00

Is it October and the fruit flies are still #$^! everywhere???

Luckily, I have a tent!

Here, it’s sheltering two sourdough breads I made yesterday – one for our family, one for a friend who had a baby. (I sent the bread with a lasagna… one cannot live on bread alone!)

I used Peter Reinhart’s basic Pain au Levain from p. 61 of Artisan Breads Every Day. Indeed, it turned out so well, crusty outside, tender and moist with HUGE openings inside, that we could DEFINITELY eat bread like this every day.

I had almost forgotten.

I don’t own this book, despite drooling over it countless times from the library, so I used my becoming-standard trick of perusing the book using Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. I took a quick screenshot of the recipe so I wouldn’t have to print it out.

And, of course, I used my amazing Sourdough Spreadsheet again.

It was helpful, because the recipe called for 458g of 60% starter, and I only had 352g, so it told me exactly how much extra flour and water I needed to add to the recipe to compensate. I wish the spreadsheet were easier to work with, and then I would definitely make it available…

But it really isn’t, and because I’m usually in a hurry when I’m tossing new recipes into it, I probably won’t develop it into a real Thing. So there it is, rough edges and all.

And the bread was delicious! I only have one dutch oven, so I baked my friend’s in there (I use the instructions from Artisan Bread in Five, which work out perfectly every time) and ours on my regular double-thick cookie sheet… now that I have no baking stone.

Waah. No baking stone!? One got broken, one got fleishiked (meatball fat dripped down onto it)… well, there it is. And still – the bread was delicious.

Whole lotta Sourdough Pumpkin Challah / Pan de Calabaza

2011-10-24T14:50:00.001-07:00

Nothing goes together at Sukkos time like fresh-picked PUMPKIN and challah dough!

We didn’t actually pick the pumpkins ourselves, but did pick them UP (and pick them OUT) at the place we went for apple picking. So it’s sort of the same thing…

I have vowed never to peel another raw squash again, because it’s so blissfully EASY to just cut them in half, pop them in an oiled pan face-down, and roast them at 300° until it’s soft enough to poke. You can actually roast them at almost any temperature. 400° works just as well but quicker… but just look what this Australian baking blog says about LOWER temperatures:

We roast the pumpkin in our wood-fired oven at a low heat (50C to 100C) for 24 - 36 hours. At the low temperatures the pumpkin malts, which firms and helps keep the pumpkin from falling apart in the dough.

Yummy! (one of the kids said they thought the pumpkin would MUMMIFY in the heat, which it sort of sounds like it does… “malting” being another word for the mummification process)

Anyway, with my sourdough being up and about for the first time since January (gasp!), I decided to risk everything and toss that amazing fresh-roasted pumpkin into a sourdough challah. I used Maggie Glezer’s Pan de Calabazas recipe from A Blessing of Bread, but I substituted 180g of my firm starter for all the yeast and some of the flour and water – using my sourdough spreadsheet to do all those tricky calculations, of course!

Here we go, step by step…

The night before, mixing it all together. Forgot to slurry it like she does in the recipe, but it all seemed to come together okay anyway, once I had compensated for a criminally evil version of the recipe that I found online (the book went missing) which listed the wrong quantity of flour… and I was so tired that I didn’t realize and thought 7 oz might just equal 3.5 cups. (nope!)

Anyway, it worked out fine once we found the recipe (thanks Amazon Look Inside - p. 178 in case you’re peeking!) and got the right quantity of flour from there… at which point, Ted came upstairs with the actual book, which he’d found stuffed backwards onto a basement bookshelf.

So here’s the dough:

(whoops – forgot the egg… but it only calls for one, and I don’t like eggy challah, so I wasn’t all that worried)

Fast-forward to mid-day the next day (erev Yom Tov), when I rolled it out. I wanted to make the sourdough Calabaza loaves look special both so I could tell them apart and because – hey, they really ARE special.

Braid the super-long snakes into a super-long braid.

And coil up the braids to make a round challah!

I also made three “plain” pumpkin challahs. I used the rest of the fresh-roasted pumpkin, but stuck it into my regular Reliable Challah recipe. Sadly, I also cut back on the sugar in that recipe, thinking the pumpkin would make it sweet – it kind of didn’t.

I made the “plain” loaves into regular snail challahs:

All the challahs were smaller than I like to make them, which is a nice even 675g (1.5lb). I knew I needed six loaves for all the meals that were coming, and couldn’t whip up another batch of challah at the last minutes.

I seem to recall that the braided round sourdough loaves were around 610g, and the regular ones were even smaller – maybe 575g? TOO small –almost everybody passing through over yom tov commented that they would have liked more challah. Blah… I hate when that happens.

I baked the regular, yeast-risen challahs first and then, perhaps an hour later, baked the sourdough. They really rose very quickly and had just exactly the right amount of puffiness.

The flavour was nice: not noticeably sourdough, but I was NOT disappointed. We stuck the ones for Shabbos into the freezer, so I couldn’t check the keeping power of the sourdough vs the regular over their 3-day lifetime. Every scrap of challah was gone by the time we made havdalah.

Oh - for once in my life, I actually managed to take a picture of the finished challahs before yom tov started! You can see that I painted the sourdough challahs with extra egg – they were super-glossy. Elisheva and Naomi begged me not to streusel the challahs – Naomi because she doesn’t like streusel and Elisheva, apparently, because it obscures the beauty of the challah… or maybe she just doesn’t like it. I was in a hurry, so for once, I listened to them.

On the right in the picture, you can see two more of the yom tov desserts – S’mores Cookie Bars and Almond Biscotti (aka Mandelbroit).

Mmm again… this was GOOD eatin’!

Apple Galette for the Last Days of Sukkos

2011-10-24T14:27:00.001-07:00

I love the IDEA of galette, though I still couldn’t overcome my distrust of fruit desserts enough to actually TASTE this one. But still, I made it and it turned out great – if I say so myself – with delicious Spy apples that Ted picked himself and set aside specifically for this purpose.

I like galette because it’s freeform and forgiving; I have never attempted the fancy two-crust pies my mother makes, or even Ted’s, which apparently taste fantastic but are slightly more homemade-looking. It’s not that I couldn’t do it – I believe I could. I just lack the patience.

No recipe for this one – a basic Crisco (gasp!) single pie crust, with some leftover graham crackers sprinkled on it. I peeled and sliced WAY too many apples, and tossed them with a bit of sugar (a compromise; Ted likes almost none and most of us here like a ton) and lots of cinnamon and left them to sit in a bowl while the crust dough chilled. Rolled it out, added the apples, sprinkled with more graham crackers, then folded the crust dough over and….

NO, it did NOT burn!!! The camera did that, I swear. Okay, some of the sugar on top sprinkled all around and got – um – overly brown. But I promise, it was not burnt looking in person!

Interviewing Ted, who was looking over my shoulder as I typed this: “how was the galette?”

Ted: “It was very yum, for sure, very yummy… crust was slightly dry. It wasn’t very moist. I would have made it thicker so it wouldn’t cook so much and dry out.”

So there you have it! “Not cook so much” should not be taken to imply that it was BURNT. Really! I’m just sitting here puzzling over how to reconcile the idea of a pie crust with the idea of MOISTness… maybe that’s why I don’t eat pie. Too many contradictions!

A Large-ish Quantity of Dough

2011-10-15T22:04:00.001-07:00

Besides a bunch of Auntie Sally’s challah which I whipped up before Rosh Hashanah and still had in the freezer, this is the main “overnight sponge challah” I’ve been playing around with this yom tov season.

Because the base recipe doesn’t make very much, I thought I’d quadruple it for the first days of Sukkos, when we were expecting lots of guests. With the help of my trusty sourdough spreadsheet (which works even with NO sourdough, just by filling in “0g” of starter), here’s what I came up with for the sponge:

1620 g flour (mix of ap and bread)

1960 g water

200 g sugar

220 g oil

4 tbsp salt

4 tsp yeast

Here’s the wet stuff going into the bucket first. With its happy new batteries, my scale held it all, even though officially it only holds up to 2kg. I was so happy I’d finally gotten around to marking the bucket weight on the side, just in case. That way, if the scale goes out (or goes to sleep) while I’m measuring, I can weigh the thing, then subtract the bucket weight with a calculator.

(on previous occasions, prior to labelling the bucket, the process had involved screaming, then estimating based on the last number I’d glimpsed on the screen)

Now, in goes all the dry stuff. I mix the flours together carefully, so I don’t have patches of one or the other – even if they’re similar, like all-purpose and bread.

Not too many kneads later, the sponge:

And now it sits and rises overnight:

In the morning – easy! No math! Just mix in flour until you have a workable, soft dough. Ted took this picture of me doing it a couple of weeks ago. YES, I do it by hand. It’s gloppy at first, but you know you’re nearly done when your hand comes out cleaner and cleaner and cleaner…

Finally, the whole blob comes out onto the table for some real kneading, about 10 minutes’ worth, depending on the size.

And then it rests in the bucket again – or buckets, as the case may be… this one used the bucket and a big bowl, and both opened themselves up after a couple of hours.

Take the thing out and fold it gently once or twice while it’s rising, if you’re so inclined. (I was.)

Here’s the finished dough. Waah! Too much! But actually, it would turn out to be not enough; I was grateful for those “extra” two challahs in the freezer, because we used both of them up with all our guests over yom tov.

Divided it up into my standard 675-gram portions. I had enough to make 8 p0rtions and a very generous 9th which I left in the bucket. Fried in a cast-iron pan, the leftovers became 12 nice-sized “naan” flatbreads for our second day’s lunch.

Oh, also I made a bracha and separated a piece of challah. I usually do it without a bracha, but for this quantity of flour, there was no doubt it needed one.

As usual, I rolled the blobs flat first, then rolled them up into these fat “grub” shapes. (kind of like an open-ended bâtard, in classic French baking) This is a Maggie Glezer technique that I think is supposed to make the dough “stronger.” Dunno… but I like to do it before I roll them out, so I do.

Roll each grub out to the length of the table. I’m sure this is the REAL reason we have the custom of eating round challahs at this time of year – can you imagine braiding challahs for so many days of yom tov??? Round is easy!

(and for some reason, people are JUST as impressed by a super- easy snail challah as they are with a fancy braid – go figure)

(like how everything on the table, mayonnaise, colouring supplies, spray oil, tinfoil pans, lapbook, etc., has been shoved to the other side to make room for the snake…?)

This year, I have learned that the secret to good round challahs is: hold the loose end and wrap it around!!! If you hold the centre and twist it around, though it may be easier, the challah will get too “high” and bunchy, like a turban, instead of a nice flat snail-shape. Hard to describe, but if yours are coming out too high, try holding the other end as you wrap.

And here they are – if not perfect, very, very yummy indeed. And true to form, not a single picture of a finished challah. They were finished literally the minute before yom tov started. And now they’re gone… so no pictures!

On Baking Challah

2011-10-15T21:53:00.001-07:00

Someone asked over Yom Tov how long I’ve been making challah. I thought it was a weird question, but the consensus is that it’s a perfectly FINE question and I’m just overly sensitive.

To me, I guess it sounds like “how long have you been breathing?” Like – obvious.

But it’s true: there WAS a time I didn’t make challah. Before Elisheva was born, for sure I didn’t. I hade made some truly bad breads, inspired by the “healthy-over-flavourful” aesthetic of Diet for a Small Planet: breads with extra milk powder, extra whole wheat, extra dry, extra hard, extra… hmm. Awful bread.

Around about when Elisheva came along, when I was living in Calgary, it wasn’t so easy to get fresh challah every single week (though, to be fair, there was a kosher bakery there in those days), so we would buy ready-made bread dough. But I think, sometimes, I would make some from scratch, too. (maybe in my food processor? or maybe that came later, with the Cuisinart…)

Certainly, I noticed early on that people were very IMPRESSED with homemade bread. Including me: even if it didn’t taste perfect, it was a darn sight better than day-old or even some bakery-fresh challah.

When I moved back to Toronto, single with two babies, I started making challah sometimes. Not always; it was very easy to buy it, and I was very, very busy. But even in a very busy life – especially in a very busy life – I realized I liked bringing in Shabbos with challah I had made myself.

When I stopped working, before Naomi was born, almost 7 years ago, I must have decided to make challah every week if I could. Because I feel like it’s been almost non-stop since then. Perfecting my basic “reliable challah” recipe, and then – more recently – branching out and inventing variations, or, in a slump, trying out something completely different.

It’s been fun. It’s been eye-opening.

Here’s what I realized, as we were talking about it in the sukkah last night:

I am MORE LIKELY to make my own challah in weeks that have been difficult, even impossible: like two days after Pesach, or after childbirth, hobbling around on a broken ankle, or stranded away from civilization up at the cottage. (when I was still in a cast with a broken ankle!)

When life is crazy, making challah grounds me. The strands surround me. If religion truly means “re-ligare”, or binding back*, if breads of various cultures have long been used to represent swaddles and papooses, then challah is the swaddling-cloth that wraps me up, holds me in, keeps me safe.

I wrap it, soft and pliable, unpredictable, twist it, form it around myself and my life, whatever my life happens to be that w eek. And then it bakes, golden-brown and solid; knowable – eternal, if I were to shellac it as artisans do with their most elaborate specimens.

These are not breads so much as they are memories; the days and weeks of my life, passing, immortalized, in my family’s belly.

I didn’t say all that at the yom tov table. I think I just shrugged and said “I don’t know.” But now, at least, I do know – and the answer, to me, was fascinating.

* (there is controversy over this translation, but this is how it’s rendered by Ari L. Goldman in The Search for God at Harvard, among other sources)

p.s. None of the breads pictured here are challah. From top, they are: cougnou, vanocka and hefezopf. But you know what they say: “a challah by any other name…”

Shanah Tovah!

2011-09-28T14:35:00.001-07:00

A wonderful, wonderful year to everybody reading this and even those who are not!

May all of our braids go ‘round and ‘round

Coiled tightly

in the snails of our lives!

More New Years’ Dough!

Two kinds of challah this year: 4-600g loaves of Super Wonder Challah (double recipe) and 3-675g loaves of Auntie Sally’s Challah.

Here, I’m mixing flour into the gloppy sponge for the Super Wonder challah last night before it had a chance to rise.

What did the sponge look like? Happy you asked!

Most spongy indeed.

And then this morning: Oy, vey!

It actually popped the bucket open in the fridge, and a bit of it was dried out, but I tucked it back in and it moistened up again just fine. By the way, you can’t quite see in this picture, but the bucket was so swollen it wouldn’t sit flat on the table – it was wobbling like a weeble.

Dark = Auntie Sally’s

Light = Super Wonder

May it be a good, sweet year of dough, dough, dough!!!

Nice to come home to!

2011-09-26T22:08:00.001-07:00

Mmm…. my baker sister was coming up today to babysit the kids and she said (half-joking?) that if I had some sourdough awake, she could make something with it.

Well, I didn’t, but I happened to have a bucket of no-knead dough left over from last Thursday… and I came home to these yummy handmade fougasse PLUS a pan of apple-and-cinnamon buns!

Mmm… now THERE’s a talent!

And now you can even Follow her on TWITTER!!!

Let Them Eat Cake

2011-09-07T20:32:00.001-07:00

“Specifically, let them eat a wormy-looking channel straight into the heart of the cake so as to avoid eating anything that has come in contact with the edges of the pan. And then claim it is because they wanted to give Mommy the ‘moistest piece.’”

No cake, however mediocre, should have to suffer and die this way.

You’ve heard of cottage CHEESE…

2011-08-21T19:17:00.001-07:00

Well, we’re back from the cottage, and here we are, making homemade “cottage challah” last Friday!

Eyeballing a very basic, thicker-than-usual dough on Thursday night…

Kneading in an impromptu “dough bowl”…

Then, hauling it out for the kids on Friday afternoon!

Mine looked gorgeous! I’m not used to working with such a firm dough…

We gave the kids raisin packets and I told them they could eat as many as they wanted and use the rest for their challahs. Naomi painstakingly poked each one in to “hide” it in her dough.

What beautiful challahs!

And once again, I forgot to take pictures of the finished product! They were a little drier than usual, and not as sweet as I like them, but they were warm and fresh, and THAT is a lovely thing in itself, in the midst of a crazy-busy cottage week.

Vegan Focaccia / Pletzl Night…

2011-07-06T22:40:00.001-07:00

The only difference between these two flatbreads is that I used lots of olive oil on the “focaccia” one, along with tomatoes and lightly-fried zucchini; the pletzl was made with milder canola oil, along with caramelized onions and poppy.

Baked 10 minutes at 500 degrees, they were both amazingly good!

Not as exciting as it sounds

2011-06-17T15:05:00.001-07:00

I came across a recipe for Blender Challah yesterday and the name just DREW me in. A blender! For challah! It just sounded so cool!

It’s not quite as exciting as it sounds. You use the blender for maybe 20 seconds at the beginning. Basically, you make a slurry with all the ingredients, plus 1/3 of the flour, in a blender (I used my Cuisinart food processor) then stir the slurry into a bowl of dry flour.

This is almost what I do with no-knead doughs, except I use my Danish Dough Whisk, so the slurry doesn’t get as well-mixed, I suppose. And I don’t pre-mix some of the flour – just dump it in all at once.

So I guess this recipe gives you a well-mixed base, probably better mixed than the no-knead, and ultimately a not-overmixed, probably cakey-type dough.

It appealed to me in part because we’re having a Rock-Bottom Shabbos where there is no grocery money so I have to make a smaller batch than usual. Blender Challah calls for only 3 cups of flour – about half the size of some of my recipes. But I was totally hoping you could do the whole thing in a blender.

It looks tiny in the bowl (picture above) and very lumpy and weird, but smoothed out and grew prodigiously and actually made two very decent-sized loaves. After 1.5 hours, the dough was silky-smooth and, with a bit of oil, fairly easy to handle. I left it on the table rolled out for a few minutes when I was called away at one point, and it loosened up considerably – it was quite saggy by the time I got back.

Then I got involved in a bunch of other stuff and almost let it overrise… but as it was, I think it was just about perfect.

Elisheva requested extra egginess on top, so I egged it very heavily and then used poppy seeds because they’re my favourite.

I will report back after Shabbos on how these tasted!

Barley Semolina Bread

2011-06-13T19:45:00.001-07:00

Recipe here if you’re curious, but truthfully, this wasn’t an outstanding bread… possibly because (mea culpa) my barley flour had actually expired. That may explain the slight bitter taste that only I could detect, though that may just be an effect of barley in general.

What WAS nice was having my hands in a lump of dough again. This dough was beautiful to work with; silky-smooth and damp, but not too damp. The recipe made two beautiful bâtards, just enough for the family plus a bit left over.

Served with a nondescript soup, this was not my best bread meal ever… but definitely not the worst, by far.

Slashed deeply, I thought, but not deeply enough…

… to really open up during baking or…

… to prevent a wee bit of a blowout out the side.

Sliced beautifully, though!

And it was quite nice with a bit of butter. But then, what isn’t?

So why is it that warm weather seemingly gives me this compulsion to work with BREAD? Shouldn’t I be at it more in the wintertime, when we’re allowed to lounge around indoors heating up the place and eating carby survival things???bar

Naomi bakes Neapolitan Cake

2011-06-09T23:59:00.001-07:00

More pics from erev Shavuos… making my grandmother’s Neapolitan Cake. She was not impressed to be the fourth generation making this cake, but I was.

Pressing the cookie dough into the pans. This would probably make AMAZING cookies, by the way. Just regular cookies. Check out the recipe – it goes together SO quickly and easily!

She also helped mix the pudding, but I didn’t get a picture of that step. Here, she’s dumping toasted almond slices haphazardly on top until I stopped her and told her to spread them out a little more…

Delicious!

How it turned out!

2011-06-09T23:57:00.001-07:00

Here it is… the Buttermilk-Parmesan Herb Bread from Shavuos!

Shaped and resting …

Risen nicely – thanks to the scorching hot day…

Baked and delicious!

With all that milk and cheese, the crust was much softer than I usually like, but the bread makes up for it (yes, there are still leftovers) by being extremely flavourful and tender. Mmm, indeed!

Mmm….

2011-06-07T09:37:00.001-07:00

All-dairy Shavuos means

Buttermilk-Parmesan Herb Bread!!!

(adapted from Artisan Bread in Five, of course!)

The herbs above are golden oregano, sage, thyme and (hard to see) chives. The chives made a huge mess when I tried to purée them in the small chopper. I really should have just chopped them by hand… :-(

Anyway, here’s the basic formula I’m using:

Herbs, above, puréed with a bit of oil

1755g (13 cups) a.p. flour

1 1/2 tablespoons yeast

1 1/2 tablespoons salt

1 1/2 tablespoons sugar

2 cups lukewarm water

2 cups buttermilk (subbed 2 cups milk w/2 Tbsp vinegar added, let rest 5 minutes)

1 cup parmesan cheese

Mix, rest, shape, bake.

Brekkies!

2011-05-24T07:58:00.001-07:00

Probably my most impromptu bread ever, partly because we were all out of flour.

You can’t see the nice yellowy tint of the bread, but it really is lovely.

This was actually the basic Artisan Bread in Five formula, doubled, which I made for pizza crusts last night. I was going to substitute an equal volume of semolina to make up two cups. But when the flour gave out, I added more than I had first intended to – there was EXACTLY enough to make the dough!

I also added 4 tbsp sugar and about 1/4 cup of olive oil total, reducing the amount of water accordingly. Oh, and I reduced the yeast to 2 Tbsp (that probably doesn’t sound “reduced” but if you double it properly, you use 3 Tbsp, which I couldn’t conscience). It was a bit slow to start rising, but eventually doubled nicely in about 3 hours.

The pizzas were very nice, though with the oil, and probably too much sauce, the crusts were a bit soft. After rising for about 10 hours yesterday, then refrigeration overnight, this was a VERY sloppy dough this morning when I went to make breakfast baguettes.

I’m very proud to say that I have fully overcome my fear of wet doughs and I persisted with this one, sprinkling with flour, turning and turning, until it developed some semblance of structure. The one I sliced was a better baguette than the other, which ended up going a bit flat, ciabatta-style. Probably still tasty, but it was the first one I made and I think I could have gone a few more rounds of tucking in to firm it up. It was also brutally hard to transfer to the pan; the second one was firmer and therefore easier.

And here it is! Wow, see how lovely and airy it looks…?

Mmm… forgot to take a picture with the butter on it, so you’ll have to visualize it. I wish my camera didn’t take such “blue” looking pictures. Or maybe it’s my monitor and the pictures look just fine. Hope so!!!

Oh, wow – yummy! Pretzel Dogs!

2011-05-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Tiffany at FrugalGourmetMom, I swiped this fantastic recipe for Pretzel Dogs that were a huge hit at tonight’s supper table. Yes, it’s a bit of a spin on the “bun-baked burgers” that we already love. But there’s a crunchy pretzel outside that is completely new and interesting.

I used Tiffany’s recipe almost exactly, except I didn’t know how much yeast was in a packet (I used 1 tbsp plus 1 tsp), I upped the sugar JUST A BIT, and I used a few tbsp of oil instead of the margarine she recommends (for that small a quantity, I doubt it makes a difference in flavour or texture).

Here’s the dough, in a bowl that really WAS clean, but there was some type of colourful oily residue in the bottom.

Rolled out into 12 strips. Tiffany says 18”, but I couldn’t be bothered measuring. See the hot dog eagerly awaiting its enrobing?

With the 12 strips, I wrapped up 12 hot dogs – 5 big knackers, 7 regular beef dogs. Whoops! Forgot to take a picture! Went out for my signing class and left Ted to follow up.

And now… here they are, all boiled, then baked up and delicious! (I was reheating them in this tinfoil pan for my supper)

Yummy!!!

Homemade Pesach Macaroons: The BEST, for less!

2011-04-17T15:14:00.001-07:00

Way less money than they cost in the store, PLUS you can whip these up in less time than it takes to run to the store!!! (no whipping required)

(in our local Pesach bakery, two dozen macaroons will run you about $9-12, if you’re LUCKY… these homemade ones taste fresher and cost well under $5)

Homemade Pesach Coconut Macaroons

(adapted from Bonnie Stern’s Passover Almond Haystacks)

Ingredients:

4 egg whites
1 cup sugar (include a bit of vanillin sugar, if desired)
275g (about 2 1/2 cups?) bag or container of finely-grated coconut – original calls for 3 cups of slivered almonds
optional: 1 bag Pesach chocolate chips

How to do it:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Stir egg whites together with sugar until evenly mixed. Do not beat or whip! I don’t know if anything bad happens if you try, but you really don’t have to!
Stir in coconut until evenly mixed.
Drop walnut-sized teaspoonfuls of mixture onto parchment paper. They don’t spread much, so you can drop them fairly close together.
Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or until golden brown. If not golden at 15 minutes, bake 5 minutes longer and check again. When golden brown, turn off oven and leave cookies inside; they will be gooey at first, but “firm up” as they cool.
Optional coating step: melt chocolate chips over very low flame (hint: turn off the heat before they’re all melted and let the warmth melt the remaining chips). Dip fully cooled macaroons halfway into chocolate. Keep refrigerated unless you know how to temper chocolate, which I don’t. (tempering chocolate aligns the crystals so that it turns nice and crisp, like a professional chocolate-bar texture, after it’s been melted)

Happy Week-without-bread, everybody!!!

Apple Pizza

2011-04-04T19:25:00.001-07:00

Inspired by Stephanies Kitchen’s approach to the Daring Bakers Pizza Challenge, I …. whoops! Forgot to post this for a million years and didn’t find it until I was cleaning out my “Drafts” folder tonight.

Anyway, I did make this for yom tov (Rosh Hashanah 5770; maybe because of the apples?) a couple of years ago and am mostly posting it as a cautionary tale. It looked delightful, but it was not a homemade crust (I think) and was not actually a very delightful experience to eat. Ted likes his fruit desserts more fruity and less sugary, and I like mine more sugary and less fruity, so neither of us ate it.

Live and learn, I guess… not a total disaster, but I never have made it since.

Six Word Saturday: 28 Adar II, 5771

2011-04-02T21:29:00.001-07:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Easiest Pecan Pie in the World!!!

The recipe I use is Janis Dohmann’s Pecan Pie, from the Dohmann Pecan Farms website. I guess they know pecans, but they most definitely know pie. (though they do warn you that if you use anything other than Texas native pecans, “don't complain to us if you aren't happy with the way your pie turns out.” I have no clue of the provenance of my pecans, but have never had occasion to complain about this pie.

It’s pareve, but it’s my favourite kind of pareve… the kind where you don’t have to substitute or leave anything out to get the taste of the real thing.

See how tattered the recipe has gotten? And this is just one copy; I have several floating around…

The one thing I sometimes do to “doctor” this pie, though I forgot this week, is to add a bit of rum while adding or instead of the vanilla. Shhh… what they don’t know they’re eating won’t hurt ‘em. (ok, except my mother-in-law who’s allergic to alcohol!!)

Look how fast it goes together!

First, rescue an old pie pan and cut out a circle to make a pie-crust protector. Save it from time to time to reuse and you can save yourself this step!

Sprinkle a frozen crust with the good stuff: one of the small packets of half-pecans they sell in the baking aisle, plus about half a cup of chocolate chips.

There is NOTHING like my Danish Dough Whisk to pull together all the ingredients super, super-fast. Just throw it all in a bowl together and whisk, and whisk until it’s all one mixture.

Tip: set the pie on a baking sheet before you do the next step! Easier to get it into the oven, protection in case it spills, and you can pull it OUT of the oven without sticking your big ugly thumbs into the pie.

Now pour the liquidy stuff over the crust and all its contents, burying them completely.

Apply the pie protector.

Bake at 375 for 20 minutes. Remove pie protector.

Bake at 375 for ANOTHER 20-30 minutes JUST until the pie is set in the middle.

By SET, I mean it has a skin on the middle that isn’t liquid. I don’t mean that it’s completely SOLIDIFIED. When the pie is done, it will still look like it’s sloshing around a bit. That’s okay!!! Don’t overbake it! As long as the top has a complete skin, the rest of the pie will firm up enough once it’s in the fridge.

Taking it out when it is still jiggly means the pie will be slightly gooey in the centre, even after it’s set. Everybody around here loves the gooey part best.

If you have time, whip up some real cream or, as we call the pareve stuff, “whippie crème,” to dollop on top. I had time this week – yum!

Homeschool Matzah Bakery – Lessons Learned

2011-03-31T20:02:00.001-07:00

Today’s homeschool matzah baking was slightly less successful than next year’s. More chaotic and fun, though, because friends came over!

It’s always cool to do matzah ahead of time, because Pesach is basically the one festival that I don’t do any challah-baking for. So it feels nice to be able to do something bready, albeit not specifically for the holiday.

Our “matzahs” aren’t kosher for Pesach, of course, but I strive for realism by setting an 18-minute timer just before the water is added to the flour. Last year, I think I got three batches finished and out of the oven by the time the timer went off – though not all of it. This year, there was one batch, and even that was not really properly baked.

Still – they were delicious (if a little hard on the teeth!) for lunch with cream cheese – or mine with just butter and salt. And a few lessons learned for next time / next year:

Use the food processor. I did it that way last year; VERY fast to mix!

Make thinner matzahs. Last year, I did it to the “6” position on the pasta maker… this year, I only did 5. That was partly because the dough was too wet; therefore…

Drier dough. I let the kiddies knead it by hand, which I thought would be more educational than the food processor. The drawback is that to get it kneadable by hand, it had to be wetter. That’s great for bread, not so great for the pasta roller. Today’s dough would not have rolled out thinner than a “5” without getting hopelessly sticky (ask me how I know!). And thin matzah is important because it leads to…

Crispy matzah! Some of this year’s were too thick and therefore, still floppy when we had to pull them out – they were on the verge of being burnt. Thinner matzah = crispier matzah, possibly also with the addition of…

More heat! This year, as it was last year, the oven was at 500 degrees; I may try 550 in future to try for that superfast superhot bake that “real” matzahs receive.

Meanwhile, it’s time again to check out this cool, puppet- and Torah-filled documentary about how matzah is made. 2000 degrees: amazing! Oh, and here’s another post from last year’s homeschool matzah bake!

Purim Onion-Poppy Ring

2011-03-20T20:46:00.001-07:00

Onion and poppy – how do I love thee! Let me count the Jewy ways to your Jewish Jewy goodness. Whether it’s on a pletzl or a bagel or here, there is something utterly old-world and PERFECT about the combination. Whereas lemon-poppy strikes me as innately goyish. Strange!

I already did a step-by-step for this recipe last year, but what the heck… Maggie Glezer lists this as a “beginner” bread in her Blessings of Bread book, but I really don’t think so. In terms of the dough, it’s simple; in terms of technique – hardly. So here we go!

Two ballies… basic “Czernowitzer Challah” recipe from the book.

Become two snakes…

Become roadkill.

I used purple onions this year, and judging from the pics, they’re not as finely diced as last year. Or perhaps last year, I fried them… I dunno. I did use butter last year and for whatever reason, I opted for oil this year. I wouldn’t say the loaf suffered at all from being pareve instead of dairy.

Shmear half on each roadkill snake.

Roll and pinch them up into snakes again.

Cross the snakes in the middle and get ready to wrap and roll!

Let’s do the TWIST…

And now twist the other end… it’s getting a bit messy where filling has started to goober out the end.

Pinch the messy ends together and try to make it look slightly elegant. Fail.

Aaaagh! Using all of your seven hands, transfer the soft, floppy, falling-aparty wreath shape to the baking pan to rise and cover well.

Fully risen, time to shmear with egg wash.

Sprinkle with poppy to disguise how messy the loaf looks.

And bake to perfection!!! Notice it’s come open in a few places. Once again, nobody complained.

Mmmm… realize it might be helpful to see the inside before it’s all gone and take a quick shot before digging in.

Another delicious, simple Purim seudah made complete with delicious bread.

Six Word Saturday: 14 Adar II, 5771 - PURIM Edition!!!

2011-03-19T23:00:00.001-07:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Baking a Purim storm around here!!!

(blah… the cherry ones all popped open… so none going out in the packages this year)

Hamentaschen Baking Day with Sara

2011-03-16T19:46:00.001-07:00

Two recipes – my classic Second Helpings, Please (Hamentashen Cookie Dough, p. 199) recipe, and Mommzy’s fascinating and EASY Cake-mix Hamentashen.

Here is Sara’s magical spoon-shaped hamentash, along with several of her less-creative triangle-shaped hamentash:

The spoon-entash poofed up a bit so it doesn’t look quite as cute fully-grown, but it was still (I think) delicious.

These ones have cherry filling.

My cake-mix cherry hamentashen turned out fatter than Sara’s… she has lavash on the brain and rolled them thinner than we were supposed to, which was fine because hers looked professional and mine looked, as usual, kinda goofy.

Then, I set her to work making some prune ones. I’m sure I was doing something really urgent at the time that prevented me from making hamentashen – maybe like taking pictures?

Anyway, Sara, if you’re reading this, they turned out delicious…

… not that my family will eat a single prune hamentash. Oy, vey.

Anyway, I think they’re delicious!

Six Word Saturday: 8 Adar 2, 5771

2011-03-12T22:06:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out! And by the way – OMG, the real Adar is almost upon us! If you know or care what that is…

Ending Shabbos… by preparing for Shabbos!

(getting next week’s candles ready; I’ve started doing this BEFORE I put the candle holders away for the week and I love it!!!)

Six Word… umm… Saturday: 30 Adar 1, 5771

2011-03-06T10:44:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Moment of infamy, shouted at the Shabbos table:

“The challah has a bite missing!”

Which would be fine or, if not fine, the end of it if said child had not chosen to clarify for the guests: “a mouse must have eaten it.”

Yup, our rodent guests are still with us, and probably multiplying by the week. It is no longer safe to leave ANY food out, especially in plastic bags. And the trap-kill-poison campaign has wound down; the baited traps that worked well at first are no longer effective at all. It must mean they’re getting too much food elsewhere to care about what’s in the traps… but how?? It’s all locked up now, I’m certain of it.

Argh. So unjust. So frustrating. And, in this case, so humiliating.

OMG – TWO special birthday desserts???

2011-03-01T19:33:00.001-08:00

Today’s my sister’s big 30th birthday, but we celebrated on Sunday. In lieu of CAKE (so cliché!), I made two desserts:

Tiramisu (recipe here)

and

Chocolate molten cakes (recipe here)

The tiramisu was perfect – we’ve made it many times before. She asked if it was “real” tiramisu; apparently, she’s had the “not real” (surreal? unreal?) kind before. This is as real as I can get it; there are now several brands of kosher mascarpone available. That’s the special cheese you need to make the creamy layers. Kosher lady fingers have been around forever.

As for the molten cakes, they were a bit TOO molten. The recipe says to keep them in the fridge and then bake them (at 450) for 6 (?) minutes before serving. I baked them exactly as long as it says to, plus an extra couple of minutes, plus a couple of minutes to firm up in the individual dishes, and they were still soggy. Soggy but amazingly DELICOUS, like the best, gooiest brownies in the universe! I just think I’d bake them 12-14 minutes next time to get them a little more firm around the edges so they could stand up on their own on a plate.

So many Jewish food, baking and cooking blogs are all about the pareve, but sometimes, you really NEED a dairy dessert.

Thankfully, Abigail requested my mother’s special “filo pizza,” so there you go; a dairy birthday meal, with a perfect dairy finale. As for the filo pizza, I don’t really love it. She makes it at Shavuos, and it’s okay surrounded by a bunch of other stuff. As a main course, it’s TOO. If you know what I mean.

Oh – just to push the whole thing over the top, we ALSO served ice cream on the side. Because we have ice cream at every birthday. The one time I tried doing something a little different for one of my sisters, she sulked the whole evening, so even if we didn’t exactly NEED ice cream, there it was on the table, for whoever wanted it.

Surprisingly, we are not a family of blimps. The way I describe us, you’d think we were some sort of butter gluttons. Anyway, no, that’s just me.

Guest post, anyone???

2011-02-24T19:58:00.001-08:00

I made yummy rosemary potato no-knead bread tonight. It was amazing! But it was WINTER amazing, which is to say, muted and blah and … well… not enough to kick-start the enthusiasm for getting off my bottom and doing stuff.

What I need is spring.

If anybody out there reading this is already experiencing spring or still has some energy left from fall, PLEASE feel free to send me a guest post – any length, any topic, as long as it has bread or some other form of baked good or wheaty/floury thing in it!!!

Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com

Six Word Saturday: 17 Adar 1, 5771

2011-02-19T22:18:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Other “weekly challenges” I participate in:

Kid’s birthday… not baking a cake. :-(

I really must do SOMETHING about this slump. But in the meantime, we will probably end up with NO bread and a storebought cake.

Sigh… I am SO ready for winter to be over.

Easy semolina!

2011-02-09T20:32:00.001-08:00

I even remembered to slash it! But not get a picture after it baked. Quite yummy, though, as a “same-day” no-knead bread, it lacked a depth and there was really no distinctive semolina flavour and texture. I have fridged the rest of the dough and plan to do something with it over the weekend. Hopefully, it will have a lot more depth by then.

Just happy I got some bread on the table, for a change!!!

Link to recipe here.

Six Word Saturday: 2 Adar 1, 5771

2011-02-05T21:31:00.001-08:00

So those are my six words:

Make bread… not sink into stupour.

Yup, I don’t know if it’s winter or what, but my motivation to make bread is just about at rock-bottom.

It’s cold, it’s snowy, I’m miserable, I’m exhausted. But I also have a ton of flour to use up and never as long ‘till Pesach as I think I’ve got! Plus, this: WE ALL LOVE BREAD.

So I need to plan something really spectacular for this week. Any suggestions??? (Other than a good night’s sleep?)

Just slightly CUTE… not really a WANT!

2011-01-29T21:55:00.001-08:00

If I had these, I’d never use them, but they are the sort of cooking tool that probably “window-shops” REALLY well: The M-CUP: Matryoshka measuring cups!

You get three “dolls” that each separate into measuring halves.

Reviewers on Amazon have mentioned that they are made of fairly flimsy plastic, and also the obvious fact that you can’t really measure anything in a canister without stuffing your fingers deep into the canister – they don’t have any handles. Also, the measurement is stamped in hard-to-read white on the inside bottom of the measurer.

SO… all in all, a clever concept implemented badly, so I don’t have to get too wanty about these in any event.

They also make a fairly uninspiring line of matching measuring spoons that feature a Matryoshka pattern on the bottom. In case you get excited staring at the bottom of measuring spoons. (nope!)

Six Word Saturday: 25 Shevat, 5771

2011-01-29T16:57:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Sourdough challah: the Jewish holy grail?

Yes, folks… I did it! After weeks and weeks of “supplementing” the challah with a teaspoon of yeast, I spent a few days this week buffing up the starter and managed to create three delicious sourdough challahs – fully risen, perfectly cooked and beautifully-textured!

The problem is… you knew there was a catch, right? They’re not very sweet. And there’s a limit to how sweet they can become without either tasting weird or the sugar inhibiting the action of the yeast.

So I think next week, I’ll return to my basic tried-and-true Reliable Challah recipe – and then, perhaps, issue myself a new challenge. Who knows what it will be?

Didja ever see one of…

2011-01-25T20:43:00.001-08:00

…these?

It’s a flatbread-stretching cushion! I have no idea what it’s called, though I saw a reference to something similar on the caption of a photo of a person making Druze flatbreads.

Ted bought it from Pita Pita, the Israeli hole-in-the-wall where he buys laffa and other Israeli-ish delicacies.

My only concern about this cushion is that it’s suede, and if I don’t flour the surface enough, and the dough is a bit sticky, black flecks of dyed suede slough off onto the flatbread.

I kind of sniffed when Ted gave it to me because I wasn’t sure how useful it would be. But with the right traction, it actually is a great thing for spreading dough rounds out gently.

I used it last week to make naan and was experimenting with the professional technique of using the cushion to “slap” the dough onto a hot cast-iron frying pan.

The authentic thing to slap the dough onto is the rounded inside wall of a scorching-hot oven, or the inverted-wok arrangement that traditional Middle-Eastern flatbreads are made on (set over a fire).

I suspect those would have been easier to “slap” onto , because inverting it all the way over the frying pan mostly caused the dough to fold over and “slouch” into a blob that I had to quickly unfold before it baked that way.

Still – it’s a weird tool that NOBODY else has… so naturally, I’m determined to use it often!

The TRUE brownie snob…

2011-01-25T20:35:00.001-08:00

Bakes brownies FAST and HOT and cools them in an ice bath.

Truly.

This IS the secret.

Here’s the basic recipe (I use only 1 cup of sugar).

Instead of the cake-y brownies we’ve had in past, the ones in the picture were baked for 15 minutes at 400°F.

The TRUE brownie snob also knows that since brownies like these consist of equal parts butter and chocolate, and that at 4 ounces each, there’s almost TWICE as much of either ingredient as there is of flour, there is absolutely no point in trying to make GREAT brownies with anything other than pure butter.

But I’m sure you knew that already, right?

Good Sourdough Semolina!

2011-01-25T20:18:00.001-08:00

I cheated – as I’ve been doing with the challah, I added a teaspoon of commercial yeast. It is just too darn cold in the house.

This would have been Maggie Glezer’s Sourdough Semolina bread otherwise…

It could have been moister, and the crumb is far tighter than the one shown in the pictures. Not as intensely yellowish, either, though it was slightly more yellow in real life before my camera destroyed the colour.

But I baked this in the dutch oven and was quite pleased that at least the darn thing was edible all the way through, for a change. Considering I mixed the final dough at 1 pm and we sat down to eat this at 6 pm, it was quite fast for sourdough.

Next time – no yeast and a longer rise, like maybe even overnight, probably wouldn’t hurt. And then, probably, a slightly shorter bake, although maybe NOT.

All in all, I’m happy to have produced edible kind-of-sourdough bread.

Jealous!

2011-01-24T20:10:00.001-08:00

As my sister the baker has pointed out often, she sometimes (probably not often) envies the flexiblity I have in deciding what to bake. Too often, however, that “flexibility” translates to inconsistent, mediocre bread simply because, like anything, you need to rehearse a bread many, many times before you can make it reliably well.

And the other day, she pointed out that the upside of her inflexible routine – baking the same breads over and over every single night – is that she has absolutely no experience refreshing and rejuvenating an old starter from the back of the fridge, which is where mine lives most of the time.

If she wants a starter, she’s got one – heck, she’s got several. Rye? Probably a bucket of it somewhere in the back. Spelt? Whole wheat? Maybe. Definitely, there are active cultures just waiting around in buckets for someone to reach in and grab out a scoop.

Whereas if I want to bake sourdough, it can’t be a spur-of-the-moment thing. I have to plan ahead by at least one day, and preferably two, just to buff up the starter enough that it will do its job.

She did mention that she was saddened by the fact that these days, the bakery where she spends most of her time isn’t baking any 100% sourdough breads – there’s commercial yeast in every single formula.

Of course, she mentioned all of this because there is an uber-chef/foodie lady in our shul and Sara happened to be at her house last Friday morning, just in time to admire the – yes, you saw it coming! – freshly-baked challahs sitting out which were, natch, 100% sourdough.

Sigh… another challenge to keep me on my toes. But NOT THIS WEEK! This week it is SOoooo cold. The temperature inside the house dropped to 16 (Celsius!) and my fingers were going numb. There is no way I’m trying sourdough challah with temperatures like these. But sourdough bread…? Maybe tomorrow.

Ewww…

2011-01-24T19:38:00.001-08:00

Thought I’d post this here in case you hadn’t seen it anywhere else. Can you spot the problem on this translated-into-English grape juice label???

If you aren’t sure, or can’t make out the label, click here to find out!

I will say that if you know the word in question, it is a very natural and “easy” mis-translation. But still – ew…!

Six-Word Saturday: 18 Shevat, 5771

2011-01-22T18:25:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Dregs of the homemade pareve eclairs!

I guess these were a hit…

OMG, Eclairs!

2011-01-21T10:58:00.001-08:00

Normally, I object to desserts that just take pareve stuff and substitute it into recipes to come up with pareve desserts. But today, I don’t know why, I just needed eclairs. I have never made them before, but they were super-easy!

Step by step:

Basic pareve Pâte à choux aka “shoe paste” (I used Earth Balance sticks instead of butter), piped with a medium ziploc freezer bag into “hot dog” shapes:

Baked, then poked with a toothpick so they can vent steam while cooling, to prevent sogginess:

When cool, skewered at the toothpick end to open up the hole a bit, and then I piped in pareve “bavarian cream” – vanilla pudding mix (made with soy milk), mixed with NutriWhip. Any ratio that tastes good would work!

Meanwhile, here’s the mess on the table!

Finally, add a simple pareve coconut-milk ganache (from this recipe at Couldn’t be Pareve) and dip, dip, dip – I was generous with the dip!

Can you see the one I’ve snuck onto a plate in the background?

Here it is – breakfast! It’s a mitzvah to sample Shabbos food before Shabbos, just to make sure it’s yummy, of course.

Mmm….. yes, indeed: it WAS as good as it looks! I can’t believe it’s not dairy! (if I hadn’t made it myself, I wouldn’t)

So there it is… my first time making eclairs, but definitely not my last.

Six Word Saturday: 11 Shevat, 5771

2011-01-15T17:26:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

My new baking stuff has arrived!

Sometimes, it just takes a little thing to re-ignite your interest… so this week, I’m excited about TWO little things, birthday present replacements from Ted, that arrived on Thursday. Both from Breadtopia!

Jumbo Flour Sack Towels x 4:

Kevlar oven gloves (women’s size) x 2:

These are the perfect bread-handling gloves, offering the dexterity and heat resistance to not fear things like 500-degree dutch ovens.

So I have to use all this loot – the only problem being my now-fleishik baking stone – so no good for most baking purposes. :-(

I never asked a shailah, but it got meatloaf-juice spattered on it, so I’m assuming it is now MEATY, as the british say… so I have to replace it before I do any serious baking.

And then be WAY more careful about removing it from the oven before doing any non-pareve baking. It’s just a pain because sometimes the oven is already hot when I realize it’s still in there. Blah.

Six-Word Saturday: 4 Shevat, 5771

2011-01-08T16:14:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Fresh challah means dishes to wash.

How I wish that were not so!

Six-Word Saturday: 25 Teves, 5771

2011-01-01T18:49:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

A whole week of bread adventures!

Not all entirely successful….

Sourdough rye bread that I finally got around to baking in my little dutch oven. Beautiful loaf! Just not all that flavourful.

The “bread” that isn’t bread: Seitan for hot & sour soup that turned out so gloriously well last time… but this time globbed into chewy rubberish nightmare. Flavourful, but the texture was horrid!

Ew!

But finally, finally, to cap things off, a sourdough challah that was amazingly buoyant; this rose better, and with less commercial yeast, than any sourdough challah that I have made so far. I had 324g of starter, more than I’ve used before, and it performed super-well, though I did add 1/2 tsp of yeast.

The rise times were comparable to non-sourdough loaves, despite the wintry-cool house. On the downside, it tasted like there was no sugar in the loaf, and I’m really kind of wondering why (I’m pretty sure I added 1/4 cup!).

Took a picture before it baked, but got too busy to do another one afterwards!

Have a great week!!!

Six-Word Saturday: 18 Teves, 5771

2010-12-25T19:22:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Less and less yeast each week…

I’ve been making the same challah for a couple of months now because it’s SOooo yummy. My challenge (to myself) has been incorporating as much sourdough as possible, decreasing the commercial yeast a bit more each week.

I haven’t really said much about this challah recipe yet. It’s based on this one, but I use sugar instead of honey, and I leave out the egg. I found it when I was searching for a sponge-based challah, and it seems like the ideal way to incorporate a sourdough, because it gives the starter lots of time to get going overnight.

This week, I wanted to make exactly THREE challahs, so I multiplied the regular formula by 1.5…

I’ve set up a spreadsheet to let me figure out how much of my 60% starter I can substitute in a recipe that either calls for another type of starter – or no starter.

In the case of this challah recipe, the original calls for no starter, so I decrease the flour and water quantities relative to how much is in the quantity of starter I put in. The spreadsheet figures this out automatically: I just measure everything out the way it says.

This week, I ended up with about 165g of useable starter – that’s the only quantity that doesn’t change in the spreadsheet, because I have however much I have after resuscitating it from the fridge for a day or two. If I was making a bigger batch of challah, I’d increase it more.

Here’s the formula the spreadsheet spit out this week, to make 1.5 loaves of challah (see all the 1.5’s?). Every number here will change depending on the starter quantity and hydration.

MODIFIED RECIPE		165	g of 60% hydration starter
	plus	526.875	g flour
		673.125	g water
		75	g sugar or honey
		82.5	g oil
		1.5	Tbsp salt
	min	1.5	tsp yeast
	max	1.5	Tbsp yeast

Although this says 1.5 tsp yeast, I was feeling macho and took it down to one teaspoon. Unfortunately, my starter wasn’t feeling as macho as I was, and with the wintry-cold house, the sponge took forever to start bubbling and being active.

On Friday morning, I add a few cups of bread and all-purpose flour – just enough to make a kneadable dough, and by kneadable, I mean that it’s still VERY wet, but I use the scraper to help bring it together without the whole thing adhering to the table.

The dough was also quite sluggish on Friday – a bit of a challenge for an early Shabbos. (Once Shabbos gets back to around 6ish, and the weather is a bit warmer, I’m going to try bumping the commercial yeast down to zero and the sourdough up as much as I can… perhaps with a backup challah in place just in case!)

Nevertheless, despite some initial concern that the loaves were too heavy and perhaps under-risen or under-baked – well, they were slightly under-risen, but baked to perfection, and delicious nevertheless.

Instead of flour, I have started using oil when I portion it and roll out the “snakes.” I think it helps keep the braids separate and lovely, and indeed, after tons of practice my Maggie-Glezer-style four-braid challahs are looking consistently decent.

Pics next week!!!

Six-Word Saturday: 12 Teves, 5771

2010-12-18T21:10:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Birthday’s a’comin’… my wish list here.

(yes, fo’sure “a’comin’” is one word!!!)

Black Forest Birthday Cake for a Neighbour

2010-12-17T09:18:00.001-08:00

Our neighbour’s birthday was on Wednesday. She doesn’t have much family, and I figure everybody deserves cake, so I invited her for Shabbos dinner so I’d have an excuse to present her with THIS:

It’s a black forest cake, made out of my basic chocolate cake recipe . I sliced the layers and spread white icing and pie-filling cherries in between. I toasted one layer and crumbled it in the food processor to make cake crumbs to press onto the outside, somewhat messily.

In fact, it is a very messy cake, and not entirely a beautiful one, despite my amateurish efforts with the star tip. The initial looks more like a T than a J, but, hey, it’s the thought – and the taste – that counts, right???

Today’s Project: Whole Lotta Bread!

2010-12-16T19:39:00.001-08:00

This is the Pumpkin-Oatmeal No-Knead Bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (which I still don’t own!). It’s a fun bread because it doesn’t taste like a “healthy” bread (being mostly white flour), but does contain token quantities of rye, whole-wheat and oat. It is a very easy bread to make, despite the sloppiness of the final dough.

I baked these seven loaves, along with gingerbread and shortbread cookies, to fill up holiday parcel boxes whicih we mailed to members of our extended families. (actually, the 7th was for our supper: shhh…)

I added cranberries and lightly toasted walnuts to make it into more of a “festive” bread.

Anyway, ours was delicious with tomato soup this evening; soft and fresh. Almost too soft, I hope, because, this being Thursday, the others won’t arrive at their new homes until perhaps Monday.

This particular loaf is one that would be delicious slightly stale and toasted, so I was hoping that even if the loaves aren’t completely fresh when they arrive, they will still be a nice treat.

But here, I must whisper a shameful, awful truth that may doom the whole exercise to failure: the loaves were not completely cool when we mailed them. It was 4:30, Ted was hanging around getting antsy, wanting to run to the post office, and I was also getting worried that we would miss out on shipping them today altogether.

So I wrapped them, quite well, in my opinion, and sent them out the door. For wrapping, I wrapped each loaf in a layer of paper bag (paper “sleeves” made from two huge paper bags), then a large-sized ziploc freezer bag.

But now I am worried that the loaves will be terrible as a result of not being fully cool. The outside was cool, but the insides were still a bit warm. I’m scared that they’ll turn moldy in transit. Ick, what a nightmare!

Six-Word Saturday: 5 Teves, 5771

2010-12-11T20:23:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

“No knead” bread broke my mixer!

Forgot to blog about this one during the week. I have some wonderful, local Red Fife whole-wheat flour my sister gave me that I wanted to try out, so I decided to do the No-Knead 100% Whole-Wheat Bread from King Arthur Flour again.

I made it once before with spelt and it wasn’t fantastic. This time around, it made a VERY dense loaf, but one that was eminently sliceable and eatable.

This is an unusual no-knead bread because you use a hand mixer (or stand mixer) to mix the ingredients. The finished “dough” is somewhere between a thick cake batter and a thin bread dough. Definitely not kneadable. And as the six words point out, really too heavy for what my cheapo hand mixer could take on, apparently. (Luckily, I had a spare in the basement, albeit a tippy one I hate.)

Once mixed, you let the dough rise in the loaf pan (mine’s a bit big, which the King Arthur blog warns about – it really does affect the height of the finished loaf).

My loaf pan is bigger than recommended, and the house was a bit cool for rising bread. All in all, though, I think this turned out quite passably well!

This loaf actually reminded me of the delicious round Malt Bread I loved as a child. I’ll probably try making it again with a bit of white flour AND some of the malt powder she gave me a LOoooong time ago that is still sitting in the freezer. Lightened up a bit, with a touch of malt, this could be the perfect toasting loaf.

In fact, perhaps I’ll mix some up now and bake it tonight for tomorrow’s breakfast…

It’s PURPLE!!!

2010-12-09T16:40:00.001-08:00

Elisheva made cimbuns again… but this time, she added just a few drops of food colouring to the icing.

Mmm, purple!

The naked Sufganya (aka Jelly Donut!)

2010-12-05T20:31:00.001-08:00

These are the same as Friday’s, made once again with the Balthazar’s Chocolate Bread dough.

They turned out great! Much easier than I thought they would be, although the table is still a powdery, jammy mess.

The sourdough wasn’t quite ready from its overnight rest when I had to mix up the final dough (it was fridge-cold when I started it last night – I didn’t give it any time to warm up first), but because the recipe calls for added yeast, I didn’t worry about it too much, and the dough still rose fabulously well.

It’s a moist dough, but far more workable (in my opinion) than the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day pain au chocolat. If I was making it up as a loaf, I would definitely go with this recipe.

I used a plain round cookie cutter, let them rise a bit before frying, and filled the heavy pareve enamel pot with oil so as to ensure a perfect yummy sphere shape for each sufganya.

Et voila! Here they are, fried up and naked, waiting for their powder…

The jamming / jellying operation was pretty tricky, and there was quite a bit of jam goobering here and there. I thought raspberry tasted much yummier than strawberry, but I ran out towards the end and hat to use strawberry on the last few. The ones with strawberry just tasted like chocolatey toast, at least to me.

Here they are with a light sprinkling of icing sugar (unlike on Friday, when I overly drenched them):

Definitely a hit at the Chanukah party! Definitely one to make again.

Six-Word Saturday: 28 Kislev, 5771 (Chanukah Edition)

2010-12-04T22:25:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Chocolate beignets… a newfangled Chanukah treat!

I made chocolate-bread-dough donuts last year for Chanukah, but I think I used the Artisan Bread in Five recipe, which I remember as being on the potchke-dik side (long and involved process).

This year, I went with the Balthazar’s Chocolate Bread recipe. Chocolate bread is ideal for donut-making in so many ways – it’s definitely chocolatey but not too sweet. My family didn’t like the bread as BREAD because the chocolatey look of it really throws you off and you’re expecting cake.

The Balthazar’s dough, based on a gentle sourdough or overnight starter, was VERY easy to mix up and to work with. The trade-off seems to have been that the donuts were not very puffed-up; not very rich.

Here are the steps, without much commentary, because it’s late and I’m tired.

I tried filling with jelly and folding over… ugh, what a mess. I stopped after the first four.

Just cut the rest into nice rectangles.

Followed the advice of this King Arthur author and shallow-fried rather than wasting a huge pot of oil. Worked well enough, I guess. This is my new pareve 12” cast-iron pan, which I found at Superstore for $9 and finally toivelled this week.

What a great way to break it in; It’s thoroughly seasoned now!

I wish I had sprinkled the finished beignets with icing sugar. Instead, I tossed them in icing sugar, which made the sugar look caked and unappealing.

This is a terrible picture:

They went fast, so they must have tasted good. I know I had a few, and they stayed fresh and appealing well into Shabbos afternoon. I am making this recipe again for my extended-family’s Chanukah party tomorrow afternoon.

Happy Chanukah from all of us: the staff, volunteers, members, board and executive of Adventures in BreadLand!

Ted's erev-Shabbos Apple Galette

2010-11-27T21:37:00.000-08:00

I love a man who bakes!!!

They were delicious, too!

Our Annual Gingerbread House

2010-11-27T21:25:00.001-08:00

From this (assortment of motley house-pieces)…

to this! (triumphant gorgeous finished house!)

…in a single evening, with kids helping and everything!

More steps and photos on my other blog over here.

Six Word Saturday: 21 Kislev, 5771

2010-11-27T19:51:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Gorgeous challah, fluffy-soft… no SALT!!! :-(

Sad but true. And we were taking it to neighbours’ for supper. I just gestured to keep on sprinkling more more more salt… but salt sprinkled is NOT the same as salt incorporated in dough. Blah.

Sourdough Cornbread Math for Vegan Night

2010-11-25T12:07:00.001-08:00

Once again, I am happy and amazed that bread – even the BEST breads – can be made not only pareve, but also completely vegan. That’s because I have declared “Vegan Vursdays” and tonight, we are hoping to have bread with soup – a classic combination that’s perfect for a day like today.

I found this recipe for Sourdough Corn Bread that looked good (though I might not go so far as to shape it into bread bowls), except it calls for starter at 100% hydration. The starter that I’ve been building up all week is more of a stiff starter (I estimated 50, but that’s probably not right, either).

At The Fresh Loaf, I found this primer explaining the math of how to convert recipes to use a stiffer or thinner starter, but it started giving me a headache.

So – always my father’s child! - I broke it down using a spreadsheet. You just plug in:

quantity of starter called for, at what hydration
flour and water quantities from the recipe
how much starter you HAVE, at what hydration

And it does the math: how much extra flour or water to add (or remove) to/from the recipe to obtain hopefully similar consistency.

Here’s what it came up with!

I used my updated quantity of flour, but only about 425g total water instead of almost 500g. The original recipe says to hold back some of the water, and I’m glad I did. The corn flour / cornmeal may have had something to do with this, because it absorbs water differently.

I actually didn’t have what I’d consider corn FLOUR – what is that, anyway? But I had Bob’s Red Mill stone-ground cornmeal, which contains the bits that are usually not included in cornmeal, so I think it’s roughly equivalent, if quite a bit grittier. When it comes to cornbread, I don’t mind gritty.

Took some kneading to work in the starter completely. If I hadn’t been so discombobulated today, and had the luxury of time, I probably would have broken it up more and maybe even stirred it well into the water before I started. But I eventually got it evenly distributed into the dough:

What I ended up with is a very moist dough that should benefit from a couple of stretch and fold operations in the next hour before I actually shape it into loaf/loaves (haven’t decided yet on the final portioning/shaping).

Wish me luck!!! It’s been a terrible day in almost every other way… at the very least, I deserve good bread. Right?

Nutella Pound Cake – why didn’t I think of that???

2010-11-25T11:54:00.001-08:00

I have been having a bit of a pound cake thing going lately, but I had never made pound cake before and thought it would be a huge potchke.

Then, earlier this week, as if reading my mind, the GourmetKosherCooking blog posted a recipe for Nutella-Swirl Pound Cake – perfect!

Super-easy to throw together (providing you have enough butter!)… and utterly decadent and delicious. Don’t tell anybody, but we ate it for breakfast!

(Chocolate for breakfast: just one more way we’re preparing for aliyah!)

Six Word Saturday: 14 Kislev, 5771

2010-11-20T21:07:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Time to dust off the sourdough!

No excuses… life is as “back to normal” as it’s gonna get, and there’s no reason I can’t bake good bread this week!

(plus, now that I used up the last of the spelt, I have some nice whole wheat flour my sister gave me last week… and some rye to use up and some oat flour and… OMG, Pesach is coming!!!)

National Homemade Bread Day!

2010-11-17T22:08:00.001-08:00

Did you know? It’s today, November 17th! I had no clue…

And yet, I woke up, made a yummy baguette, and later served four pizzas to my family. Just like any ordinary week.

Sure feels nice that we don’t need a special day to honour home-baked breads!!!

Six Word Bread Saturday: 7 Kislev, 5771

2010-11-13T16:09:00.001-08:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Breads I forgot to blog about!

…Like Wednesday night’s excellent rye-licious loaf! Exactly the same ryelicious formula as the first time, and it worked out beautifully. I even used corn starch – properly, this time! – to create a lovely crusty sheen on top of the loaf. Yes, it’s peanut-shaped, the result of a mis-handled transfer from peel to stone… but I’m getting the hang of it, really I am. And yes, there was a bit of a blowout on the side. I don’t know why my slashing is so unsuccessful lately. But inside, the bread was perfectly baked and absolutely luscious with Alton Brown’s beef stew.

Mmm…

And then there were Thursday’s (vegan night) Scallion Pancakes. Super, super easy, this is a boiled-water-and-bread-flour dough that mixes up quickly and it’s ready to roll after only about half an hour. Yes, I truly am obsessed with flatbreads these days – I can’t wait for the next Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day book, which is all about flat! (hey, I just noticed they have a new British release – using weight measurements and British cooking terms, presumably, along with the WAY more palatable, “Artisan”-free title, “Five Minute Bread.”)

I got into a nice rhythm with these little cakes (I’d probably make them double the size next time!): roll flat, brush with oil, sprinkle with salt, pepper and onions; roll up into a cigar, coil the cigar; roll flattish again with a rolling pin, then fry on the cast-iron skillet. As you can see, though, we were BAD VEGANS, eating pareve but not animal-free Tomato Egg Drop Soup from Kosher by Design: Teens & 20-Somethings. It was yummy soup, but there’s nothing quite like egg drops in an egg-drop soup.

So that’s it – our week in bread!

Bake Bread Bold with “Stretch n’ Fold”!

2010-11-12T12:22:00.001-08:00

Stretch and fold! I heard the term many times before I actually tried it myself. Now, I do it all the time… and it’s improved my breads considerably.

The stretch n’ fold is especially useful in developing a very wet dough, when you can’t or don’t want to do a lot of kneading. It’s incredible when you

The wetter the dough, the more you will need your trusty dough scraper, and perhaps a floured surface, but the goal here (as I understand it) is to incorporate as little new flour as possible.

Before I say anything about stretching and folding, though, I want to add a big NO: just say no to PUNCHING down the dough! (hey, that rhymes)

Even if a recipe says you should do it, and even though I did it for years, few legitimate bread recipes will ask you to pummel all the rise out of your bread. The bread has been working SO hard to rise that you’d be shooting yourself in the foot to handle it so roughly.

Worse, I used to interpret “punch down dough” as “knead it all over again, at great length.” Hmm… a recipe for tough, dense, chewy bread if ever I’ve heard one! If you like that kind of bread, well, fantastic… but I don’t.

Nowadays, I treat dough more cautiously. I’m not afraid of it (no matter how wet and gloppy it gets, I trust my floured hands and bench scraper to keep things tidy!) – but with a little respect for the work that’s already taken place.

Now that you’re convinced here’s how you do the stretch n’ fold with your own dough!

1) After your dough has had some amount of time to rise (an hour or so, or as specified in the recipe), turn it out gently (using your trusty teeny bowl scraper!) onto a wooden surface. (sorry – forgot to take a picture of this step)

2) Press, pat and spread the dough gently – you don’t want to lose all those bubbles, just redistribute them a bit – into a roughly rectangular shape.

3) Pick up one short edge of the dough – use the scraper if you have to – and bring it up about 2/3 of the way down the length of the rectangle, like you’re folding a letter.

4) Now, pick up the other short edge and fold it so it completely covers the rest of the dough. You’ve just folded the dough in thirds, like a letter! The dough now looks like a (smaller) rectangle.

5) Now, we’re going to do it again. Pick up one of the short ends of the rectangle (using the scraper again if you have to), pull it away from the rest of the dough, and then fold it 1/3 of the way back.

6) Grab the other short end, stretch it the same way, and fold it 1/3 of the way back. It won’t look like a letter now, it just looks like a big fat folded blob of dough.

7) Return letter-folded dough back to bowl, cover with lid, and allow to rest for at least another 45 minutes to an hour, until the dough has had a chance to smoothe out, relax, and rise a bit more.

Enjoy your own yummy bread!

Yummy chocolate-chiffon pie!

2010-11-06T20:15:00.001-07:00

My mother’s mother used to make chocolate chiffon pie… it was one of her hallmark baked things, along with her Neapolitan Cake. I don’t have a recipe, but I do know that she used gelatin in hers; many chocolate mousses call for it because it lends the mousse a longer-term room-temperature stability that whipped cream or egg whites alone cannot reproduce.

I tried to make it once using the only kosher gelatin I could find: fish-based gelatin, which I believe came in little silver packets, from France. It was terrible. The gelatin tainted the pie with a sour tang that I tried to convince myself was “lemony,” but let’s be honest… it was quite simply foul.

Fast-forward to last year, when I noticed that Kolatin kosher gelatin was once again on the market. It used to be all over the place here, back when I first started keeping kosher, but I don’t remember seeing an unflavoured gelatin at the time.

(Being new to keeping kosher, I may have just not noticed it; there’s a lot I used to take for granted.)

Anyway, I have been looking for the products here, and when I found out on Thursday that they were available at Sobey’s and Kosher City here, I sent Ted on a mission. He returned with about ten packets of various flavours of Jello (sorry, Kraft, but it’s all Jello to me!) (and sorry, Ted, but strawberry is the only authentic jello flavour!), along with two packages of unflavoured gelatin.

Baking nirvana! Naturally, my first project was tackling the chocolate-mousse pie. The recipe I used was Susie Fishbein’s, from the Kolatin website.

I made Ted go out (again!) and buy a special chocolate-cookie crust, because the plain graham ones we had Just Wouldn’t Do. And I changed the recipe slightly, keeping out a bit of the white whipped “cream” so the top would be a white layer on top of the chocolate layer – just like Grama used to make it.

It was incredible. Even pareve, made with Nutriwhip, my pareve topping of choice, it was incredible. The pie was mostly gone in minutes after supper last night, and completely demolished by the time Ted & I went to bed last night.

So what’s next in gelatin-land??? Well, my first thought was to try making the homemade marshmallows that Shoshana of Couldn’t be Pareve is always going on about. But then I thought maybe I’m not that ambitious.

We shall see… and I will definitely keep you posted about this and any other exciting new developments in… well, not Breadland, and not even Cakeland… but don’t we all love to venture into Pieland from time to time???

Six Word Saturday: 30 Cheshvan, 5771

2010-11-06T19:29:00.001-07:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Delicious challah… better the next day!

Now that is an accomplishment, because I usually don’t like challah very much by Saturday afternoon.

I made last week’s amazing Super Wonder Challah. I ran out of bread flour, so it was perhaps a little softer than last week. That made it very hard to braid. Didn’t help that I doubled the recipe and ended up with enough to make three HUGE loaves (>2lb) that spread like crazy in the pan.

So in the end, it was not as picture-perfect as last week, but absolutely just as yummy – if not more so. And today, even yummier! Hooray for pre-fermentation; definitely works for me, though it’s a mystery why prefermenting HALF the flour can make the bread tastier than prefermenting all of it (I usually make the entire batch on Thursday night, let it rise, and fridge it overnight).

Elisheva said that this was the closest to storebought challah that I’d ever made. She meant it as a compliment… perhaps realizing that I’ve never liked storebought challah very much.

I also want to add, for people who don’t like or can’t have egg: this was the richest, most delicious eggless challah ever. I can’t believe there’s none in there. And it doesn’t even call for a ton of sugar – it uses LESS sugar than my Rosh Hashanah challahs did, and I swear, it tastes sweeter. More magic.

Hopefully, I’ll post the recipe later on this week or – more likely – at the last minute next Thursday night!

p.s. Have you entered my free Cooking Disaster Contest??? One day left (24 hours, give or take) to win a free Cooking by Design cookbook!

Yummy sweetie bread!

2010-11-03T19:27:00.001-07:00

This was yesterday’s bread component of a bread-and-soup meal. In the morning, I mixed up the oatmeal-honey bread from 200 Fast and Easy Artisan Breads: No-Knead, One Bowl, to bake in the afternoon.

I wanted to do something a little MORE with it than just a straight loaf, so I decided to do a filled, swirled raisin loaf.

Oh – I was proud of myself; I didn’t have brown sugar for the swirl, so I took white sugar and used the mixer to beat in a couple of blobs of molasses… the result was identical. While I was mixing, I beat in a bit of butter and cinnamon as well. Spread it on the loaf, sprinkled with raisins, rolled up, allowed it to rise, then baked it.

As you can see, I knew there was a problem as soon as I took the loaf out of the oven. The seam of the swirl hadn’t been on the bottom, or shifted during rising, and suddenly, I had buttery raisin glop goobering out of the bread and even a bit over the side of the pan.

Definitely asymmetrical – not the most beautiful swirl loaf ever, but this was my first attempt. Oops!

It was very, VERY yummy however. Hit all the “cinnamon bun” buttons with a fraction of the calories. The oats were not noticeable in the final bread, but gave it a softness and sweetness that definitely sang out “cake.”

And it was all only slightly surreal served alongside the “main attraction,” which was broccoli soup!!! The kids couldn’t believe I was giving them dessert for supper… still; they can’t all be dense, underbaked super-sprouty experimental spelty wheat loaves.

Easy Quick Tortillas

2010-11-01T21:27:00.001-07:00

As you know, I’m a sucker for flatbreads of all kinds. This was my first venture into tortillas, but they’re basically the same as many other “ethnic” flatbreads I’ve made in past. Yum, flatbreads!

Here’s the recipe I used to create these easy, quick tortillas for tonight’s ground-chicken burrito supper (shh… don’t tell Elisheva, who requested burritos, but they were basically soft tacos).

Too small to hold in all that fillingy goodness! Next time, I double the recipe and make them twice as big!!!

p.s. Soft tacos is something I’ve avoided since keeping kosher (yes, that does mean almost 20 years), but I’m happy I did this at last… they don’t really, REALLY need cheese and sour cream, and the lettuce adds a nice touch).

Cheddary Scones for Breakfast!

2010-10-31T07:28:00.001-07:00

Yum!

These are the “double-cheddar” scones from Marcy Goldman’s Best of BetterBaking.com – I had some butter and some cheddar and could not resist these. (not quite enough cheddar, so I skimped a bit, but they are still cheesy and delish!)

Super-easy… the only hard part was waiting for them to cool before eating!

Six Word Saturday: 23 Cheshvan, 5771

2010-10-30T20:02:00.001-07:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Unveiling My New Super Wonder Challah!

My mother invited us for Shabbos dinner because she was also having my aunt (who just returned from shiva in Vancouver earlier this week) and she asked if I was bringing challah, so I said sure.

Having messed up a couple of breads in a row, I promised myself I’d stick to the standard recipe, but couldn’t help myself… I wanted to do a preferment.

I found this recipe online, which is very similar to my Reliable Challah except that it preferments half the flour overnight. Perfect!

I don’t have cubes of fresh yeast, so I used half of the regular yeast from the Reliable Challah recipe, about 1/2 tbsp, subbed 1/4 cup of sugar instead of honey, and left out the egg entirely. I used 3 cups of bread flour, measured by volume, because I figured it didn’t have to be exact. After a short room-temperature rise, I let it sit in the fridge overnight.

In the morning, after bringing it to room temperature, I stirred in about three more cups of flour, until it was just this side of kneadable, and then kneaded it for a while before setting aside.

After an hour or so (time flies when kiddies are running around screaming!), I did a quick stretch-and-fold and returned it to the bucket for another hour or so.

The dough was definitely on the sloppy side, but with a bit of oil, rolled up nicely into two of the most gorgeous braids. Wow! They were impressively unveiled to a crowd of twelve or thirteen people – not just my aunt after all!

So many that we had to sacrifice the second loaf, even though it meant eating matzah for Shabbos lunch.

This challah was “just” everything: just sweet, chewy, dense, fluffy, silky… enough to satisfy absolutely everybody around the table.

I am calling it Jennifer’s Super Wonder Challah, and I will try to refine it into recipe form, or at least take a few pictures, next Friday.

Meanwhile, I am VERY impressed. Just when it seems like I am making no progress here in BreadLand, along comes a challah I absolutely know I could not have produced two years or even one year ago.

Most bakers say that challah doesn’t need a preferment, sourdough, or anything else, because as a “rich” bread, it doesn’t need those things to have good flavour (in most challahs, you’re not tasting the flour so much as the eggs, oil and sugar).

Well, it may not NEED them, but especially given that I like my challah on the eggless side (though still sweet), it certainly seems to benefit.

Yum!

(Mis)adventures in SPELT…

2010-10-28T18:56:00.001-07:00

It’s my disasters that keep me humble… that’s for sure.
(Speaking of disasters, have you entered my Kitchen Disaster contest yet???)

Then again, I bet you don’t get so many disasters with all those other marginally competent bread blogs out there!!! I bet that’s how I earned my fifteen loyal followers in the first place, by being human, just like them!

So. If you recall, I decided to make a delicious sprouty, wheaty bread for our supper tonight! I started sprouting the wheat berries on Monday, and mixed up a couple of components of this bread last night.

Here’s what I started with when I picked it up this afternoon: “soaker”, preferment, exactly 11g of sprouted wheat berries.

Ground the wheat berries to “kneadable” consistency.

Holds together when smooshed into a ball in your hand:

Tossed in the rest of the flour, touch of honey, touch more yeast and kneaded the whole mess together. Should have torn up the various starter pieces to ensure evenness, but I didn’t. That didn’t make a huge difference.

The dough was actually incredibly clean and kneadable. Once mixed, it didn’t shed any flour or moisture or even leave a trace on the table as I kneaded.

Slip it in a bowl and allow to rest 2-3 hours, folding once.

End of the rise time – nicely risen, though I accidentally knocked it down a bit before I remembered to take a picture.

Spread into a rectangle, and without degassing much, roll tightly into a sandwich loaf. This is actually the best one I’ve ever done!

Oil & let rise 1 hour inside a bag.

Ooh, nicely risen, it was just about at the top of the pan.

Bake half an hour – and then an extra 5-10 minutes for good n’ doneness. And here’s where I need a thermometer, because it looked fine to me, and I pulled it out!!!

Took its picture, turned it out, tapped it – it sounded FINE; what do I know?

Let it cool – hey, I was sooo proud of myself!

Slice, take a picture… first few slices were okay, and then…

Kaboom! The whole loaf basically disintegrated. It was at once powdery and gummy in the centre.

Apologized, almost cried, handed everybody their bready fragment as we all tucked into our sandwiches of homemade falafel patty and veggies on gummy, crumpled-up bread bits.

The silver lining: it really WAS the most delicious bread. The sprouts made it taste exactly like the commercial malt bread I grew up loving – and have been missing these past, ooh, twenty years. The spelt added a touch of sweetness and lightness, as I expected, Although hearty, it was delicious bread that everybody enjoyed… if only it wasn’t a gooey crumbly mess.

My brain is nagging, trying to telling me something – a message eking its way through the white noise. Listen! Can you hear it; whispering, hissing?

“Slash it!!!”

Yup. Did you notice I forgot to slash the loaf? I didn’t!

I don’t know if that would have made ALL the difference, but it surely would have helped with the crumb – ie allowed it to expand beyond the confines of a fairly low top crust.

Indeed, if you look at the photo of the whole loaf, it looks suspiciously like it was trying to grow higher and got calcified in place instead.

I didn’t exactly FORGET to slash it. Just, well, you don’t always have to with a sandwich loaf like this. But I guess with this one, you do. Next time, I’ll know.

Will I make it again? Well, I’m all out of spelt, so I may try it with the whole wheat it originally called for, or I may beg my sister for another bag of spelt! It’s a lot of planning ahead, to start sprouting wheat berries on Monday for bread on Thursday. And I just remembered that I’m out of wheat berries.

None of which are insurmountable difficulties, and considering it’s hard to find a whole-grain loaf that I really love, I’m definitely going to have to add this to my list of Breads for the Future.

Now what???

2010-10-27T18:50:00.001-07:00

I’ve been sprouting these wheat berries for a few days now… they’re ready. Now what should I do with them?? I have some rye flour I’ve been wanting to play around with… any thoughts?

(the sprouts are in the fridge now, awaiting their fate – they should keep for a bit while I decide!)

Postscript: I’ve found the solution (I hope!): Sprouty Spelty Wheat Bread.

Original recipe, speltless, is here, apparently adapted from Peter Reinhardt’s Whole Grain Breads, which I haven’t read. (from Kath Eats, a blog where I borrowed another recipe a while back, for making Ciabatta and Focaccia from the same batch of dough.

(I also just discovered that the lovely Kath and her husband Matt – who bread-blogs at her food blog – are opening their own Great Harvest Bread franchise this fall!)

I have no whole wheat flour in the house, but some leftover whole-grain spelt, a gift from my sister a long, LONG time ago. I decided to use it up with this recipe.

I used King Arthur Flour’s chart, here, to make the substitutions. They list a 4oz cup for whole wheat, and a 3.5oz cup for spelt.

The preferment calls for 109g WW flour (3.8oz, or .95 of a cup), so I subbed .95 of a “spelt cup” with 94g of spelt (3.3oz, also .95 of a cup).

The soaker calls for 175g WW flour (around 6 oz, or 1.5 cups, as listed in the recipe), so I subbed 149g of spelt (5.25 oz, also 1.5 cups). However, the mix was far softer and not really kneadable, so I added 30g of spelt to make it approach what I guessed was the right consistency.

Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll crush up the sprouted wheat berries and turn the whole mess into a lovely wheaty spelty bread for our supper! (I hope)

Online Window Shopping Wish List

2010-10-23T21:52:00.001-07:00

As the weather gets colder, and we approach my winter birthday, my thoughts invariably turn to… what I want!!! This is my Bread Wish List, to be updated as I spot things that catch my eye.

Thought I’d do better blogging my wishes for a change, rather than clicking the BUY button!

Kevlar Oven Glove from Breadtopia

Loaf Pan - 4½ × 8½
from Golda’s Kitchen

Nothing fancy… but I’d like a couple of pareve ones, bread size and perhaps some others – like all-purpose cookie sheets. From last year’s wish list: “I am SO sickened by the quantity of tinfoil bakeware we go through around here. (still true – still going through the tinfoil like crazy) Plus, whenever I go to cook something, I have to test all the washed tinfoil to see if it leaks (usually, it does).

Bread Thermometer from Breadtopia

This one says six seconds and apparently, they mean it. I’d settle for any other model, from anywhere, as long as it works fast and doesn’t make a huge hole in my bread.

Measuring Spoons from Golda’s Kitchen (or anywhere)

I have measuring spoons, lots of them. My two criteria are: I want a SET that stays together, and I want the numbers to stay on, unlike the dollar-store ones. Without the numbers, they’re kind of useless.

NO!!!! Not this terrible thing! Made by Anchor Hocking, I bought one at Superstore, thrilled that I was getting a real Glass Measuring Cup at last (Dollarama ones crack on contact with liquid).

But it pours terribly, and why the heck do you need THREE spouts – in case you’re too lazy to twist your wrist 45 degrees? When you begin to pour, the liquid trickles down the side and then gushes everywhere except where you’re aiming. Plus, it doesn’t have a quarter-cup line. So I (still) want a real measuring cup, or two, that are glass for durability, that have all the lines marked on, and that pour reasonably well.

Cast-iron or enameled cast-iron pot. For baking bread in, but I’m sure it will have other uses as well. Inexpensive is fine, but it should be entirely oven-safe to temps as high as 500°.

Here’s last year’s wish list, in case you’re interested. Interesting how many of the items have come my way magically or with very little effort… like the laptop. :-o

Amazing. I guess I should spend more time being grateful and less time being wanty.

Six Word Saturday in Bread: 16 Cheshvan, 5771

2010-10-23T21:30:00.001-07:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Oy, vey… that was BAD challah.

Not BAD, bad, exactly. The taste was nondescript, not terrible. Sourdough was completely undetectable, which is fine with me either way.

But what killed it for me was that this was absolutely the driest challah I have ever, ever tasted.

It was like chewing a mouthful of sawdust. I couldn’t eat more than half a slice.

What happened???? What could have made this bread so, so, utterly, unspeakably dry? Too much oil (huh)? Too long baking? (note to self: add bread thermometer to “wanty” list so I am not always overbaking stuff)

I am getting back on this sourdough pony one more time. I feel I am very close to a breakthrough, aka delicious sourdough challah. For next week: “Rose Levy Beranbaum’s New Favourite Traditional Challah.”

I have her Bread Bible out of the library right now, but she says the online recipe is way better than the one she’s got in there. She describes it as “the best challah I’ve ever tasted.”

Oh, just remembered: the part of this that is SO terrible is that we had a challah last night that was store-bought from a bakery up north and it was not only SO good, and not only did it have an intriguing orangey streusel sprinkled on top… but I could have sworn there was a distinctive sourdough tang to the bread. I want to make challah like THAT, and this week, I have utterly failed.

Out of the primordial ooze…

2010-10-21T20:52:00.001-07:00

This week’s Maggie Glezer Sourdough Challah is looking pretty good despite the debacle that went into their creation.

There is definitely double the oil in these loaves; the dough was super-shiny and almost translucent. (however, the exterior shine in the picture is from my oiling the strands as I rolled them)

I am really worried about how these loaves will perform. For one thing, the dough really wants to spread. The snakes got a little bit “wide and flat” just sitting on the table waiting for me to roll them out. :-o

Here’s what I have done to salvage them: stuck them in loaf pans so they will rise up, not out; oiled the strands so they’ll retain their definition better; pop them in the fridge to retard overnight.

Actually, this last may be a disaster in itself, because there’s a chance they could overproof during the night and be flaccid, liquid-toady blobs by morning.

Meanwhile, they’re looking good – despite my amateurish and distracted efforts, I suppose.

Postscript!

Rose a bit overnight, but not a ton. For sure, the braids lost some definition. Left on the table for 2 hours while we went out, baked at 350° when we got home (I left plenty of time for the stone to preheat – indeed, I baked lunch bourekas at 425° first before turning down the temperature!).

Here they are, brushed with egg, ready to go in (not sprinkled yet; I used poppy).

I baked them long, because loaf pan loaves take longer. Maybe 45 minutes? They rose okay in the oven, though I would have liked to see more spring after such a lackluster second fermentation.

Underside looks nice!

Will report back tomorrow on how they tasted… after all those mishaps, maybe they will be delicious after all.

Good Shabbos!

(post-Shabbos postscript: oy vey, this was SO bad. See my 6ws for details)

The slightly sour sicilian!

2010-10-21T20:35:00.001-07:00

Mmm, good!

At last, against all odds, and after several disastrous and/or ho-hum attempts, I have accomplished the seemingly impossible: a perfectly-risen, perfectly-baked, perfectly delightful loaf of Sicilian No-Knead Bread (the sourdough variation).

It rose overnight and then some, stretch-and-fold maybe around 12:30, and around 2 pm, I formed the loaf. The combination of sesame and semolina on the crispy crust backdrop is utterly delightful.

The only major flaw in this bread was too little oven/stone preheating. I suspect that led to the stone being too cool for the initial jolt on the bottom crust. It was ever-so-slightly soft, and I think a longer preheat would have taken care of that. However, the bread was getting mushy and starting to spread. Since sourdough loses definition so easily, I chose to bake it right away rather than wait for a super-hot stone. I think it was the right decision.

The recipe calls for a 475° oven. Mine was only set at 450°, but even at that temperature, the crust couldn’t make it all the way through a 40 minute bake time without getting much too dark. I tented it with tinfoil around 35 minutes and gave it another 15 minutes to bake in the tent.

Yummy! I feel so proud, but nobody else here could really care less… so I suppose I am an unsung genius.

Disaster Strikes the Sourdough Challah!

2010-10-21T14:12:00.001-07:00

I bet my sister the amazing smart professional artisan sourdough baker never EVER ever has to deal with the sound of fifty screaming kids in the background while she bakes…

It wasn’t REALLY fifty kids, you understand: just the SOUND of fifty kids, coming from my FOUR kids. I think, actually, only THREE of them were home at the time. It doesn’t really matter except to say: it was a lot of noise.

And so as I threw together the challah (recipe here), I set the bowl on the scale and tossed in ingredients willy-nilly, here and there, glancing at the open recipe book which lay under a layer of crud and homeschool detritus on the table.

BUSY MAMA’S TIP FOR SUCCESS: Clear the WHOLE table first, even if you think you’re only going to need half!

I was rushing a bit as I threw stuff in because my wonderful scale does have this way of turning off if it’s inactive for too long. So you have to keep the ingredients coming, or at least, finish up one ingredient before it shuts down. (cuz then you can let it turn off and it zeroes when it comes back on - just like taring it would do)

So I tossed in the water, oil, eggs, sugar, salt, and mixed them up with the lovely risen starter. Such a lovely, nice, swishy mixture. Then I dumped in all the flour… and ended up with SOUP. Creamy, sloshy soup. Huh?

This wasn’t even a situation where I could add another half-cup of flour or so to make it into a kneadable dough. It was utterly and completely SOUP. Bread soup.

I checked the flour quantity again on the scale; exactly right, 400 grams. Why did that number sound so familiar???

Oh, bloody hell. That was exactly the amount of water I had added a few minutes earlier.

Scanning upwards in the recipe, I saw that the actual quantity of water I was supposed to have added was 60 grams… not 400. I had added almost seven times more water than the recipe needed. :-o

Which would have meant, if I wanted to salvage the dough, adding a bunch more eggs, sugar, salt, starter… not to mention 2400 more grams of bread flour. I barely had another 400 in the bag.

Oh, and did I mention I used up almost all the starter in the first batch?

LUCKILY… (well, we’ll see), I have been reluctant to throw away the excess starter as I revived it this week, so I had a bunch sitting chilling in the fridge.

So I did the only thing possible, short of buying a Lenchner challah: I started over.

Just before adding the flour, for the second time, I looked down at the swirly mess in the bowl and asked myself out loud: “Did I put the oil in yet?”

Of course, I didn’t remember. No clue. There were dots of oil on top of the mixture, but that could have been from the previous batch. And I had stirred it really well, so there wasn’t a single large pocket of oil, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t in there already; the yellow from the eggs made everything look yellowish and oily.

Sigh… LUCKILY (well, we’ll see), the recipe only calls for 1/4 cup of oil, which is less than many others (kind of). So I dumped in (another?) 1/4 cup of oil.

I think that was the wrong move, because the dough was quite moist, but at least it WAS dough, not soup. I dumped it out and added another cup of flour during kneading to achieve the “clay” consistency Glezer calls for.

It’s resting now. I’m giving it longer than the recipe’s 2 hours of bulk fermentation because the starter was cold when I added it, so I’ll probably form the challahs in an hour or so, and then stash them overnight in the fridge.

(at which point, they may fall apart due to sourdough overproofing… or something, but what else is new?)

I may really, really regret doing it this way, but for now, the dough is holding together and looking good.

…like hotcakes?

2010-10-21T06:25:00.001-07:00

These using-up-the sourdough hotcakes got mixed reviews. Kids didn’t eat them, and Ted said it “tasted like pancakes a hundred years ago.” Great.

My reaction? Different. Interesting. Tangy. The texture is good – a tad rubbery, in a good way. Quite nice with brown sugar sprinkled on top (as suggested). Perhaps an acquired taste.

I mixed in blueberries to sweeten it, but next time, I’d probably make some significant changes:

Less starter
Use at least some milk, not all water
Add some sugar to the batter

While they were frying, I started thinking this batter might make nice crumpets, but I couldn’t find metal rings to go in the cast-iron skillet to test my theory. But who knows… maybe I’ll try sourdough crumpets next time!

Sourdough on the go…

2010-10-20T20:38:00.001-07:00

Yup, not one, not two, but THREE sourdough projects on the go at the moment!

Firm starter being fed and groomed for sourdough challah
Breadtopia’s No-Knead Sicilian bread, sourdough style (yes, I realize we ate semolina bread on Monday, but I really didn’t like it, and I’d like to try something different…). I hope to either bake this in the dutch oven or use the dutch oven as a cloche over it while it bakes so as to fulfill my “bake-in-pot” promise!
Finally, what to do with all that poured-off un-needed sourdough? Sourdough hotcakes fermenting in a bowl for breakfast tomorrow! I plan to mix in blueberries to make them a bit more exciting. I realized only after mixing the overnight portion of this batter that there’s no dairy, so these are totally pareve. I picked the recipe because it was eggless, but yes, I’m tired, and didn’t realize they were also dairy-free (though I will fry them in butter to compensate!). They look a bit like the injera I made a while ago, only with bread flour. We shall see how they turn out…

Yummy!

Win Kosher by Design in my own COOKING DISASTER contest!

2010-10-20T09:29:00.001-07:00

Even if you’re not a teen or twenty-something (anymore – or yet!), here’s another chance to WIN a copy of Susie Fishbein’s Kosher by Design: Teens and 20-Somethings.

I’ll be posting a review and announcing my contest winner on my regular blog on November 10th (3 Kislev). You can check out other blogger reviews, recipes, etc., in the meantime here.

In honour of this slick new cookbook (I love the “fun” side of Artscroll!), I am announcing my very own… COOKING DISASTER CONTEST.

Leave a comment after THE CONTEST POST (NOT here!) to tell me (in as much hilarious detail as you want) about your most disastrous kitchen disaster – EVER. Read more rules here… bread- and cake-related disasters are most welcome!

Guess I sometimes meet a bread I don’t like…

2010-10-19T13:52:00.001-07:00

This is the Semolina (Durum) Bread from Bread: A Baker’s Book, which I wanted to try as an alternative to the semolina bread I have been attemping (and failing) so far.

(I forgot to put sesame seeds on top and just floured before slashing. And once again, the slashes were not deep enough!)

It’s made with a “flying” sponge – which apparently means that all the yeast is in it and makes for a faster bulk fermentation. It is faster than the other semolina breads I’ve tried, but I guess faster isn’t always better.

I really think I did everything right with this one! Okay, ALMOST everything.

I admit: I was scared of another raw-in-the-middle disaster, so I baked this a bit longer than I was supposed to. I was planning to give it 40 minutes at 460°. After 30 minutes, it was alarmingly dark, so I tented it and turned the temp down to 450°.

I don’t think overbaking was solely responsible for the ultimate dryness of this bread, though I will take about 20% responsibility.

The outside looked good, and we even made a good-faith effort to wait for some cooling to take place before slicing it… and waah! The crumb is SO fine! And the flavour, so dry!

Luckily, I was serving it with fall stew, so nobody noticed the dryness… :-)

Did I overmix it? I used the food processor, probably for about 30 seconds. The dough was still quite moist, though it had more structure than a no-knead dough. I dunno…

So I’m still wondering whether I went wrong, or whether it’s just not a fantastic recipe.

I was surprised to see it amid all of Hamelman’s slow-rise, extensively pre-fermented formulas. If this is his nod to faster bread, the book is fine without it, in my opinion.

Here: you can have the rest of the piece…

Hey, here’s a recipe for semolina rolls – made with gritty semolina, NOT durum flour – that look like hedgehogs. Maybe I should add those to the list of future bake projects…

What to do with a Leftover Challah

2010-10-17T14:10:00.001-07:00

Marcy Goldman’s Best of BetterBaking.com Bread Pudding Muffins!!!

Yummy… and utterly decadent…

Six Word Saturday: 9 Cheshvan, 5771

2010-10-16T20:38:00.001-07:00

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

This week’s goal: bake in pot!

I posted a really long 6ws on my regular blog, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet.

I have a fairly new small (3 quart?) enameled cast-iron dutch oven and I intend to use it for bread-baking.

I tried it out for the first time last week for my second attempt at Sicilian No-Knead Bread.

But then I had to go out while the bread was baking. I told Ted to remove the cover after 30 minutes and bake it 10-15 minutes longer, which he faithfully did… and in the end, the bread was woefully underdone.

But he did say I really must make the bread again. Indeed, what there was of it that was edible was simply amazing: gritty and moist and robust and flavourful, with the most crunchy crust.

But I may not make this recipe. I may see what Jim Lahey, the master of no-knead-dutch-oven-baking has to say about semolina. Or, I took out Bread: A Baker’s Book from the library again, and I may use that to look for formulas instead.

In any event, there it is, in six words, my intention for This Week in Bread: bake in pot. Oh, and revive my sourdough, but then, that would be more than six words…

Well, I made the Baby…

2010-10-12T20:35:00.001-07:00

…But I called it BIG PANCAKE! (also known as a “Dutch Baby”, apparently… because in Holland, the babies are born big, floury and sizzling hot)

See, that way I have an edge. Ted may make ORDINARY pancakes, but I can (now) make BIIIIIIIG pancake.

Utterly, utterly easy. Simple, and delicious. Served for lunch with powdered sugar, but YM had his with cottage cheese.

Whir the batter in the blender – 2 eggs, half a cup of flour, a couple more things (I halved the recipe). So simple.

Leave it to sit for half an hour.

Pour into cast-iron pan in which I’ve melted about 1/4 of a stick of butter.

Bake 10 minutes on bottom rack; 10 more minutes on top rack.

Boy, did it puff!

Slid out like a dream…

… and right out onto the plate!

Yummy! As close as you can get to a no-effort kid-pleasing lunch…

p.s. So this officially ends my dithering over the genre of my cast-iron pan: it is now a DAIRY pan. But I still have the small enameled cast-iron dutch oven, which is pareve. However, it slightly failed to do its job of baking a loaf of bread tonight, so I will blog about it another day.

Mmm… is it BREAD? And a call to readers!

2010-10-11T20:35:00.001-07:00

Actually, who cares! Whether or not it’s bread, I’ll be using it to inaugurate my new cast-iron skillet: BIG PANCAKE (aka Dutch Baby).

Well… if I decide that the pan is going to be for dairy, that is. I think so. Though it strikes me as the perfect thing for bacon, we’re not really eating much of that around here.

Okay, here’s where you, my loyal reader(s), can help me out! (Google tells me I have followers now!)

Here’s what I need to know:

What can I make with a 10” cast-iron pan? Should I use it for dairy? Or keep it pareve and use it for breads somehow? (keeping in mind I do have a small pareve cast-iron pot that already intend to use for breads)

By the way, lest anyone think that I’ve gone all splurgy, what with my new whisk and now a new cast-iron pan, rest assured, it’s not exactly BRAND new. (gasp!) I bought it at Value Village for under $7.

Years ago, somebody told me you shouldn’t buy used dishes and cookware with the intent to kasher them. But recently, I started thinking this was silly and/or needlessly burdensome because many things are a) relatively easy to kasher, and b) relatively expensive (not to mention wasteful) to buy brand-new.

Amazon.com tells me that Lodge cast-iron skillets are $12-15 brand-new, but I have not been able to find prices like that here – any that I have seen start at maybe $20 (Cayne’s).

I kashered this one in the oven on the self-clean cycle; zero effort. Now it’s just a hunk of bare metal, which I will toivel, then wash well, then season before its first use… in Dutch Baby land!!!

Seriously – I need your input here. Should it stay pareve, or are there a million wonderful dairy delectables that I will use this pan for in feeding my family???

Adventures in BreadLand

Day Off!

Rye Onion Swirl Loaf: An awesome bread I forgot to blog!

Note to Self: YEAST!

The LAZIEST Challah Ever

Mmm… kichelicious!

Test-Driving the Pyrex Bake-a-Round

New Baking Toy!

I should be going to bed…

Sharing the dough!

Scottish Shortbread – so awesome, I had to blog it!!!

Pass the Pita, Please!

Six Word Saturday: 1 Cheshvan, 5772

Why, oh, why???

Whole lotta Sourdough Pumpkin Challah / Pan de Calabaza

Apple Galette for the Last Days of Sukkos

A Large-ish Quantity of Dough

On Baking Challah

Shanah Tovah!

Nice to come home to!

Let Them Eat Cake

You’ve heard of cottage CHEESE…

Vegan Focaccia / Pletzl Night…

Not as exciting as it sounds

Barley Semolina Bread

Naomi bakes Neapolitan Cake

How it turned out!

Mmm….

Brekkies!

Oh, wow – yummy! Pretzel Dogs!

Homemade Pesach Macaroons: The BEST, for less!

Apple Pizza

Six Word Saturday: 28 Adar II, 5771

Homeschool Matzah Bakery – Lessons Learned

Purim Onion-Poppy Ring

Six Word Saturday: 14 Adar II, 5771 - PURIM Edition!!!

Hamentaschen Baking Day with Sara

Six Word Saturday: 8 Adar 2, 5771

Six Word… umm… Saturday: 30 Adar 1, 5771

OMG – TWO special birthday desserts???

Guest post, anyone???

Six Word Saturday: 17 Adar 1, 5771

Easy semolina!

Six Word Saturday: 2 Adar 1, 5771

Just slightly CUTE… not really a WANT!

Six Word Saturday: 25 Shevat, 5771

Didja ever see one of…

The TRUE brownie snob…

Good Sourdough Semolina!

Jealous!

Ewww…

Six-Word Saturday: 18 Shevat, 5771

OMG, Eclairs!

Six Word Saturday: 11 Shevat, 5771

Six-Word Saturday: 4 Shevat, 5771

Six-Word Saturday: 25 Teves, 5771

Six-Word Saturday: 18 Teves, 5771

Six-Word Saturday: 12 Teves, 5771

Black Forest Birthday Cake for a Neighbour

Today’s Project: Whole Lotta Bread!

Six-Word Saturday: 5 Teves, 5771

It’s PURPLE!!!

The naked Sufganya (aka Jelly Donut!)

Six-Word Saturday: 28 Kislev, 5771 (Chanukah Edition)

Ted's erev-Shabbos Apple Galette

Our Annual Gingerbread House

Six Word Saturday: 21 Kislev, 5771

Sourdough Cornbread Math for Vegan Night

Nutella Pound Cake – why didn’t *I* think of that???

Six Word Saturday: 14 Kislev, 5771

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

National Homemade Bread Day!

Six Word Bread Saturday: 7 Kislev, 5771

Bake Bread Bold with “Stretch n’ Fold”!

Yummy chocolate-chiffon pie!

Six Word Saturday: 30 Cheshvan, 5771

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!

Yummy sweetie bread!

Easy Quick Tortillas

Cheddary Scones for Breakfast!

Nutella Pound Cake – why didn’t I think of that???