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    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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Pastry again: vinegar adds the tender touch

Posted on December 31, 2013 by DebbieN

Most people, if faced with a quick baking dilemma, probably go to the supermarket and buy cookies or brownie bites or something.  And it makes sense, kind of, although with a food processor, you can make pretty good cookies and brownies in less time than it would take you to fight over holiday parking, much less elbow your way through the store.

The corresponding shortcut for most people who do bake would probably have to be pie crust–to say nothing of puff pastry dough. For years I’ve been looking for ways to make a pastry dough that is close to puff pastry–flaky and light and puffy–without being as heavy on saturated fats and calories. Not the easiest combination.

Fillo (purchased, I’m not enough of a DIYer to make my own yet and my kitchen’s too tiny for rolling and tossing a huge thin sail of dough the right way)–fillo is good for a lot of things, but it’s so obviously itself and not pie dough, tart dough or puff pastry. It’s also pretty salted–I always have to comparison-shop to remember which commercial version has the least sodium per ounce (they vary within brands, because some are intended for savories and the others for sweet pastries. I think the savory ones are much too salty and use the less-salted ones for spanakopita and so on as well as for baklava).

After having made a variety of pie doughs–standard flour-butter-salt-water, olive oil tart dough, rugelach butter-cream-cheese dough, and even a puff pastry recipe with about half the fat called for in the classics–plus croissants that I finally got right–I can say my latest experiment is something of an eye-opener for me.

All of these worked okay as doughs, but except for the olive oil tart dough, which I use routinely for quiche, none are really all that light-tasting or actually light in terms of fat content and overall calories. And rolling them thinner than the standard 3/8 inch (thinner equals less dough and fewer calories per serving…) sometimes leads to a tough pastry. The fact that I tend to use bread flour instead of all-purpose or cake flour is probably at fault as well, I’m sure, but I’m mostly a bread baker and not exactly a perfectionist, so how many different sacks of flour do I really want hanging around my cramped galley kitchen at any given time?

A week or two ago I checked out an older cookbook (late ’80s) on Armenian food and tried to puzzle out the Armenian, Lebanese, Turkish and Russian influences–it’s a real mix. I was looking for a recipe for bureka dough, and this book had one.

The recipe for spinach burekas had an accompanying (and aging, over-tinted ’80s-style) photo of a browned and flaky dough wrapped around a log of improbably-green spinach filling on a platter lined with too-green lettuce and too-orange tomato slices underneath. But other than the color enhancements, the spinach log, kind of like a spinach Wellington, looked pretty nice.

To my great surprise, the dough was quite similar to some of the ones Joan Nathan had in The Jewish Holiday Kitchen.  The key ingredient differences from my standard pie doughs are:

1. slightly more butter for the amount of flour than for standard pastry dough (to be expected–you want it flakier, you probably need more fat in the dough) though a lot less than for rugelach or puff pastry

2. a little vegetable oil as well

3. an egg. Nathan’s “muerbeteig” egg dough for a plum pie calls for a hard boiled egg yolk, of all things, but the one here is raw. I’m not sure what it’s for, exactly. Perhaps for leavening or some other structural purpose–maybe it helps the dough puff into layers and hold them better with less hard fat than puff pastry requires?

4. a quarter-cup of dry white wine–which I didn’t have, only red, which would have turned the dough gray…so I substituted half apple cider vinegar and half water–the vinegar because Nathan had used it in a dough with egg. Why wine or vinegar? I think–don’t quote me–it’s the acidity, which breaks down gluten a little and tenderizes the dough. Certainly it did in this case compared to my usual experience.

So anyway–this dough came out surprisingly well. It doesn’t puff anywhere near as much as puff pastry–at least not while rolled out as thin as possible, and I haven’t tried it thicker–but it’s light, crisp and tender at the same time and not heavy or greasy. It’s unsweetened and mostly unsalted and would be equally good for savory pastries, Wellingtons and other encased main-dish things (like pot pies, coulibiac of salmon, and spinach-type fillings) where it’s the top layer or a wraparound, and for sweet ones like the impromptu almond paste and apple tartlet at the bottom of this post. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, cooking, Desserts, fruits, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes, wine | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Pastry again: vinegar adds the tender touch

Emergency eclairs

Posted on June 4, 2013 by DebbieN

Note: this is not my photo–I have not been to the balcony of Notre Dame lately. I merely share their dismay. [Source: Brittanica Online, with gentle modifications for parody purposes]

You may be wondering what to do if you drop half your éclair over the balcony of the Eiffel Tower, or worse yet, Notre Dame, while pondering your options for the afternoon’s conquest…YSL first, or peut-être Dior?…ooh-la-la-oops!

AAAAAGGGGHHHH!

Screaming will not get your éclair back, though it is a good start. You need to get down to ground level and purchase another tout de suite!

No, this is not really me channeling Miss Piggy at her “Who, Moi?” finest. I don’t have the lavender satin opera-length gloves for it, for one thing. I’ve just been watching too many of the various Muppet movies with my daughter lately.

Plus, and let’s be honest about it, the one time I ever tried on a long blonde wig (for a college skit), I took one look in the mirror and fell down on the costume department floor laughing until my ribs hurt. It was 20 minutes until I could breathe again. Picture Danny deVito (his eyebrows, anyway) peering out from under that wig, hoping to stand in for La Porcette,  and you understand why Frank Oz can never, ever go on vacation.

I have not been to Paris in seven years, and when we were there (for an engineering conference, with our then-kindergartner) we did not actually eat any éclairs. We also did not shop at Pierre Hermé, nor at Hermès, nor anyplace that wasn’t either a museum, an RER or métro stop,  a café or a tchotchke booth along the Seine. Other than for food, if it cost more than 15 bucks (or 11 euros, as for example, the tiny 3-inch-long stuffed unicorn at the Musée du Moyen Age, which we paid for hastily during a shall-we-say-jetlag-inspired meltdown), it was out of the question. I actually spent two full hours–ON VACATION IN PARIS–sitting forlornly in a coin-op laundromat down the alley from our hotel, hoping I had enough change to get all the horrible perfumed detergent back out of our clothes, while my husband and daughter went to the park. Not exactly the Paris experience I’d imagined way back in my high school French class.

So what am I doing imagining that I could climb up OR down the Eiffel Tower in chic heels (instead of the more believable sneakers and backpack with the entire belongings of my family plus bandaids and extra sandwiches…), waving an éclair around with incredible nonchalance and somehow not lose it (which I’ve never actually done; I’m a fervent believer in pastry) or break an ankle (which I have actually done, wearing flats), or both, with loads of people looking on?

Who knows–daydreams like these are the kind of thing mentioning Paris does to one when one blogs about food or fashion. Practically obligatory. It’s fun to imagine a life where such trivial matters can leaven, not to say inflate, my expectations. And, of course, where I’m not the one who has to schlep all the emergency supplies up however many flights of stairs. And back down.

Let’s face it, I’m a natural pessimist and (therefore) fan of both the Muppets and Matt Groening. Tell me true, now, doesn’t the gargoyle on the right look like the original inspiration for that sad shrimpy one-horned character in Life is Hell? He’s even wearing my backpack.

Real life is hard, gritty for more serious reasons than high-heeled éclair mishaps, and it’s filled with nagging of the now-ex-7th-grader. Ahem! These are things we just have to get through because there’s no great alternative (…yet. I’m working on it, believe me.)

Eclairs, on the other hand, are not actually difficult to make. And eating them makes one feel a lot less like life is hell, particularly if one skips the high heels and eats them barefoot.

And on the other other hand, baking anything in Los Angeles, even in winter, may well make one feel that one is actually living in hell, at least while the oven’s on. And right now it’s June.

How to cope? Toaster oven? Microwave?! The eagle squawking in shock above left may not approve of my methods, but he’d find it hard to argue with the results. Especially if you’re in the mood for just a couple of éclairs Right Now, and you have ice cream on hand so you can skip the custard chilling and filling bit and go right to profiterole heaven.

The pastry for éclairs, called pâte à choux, or choux paste (shoe paste! I knew there was a connection to the sudden appearance of high heels in my daydream), takes only a couple of ingredients: flour, water, butter, sugar, eggs. Maybe a pinch of salt too, okay.

Everyone and their uncle (or aunt) who’s ever written a Frenchy kind of cookbook has a recipe for éclairs, but who do you know anymore who’s ever actually made them? Right.

But actually, they’re pretty easy to make. At least as easy as brownies from a mix, and they seem fancier. You boil the butter, sugar and salt with the water, dump in the flour and stir until it looks like stiff mashed potatoes, then take it off the heat and beat in the eggs one at a time and voilà, there you have the dough–shiny yellow stuff to pipe out or dollop out onto a greased and floured baking pan and bake at high temperature for about 30 minutes until they’re really puffed and brown and don’t collapse anymore when you let them cool.

David Lebovitz has the classic recipe on his web site — a cup each of flour and water, 6 T butter, 2 t sugar, 1/2 t salt, and 4 large eggs. Pierre Hermé of exotically-flavored-macaron fame has a richer one with more butter and 6 eggs for the same amount of flour. And I’m sure they’re wonderful. But I can’t help messing around.

First off, I want fewer than 24 éclairs–what do you do with the rest of the dough? (turns out you can pipe it and freeze it, then bake straight from frozen sometime later, or else freeze the baked shells. OK. But still.) So I cut David’s basic proportions in half. Limit the damage to the avoirdupois, I always say. Fewer situps required.

Second, the butter. I know éclairs are the ultimate Unalterable Classic French Recipe but…here starteth the messing around. Like I say, I can’t help it. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, shopping | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Emergency eclairs

Little Green Footballs

Posted on May 26, 2013 by DebbieN

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

cheese and pesto triangles

Two or three weeks ago I got a frantic email from the assistant at my daughter’s Hebrew school: could I lead a cooking session for the 8th graders for an hour that Sunday?

Teens and preteens are not my specialty–I have a friend who’s really terrific with them; she’s an 8th grade and high school teacher and would rather deal with kids than write. I’m the other way around, and my own kid’s turning 13 very soon. Very soon.

Suffice it to say, my answer probably should have been, “Who me? Are you off your nut? Cook with preteens in only an hour?”

And then I thought–but wait. Fillo. It’s inexpensive (a big plus), it’s  easy enough to fold, it’s almost (if you squint) kind of a craft.  Like origami. Make some tasty and quick fillings for it (though no nuts–schools have gotten annoyingly leary of anything with nuts. How are you supposed to teach baklava? Eh? Eh???) and let the kids go to town, a couple of sheets of fillo apiece in the synagogue kitchen. An hour should do it, and it’s a cool, sophisticated food to know how to make–very different from the standard summer camp challah with blue or green food coloring.

So…I bought a couple of packets of fillo (about $2.69 for a roll of 20-24 sheets), a couple of pounds of loose-frozen spinach, an onion, some garlic, a bottle of olive oil and another bottle of canola oil (for the sweet fillings), a packet of dried apricots, a packet of dried figs, some farmer cheese (mistake, doesn’t taste that good; stick with ricotta) and some feta. And some dill and scallions I had at home. Also a lemon or two. I left the fillo in the fridge overnight to thaw slowly the way you’re supposed to, and not the way I usually do (i.e., take the thing out of the wrapper and let it sit an hour on the counter and then wonder why it cracks when I rush to unroll it).

I made the fillings the Sunday morning in a microwaver’s frenzy of immense efficiency:

  1.  Nuke a stick of unsalted butter in a bowl, pour it into a snaplock container.
  2. Thaw the spinach on a plate–4 minutes on HIGH. Take it out.
  3. Dump the dried apricots in a bowl with water to cover and a saucer on top–3 minutes. Meanwhile, start squeezing the spinach dry, and I mean dry, in handfuls over the sink. Nothing worse than soggy spanakopita. Except maybe soggy pizza.
  4. Take the apricots out, put in the bowl of figs with the stems cut off, some water and a lid, 3 minutes for them.
  5. Blend the apricots with a little sugar and water and lemon juice to make a thick paste. Get it out of the food processor and pack it in a disposable container with a lid.
  6. Do the same thing for the figs, only no sugar necessary.
  7. Rinse out the food processor, stick the scallions, wild thyme, fresh dill and basil in and chop them fine, drop in the spinach, a fat clove of minced garlic, and the feta. Pack that too.
  8. Grab all the bags with the goods and don’t forget the oils and the butter and the fillings and the extra feta and farmer’s cheese just in case there’s time to make some cheese-only filling there and somebody wants it. …

I hustled, I got to the synagogue kitchen on time, I set up stations around a stainless steel work table–foil sheets at each place, paper bowls with a dab of melted butter and a pour of oil, plastic baggies to go over everyone’s hands instead of pastry brushes, the carefully unrolled fillo under plastic wrap. The oven–on. The fillings–ready to rock. And then I waited. And waited.

An hour really would have been enough time for that class. But none of the kids showed up for the first 20 minutes because it was also the day the photographers were herding all the classes out into the basketball court area for graduation photos. So when they finally straggled in, all eight–and surprisingly, three of them were boys–I made them wash their hands and then set them to work.

The first thing I did was hand out individual sheets of fillo and pointed out that they were nearly as thin and tearable as tissue paper. They were all surprised when they saw it. None of the kids, who’d been cooking all year and who had attended a lot of bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, had seen fillo “in the raw”.

I got them started on spanakopita triangles–also known sometimes as bulemas (Greek root found here; you’ve heard of bulimia, right? Didn’t mention that connection, of course. You would never want to get into that with a batch of preteens. Don’t get too disturbed, though. The rough translation as used in Hebrew is “appetizers” or “things to gobble”. Of course, in Israel “bulmus” is also what they call anything like the American after-Thanksgiving shoppers’ frenzy or otherwise a run on the stock market…so much for appetites gone hog wild…)

I naturally thought fillo triangles would be a cinch for the boys especially–you do it the same way you fold a paper football and try not to get caught in class. Only with a little more butter and olive oil involved, and hopefully no punting in the kitchen, because I wasn’t gonna clean it up for them when the spanakopita went flying.

Here came the second generational surprise, though: none of the kids, not even the boys, had any idea how to fold a basic paper football! They’d never done it. Paper airplane? I asked desperately.  Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, cooking, Desserts, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Little Green Footballs

Pinned for Purim!

Posted on February 25, 2013 by DebbieN

Thanks to Yael Shuval for choosing my Low-Carb Hamantaschen for her board at Pinterest.com.

Three years ago I developed almond-meal based hamantaschen for my daughter, who had been diagnosed with Type I diabetes only a couple of weeks earlier and needed something that was low enough in carb that (at the time, anyway) she could actually have one or two when all the other kids were having theirs and without having to get an extra shot of insulin.

Almond meal has only about one-fourth as much carbohydrate per cup  as wheat flour, so it seemed like a good substitute. To our surprise, although the dough was a little finicky to work with, the hamantaschen came out tasting pretty good, and they were indeed pretty low carb, about 4-5 grams per mini-hamantaschen. Granted, they were also pretty small, but it was a symbolic triumph in the first few weeks and made us all feel like being diabetic wasn’t going to be the end of having fun.

Now that my daughter is on an insulin pump, getting an extra shot is no big deal, though in our experience the pitfall is that it’s now just a little too easy, especially for a preteen, to “eat anything you want, at any time, without thinking about it, as long as you program the insulin for it” which is one of the less responsible marketing messages in Medtronic’s brochure for teenagers (note: the pump itself is pretty good, but it still doesn’t mean you don’t have to be careful about what you’re eating). Those sour gummy heart candies the teacher handed out for snack earlier this week and left on my daughter’s desk, for instance….well, candy never seems like as much food as it really is, and I think my daughter gained a valuable lesson when she added up what she’d really eaten…she wouldn’t be the first one.

It’s always good to have a general plan in place for holiday eating so you don’t overdo the treats or eat an entire meal’s worth of carb in just a few cookies or candies or whatever…what can I say, we’re working on it.

Still. In the last year or two I’ve mostly gone back to making standard hamantaschen based on Joan Nathan’s classic cookie-dough recipe, which I like a lot and which looks and tastes much, much better than the dry, pasty-white horrors at the annual Purim carnival.

hamantaschen1

What I like about the standard flour-based recipe, other than that it tastes and looks good and is easy to work with, is that I can roll the dough out very thin and get crisp, delicate hamantaschen that are a decent cookie size but still hold together nicely and are not extravagantly carb-laden, particularly if the fillings are reasonable and you don’t eat ten at a time (the big challenge). They’re not as low-carb as the almond meal ones, but they still work out okay–about 7 grams apiece for a 1.5-2″ cookie. They taste good even made with pareve (nondairy) margarine instead of butter.

The LA-area idea of hamantaschen usually involves M&Ms, colored sprinkles, anything completely artificial. I bet gummy sour hearts (this afternoon’s culprit) would be a huge hit too. I don’t think they’ve heard of either prune or poppyseed out here in at least a generation.

Traditional fruit or nut fillings are a much more decent bet for carb, and they taste better (and look nicer too, because I’m not 6 years old and don’t insist on rainbow colors anymore). They’re also easy to make from scratch in a microwave or on the stove top so that you can decide how much sugar to put in them. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, cooking, Dairy, Desserts, Diabetes, Food Blogs, fruits, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pinned for Purim!

Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Posted on December 23, 2012 by DebbieN

Doesn’t that sound like the perfect title for an equal-opportunity holiday-themed kiddie book? Too bad my daughter’s too old for it now, and so are my nephews. Plus no one under 30 knows how to pronounce rugelach anymore. The “ch” always makes for Adam Sandler jokes because it’s so obviously Hard to Pronounce and even more obviously Not English–you use your throat to talk? Gross joke alert! The young and self-conscious have even taken to respelling Chanukah Hanukkah, just to avoid getting laughed at by their friends. Or their parents.

You may be asking what on earth rugelach have to do with Chanukah–and I’m a little late discoursing about Chanukah this week, since it just ended. However, let me warn you, they’re entirely relevant to the holiday treats vs. self-control dilemma.

Rugelach rolls slashed, baked and ready to be cut apart

Forming long rolls, slashing them partway before baking and then slicing them after is a quicker and easier way to form rugelach, especially with a very soft, delicate and hard-to-handle dough. It also lets the dough bake into crisp layers without letting the jam leak out. These two rolls are half the batch.

Fresh cheese (cream cheese, farmer’s or pot cheese) and sour cream are symbolic of Chanukah just as much as frying latkes or sufganiyot (doughnuts) in olive oil. During the war with the Assyrian Greeks in ca. 165 BCE that led to the rededication of the Temple (the event that sparked Chanukah), a Jewish woman named Judith invited the Assyrian Greek general Holofernes into her tent for what he thought was dinner and a movie–and she served him rich cheesecake (sometimes the story says “cheese pancakes”–maybe blintzes? who knows) to make him thirsty and then offered him a lot of undiluted wine. After that, the tryptophan got to him as she’d hoped (they didn’t have turkey back then) and he fell asleep. She chopped off his head (possibly to save the Jews, probably to stop the snoring) and Famous Western Painters from Rubens to Klimt have been painting her portrait ever since.

Puts another spin on the supposed tameness of homestyle baking, don’t it? Also serves as a warning on the more-is-more approach to pigging out. But old-style rugelach are designed to prevent both tameness and pigging out.

Now rugelach–the real thing–are what Pop Tarts never aspired to be (see Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop Tart joke in development at the New York Times online). That is, rugelach are self-limiting (an anti-commercial value) not because there are only two in the package but because they are serious pastry and taste like it.

The real thing is rich and flavorful enough that a few bites, one or two rugelach, are plenty even though they’re small. And before you ask why, it’s the use of cream cheese in the dough; the  tang makes the flavor seem a lot richer with a little less fat than an all-butter pastry dough. And it makes the dietary badness self-limiting: you really know when you’ve had enough.

One or two–delightful, blissful, they don’t do it like this anymore, it’s really Old School, my grandmother used to make these, how do you get them so flaky? Three–these are delicious, these are so evil, you’ve got to try the chocolate apricot one, I’ve already had so many! Four–klunk, groan (head hits knees in queasy stupor). It never fails.

Despite the Americanization and factory production of rugelach (even Starbucks sells a tame untangy version of them occasionally, or they used to), rugelach are a Jewish bakery specialty with a very simple dough that gives unbelievably rich, flaky, almost strudel-like results if you do it right. And luckily for me, it’s easy to do right. But it’s still too dangerous to do often.

And yet I’ve found myself making several batches this “holiday season”–one for my daughter’s piano recital, using the classic (and palming off the leftovers on the hosts so I wouldn’t have them at home), one for an experimental “lite” version that almost, but not quite, worked. It had flake, it lacked character. Sort of like the bland Americanized versions. What can I tell you? The lack of tang can’t be made up with salt and sugar–the tang is really what does it, which is why I went back to the classic and won’t revisit it again until next year.

…Although a woman in my congregation says she has a recipe that uses cottage cheese instead of cream cheese and is really good, I am choosing not to believe her.

Note on the dietary badness factor: If you go with either of these doughs and the fillings as directed in the recipe (i.e., you don’t double the sugar or use very sugary jam), a single rugelach comes out with about 6 grams total fat and 6 grams carbohydrate, about 65 calories, and about 20 mg. sodium. The degree of saturated fat depends on which recipe you use.

Classic Rugelach Dough (makes 44-48)

The classic recipe for the dough is:

  • 2 sticks (8 oz., 1/2 lb.) unsalted butter
  • an 8 oz package cream cheese
  • 2 c. flour

So basically equal and large amounts of butter and cream cheese. Soften them both and beat them together (a food processor is fine). Put the blended fats in a big mixing bowl and fold in the flour very gently with a wooden spoon, a couple of forks or the like, and don’t mix too thoroughly,  just barely enough for everything to come together as a very soft crumbly dough you can press into a ball. Put the dough in a plastic bag and pat it into a disk, divide it into four parts with a knife, and chill in the fridge or freezer about an hour until it’s firm enough to roll out. Easy, right?

Some people decorate the basic recipe with extra salt or sugar or, G-d help us, vanilla (Gale Gand puts in all three, why I don’t know). But really, the basic is the best. It gives you a nonsweet, very savory base for a sweet filling, and it’s anything but boring. It does NOT need jazzing up any more than French or Danish puff pastry does. And it builds character to make a pastry that doesn’t bow to middle-American excess. We have plenty of our own excess, thank you very much.

But cream cheese AND butter. A pound of fats for only two cups of flour, and almost all of it’s saturated. Yikes.

So I got to thinking (it had to happen sometime last week). Could I make the dough a little less rich and still great? Subbing in a reduced-fat labaneh from Karoun Dairies for the cream cheese? Maybe–but there’d be some water in it. Might not flake right. Hmm. Try it anyway, report back. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, Dairy, Desserts, history, holiday cooking, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Baking with “Inside the Jewish Bakery”

Posted on June 20, 2012 by DebbieN

A few weeks ago I reviewed Stanley Ginsberg and Norman Berg’s new book, “Inside the Jewish Bakery” for my local Jewish book festival committee by testing out the key recipe: bagels. Ginsberg and Berg give the inside scoop on what bakeries do and don’t do to make things work better than you usually can at home. Along the way–and the most interesting part for me–they give a huge helping of Jewish Bakery history. Not just nostalgia (“Weren’t those marble ryes worth wrestling over?”) but the fascinating cultural developments that gave rise to such things the Bagel Maker’s Union (local 338 [number corrected thanks to Stan Ginsberg]) in Brooklyn, and they’d break your legs if you tried to make nonunion bagels, at least through the 1960s.

Ginsberg’s the son of a baking family and Berg is a professional baker; between them they tell the story of Ashkenazi baking and the inside story of what it’s like to start work at 10 pm and head for home around 7 in the morning, all the while giving what turn out to be great technical baking notes.

And yet the recipes themselves are full of errors–and yes, this is the print edition we’re talking about, not an advance reader’s copy. The authors have a 6-page correction sheet (errata) up on the book’s web page, so if you’re going to get to it and try it out–and why not, if you’re ambitious about baking–check it out carefully against the recipe in the book, read everything over very carefully first, and then get to it in a way that won’t send you scurrying for specialty ingredients. NOTE: per Stan Ginsberg (see comments below) the 2nd edition’s recipes have been corrected so things should be easier.

If you can read between the lines and have some experience with bread under your belt, you’ll find the recipes do work (once corrected). My bagels came out very well, with that crunchy crust and dense, chewy bite all of us ex-New York types have missed for decades out here in California (actually, I’m posting this from Montreal, where the bagels are lighter and sweet? have to try, probably won’t love them).

I do have pictures to post (once I can get home and edit them down) of the bagels proofing slowly overnight in the fridge and one of the last remaining survivors–my daughter still had it in her bookbag when we came east this week. Ten days, obviously not still fresh, but not spoiled either. As tough as the dough it came from (which, again with the asides, is very tough compared with regular pizza or challah doughs, and you have to knead it by hand unless you have the dough hook of the century. If not, you’ll develop the right hook of the century.)

So here are my notes to the local Challah Club, which was interested in trying out some of the other recipes. Good luck and eat nice!

Notes for the Challah Club members up for a challenge:

1. Read all the instructions several times first and double-check the errata sheets. It’s 6 pages of corrections for the whole book and it’s up at the Inside the Jewish Bakery web site under a top menu link on the right (Errata). Hopefully we can get the second edition in soon.

The book web site also has lots of info, interviews, links to other related stuff.

Also check notes on special ingredients in the front for unfamiliar names–diastatic malt in the bagels and elsewhere is defined up front; it’s just malt. I think they get a little technical on flour grades–they’re tied in with an aggressively technical bakers web site/forum (NY Bakers, you don’t expect them to be laidback, do you? but most of it’s just futzing around with professional stuff). Chernushka seed is nigella seed–available here at the Armenian groceries. And then do whatever makes best common sense and doesn’t have a huge cash layout just for one loaf!

2. The recipes in this book are weighable on a food scale in grams, which is how I did the bagels (just this once, just to see if it needed me to be that nerdy). Some of the flours are technical grades beyond what you can easily get in the grocery store; you can mix flours to get the right consistency. For example, bread flour is 13% protein, but I added a teaspoon of vital wheat gluten to bring it up to the 14% protein specification for the bagels, and for something that really needed stretch, like rye, maybe, I would have added a little more. Don’t know that you really need to, but if you’re gonna be nerdy, a food scale and a calculator are handy tools.

3. If you go for the pastries, some have a mix of butter and shortening-plus-butter-flavoring. I’m not a shortening fan; I’m just not; I prefer butter or margarine. The laminated doughs add these things in stages, so read the errata pages and double-check the recipe instructions for how much fat to put into the pastry dough when. Gets confusing occasionally.

4. One thing that’s not in the corrections pages: watch the salt. You do not need as much as they throw in for the breads–not for flavor, not for texture. The bagels I made with only half the salt in the recipe because the original would have been 400-500 mg. of sodium per bagel, which is getting up into Campbell’s Tomato Soup territory (or half a South Beach Diet frozen microwaveable “lunch”). And they tasted fine without it and did most of the right things without me having to join the bagel-makers’ union.

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Lightening up homemade scones

Posted on May 22, 2012 by DebbieN

Blackberry scones for brunch

I’ve been wanting to post my favorite scone recipe for some time, but it seems to me that most food blogs start out with good intentions and end up maxing out on the desserts-and-starches end of the food spectrum.

The reason is pretty simple: if you’re a food blogger,  a baking recipe and a pretty picture (or any picture of an aggressively-frosted cupcake) will never put you wrong, even if the real result tastes kind of blah. I mean, cupcakes? Isn’t that what Duncan Hines is for? But if you do feature cupcakes, somebody’s sure to repost it or call it awesome, particularly if you figure out how to add bacon to it. Somehow people just don’t flock to posts about green beans in droves unless you’re redoing the Thanksgiving-straight-from-the-can classic, complete with canned fried onions.

There are way too many variations for every kind of baked good, none with a clear and permanent advantage, and people take them all literally (see under, my New Year’s apple pie insecurities).

So as I say, I’ve been reluctant to put up too many baking posts. Scones, though they’re not exactly the staff of life, are very easy to make and actually taste best when you make them from scratch–much better than buying them in a store and definitely not at your local Starbucks. The question I have is whether it’s a good idea to do it very often–I usually don’t, even on the weekend, but partly that’s because I live in southern California and heating the oven for more than five minutes in my little galley kitchen is often a Very Bad Idea. The other reason is that I keep remembering something Valerie Harper once said (maybe in the role of Rhoda Morgenstern; can’t remember): “I don’t know why I bother to eat this piece of chocolate cake. I should just apply it directly to my hips.”

Most quick breads (i.e., raised with baking soda or powder, or beaten egg whites, not yeast) do fine in a microwave as long as you don’t need them to brown. So lemon-poppyseed cake is okay, as is gingerbread. Scones, which to my mind require a deep and crunchy crust, need a regular oven to do well, but I make the sacrifice (90-degree weather makes it a genuine sacrifice) once in a while on Sunday mornings, because they taste terrific and they’re not exactly rocket science to make.

So if they’re that easy, should I really be posting about them–haven’t you already seen too many wide-eyed, “Look, Ma, I made SCONES!” kinds of posts?

Let’s face it. You can make great scones in a food processor from a very short list of ingredients for cheap, in about half an hour including baking time, and flavor them simply or exotically. Fruit or chocolate chips or chiles and herbs and cheese–all optional. I stick with berries and turbinado sugar, which makes the crust crunchy and glittery. Continue reading →

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A Handful of Farina Breads

Posted on March 21, 2012 by DebbieN

Simit bread or "beigele" with labaneh and herb spread

It’s been a couple or three weeks since my last post. I am currently in the desperate process of using up as much hametz, which is flour-yeast-bread-beans-lentils-rice-pasta-fillo-dough-oatmeal-etcetera, as possible before Passover. Right after Purim  I discovered I still had about 5 sacks of dried beans and lentils cleverly saved up and a sack of whole wheat flour and a 2-lb. bag each of bulgur AND farina! And a pound of wild rice. And a new bag of soy flour. Most of all which I couldn’t donate to the food shelter because it was either bulk or partly opened. Yeesh. What’s a girl to do?

Well…we’re certainly going to find out in the next couple of posts, aren’t we?…Even my suddenly-vegetarian daughter–yes, the very same one who kept bugging me about why I wasn’t cooking enough chicken for her last year–is wondering whether she has the stomach for more black bean burritos in the next two or three weeks (her conclusion: as long as there’s chipotle salsa around, what’s the problem?) My husband is looking at both of us cross-eyed.

Okay, then. Project #1 (well, after the pot of black beans, anyway; those were pretty standard and don’t call for a post): bread.

Long, long ago, in a kibbutz kitchen far, far away, I made some bread for my parents, who were coming to Israel for a visit during the year I was there. December in Israel–drizzly and cold some days, bright and cool others. You never know what you’re going to get.

But I’d missed my parents dearly for half a year. To celebrate seeing them I had in mind something like one of the blackish poppy-filled strudel I’d seen in a Romanian bakery in the middle of Haifa’s downtown “Hadar” shopping district amid the felafel stands and bookstalls. Only I wanted something not sweet, and with a better dough. A savory bread, like a bialy but with poppy seeds. So onion and maybe a little parsley or dill, now that I’d worked in the side kitchen for 5 months and knew the Hebrew names for both herbs.

I decided on a basic bread dough, flour-water-yeast-salt with a bit of oil. I rolled it out flat into a long rectangle and filled it with chopped, fried onions, parsley, dill, thyme and salt (it actually had too much salt, to my embarrassment, but my mother loved it anyway) and a couple of handfuls of poppy seeds. Then I rolled up the column of bread, twisted it around itself into a longish double rope, glazed it with egg yolk and baked it. It was pretty good and looked impressive. And it was really easy. My mother ate it all week sightseeing while my dad was at his conference.

Those days are gone, but a recent trip my husband took brought back the memory along with a couple of loaves of multigrain herb bread from a traditional German bakery he discovered in Tehachapi. The breads lasted an entire week at room temperature (of course, our humidity’s so low in Pasadena that this may be an exception) without seriously high salt in the dough, and every time we passed the dining room table, the aroma of dill and thyme and scallions and sourdough made us want to tear off a chunk to eat just as-is.

Two weeks ago was Purim, the feast of lots (as in drawing lots to determine someone’s fate, not lots as in lots-of-hametz-to-use-up). It’s the holiday from which we get the term “the whole Megillah”–the Megillah being the Scroll of Esther, a long Scheherezade-style story set in Persia and very long to read out loud in one sitting to a large congregation while they cheer the heroes and boo the villain (also Scheherezade-style, it’s the wicked vizier–am I giving anything away? It’s always the wicked vizier, except when it isn’t. And did I mention it’s kind of long? Okay, then).

So anyway, I decided to make some of this scrolled bread to give as Purim shalachmones–food baskets sent to friends, but didn’t get that far this year. Hamantaschen was about the limit of my ability, since it’s also get-your-kid-into-a-decent-school-for-next-year lottery time.

Usually these days the mishloach manot (same term, without the Yiddish accent) are candy bars, bagged snack foods, and maybe some raisins or an orange to round out the “3 different foods” custom. Occasionally you still see hamantaschen but the junk food factor has really taken over very sadly, I gotta say, even if it’s Israeli junk food. I mean, okay, felafel-flavored Bisli is fun once, but it’s really not much better than Cheetos, except that the wrapper is a good exercise for my daughter’s Hebrew reading skills (especially once she figured out which word meant “carbohydrates” on the nutrition label).

Nobody on the west coast even makes poppy seed hamantaschen anymore, to say nothing of prune lekvar filling, the two classics of my childhood. It’s a cultural deterioration I aim to remedy. Maybe next year–but for now, this weekend, with a container of poppy seeds still in the freezer, I’m thinking about making the bread, since it’s delicious, also involves poppy seeds and is unlike anyone else’s. And because I have flour and yeast to use up before Pesach, which is now right around the corner.

So I started pulling the flour off the shelf and realized I’d used up all the bread flour for hamantaschen but I still had a good 3-4 pounds of whole wheat, which wouldn’t make a good bread all by its lonesome. And on the other hand, I had both bulgur and farina–bulgur for tabbouleh or a wheat version of polenta, but farina–2 pounds of it. Well…it’s wheat and fairly fine. Maybe if I ground it up a bit further in the coffee grinder? I did, though the end result seemed less than convincing that I’d made any difference in it at all. Still pretty grainy. Dumped it into the food processor anyway along with an equal amount of whole wheat flour, some yeast, a little salt, and enough water for a fairly stiff but elastic ball of dough once it was processed.

The dough was pretty heavy to lift out and the farina absorbed a lot of water but it did seem to be developing some stretch, at least. I let it rise overnight in the fridge and started testing it out the next day. Continue reading →

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Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

Posted on February 29, 2012 by DebbieN

calzone

Calzone–one of my favorite Italian dishes–is extremely easy to make once you’ve got some basic pizza or bread dough risen and ready to shape. Flatten out individual rounds of dough, mix up a ricotta-based or roasted vegetable filling, fill and fold the dough over into half-moons, crimp the edges, brush with olive oil, and bake on a sheet in a hot oven until they’re puffed and golden. A satisfying but fairly light supper dish, especially if you have a good thick spicy tomato sauce to go with it and a salad on the side.

But even if you don’t, they’re a good consolation on a Sunday night for a kid with frustratingly advanced math homework the teacher didn’t quite prepare himself or the class for (11th-grade precalculus techniques popping up in a sheet of homework for 11-year-olds? The dangers of pulling your homework handouts from a math site on the internet. I keep reminding myself that he’s young yet). All I can say is, you know you’re in trouble when the heartburn is coming from the homework and not the food.

Grrrr. I’m almost over it. Anyway, here’s a much easier calculation trick that doesn’t require factorials…

The trick about making dinner from homemade dough is that the kid in question is diabetic and needs to know how many grams of carb she’s going to get in her calzone. Pizza, calzone, any kind of handmade entrée with dough plus noncarb ingredients, is tricky to calculate carbs for because you can’t easily tell by eye how much bread you’re getting in a serving. Check out any of the commercial pizza companies’ nutrition stats per slice–they’ll often state carbs as a range rather than a set value. How thick the dough is, how large the slice, etc, can really throw things off. Most people don’t need to know more precisely than “35-50 grams per slice”, but diabetics really do. Fifteen grams is a pretty big variation.

So how do you deal with it at home? If you’re making lasagne or stuffed shells or spanakopita, you can calculate the carb by counting the noodles or sheets of fillo dough you use and looking on the package nutrition label, then figuring a total carb count for the tray and dividing by the number of portions. A little tedious, but manageable.

Bread that’s already baked is also easy enough to calculate for–just weigh it out on a food scale in grams and figure 50 percent carb by weight. Most nonsweetened bread is pretty consistent, whatever density its texture. Weigh out a 70-gram piece of bread, and you’re usually looking at 35 grams of carb.

But for calzone or pizza you’re dealing with a bowl of wet dough to start, and once the dish is baked, it’s got lots of other stuff on or in it so you won’t be able to weigh it cooked and really know what carbs you’ve got. You need to test a portion of your raw dough, only raw dough is heavier than it will be once baked. Depending how wet the dough is, the proportion of carb could vary from a little less than half to a lot less.

Weighing a sample of raw dough to figure carbs after baking

Weighing a sample of raw dough to figure carbs after baking

The only thing to do is test a bit of dough by weighing it out raw, then reweighing it once it’s baked. Doing this in a conventional oven just for a single test ball of dough can be time-consuming unless you’re already heating it for the main event. Still, you want to get ahead with making the actual calzone so dinner will be sometime before midnight.

Enter the microwave. Yes, really. A nectarine-sized ball of dough, say 100 grams raw weight, will cook through lightly in 40-50 seconds in the microwave if you put it on a saucer and punch the “nuke” button. It’ll still be white and pale, but it’ll have risen fairly well to the size of a large dinner roll and won’t have gooey raw spots (you can check by breaking it open, just watch out for steam). Then just pop it in the toaster oven for about 5 minutes and it’s browned and baked through. When you reweigh it, you’ll know how much a 100-gram ball of your dough weighs cooked, and then figure 50 percent of that weight for carbs.

Aside: This nuke-and-toast scheme works pretty well for making a fast sandwich roll from a bowl of dough in the fridge. When I first came up with the idea, it was with great reluctance, because my only previous experience with microwaving bread had been the horrible, horrible mistake of Continue reading →

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What do you make on New Year’s Morning?

Posted on January 2, 2012 by DebbieN

Apple pie for New Year's Day

If you’re me–as I was, this morning, and will be until I can find someone better and clearly cooler to be–you make pie to take for a brunch at the house where a childhood friend is visiting. We had a great visit at her mother-in-law’s and my daughter got to meet my friend’s kids and trade rolled eyes while us uncool parents hung out and swapped tales of child-raising woe and pride–all the usual things.

But this morning–there’s no denying it–was a little rough. I got up about two hours later than I’d hoped to, after worrying much of last night about what kind of fool was I to offer to bring apple pie for 15 when I’d never made an actual apple pie before, just pumpkin pie and various apple cobblers–which probably wouldn’t add up to the same thing. And my friend and her husband are the “accomplished cook” sort of couple that makes such a gambit even riskier. Sort of like going to that 30th class reunion, only crossed with a cook-off. I’m not southern enough to enjoy the prospect very gracefully.

So at 9 a.m. I was up, cranky, and snarling (effectively, as it turns out) at my nearest and dearest that if they wanted breakfast they were on their own; I had pie to figure out and only about 2 hours or so to do it in before we had to leave, and maybe I could be convinced to brew coffee after the pies were in the oven, but until then they were cordially invited to seek out the Starbucks and leave me to my fate. Which was about a pound of flour, 3 1/2 sticks of butter, 3/4 cup of sugar, some cinnamon and cloves and 11 huge Granny Smith apples.

I think I made more dough than I’ve ever made before in one recipe–double crust for two pies. Only other double-crust pie I’ve ever made was the medieval tart for my daughter’s class a month or so ago (and I was panicked enough that she had to remind me that it had worked out fine, so what was the big deal?).

When you scale up like that, will your recipe still work? will it be too tough or uneven? too dry? too stretchy? will it roll out right? –too much worrying for one morning before benefit of caffeine, I’ll tell you that.

I had actually checked out about 5 different baking books to compare notes on dough and apples and how much sugar for how many apples–and on and on. You will say–correctly–that I probably shouldn’t have bothered. Apple pie has got to be one of the big basics, and despite the fact that every one of the books had about the same ratios, none of them were exactly alike, and they all looked fine.

I don’t usually get like this, and if it had been an apple crisp, I certainly wouldn’t have worried about any recipes at all. But pie. Pie is a standard, and apple pie even more of a standard. Everyone knows what it’s supposed to look and taste like. It’s the only food Americans really get French about.

There’s nothing to do about that, except to take the chance and pick your friends wisely, so they’ll be thrilled you brought a homemade pie or two. Which is what I did. And it turned out much better than I had any right to expect. So if you’ve never tried it, and you actually like apple pie–this is not bad. Not bad at all.

The only other hidden wisdom in this post is how to schlep your pies, still hot, across Los Angeles at noon on New Year’s Day. Think Priority Mail ™–the Continue reading →

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