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ОглавлениеBREAD AND SUCH
Chris – Like the song says, let’s start at the very beginning. Making bread is a miracle that transforms lifeless flour and pure water into one of the simplest and most satisfying of pleasures. It is both a miracle to create and a delight to consume and so it has been for millennia.
Every culture has its variations. One of my great childhood pleasures was to dip a plain piece of bread into the Sunday tomato sauce as it simmered on the stove. And the first solid food of any baby in our family is a hunk of bread for them to gnaw on.
Daniel – The smell of bread rising and bread baking can trigger early childhood memories of home. In my mind, I can still see the corner of the kitchen table right against the wall where the bread would rise, covered with a kitchen towel. I remember peeking under those towels many times, wondering what was going on under there.
Chris
These two recipes really belong together because they create one of the most satisfying combinations of simple pleasures – bread and butter. That phrase has crept its way into our vernacular to stand for the very basics, the things we are most comfortable with. But real bread and butter has fallen out of the repertoire of most home cooks. Milk, honey, yeast, flour and a little salt are all that are needed to create this dynamic duo of comfort foods.
A NOTE ABOUT FLOUR
I generally use bread flour or high-gluten flour for this recipe, but all-purpose flour works just fine.
Milk and Honey Bread with Homemade Butter
Makes ½ pound of butter (plus 2 cups of whey or buttermilk) and 2 loaves of bread
BREAD
INGREDIENTS
2 cups whey (you can also use regular milk or buttermilk)
¼ cup warm water (115°F)
2 teaspoons dry yeast
¼ cup honey
5 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
STEPS
• Dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Add the honey and stir to combine. The yeast should begin to foam.
• Put the flour and the whey into the bowl of a stand mixer. Add the yeast and honey mixture and finally the salt.
• Beat on low speed with the dough hook until the mixture is combined. Increase the speed a notch and continue to knead until the dough forms a ball and cleans the side of the bowl. This should take around 5 minutes. If the dough appears very stiff and dry you can add a few tablespoons of water. If it is too wet you can add a few tablespoons more of flour.
• Take out the dough hook and cover the bowl. Let the dough rise for about an hour. It should double in size.
• Preheat the oven to 350°F.
• Coat the inside of 2 loaf pans with nonstick spray.
• Sprinkle a little flour on your work surface and pull the dough out of the bowl. Cut it in half. Press one half into an approximate 8-inch square. Roll it up tightly and place, seam side down, into one of the pans. Repeat with the remaining dough. Cover loosely with a towel and let rise again until the dough is an inch or more above the rim of the pan.
• Bake the loaves for 35–40 minutes or until a thermometer registers over 200°F. Let the loaves cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then empty onto a rack to cool completely.
• Cut into thick slices with a serrated knife and enjoy with a big slather of your fresh butter.
BUTTER
INGREDIENTS
1 quart heavy cream (avoid the ultra-pasteurized if possible)
Salt to taste
STEPS
• Add the cream to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Turn the machine on low. In a few minutes the cream will begin to thicken. A little bit longer and the cream will start to stiffen. And finally, the butter and whey will separate in the bowl.
• Use your hands to gather the butter together and squeeze any excess moisture back into the bowl.
• Place the butter on a flat surface, knead in a little salt, if desired, and shape into a log or press it into a crock.
Chris
I tried to research the origin of this name for a dish my mother made for me as a special treat when I was home sick from school or on occasional Saturday mornings. I seem to remember that she always suggested it when she thought I was a little down in the dumps. After a pretty exhaustive online search, I have come to the conclusion that it was just a clever way for Mom to try and cheer me up. I was a big fan of Davy Crockett (there are embarrassing pictures of me in a coonskin cap which we will NOT include here) and the use of his name elevated the status of this simple sweetened toast.
Davy Crockett Toast
Makes 2 Davy Crocketts
INGREDIENTS
2 thick slices homemade bread
4 pats butter
Powdered sugar
STEPS
• Heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add 2 pats of butter and place the bread slices over the butter, sliding them around to distribute the butter. Add a pat of butter to the top of each slice.
• Cook until browned on the top and flip to brown the second side. Sprinkle liberally with powdered sugar and serve immediately.
• These are best hot out of the pan.
Daniel
Breakfasts of magdalenas and hot chocolate were a big part of growing up, and I still enjoy them as a breakfast or snack. If the name and flavor remind you of French madeleines, it’s no accident – this is a Spanish version of that classic treat, but bigger and heartier, a more muffin-like pastry. Try them and you may prefer them to madeleines – and muffins, too.
This recipe is interesting in that it recreates the heating pattern of an old-fashioned brick baking oven, which would be heated to a peak temperature and then lose heat gradually as bakers raked out the coals and filled the oven with bread dough or pastry.
Magdalenas are traditionally made in baking pans lined with paper muffin cups, but you know your bakeware best: if you trust your muffin pan, you can coat the individual muffin wells with nonstick baking spray, butter, or nothing at all as you see fit.
Magdalenas (Olive Oil Muffins)
Makes 12 magdalenas
INGREDIENTS
1 cup sugar, plus more for sprinkling
3 eggs
Zest of ½ lemon
1 cup olive oil
¼ cup milk
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon salt
2 cups cake flour
STEPS
• In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream sugar and eggs at medium speed. Continue at medium speed while adding lemon zest, olive oil and milk.
• In a separate mixing bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Reduce the speed of the mixer and add the flour mixture. Gradually increase mixer speed to high and whip batter for 3 minutes. Put the mixing bowl in the fridge for 45 minutes.
• Ten or 15 minutes before you’re ready to bake, heat the oven to 475°F.
• Prepare the muffin pan using paper baking cups, nonstick baking spray or other preparation. Evenly divide batter among wells in the muffin tin, filling each one ½–¾ full. Sprinkle a little sugar on top of each magdalena.
• Put the muffin pan in the oven, lowering temperature to 350°F. Bake for about 15 minutes, or until a toothpick or cake tester poked into a magdalena comes out dry.
• Enjoy with thick, bittersweet hot chocolate, coffee, juice or milk, according to your age, time of day, or personal preference.
Chris
There is nothing wrong with a nice, gooey, grilled cheese sandwich. But when I was growing up we looked forward to a different kind of cheese sandwich for a Saturday lunch. It was made with ricotta and mozzarella, but the distinctive cheese flavor came from the addition of caciocavallo (which means saddlebags in Italian). The name comes from the way the balls of cheese are tied with string and hung over a rafter or wooden beam to dry and age. It is reminiscent of provolone with a salty and smoky character. You can easily substitute provolone if the more exotic cheese is unavailable.
(In the Sicilian dialect spoken by my Gram, caciocavallo sounded to a child’s ear like “ghas gavalda” and it took me many years to track down the real thing.)
SERVING OPTION
You can also put 2 halves together for an even heartier sandwich.
Ricotta and Mozzarella Sandwiches
Makes 8 open-faced sandwiches
INGREDIENTS
4 soft Italian rolls, split
8 ounces whole milk ricotta
8 slices fresh mozzarella
1 cup shredded caciocavallo (or provolone)
Freshly ground black pepper
STEPS
• Spread each half of the rolls with ricotta and season with fresh cracked pepper. Cover with a slice of mozzarella and a handful of the shredded caciocavallo.
• Lay the sandwich halves on a foil-lined baking sheet and broil for just a minute or two, until the cheese is bubbling.
Chris
If you ask for biscuits and jam in England, you’ll probably get a plate of flat dry crackers and a small dish of preserves. But around here we like our biscuits fresh from the oven, light and flaky with a golden crust. You can enjoy them as a breakfast bread with eggs and sausage gravy but they might be best of all when split and served with a dollop of fresh jam.
This recipe for freezer jam means you don’t need any special canning equipment or expertise, and because the fruit is never cooked it retains its fresh-picked flavors.
This recipe makes a delicious jam with minimum work. It is kept in the freezer because it has not technically been preserved like traditional jams. It will keep in the freezer for months and, once opened, it will easily keep a week in the refrigerator. Freezer jam can be made with any kind of fresh berries or fruit, but strawberries seem to hold up particularly well.
Welch’s grape jelly was our sweet spread of choice. It went on our toast with peanut butter, cream cheese or butter. We spread it on crackers and English muffins. I don’t think it was so popular because of any outstanding flavor characteristics. It just came in the cutest glass jars with cartoon characters. Our cupboards were overflowing with these colorful and whimsical little drinking glasses. Something for free! And much quicker and easier than saving Bazooka Bubble Gum wrappers to send in for a prize.
Biscuits and Jam
Makes about 12 biscuits and 5 cups of jam
BISCUITS
INGREDIENTS
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
½ cup shortening
¾ cup buttermilk
STEPS
• Preheat the oven to 425°F.
• In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Cut in the shortening with a pastry cutter as you would for pie crust until the mixture is crumbly with pea-sized pieces of shortening.
• Pour in the buttermilk all at once and stir gently with a fork, just until the dough clings together in a ball.
• Put the dough on a well floured board and knead ten times, dusting with flour only if necessary. The dough should be springy and elastic.
• Dust the top with a little flour and roll out gently to ½-inch thickness. Use a 2½-inch cutter (or the top of a juice glass) to cut out rounds and place them on a greased cookie sheet with the edges touching. Push the remaining dough together and cut out the rest.
• Bake for 12–15 minutes or until puffed up and golden brown on top.
• Eat them as soon as possible after they come out of the oven!
FREEZER JAM
INGREDIENTS
2 cups ripe, hulled strawberries (about one quart)
4 cups granulated sugar
1 package pectin
¾ cup water
STEPS
• Wash and dry about five 1-cup jelly jars.
• Use a potato masher to make a rough puree of the strawberries. Stir in the sugar and let sit for about 10 minutes.
• Dissolve the packet of pectin in the water and stir over heat while it comes to a boil. Boil for about 1 minute and then add to the strawberries, stirring until most of the sugar is dissolved. There may still be a few granules.
• Pour into the jars, leaving about ½ inch at the top. Wipe the rims and screw on the covers. Let the jelly sit at room temperature for a day. Then it is ready to use or store in the fridge for a week or in the freezer for up to a year!
Chris
In my neighborhood in Brooklyn there was a pizzeria on every other corner. A slice was nice but my mother made pizza at home. What I really looked forward to at the pizzerias were zeppoli. They would take little pieces of the pizza dough and drop them into the deep fryer. In just a few seconds they looked like deep brown asteroids from outer space. Three or four of these little fried dough balls were thrown into a paper bag and completely doused with powdered sugar. The bag was closed and shaken until the zeppoli were completely coated.
Zeppoli
Makes about 24 zeppoli
INGREDIENTS
1½ teaspoons yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup warm water (115°F)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1½ cups flour
Oil for deep frying
Powdered sugar
STEPS
• Sprinkle the yeast and sugar on top of the warm water. Add the olive oil and wait for the yeast to foam.
• Put the flour in a bowl and stir in the yeast mixture. Stir for a few minutes until a stiff batter forms. Sprinkle on a tablespoon or so of additional flour and stir until the batter just starts to clean the side of the bowl. Cover and let rest for one hour. It should double in size.
• In the deep fryer, heat the cooking oil to 365°F and drop in golf-ball-sized pieces of dough. Cook until well browned.
• Drain on paper towels and dredge in powdered sugar.
Chris
My mom made pizza every Friday night of my childhood. She had well-seasoned black square pans that were perfect for our style of thick-crusted Sicilian pizza. She really had it down to a science. Mix the dough at 3:00 pm; put in the pans and top with sauce and cheese at 4:00 pm; into the oven at 5:00 pm; out on the table at 5:30 pm. At the request of my father, Mom always made 5 pizzas. That allowed for plenty at mealtime and at least one pan to enjoy cold the next morning as we all gathered around the television to watch cartoons. This recipe is a little scaled down from Mom’s.
Pizza Dough
Makes 2 thick-crust or 3 thin-crust pizzas
INGREDIENTS
2 cups lukewarm water
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 teaspoons yeast (or one package)
1 tablespoon sugar
4 cups high-gluten bread flour, divided
1 tablespoon salt
STEPS
• Heat the water to 120°F. Stir in the olive oil, yeast and sugar and let stand 5–10 minutes while the yeast develops.
• In a bowl, mix the salt with 3 cups of the flour, then stir in the liquid. Stir until well blended and smooth. (You can use the dough hook on your stand mixer, but one of the simple pleasures of this recipe is to get your hands in the warm and supple dough.)
• Once the dough is smooth, add the remaining flour a few tablespoons at a time until the dough is dry enough to turn out on a floured board to knead. Continue to knead and add flour as needed until the dough is no longer very sticky. The less flour you use, the more delicate the dough will be.
• Put the dough in a large greased bowl and cover. Let it sit until it has doubled in size.
• The dough is now ready to be cut and spread into pans or used for any number of pizza dough-based recipes like calzones, breadsticks and focaccia.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT YEAST
People tell me that they have no “luck” with yeast. But the only thing you can do to kill yeast is to dissolve it in water over 130°F. Cooler temperatures won’t kill the yeast, only increase the amount of time it takes for the product to rise. Do yourself a favor and get an instant-read thermometer. Test the water temperature before you stir in the yeast. You’ll never have a problem with yeast again.
And one more tip: if you are going to be doing any baking, it is much more economical to buy yeast in bulk. A little package containing 2¼ teaspoons can cost as much as $.70 but you can buy a two-pound bag of yeast for around $4.00.
Daniel
I make sourdough bread with my own starter. Starter is a culture of yeast and bacteria that feeds on water and flour, producing the bubbles that make sourdough bread rise and give it its tangy “sourdough” flavor. To maintain a starter, you must add water and flour on a regular basis. Of course the starter grows as you feed it, so whenever you feed it you also have to throw some of it away. It feels wasteful to discard all that bubbly, delicious starter, so ideally you can put it straight into a recipe and bake it. Here is one of my favorites.
Churros are traditionally made with boiling water. Boiling water would kill the yeast in the starter, so use hot tap water instead for this recipe. You can use a fryer if you have one, but the larger surface area of a big sauté pan actually makes it easier to work with the churros.
ABOUT HYDRATION
The recipe calls for sourdough starter at "100% hydration." That means that the starter should be equal parts flour and water, a fairly runny mixture.
Sourdough Churros
Makes about 16 churros
INGREDIENTS
½ cup sourdough starter (100% hydration)
2 cups plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose or high-gluten flour
1½ teaspoons salt
2 cups plus 1 tablespoon hot water (not boiling)
Oil for frying
Granulated sugar or confectioner’s sugar for dusting
STEPS
• Mix the sourdough starter, flour and salt. Add the hot water and mix until you get a smooth, runny dough, maybe a little thicker than pancake batter. Let the dough rest for about 20 minutes while you heat the oil.
• Pour 1–1½ inches of oil in a sauté pan and heat to 350°F.
• Pour the dough into a pastry bag with a large tip. (Of course, if you have a churrera – a big dough syringe made especially for churros – use it instead!) Squeeze dough into the hot oil gently but quickly and “cut” the stream of dough with a butter knife when each churro is the desired size. You may fry 3 or 4 churros at a time, or make a spiral of dough in the oil and cut it into pieces later.
• Fry to a golden brown, turning the dough over in the oil to ensure even cooking and color. Remove the churros from the oil when golden brown and put them on a plate lined with paper towels to absorb extra oil.
• Sand them with granulated sugar while they are hot, or (as my daughters prefer) wait until they cool to powder them with confectioner’s sugar. They are also delicious with cinnamon sugar or honey.
• Serve with rich, thick hot chocolate.
