OMG Bagels!

Dear Wednesday Chef: marry me. Adopt me. Take me in as your kitchen slave. In what manner can I laud and adore you for this wonder that you have brought into my life?

Ahem. Oh, hi there!

As you might recall, some time ago, I was discussing the merits of Chicago deep-dish pizza vs New York's thin crust. And, I admit, shamelessly poking fun at New Yorkers' quirky and intense pride. Yeah, sorry about that. I guess I'm still a little bitter from losing all my friends to that city (*shakes fist). So, to make amends, today I'm going to focus on one of NYC's great culinary accomplishments: bagels.

To tell the truth, I approached this with even more skepticism than I had the deep-dish. I simply wasn't convinced that you could actually make bagels in your home's kitchen. The chewy interior, the lightly-blistered crust, and don't you have to boil them for a while...? Sounds like something better left to industrial -- or at least specialized -- kitchens. Visions of disaster, of bloated, soppy dough loosely shaped into a torus, blossomed in my mind. It occurs to me that I must have once eaten such homemade "bagels" for the thoughts to be so vivid.

And then I found myself on The Wednesday Chef, a cooking blog by a New Yorker living in Berlin. Heh, a blog -- by an expat -- recommend -- by an expat -- to me (an ex-expat): expatriates FTW! That, plus the fact that she sounds like my sister in a good mood led me to take a liking to her recipes. And who could not take a liking to this: a recipe on how to make bagels from your own kitchen. I was caught when her initial skepticism mirrored my own, and then swept up in her rushed ebullience as the recipe culminated into The *Perfect* Bagels.

You don't believe it. I understand. *I* didn't believe it! Not even when I took their perfectly golden forms from the oven, nor when I cut through their crispy blistered skin, nor as I bit into their perfectly chewy interiors. I couldn't have made these! Impossible! Surely the kitchen gnomes must have surreptitiously replaced my dough with these god-touched bagels from heaven. And you know what? I don't care! As long as the gnomes do the same thing next weekend, when I'm making this recipe again. Twice. Maybe three times.

It's been a good morning.

I'm going to stop talking now, because you need to go make this right now.

Peter Reinhart's Bagels
as presented by Luisa Weiss, verbatim (yay plagiarism!) Makes 6 to 8 bagels

• 3 1/2 cups (1 pound) unbleached flour (bread or all-purpose)
• 3 teaspoons salt, divided
• 3/4 teaspoon instant yeast
• 1 tablespoon honey or barley malt syrup, if you've got it
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons water
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• Poppy or sesame seeds

By hand, mix the flour, 2 teaspoons salt, the yeast, honey and the water until the ingredients form a stiff, coarse ball of dough (about 3 minutes). If necessary, add a little more water. Let the dough rest 5 minutes.

Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface until the dough feels stiff yet supple, with a satiny, slightly tacky feel, 2 to 3 minutes. If the dough seems too soft or too tacky, sprinkle over just enough flour as needed.

Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and place it in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour and up to several hours. Keep in mind that the bagels must be shaped before proofing overnight.

When ready to shape the bagels, line a baking sheet with lightly greased parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator and divide it into 6 to 8 equal pieces. Form each piece into a loose, round ball by rolling it on a clean, dry work surface with a cupped hand; do not use any flour on the surface. If the dough slides around and won't ball up, wipe the work surface with a damp paper towel and try again - the slight amount of moisture will provide enough "bite" for the dough to form a ball. When each piece has been formed into a ball, you are ready to shape the bagels.

Using your hands and a fair amount of pressure, roll each dough ball into a "rope" 8 to 10 inches long. (Moisten the work surface with a damp paper towel, if necessary, to get the necessary bite or friction). Slightly taper the rope at the ends so that they are thinner than the middle. Place one end of the dough between your thumb and forefinger and wrap it around your hand until the ends overlap in your palm; they should overlap by about 2 inches. Squeeze the overlapping ends together and then press the joined ends into the work surface, rolling them back and forth a few times until they are completely sealed.

Remove the dough from your hand and squeeze as necessary to even out the thickness so that there is a 2-inch hole in the center. Place the bagel on the prepared sheet pan. Repeat with the other pieces. Lightly wipe the bagels with oil, cover with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator overnight.

Remove the bagels from the refrigerator 90 minutes before you plan to bake them. Fill a large stockpot with 3 quarts of water (be sure the water is at least 4 inches deep), cover with a lid, and slowly bring the water to a boil. When it comes to a boil, add the remaining teaspoon of salt and 1 teaspoon of baking soda, reduce the heat and simmer with the lid on.

Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven to 500 degrees.

Test the bagels by placing one in a bowl of cold water. If it sinks and doesn't float to the surface, return it to the sheet, wait 15 minutes and then test it again. When one bagel passes the float test, they are ready for the pot.

Gently lift each bagel and drop it into the simmering water. Add as many as will comfortably fit in the pot. After 1 minute, use a slotted spoon to flip each bagel over. Poach for an extra 30 seconds. Using the slotted spoon, remove each bagel and return it to the lined baking sheet. Continue until all the bagels have been poached. Generously sprinkle each bagel with a topping.

Place the baking sheet in the oven and reduce the heat to 450 degrees. Bake for 8 minutes and then rotate the sheet (if using two sheets, also switch their positions). Check the underside of the bagels. If they are getting too dark, place another sheet under the baking sheet. Bake until the bagels are golden brown, an additional 8 to 12 minutes. Remove from the oven and transfer the bagels to a rack for at least 30 minutes before serving.

Buttermilk Biscuits

If you're like me, you probably don't take too much time to worry about breakfast in the morning. A bowl of cereal or oatmeal, maybe some toast, is all you need to expedite your way out the door and into a new day. Something fast & simple that you can make on autopilot, and if you're running late, can be skipped entirely with minimal consequences.

This is why I like baked goods for breakfast: their rarity alone makes them prized meals. But moreover, the time they take to prepare forces you slow down and not rush out haphazardly. Growing up, having my mother's breakfast biscuits, blueberry muffins, or even store-bought croissants were an indication that it was a weekend. We knew that there was nothing immediately pressing when my mother could bake first thing in the morning, so we could relax for a leisurely breakfast fresh from the oven.

Which is why, when I found a recipe for buttermilk biscuits sandwiches, I immediately decided to alter the recipe to make breakfast buttermilk biscuits instead. Why concern yourself with making an egg-ham-bacon sandwich monstrosity when you can enjoy the simple pleasure of freshly baked bread? It took a couple tries to lower the salt content and manage the cooking heat/time, but the result a delicious (and large!) pile of biscuits.

Buttermilk Biscuits

• 4 cups flour, plus more for dusting
• 1 Tbs salt
• 1,1/2 Tbs baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 sticks butter, cubed and chilled, plus more for spreading
• 1,1/2 cups buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and position racks in the upper and lower thirds. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. In a large bowl, whisk the flour with the salt, baking powder and baking soda. Using a pastry blender or 2 knives, cut in the butter until it is the size of small peas. Add the buttermilk and stir until a shaggy dough forms.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface: knead until it comes together. Pat the dough 3/4 inch thick. Using a 2 inch round cutter, stamp out as many biscuits as possible. Reroll the scraps and stamp out more biscuits.

Transfer the biscuits to the baking sheets and bake for about 20-25min, until golden and risen, shifting the pans halfway through baking. Let the biscuits cool. Devour.

Round Challah for Rosh Hashana - aka Victory Dance

It's traditional to bake round Challah for Rosh Hashana. I mentioned to Do this morning that I was just going to bake a normal round loaf, but he (knowing the best way to get exactly what he wants) went off on a long shtick about how much he loves my Challah, and how the braiding gives it this perfect texture, without the braiding it just wouldn't be the same, yadda yadda. On top of it, I haven't baked Challah for almost a year, so he's been deprived, yadda yadda.

So I give you *drumroll* braided round Challah. The things one does for a loved one. Before a dinner party, no less.

How fucking awesome does that bread look???? I can't wait to see his face when he comes home!


Braiding Instructions are here: http://alturl.com/bnof. The challah recipe is in this blog's files.

Moving Day 3: Baking Bread while Packing

We're almost there. Yesterday the containers were delivered and we spent an arduous afternoon lugging nearly all of Do's and my worldly possessions down to the curb. We can almost fit everything into one container, but not quite. Bummer. That said, we've kept up a pretty impressive pace: all that's left is half the kitchen and the stuff we've been using (mattresses, sheets, towels, etc.). Today should be the last day.

In other phenomenal news, Do has got us a beautiful new home in North Oakland. It's the bottom half of a duplex, with the adorable landlords and their young daughters living upstairs. The neighborhood is a vibrant, mixed income community, yet safer than the South Side Chicago neighborhood where we lived during college. The place is also very close to all forms of public transportation (yes!! The less we have to use the car, the better!). The apartment itself is HUGE. We have no idea what we're going to do with all that space. My Dad has suggested that he move in six-months a year (I really, really hope that was a joke), and my Mom reminds us that we'll hopefully be living there until Do gets his Ph.D., so we'll definitely be acquiring stuff. Do and I agree that we're going to miss our cute, teeny, European-sized apartment here in D.C., but, well, onward and upward. If its worst flaw is that it's too big, well, I think we'll cope.

SuperMom decided that we were going to have meatloaf sandwiches for lunch yesterday (meatloaf = lots o leftovers), and asked me to bake a loaf of bread (to make a dent in the baking supplies). The cookbooks were already packed, but my little index card-recipe box was still out. In it, I rediscovered the perfect "baking bread while moving" recipe: one that uses baking soda instead of yeast and therefore doesn't need to rise. So, ladies and gents, if you're ever in the middle of moving and suddenly realize that now would be the perfect time to bake a loaf of bread, well, first acknowledge that you're just plain weird, and then use this recipe. As a disclaimer, I baked the bread in the early morning when all my packers were still injecting themselves with coffee. The bread was ready before the caffeine addicts were.

This recipe comes from a Mennonite cookbook, Simply in Season, which was recommended by a friend. The book was really appealing for someone learning how to eat seasonally: recipes organized by season, and the in-season ingredients are highlighted. Pithy little Mennonite blurbs are sprinkled throughout, extolling the virtues of family dinners and local ingredients. There were even some real winners, including several dynamite bread and soup recipes. However, I ended up giving the book to my Mom because most recipes just didn't fit what Do and I enjoy about food and cooking. The food was very middle-America, down-home hearty, no surprising flavor combinations or mind-expanding ideas. It's not a book for folks who are looking for a challenge, technically or cerebrally. The recipes are not sexy. And several of the Americanized adaptations of foreign foods (a curry, a couscous, etc.) were downright awful. So I gave it my Mom and copied down the winner recipes onto index cards.

This bread itself is dense and chewy, rather than dry. The Molasses flavor really comes through, making it perfect for sandwiches or butter & jam. It's also even easier than baking cookies.

No Rise Whole Wheat Molasses Bread (from Simply in Season).

Oil for greasing the pan
1 2/3 cup buttermilk OR plain Yogurt OR 1 1/2 cup milk & 2 Tbs white vinegar
2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup molasses

1. Heat oven to 325 degrees. Grease loaf pan.
2. If substituting sour milk for buttermilk, warm milk gently (30 seconds in microwave) and add the vinegar. Stir Molasses into soured milk/buttermilk.
3. Mix dry ingredients in a larger bowl. Stir liquid into dry ingredients, just enough to combine, then pour batter into greased loaf pan.
4. Bake until firm and toothpick comes out clean (45min-1 hour). Cool on rack for 15 minutes before removing bread from pan.
   

For a Lighter version:
Use 1 1/2 cups whole wheat and 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour, omit cornmeal. Substitute honey for molasses. Beat 1 egg into wet ingredients. Proceed with recipe.

Cooking while Moving

Q: You know when blogs are really useful?
A: When all your cookbooks are packed in boxes.

Q:You know when you feel really stupid?
A: When you're up to the elbows in Challah dough and you realize that your blog post a) has a typo when referring to the quantity of liquid required, and b) didn't bother to mention the oven temperature.

Oops.

My little brother was really cute and asked me to make Challah. Apparently, during his finals last week, some girl in his dorm made Challah as a way to de-stress and shared it all around ... and it wasn't as good as my Challah. (Yes, I now am fluffing my shiksa feathers like a peacock). Well, with a compliment like that, how could I not oblige?

Despite the typos on the blog, the Challah turned out excellent. It did require a panicked tearing open of already-packed boxes to find the original recipe, but hey. Good thing it was only Day 1 of packing, so everyone was very forgiving.

The correct version of the recipe is typed out below (for my and your future reference), and I'm going to correct the other posts that mention it (here and here).


For 1 challah:

1 package dry yeast
warm water
1/4 c vegetable oil
3 1/4 c all purpose flour
1 egg, beaten
1/8 c sugar (on the plus side)
1 tsp salt (on the plus side)

Set the oven to 325 degrees
Proof yeast in a small bowl by mixing yeast, 1/4 c warm water.
In a large bowl, mix flour, eggs, sugar, salt, oil and 2/3 c warm water. Add dissolved yeast mixture, mix together and knead well, folding the dough over itself so as to capture air pockets. (Depending on how dry your dough is, you may need to add a Tablespoon of warm water). Cover and let rise anywhere from 1.5 hours to 4.5 hours.
Divide into three strands, and braid. Let rise another hour. Bake for 25 min.

Biscuits at Dawn

Since the last time we spoke, Do has hightailed it out to California and is trying simultaneously to impress his new boss (aka work the expected 14-17 hour days of a graduate student) and to find us an apartment in Berkeley/North Oakland. My parents and my little brother have come out to Washington D.C. to help me pack up the place, which makes it very déja vu from all those childhood moves (only now we're 4 adults, which is a whole new dynamic). My last day at my job was on Friday the 13th, and I was much less melodramatic about it than everyone expected. I really loathe goodbyes in the gerund form: I'm here or I'm gone, there's no anguished leaving. That said, while walking out of the ugly Federal building, I did turn around and realize with astonishment that I spent a whole year of my life here. Was it a year well spent? Have I grown, changed, matured as a result of that year? Or was I just treading water? 1/23rd of your life is an awful big fraction.

Anyways. Last night we had a minor adventure when, sometime between witching hour and the crack of dawn, a painting decided that it would preempt the move and leaped, valiantly, off the wall. Unfortunately, in between the wall and the floor was a bookshelf with a wine glass on it. The resulting crash around 4 a.m. brought us all to our feet, and then to our hands and knees hunting down shards of glass. Needless to say, none of us was really able to get back to sleep after that adrenaline rush. So my Mom, being the amazingly gracious hostess that she is (even though, technically, it's my home and she's the Yankee component of her cross-Mason-Dixon line marriage), baked us all biscuits from scratch.

I think I mentioned in a previous post that my maternal line has a gift for baking. These biscuits are no exception: light, fluffy, flaky, and they don't taste like commercial dinner rolls. The keys are real butter and buttermilk (or a substitution of yogurt and milk, if you're moving and are trying to use up the ingredients in your fridge). Another one of my Mom's hallmarks.

Mommy's Sunday Morning Biscuits
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
6 Tbs chilled butter
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 c yogurt
1/4 c milk (You can replace the yogurt and milk with 3/4 cups buttermilk)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda. Using your fingers, squeeze butter with flour until the butter breaks up into small bits. Make a well in the center and add the yogurt and milk all at once. Fold it all together with a light hand, until it forms a dough. Put the dough on a floured surface and pat it down to make it 1/3" thick. Use a glass as a cookie cutter, and place biscuits on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake until lightly browned (12-15 min).

Kitchen Confessions: Last Night's Fiascos

I don't want this blog to be limited to eternally chirpy posts. I'm not here to sell anything, or convince anyone of my mad cooking skills. Arguably, I didn't start this blog to share great recipes, but to process and learn from our food-related adventures. What's the point of blogging only about our successes?

Can you tell that I'm trying to work myself up to publicly admitting my stupidity? :)

Fiasco 1: The Challah.
I made Challah yesterday to serve with our morels (as recommended by Gourmet) and to submit to Psychgrad and Giz's Tried, Tested and True event. I chose this recipe because a) Gourmet recommends serving the morels on Challah, b) Challah is associated with a lot of powerful memories for me, and c) because I make the recipe so damn often that I've hammered out its kinks. It fit with the whole "tested" theme.

For future reference, there are an endless number of "kinks" that can be summoned up through the powers of absent-mindedness. I knew this: last week I ruined the Challah by adding the water and oil in the wrong order (among other things). Well, my accomplishment for this week was to divide my ingredients by 4 ... until I switched and started dividing them by 3 halfway through.

ARH, so preventable! The recipe in the book (with all my "notes-to-self" written in the margins) is 4x as much as we need. I knew that I should be dividing everything by four, I've done it before, and I even had correct measurements written on this blog! Worse case scenario, the fact that I used all four of my measuring cups should have alerted me to the mix-up. Dumb!

In the end, the bread turned out mostly fine. The the ratio of water-to-flour was correct, but there was insufficient yeast and egg and oil and salt. So, while the texture of the crumb was perfect and the end result looked phenomenal, the flavor was much tamer than I remembered... less salt, less butter-flavor. I'm just kicking myself that I made such an avoidable mistake and that I submitted it to an event for "tested and true" recipes. I mean, the recipe itself is wonderful and perfect, it's just my apparent inability to follow its directions successfully. Oh the irony.

Fiasco #2: The Morels.
D was so jealous that we bought and cooked morels without him last week that he insisted that we repeat the recipe. So we bought another $20 box of morels at the Farmer's Market on Sunday.

And decided to cook them on Monday. And didn't refrigerate them.

In my defense, I had no idea that you have to refrigerate mushrooms. They're already fungi, right? But you do. Or they go bad. Very bad.

D approached me skeptically after smelling the morels on Monday evening. They smelled awful, but I was hoping that a nice wash and saute would take care of everything. Suspension of disbelief. Yeah right. To make a painful story short, D went to all the effort of making the morel recipe, and we threw it out after one bite.

Sigh. Mondays.

Tried, Tested and True: Challah

The foodie blogger community should be the subject of an anthropological study. I mean, have you noticed the ratio of women bloggers to men bloggers? Or the near uniform format of 1) Photo, 2) short blurb (1-4 paragraphs), and 3) Recipe? I thought the internet was supposed to liberate us from convention. At times, I've threatened to quit my blog all together because it feels like I've returned to high school, with a million little peons struggling to catch the attention of a few glamor queens and get social recognition. Other times, I'm really touched by the gestures of friendship extended by complete strangers, such as when Johanna of Green Gourmet Giraffe offered to help us through our self-imposed stint with Vegetarianism during Lent, or when Lisa of Lisa's Kitchen and I had exchanges over Madhur Jaffrey cookbooks.

Giz and Psychgrad of Equal Opportunity Kitchen are a mother-daughter team of foodie bloggers. It's been lovely to follow their blog since we "met" a couple weeks ago, in part to see how other duo blogs balance the two voices, in part because what woman doesn't see echoes of herself in others' mother-daughter interactions? I almost feel as though I know them, even though blogging can bring out intimate personality quirks while concealing basic identity characteristics. Giz and Psychgrad are hosting their first event, Tried, Tested, and True, and I'm bringing fresh-out-of the oven bread (so fresh that it's still in the oven as I write this) because it's the universal housewarming gift. Giz and Psychgrad, here's to warm hospitality in the virtual universe.

My hostess gift is our favorite Challah, which I've already blogged about here (after a successful baking spree) and here (after an unsuccessful one). I'm blogging about it again because it is:

Tried: Challah, though not in this particular permutation, was my first attempt at bread baking. Ever. The episode was a blatant attempt to display my domestic prowess (ahem. stop laughing) to win over my favorite Jew, Do. Who, at the time, didn't like Challah and already knew that I couldn't do basic domestic tasks if my life depended on it. :) Not one of my most rational moments. Homemade Challah is also near and dear to my heart because it made its first public appearance at the housewarming party for our first apartment, during which my priest officiated over the Episcopal "Blessing Of a New Home" rite and D led everyone in Shabbat prayers. Nothing like breaking fresh bread to mark life's big steps.

Tested: I don't even want to think about how many different Challah recipes I tried before I found this one. Joy of Cooking was unimpressive and went stale quickly, my colleague's Mom's recipe used so much flour that the end result bore distinct resemblance to a brick. Then I tried this recipe from that colleague's roommate's private school's cookbook (Not even kidding: "New Kosher Cuisines for all Seasons," a compendium of recipes from the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston). Although I'm too lazy and too disorganized to bake Challah every Shabbat, this recipe does get used at least twice a month. That's a lot of repetitive testing, with both the good and the bad documented on this site.

True: This Challah recipe, to me, is the Platonic ideal of Challah -- light, buttery flavored crumb, not cake-y, doesn't dry out overnight, and doesn't involve 4 eggs. D literally asks me to bake it a couple times a week. As long as I follow the recipe (unlike last week, sigh), it's foolproof.

The smell is wafting from the oven. 4 minutes to go. Please excuse me while I go wait impatiently in the kitchen.


For 1 challah:

1 package dry yeast
warm water
1/4 c vegetable oil
3 1/4 c all purpose flour
1 egg, beaten
1/8 c sugar (on the plus side)
1 tsp salt (on the plus side)

Proof yeast in a small bowl by mixing yeast, 1/4 c warm water, and oil.
In a large bowl, mix flour, eggs, sugar, salt, and 1/3 c warm water. Add dissolved yeast mixture, mix together and knead well. Cover and let rise anywhere from 1.5 hours to 4.5 hours.
Divide into three strands, and braid. Let rise another hour. Bake for 25 min.

The loaves supposedly freeze well, and don't go stale if left out overnight (yay for Challah for breakfast!)

A Father-Daughter moment over Naan

I'm not really sure how it happened, but I think my father and I share some sort of subliminal Indian food cooking bond. Go ahead, laugh. We are both solidly in the amateur category; neither can claim ties to the cuisine based on heritage or personal experience (never been to India, we've probably cooked 20 Indian meals between the two of us). But when sitting down to write this entry, I realized that my Dad is associated with nearly all my homemade Indian food memories. I made my first all out Indian food meal for his birthday 5 years ago. Prompted by my budding interest in his coming-apart-at-the-seams Madhur Jaffrey cookbook, he brought home a copy with an intact spine... and a couple more Jaffrey cookbooks for good measure. He rediscovered the books (and the kitchen!) since retiring to Austin last fall, so he was the one I called for recommendations when D and I turned to Indian food to survive Lent. During Lent, he mailed me some hard-to-find spices from Austin and, when we came to visit for Easter, took D and me to an Indian store so we could stock up on dal. So it's not completely random that the first thing he does upon arriving in D.C. is cook up a multi-dish Indian meal in my kitchen. Not random, but almost everyone outside the blogosphere and our nuclear family would be completely befuddled that he and I have this thing for cooking Indian food.

Oh, and I wish that I could have captured the back-and-forth dialogue that accompanied my father's cooking spree and my mother's cleaning spree. There were lots of "Do you have measuring cups/a whisk/a rolling pin?" & "Where do you keep your parchment paper?" & "You mean to tell me that you have only ONE cookie sheet??" & "I GAVE you a cucumber slicer -- what did you do with it?!" Ah, family. Did I mention that the apartment is small?

Dad's going to tell you about his cooking exploits from yesterday, but I wanted to single out and highlight the horizon-expanding creation of the feast: the Naan.

Naan is like a cross between the puffed Chapati and high quality white sandwich bread, only better. Yeast creates the thin outer crust and the more sophisticatedly-textured crumb (I'm at loss for a better word), while baking soda makes it chewy. Like Chapati and unlike French baguettes, a very short period close to high heat puffs the bread out like an envelope, but the walls of that envelope are chewy instead of crispy. It also calls for yogurt, milk, and an egg, so the flavor is vaguely reminiscent of a subtle brioche.

It was by far the highlight of the meal, in my opinion. Crispy crust, yet substantial enough to sop up all the flavorful dal and veggies. A delicate yet interesting flavor on its own. Very satisfying. And very out of the ordinary, or at least out of 'my' ordinary.

Plus, now I know what a broiler is and how to use it. Sheepish grin.

Madhur Jaffrey's Naan

3 cups all purpose white flour
1/2 cups plus 3 Tbs milk
1 egg, beaten
3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 packet dry yeast (Dad prefers the texture of a whole packet)
2 Tbs vegetable oil
4 Tbs plain yogurt
1/4 tsp black onion seeds

1. Warm milk. Put flour into a big bowl. In a medium bowl, combine the egg, salt, sugar, baking powder, yeast, 2 Tbs oil, yogurt, and 5 Tbs of the warm milk. Mix well. Pour mixture over flour and rub it in with the hands.
2. Add 1 Tbs of warm milk at a time to the flour, and begin kneading. Add up to 6 Tbs or enough so that all the flour adheres and kneading is easy. Knead until the dough is elastic (about 10 min). Form into a ball, brush with oil, cover with damp cloth, and leave in a warm place to rise for 2-3 hours. If the temperature is above 80 degrees it should take only 2 hours. Otherwise it may take about 3 hours.
3. Preheat the broiler to about 550 degrees. Line 3 cookie sheets with aluminum foil, and brush lightly with oil.
4. Knead dough again for about a minute or two and divide into six balls. Flatten the balls one at a time, keeping the rest covered, and stretch them and pat them with your hands until you have a teardrop shape of about 11 inches long and 4 inches wide. (Dad used a rolling pin). Place two naans on each baking sheet, cover with a moistened cloth and leave for 15 min in a warm place.
5. Remove moistened cloths. Brush the center portion of each naan with water, leaving a 1/2 inch margin. Sprinkle the center portion with the onion seeds.
6. Place sheets under broiler, about 2.5-3 inches away form the heat and broil quickly for about 2.5 min on each side or until lightly browned.
   

Bread conquered me. Jam conquered Bread.

Had a disastrous experience with our favorite Challah last night. It could have been one of a number of mishaps:

1. When proofing the yeast, I added the oil before the water. Oops. The oil created a barrier, and the yeast could not intermingle with the hot water. I hoped that when I added the whole mess to the flour, that would break this enforced chastity, but the yeast might have been so coated with the good word of the oil that it refused to come into physical contact with the water. Crap.
   
2. I was quartering the recipe and not being super precise. I think I erred too much on the plus side with the liquid, and on the minus side with the flour. I should have paid attention to Wild Yeast's great tutorials on the baker's percentage.
   
3. I made it in the morning and intended to let it rise in the fridge during the day, so that I could bake it at night. Usually, the Challah takes 1-3 hours to rise at room temperature. Mr. Challah did not like Mr. Fridge, and refused to embrace upward mobility.
   

In essence, I came home to some clammy cold play-dough thing. My Mom, who's visiting for the week, refused to admit defeat and nursed it into rising a wee bit over the course of the evening, enough to convince us to let it continue putt-putting through the night. I made the challah in the morning... the dough was still cold and clammy but there was more of it. The challah sort of merged together in the oven... no nice ridged braiding, it sort of melded like a round balloon.

It tasted like sourdough, leading us all to believe that it had reached it's peak during the night and fallen. Finiky Jerk. Success at impressing parents: zero. However! My parents just happened to have brought us Fig Jam from Texas and Lingonberry preserves from Ikea (Ikea's practically a state, right? ). It was delicious. Totally masked the sour taste. And the Challah was still soft and brioche-like , so it made a great breakfast bread as we were rushing around to get D to the airport.

So. D is out of town for the week at a conference, and I'm here with my parents. My Mom has already scrubbed my stove and cleaned my toilet, and my Dad is busy cooking up an Indian feast.

I've invited him to be a guest blogger for the occasion.

I hope that's okay.

Maybe I'll blame the bread failure on the weather. Yeah...

Leftovers Pizza = Effortless Glamor

Giddy with excitement! I'm feeling really bubbly due to tonight's unexpected success. :)

What you have to realize is that I had no desire to cook. None. Our house was a pigsty, with semi-unpacked luggage and unopened mail and magazines and various electric cords and clothes all over the place. The drain in the kitchen is on the spritz, making dish washing very slow and frustrating. We're also still moderately sleep-deprived from the late Austin flight and haven't been to a grocery store for a week. Ugh. None of the above is conducive for culinary inspiration. It's Leftovers Night.

But! Leftovers....put leftovers on bread...and you get... PIZZA!! Leftovers = blah, but Homemade Pizza = sophisticated party! The very thought of it magically transformed our messy apartment into an "artistic" Yuppie loft (at least in my mind's eye). Pour some leftover cornerstore Chianti, turn on some Jazz (or better yet, some very hip bluegrass from Austin -- you have to be really in-the-know to play Texas bluegrass in your "loft" while sipping cheap chianti), and suddenly the world looks so much better. I even got inspired enough to do a load of laundry and face the evil kitchen drain, and D swiftered the hell out of the living room.

In general, I've found homemade pizza to be one of those quick, easy but fun and surprising entertaining ideas, at least when we've invited other twenty-somethings over. When you're in our age bracket, a "dinner party" means either a) order pizza and bring beer or b) feel really awkward as the host(ess) "plays grown-up" and serves poorly executed, complicated food which you eat on plastic plates. I know, I've done both. One of the most successful dinner parties we've had since moving to D.C. was when we had a couple of D's Physics graduate student friends over and made pizza dough and had everyone "design" their own pizzas. No dirty pots, didn't even have to turn on the stovetop. We just let everyone loose into the kitchen to grab a bit of this and a bit of that and design the perfect pizza. Sounds like a trick that would work with preschoolers you say? Well, I won't dwell on the comparison between preschoolers and graduate students, but it was a hellova a lot of fun and not at all pretentious. Which is a fine line to walk when you're a twenty-three year old foodie who collects wine.

Now, you can serve "homemade" pizza by picking up pizza dough from the freezer in ye local grocery store. Or, you can make reasonably yummy dough pretty easily by hand. Or, you can produce Superlative pizza dough by using the best Bread Cookbook I have ever encountered. Richard Bertinet, a French baker based out of Bath (UK), revolutionized my whole approach to bread. D received his Crust cookbook from my grandparents for Christmas, and we were so impressed with it that we immediately purchased Bertinet's first book, Dough. The former deals with sourdough and other intense breads, and the latter with doughs that require only one rising. The amazing thing about Bertinet is that he is able to teach you how to "feel" bread -- how to interpret what your senses tell you, what is going on, what are you trying to achieve, what should it look like... with very very precise, comparative photos. Kind of like the Cook's Illustrated approach, only a LOT MORE photos and explanations, and without getting into his learning process. There's even a full-page chart explaining how the weather will affect the rising.

Best of all is his technique for "kneading" the dough. Instead of the common "punch" method, which stretchs dough out, he uses a slap-and-pull technique that captures air inside the dough. Essentially, you grab a rectangle of dough from one end and slap the front end onto the counter, then take the end that you're holding and lift up and over... and grab the dough that's stuck to the counter, capturing air between the two parts of the dough rectangle. You clearly have no idea what I'm talking about, but he's got several pages of photos and a dvd is included in the books to explain the technique. The first time I used his method, it was like magic -- the dough became this vibrant, living being, unlike any other bread I had made before. Using his technique and a higher ratio of liquid to flour, I ended up with gorgeous French baguettes. Who needs Julia Child's 18 page recipe, when you can bake bread on a worknight using Richard Bertinet? If I had to throw away all but one cookbook in my collection, his would be the one that I would keep. (If I could keep two cookbooks, it would be his and something by Madhur Jaffrey; both use techniques and an understanding of ingredient proportion that I just can't replicate on my own).

Okay, enough evangelizing. Now that I'm up here on the podium, I would also like to thank my little brother, who gave me a bread stone for my 23rd birthday, without which this pizza would have been no where near as good. No question, bread stones are WORTH IT. The difference is immeasurable. I would also like to thank D's Dad, who loves to feed our kitchen fetishes, and got us our kitchen scale. Without you, none of this would have been possible.

and, for those of you keeping track, this was a 100% vegetarian meal. We used some leftover tomato sauce, parmesan, spinach, fresh tomatoes, olives, capers, dried basil, hot peppers, and more parmesan. Maybe our eating habits did change with that whole Lenten experiment.

Richard Bertinet's Pizza Dough (3 pizzas) We halved this recipe to make one big pizza for the two of us, and finished half.

1/2 oz fresh yeast
18 oz Italian white bread flour (3 3/4 - 3 7/8 cups)
2 tsp fine grain salt
5 Tbs Olive Oil
11 1/2 oz Water

1. Rub yeast into flour with your fingertips. Ass salt, olive oil, and water, and then use Bertinet's slap and pull method (described above, or just buy the book). Let the dough rise for 1 hour or so (it always needs at least 2 hours in our house) or, to acheive a better crust and taste, rest it overnight in the fridge. By doing this, you will enable the dough to rise very slowly and it will develop a little acidity that will improve its flavor and give a texture that is crispy on the outside and slightly chewy inside. Preheat oven to 475 degrees.
   
   
2. Gently turn the dough out onto the counter and let it rest for 10 min more. Lightly flour the counter and place the ball of dough upon the counter. Divide into three.



3. Place the heel of your hand in the center of each piece of dough and push it away from you so that it stretches the dough out. Turn slightly and repeat. Keep stretching the dough until you have a roughly circular pizza shape of about 8-9 inches in diameter. The edge should be slightly thicker than the dough in the middle.



4. Lift the pizza base onto a piece of parchment paper and add toppings. Put the parchment + pizza onto a peel (or cutting board or flat cookie sheet) and slide it into your oven (preferably on top of your baking stone, or a preheated baking tray as a substitute). Turn the heat down to 460 degrees and bake for 10-12 minutes until the edges become golden brown and crispy.

Nothing says Home Again like Challah

New York City never fails to amuse/overwhelm. We saw a bank with a silver muzuzah affixed to its sliding glass door, downed sake bombs with a sushi chef on the Upper West Side, and had my umbrella ripped to shreds by a torrential downpour over the course of a three block walk. The downpour ended ubruptly about 90 seconds after we reached the theatre.

Our trip was a complete blast, but it's good to be home. As much as I love exploring snazzy restaurants and being introduced to unforgettable local dives, I always feel somewhat out of my element when I eat out for several days straight. Enough fast-paced urbanity, I'm feeling the need for some warm, homey comfort. It's been over two weeks since I made fresh bread, and I'm starting to go into withdrawal.


Close-up on Challah texture
Originally uploaded by Neenabeena

I first baked Challah on Rosh Hashanah 2006... in fact, I think that was the first time I ever baked bread. After experimenting with a bunch of different recipes with credentials spanning from Joy of Cooking to a friend's mom's, I tried this one from "New Kosher Cuisines for all Seasons," a compendium of recipes from the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston. This, to me, is the Platonic ideal of Challah -- light, buttery flavored crumb, not cake-y, doesn't dry out overnight, and doesn't involve 4 eggs. This is looming in my near future.

For 1 challah:

1 package dry yeast
warm water
1/4 c vegetable oil
3 1/4 c all purpose flour
1 egg, beaten
1/8 c sugar
1 tsp salt

Proof yeast in a small bowl by mixing yeast, 1/4 c warm water, and oil.
In a large bowl, mix flour, eggs, sugar, salt, and 1/3 c warm water. Add dissolved yeast mixture, mix together and knead well. Cover and let rise anywhere from 1.5 hours to 4.5 hours.
Divide into three strands, and braid. Let rise another hour. Bake for 25 min.

The loaves supposedly freeze well, and don't go stale if left out overnight (yay for Challah for breakfast!)