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Archive for the ‘Bread’ Category

Lobster from the icy North Atlantic...rolls from me

In an exquisite bit of time travel, my brain has flashed forward and is currently enjoying the long Memorial Day Weekend at the beach. Sadly, the rest of me has remained behind in the city, two weeks of work and worry away from such pleasures. I think I am not alone this year, as most people are recovering from a rather abusive relationship with Winter.

The reason I am convinced that my brain is elsewhere is because I have already started thinking about all the food that I associate with the fun of summer: hamburgers, hot dogs, ice cream sandwiches, and my New England faves, fried clams, and Lobster Roll.

While I love all of the above, Clam Roll and Lobster Roll are my travel folder summer meals. If I had to name a favorite food, they’d certainly be on the list. “The condemned man ate a hearty last meal of Lobster Roll. And then he had a Clam Roll and an ice cream sandwich.” Read that and you’ll know I’m gone.  I can’t actually name only one favorite food, but I think I have made my point.

Fried Clams are best consumed at a reputable clam bar, preferably overlooking a body of water, while jealous Sea Gulls circle overhead. But Lobster Roll remains within reach of the home cook, albeit with a hefty price tag dangling from one of the claws. Yes, my brain is down at the beach splurging on Lobster Roll.

The thing is, I feel very protective of Lobster Roll. It is so simple and basic, which explains why it is so easy to make it wrong. Lobster by itself is so perfect straight from the steam, cracked open, dunked in a touch of melted butter. When in doubt I try to not stray too far from that.

Some folks think that the same rules that apply to making Tuna Fish salad will still hold true when making Lobster Roll, but this is simply not the case. In Lobster Roll the mayonnaise should be kept to the barest minimum; just enough to coat may be too much. Some insist that you should dispense with the mayo altogether, and stick with a drizzle of butter. Not a bad idea.

For traditionalists though, a touch of mayo, and just the sparsest tumble of diced celery will suffice. No salt, thank you, the mayo and the lobster and the obligatory Wise potato chips served on the side have plenty. (French Fries? With Lobster Roll? On what planet?)

Phew! Glad that’s settled.

Oh wait! I forgot the most important part: the bread.

The real New England-style hot dog roll is baked side-by-side and sliced on top (as opposed to the side). When the rolls are pulled apart, more bread is exposed, so we butter and grill or toast the sides of the bun too. This holds true for hot dogs, Clam Rolls, and Lobster Rolls. Lobster Roll isn’t Lobster Roll without this key element. It’s the law (lower case “L”.)

The bun itself is all about texture. This is no place for whole wheat. Fluffy bread is good because the toasting creates a contrast of textures. But that should in no way imply that boring white bread is called for.

As a little treat, I decided to make my own hot dog rolls, and this called to mind the puffiest, fluffiest bread I could think of: potato bread. No, this is not a New England specialty; actually, I think it comes from Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Hold on there, buddy (you’re thinking), with all the great hot dog buns sold, why are you making your own? Is this one of those “Martha Stewart-raise-your-own-hens-so-you-can-have-the-best-scrambled-eggs” moments?

My answer: “Yes. No.”

Translation of ambiguous answer: rolls that you buy in the store are just rolls. Mine are artisanal. Yes, that’s right, I just dropped the “A” bomb on you. At $15.99 a pound, how often will I splurge on Lobster Roll? So I think it is worth it to create something special to mark the occasion. Also, New England-style top sliced buns are hard to find in New York. (You should feel free to use whatever rolls suit your fancy. No judgment from me, I promise.)

Potato bread tends to be very soft and fluffy because of the loose, gluten-free starch in the potatoes. Deciding to up the ante a bit, instead of using a regular potato, I used a sweet potato.  Its honey-like sweetness and carroty color would add a mellow tang to the bread. My intent was not to make an icky-sweet roll, just something sweetly laid back.

I diced and boiled the potato until it was cooked through, then drained it thoroughly before mashing into a smooth paste with a fork. Then I added it with some of the flour to the dough. Some potato bread recipes use a bit of the liquid in which you boiled the potato. Instead, I used milk for a touch of richness.

The result is a roll with a gentle sweetness, and a sunny saffron color which surprisingly coordinates with the rusty, salmon pink of the lobster. I have a few left over which I will pair with some Hebrew National hot dogs, or maybe some chicken sausage.

Meanwhile, I hope my brain is wearing sunscreen.

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Click here for my recipe for “Sweet Potato Hot Dog Rolls”

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Hot Cross Buns

The last stop before Grand Central Station on the Metro-North commuter train is 125th Street. Once passed, there is a sense of relief and anticipation that you’re almost “there” (that’s the relief)—but that “there” is our jumping, jiving city (that’s the anticipation).

In the case of the Easter and Good Friday holidays, the relief and anticipation are all about spring and summer and nice weather – an all too important consideration after the rough winter we’ve had this year.

Of course, at this time of year it is easy to get over confident about the weather, but Mother Nature tends to be a tricky, moody, old biddy, so we really don’t know what she has in store, but the days are just that much longer, and even the coldest mornings are just that much warmer.

Alongside seasonal weather changes are seasonal supermarket changes, for the spring heralds the arrival of the Passover food on your grocer’s doily-lined shelves, and Hot Cross Buns in the bakery section. The latter were always a curiosity to me. I had tried them and found that their spiced- icky, sticky bun-candied fruit allures held no sway over me. They always struck me as sticky buns gone wrong; bread that wanted to be fruitcake, but realized it had arrived four or five months too late and missed Christmas; dough that took the wrong path. (Has this gotten a bit film noir? Sorry.)

Purely out of a sense of duty then, I felt compelled to make Hot Cross Buns for this blog. My conscience was bothering me: can one write a baking-centric blog and ignore Hot Cross Buns? I think not.

So with that great burden weighing on me (heavy sigh), I started researching them. The great thing about the internet is that if you think it, someone, somewhere, has, at some point in time, written about it. I had an art professor in college – a tough cookie—who liked to say, “There truly is nothing new under the sun.” Surely he was talking about the internet too.

What the internet revealed to me filled me with a great deal of relief. I had expected the basic flavors and ingredients of Hot Cross Buns to be as tightly proscribed as the placement of medals on a military uniform. Turns out I was wrong. The only constants I found amongst all the variations were 1.) duh: there’s always a cross on the top (although not always sweet) and 2.) Hot Cross Buns are sweet.

While Hot Cross Buns may traditionally have been a Good Friday treat, in recent years they have broken off from their niche purpose and become a year-round bakery staple. If I ever needed an excuse to make the long trip down under to Australia (I didn’t), the revelation that the Aussies add chocolate chips to their Hot Cross Buns could certainly have been one. Bravo, Aussies, for that was the inspiration I needed to bring some enthusiasm to the project.

While the Aussies add more than just chocolate chips to their Hot Cross Buns, the allure of chocolate cannot be overstated. After reading this blog each week, my sister-in-law will often write me a short email consisting solely of the words, “Can I put chocolate on that?” I could write about sauerkraut and she would likely ask the same question, for, like me, chocolate is her cure-all. (I even crave it when I have, uh…digestive distress.) This week, the answer is a happy, “Yes, but there’s already chocolate there.”

The internet also revealed a bit of discussion about the texture of the buns. Should they be hearty and dense, or light and puffy? I have come down clearly on the side of light and puffy, and this dictated a lot of technical issues about the recipe. Light and puffy means two rises, and, because we want something just slightly sweet, a little richness in the ingredients is called for. While some bread doughs get by with only water and oil or butter, a whole egg plus a little milk and butter will give our Hot Cross Buns a supple richness that will support the sugar without making the gentle sweetness seem “thin.”

The result reminds me of the wonderful Parisian-inspired subtly sweet rolls they sell at the extraordinary Silver Moon Bakery on New York’s Upper West Side.

The process of baking bread seems intimidating to some, but the truth is, if you can plug in a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer you can bake bread. (Sounds like a sales pitch, no?) Measure a few ingredients, turn on the mixer, then leave the dough to rise. Yes, it can be three or four hours from plugging in the mixer to taking the Hot Cross Buns out of the oven. But you only work for about a half an hour. The rest of the time the yeast and your oven are doing the work. (Sorry, I shout this every time I bake any form of bread.)

I love a recipe that serves more than one purpose. It is a perverse form of recycling, but next week’s Hot Cross Buns could show up at a special holiday weekend breakfast next fall. (Well, not the same actual rolls. I’ll make a fresh batch.) All I have to do is make a squiggle with the icing instead of a cross.

But even that amount of change isn’t needed.

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Click here for my recipe for Hot Cross Buns.

…and don’t miss these great Passover recipes (they’re great any time of the year):

Coconut Macaroons

Passover Honey Cake

Torta di Mandorla per la Pasqua. (A very light Passover chocolate – almond torte)

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Parker House Rolls

If you were to ask me, “What’s the worst meal you ever had?” my quickest answer would be that I can’t think of one that was all that bad. That’s saying a lot, considering (how can I delicately put this?) the passage of time since I started eating solid food.

But as I think about it, one or two meals come to mind that were doozies. One was in an exotically ethnic restaurant, to which I was dragged with a group of work associates. Dinner consisted of a series of mushy items presented in a series of bowls set in the middle of the table. To eat the items in the bowls you ripped a piece of seemingly sodden bread from a large sheet, and used that to scoop some food from the bowls, all the while praying that your table-mates were healthy. (Eagle eyed diners may have identified this cuisine by now.) I remember hoping that dessert would be a large flat brownie sheet that I could rip into pieces to scoop some ice cream and hot fudge, but, alas, it was not.

I mean no disrespect to any ethnic group, and, truthfully, I have no way of knowing whether or not that meal was a good or bad example of that cuisine. I do know that immediately following the meal I was desperate for something crunchy.

My sodden bread scoop dinner is tied with a meal I had as a kid at camp. The camp’s cook served something that was either fried Tuna Fish Salad or very wet Tuna Quenelles. Color? Gray. Taste? Meow.

Fortunately I had many allies in my distaste of that meal–including our counselor who grabbed the platter of Tuna a la Voldemort, returned it to the kitchen, and returned with a happy platter of sliced bread, peanut butter, and jelly. Unfortunately he did this after I had already taken a bite of the tuna, scarring my taste buds’ memories for life. I think of this meal every time I watch the movie “The Odd Couple” and see Walter Matthau throw a plate of spaghetti against a wall, yelling, “It was spaghetti. Now it’s gawbage.”

This is not to say that there haven’t been a great many mediocre meals through the years, some self-inflicted in the name of vanity (a/k/a, dieting.) But take note of the two stories above. My camp counselor was able to save the day with a loaf of bread, but the un-named ethnic meal was unsalvageable because even the bread was unsatisfying. My lesson? It comes in the form of an affirmation. If a meal is mediocre (or less), I reach for the bread basket, for I am saved by the bread — carbs be damned.

I may have hinted recently that the Corned Beef and Cabbage meal that is a tradition on St. Patrick’s Day is, for me, strictly a hit or miss proposition; it has to be really good for me to enjoy it. If not, I pray to St. Patrick that while he was driving the snakes out of Ireland he was also able to leave me some good bread in the basket.

When I eat out I have the questionable habit of judging a place by the bread basket. Am I wrong? You hear, “Never judge a book by its cover” ad nauseum; you never hear “Never judge a joint by the rolls” because they actually can be a darn good barometer of what’s to follow.

There was a long-ago time when every big city had its grand hotels. In those days it was the grand hotel that hosted the city’s finest dining room, the kitchen of which was likely helmed by an Escoffier trained or inspired chef. Indeed, if old M-G-M movies are to be believed, these gentlemen were invariably named Pierre, and were quite high strung.

I have previously written about Boston’s venerable Parker House Hotel as the birthplace of the Boston Cream Pie. The hotel also has the distinction of having an eponymous roll –which, yes, sounds like something that can be conquered with a few sets of sit ups. In reality, the Parker House roll is a lovely, buttery bread (which, yes, will sooner or later need to be conquered with a few sets of sit ups.)

Boston is my home town, so perhaps I can be forgiven for the undeniable (but perhaps outdated) claim that it is a very Irish town. Right or wrong, that explains why I consider the Parker House roll the remedy for a bad St. Patty’s Day dinner—or for that matter, the remedy for a bad Easter dinner (or any other big occasion.)

The Parker House roll is the brioche’s plainer, American cousin. Almost everything you love about brioche is there, except a bit softer, fluffier, with less egg, and more butter. (I may have just described the difference between the Americans and the French. You be the judge, I’ve stuck my neck out far enough already.)

While brioche can be somewhat labor intense and require a special fluted brioche pan, Parker House Rolls only require a rolling pin and biscuit cutter, equipment that can do many other jobs. I used an adaptation of the hotel’s recipe that is published on the Food Network website, cutting the recipe in half. This still resulted in about eighteen rolls, with a couple of more from scraps, although I prefer to call them “baker’s prerogatives.” Eighteen rolls is a good yield for dinner for four to five folks, or two if one of the folks is me.

In addition, I have annotated the recipe so that you can easily bake them exactly the way I did, using my Kitchen Aid mixer. Don’t feel limited by holiday meals; these are perfect breakfast rolls too.

It’s no secret that the moment I open the oven door to retrieve anything I have made from a yeast dough is always a thrill.

Not a thrill on the level of finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, but still a thrill.

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Click here for the recipe for Parker House Rolls.

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Wash down with a bit of bubbly...

Living in a big city like New York is like an immersion course in eavesdropping. You can’t help it: step outside your apartment and you’re in a world of other people’s business. Elevators are the bull’s eye in this conversational target. The image of New Yorkers packed into an elevator staring silently at the changing floor numbers is only partly true; there are enough folks willing to air their dirty laundry in this venue to give reality TV a run for its money. (My brother used to “goose” the crowded elevator reality game by turning to his wife and scolding, “Put that gun away!”)

This was true even BCP (before cell phone); the spice that cell phones have added is that you often have to imagine half of the conversation. (I say “often” because there are enough folks who carry the weight of the whole conversation solo to more than compensate for the absence of person at the other end. Some time ago I was standing in the lobby of a theater during intermission and was treated to a gentleman’s loud and vivid description of his root canal earlier that day. I gave him a look that said, “Really?” so he turned away but kept up his loud play-by-play because, obviously, if he couldn’t see me then I couldn’t hear him. Cell phone logic?)

It should come as no surprise that the eavesdropped conversation of late centers on New Year’s Eve. Everyone is answering the musical question, “What are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” More often than not the answer is, “Staying home.” (Granted, the frequency of that specific answer rises in direct relation to the age of the respondent.)

No comments about my age, please; I am enthusiastically joining the hordes staying home this year. Friends can stop by if they like, and, not to worry, I can feed them. Staying home on New Year’s Eve means one thing to me: food. But be warned: on New Year’s Eve I feel no obligation to have an entrée and willingly make a meal out of appetizers. This year “Nibbles R Us.”

Naturally any New Year’s Eve nibble must be bubbly compatible. The bubbly of choice this year is Prosecco, the delicately sweet Italian sparkling wine, or Ginger Ale. (Being a lightweight, I’m good for one slug of Prosecco before changing to Ginger Ale. Friends who stop by during their night of revelry will finish the Prosecco for me.)

Making bubbly-compatible nibbles is easy: anything goes with Prosecco (and Ginger Ale.) Cheese and good crackers; Zabar’s Lobster Pâté on skinny toast points; Spiced Pecans are an easy treat: I lightly sauté pecans with a dot of butter, a touch of brown sugar, a little salt, and some crushed, fresh rosemary—not unlike the legendary bar pecans served at Manhattan’s Union Square Café (theirs includes cayenne pepper, good with Ginger Ale, not so great (my opinion) with Prosecco. So I leave it out.)

But I think the star of the show will be little Potato-Rosemary Pizzettas. Making these is as simple as making (or buying) pizza dough, rolling it into small pieces then topping each with a couple of very thinly sliced potato slices, rosemary, pine nuts, and sea salt before baking in a very hot oven. (The hot oven will roast the potato slices, so make sure the slices are thin.) A few of these will make a great dinner. (I like to use an assortment of different color potatoes, but feel free to use your favorite kind.)

These can be re-warmed easily throughout the evening, and I think they are great as is. However, I reserve the right to “gild the lily” at the last minute. If I do, then the slightest dab of crème fraiche and a grain or two (or three) of decent caviar will swaddle baby 2011 in a luxurious blanket.

Don’t think for a second that the whole nibble concept can’t be extended to include dessert. I’ll be making tiny chocolate chip cookies, (a surprisingly adept Prosecco partner), fresh raspberries (created by Mother Nature specifically to be dropped into sparkling wine), and shot glass-sized hot fudge sundaes. The latter will be doing double duty: dessert first, then something sweet to ring in the New Year (I have a superstition whereby the first thing I eat in the New Year should be sweet.) (My short cut for these short sweets? Buy a little good fudge and melt it over a double boiler. The sundaes may be small, but they should be deadly, yes?)

Here’s my New Year’s toast to you: Thank you for reading my blog. Thank you for your support. May the New Year find you happy, healthy, and well fed. For hints on the latter, visit here often. Don’t be a stranger.

Happy New Year!

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Click here for the recipe for my Pizza Dough recipe.(Makes approximately 64 Pizzettas.)

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The Ronald McDonald House of New York is an amazing facility which provides a temporary “home-away-from-home” for pediatric cancer patients and their families. The Ronald McDonald House is supported entirely by private donations. Please read about this amazing place, and keep them in mind when considering your year-end charity donation.

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Write to me at the email address below with any questions or thoughts you may have. Thanks!

Let me email you when the blog has been updated! Opt in by clicking the biscotti at right or by sending your email address to michael@butterfloureggs.com

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Pull Apart Bread: Christmas potluck chic

The little kid in me resents it when Christmas falls on a weekend. There’s no logic to my resentment, after all, like most folks I will take just as much time off as I would have if the holiday fell on a Wednesday.  Most of my big holiday obligations have already been met: the tree is up, my cards are in the mail, and the majority of my holiday party baking is done. That can only mean one thing: it’s Holiday Movie Time. Bing Crosby is rehearsing, Rosie Clooney is getting into her costume, and Jimmy Stewart is getting ready to lasso the moon.

The splashy grand finale of this year’s holiday party baking was a friend’s annual holiday party. I don’t want to say he’s been giving this party for a long time but I think the guests at his first holiday party arrived bearing frankincense and myrrh. (Rim shot, please.)

ANYWAY, the party has always served as a laboratory for me to try out the big show off-y baking that you can only get away with around the holidays.  Over the years there have been Yule logs, cookie Christmas trees, and cookie tributes.

Cookie tributes you ask? Not to worry: there were no cookies in the shape of Elvis. But a few years back all of my holiday cookies were citrus flavored in tribute to the big cartons of Florida citrus fruit we would find sitting on our snowy doorstep each Christmas courtesy of my dad’s best childhood buddy. (Frosted orange-spice cookies were my favorite that year.) Ah, restraint…

This year I somehow had it in my mind to celebrate a slightly more humble aesthetic. I didn’t have a specific game plan in mind when the season started, but following the path of holiday basics from salted caramel-dipped chocolate drop cookies to Snickerdoodles to chocolate gingerbread revealed my destination the same way as when you pick your way through the trees and suddenly find yourself on the beach.

Two things come to mind here: the first is my fear that I may have been turning my nose up at this humble aesthetic—indulging in the sort of food snobbery that I outwardly confess to abhor. The second is that while I consider my experiences cooking and eating to be as much about educating myself as they are about eating well, I sometimes need to be reminded that I can learn as much from a really great brownie as I can from a really great Éclair. It’s up to me to keep my eyes open, yes?

I wanted to bake something for the party that had a relaxed, family / sharing / party feeling; flipping through a few copies of Life Magazine from December 1960 helped me to focus on the kind of friendly, frilly, holiday food I thought would still work at Christmas Dinner fifty years hence: a sort of Potluck Chic.

Please don’t confuse this with the smirking wink at “White Trash” cooking that came and went a few years back. This isn’t Bologna Macaroni and Cheese; It is Nancy Reagan serving Monkey Bread at The White House.

With all that in mind I settled on a simple Cheddar Pull-Apart Bread that had intrigued me some time ago while flipping through a cheap cookbook. A more savory, perhaps more sober relative of Monkey Bread, it also owes some of its DNA to the flaky, buttery Parker House roll. And the way my mind works, when I bake bread I especially prize yeasty concoctions that are as good—or better—toasted the next morning. A slice of this bread with a fried egg on top is my holiday breakfast of choice this year. (Thankfully there are two holidays so I can still have my yummy Yeast Waffles.)

The concept is easy: divide unbaked bread dough into ten even pieces, spread with the savory filling of choice, stack the pieces, then squeeze into a loaf pan and bake. Served warm, friends and loved ones can then “pull apart” the loaf. The recipe attached is very basic, but I’m anxious to try it with Challah dough. Add a bit of cinnamon and sugar and you’ve got an enviable sweet breakfast loaf.

Folks who fear working with yeast dough should feel free to try this concept with store-bought pizza dough. It crusty chewiness will pair beautifully with olive oil and a bit of chopped garlic as the filling. I may have to bring this to a big “five fishes” Christmas Eve dinner.

Have a wonderful holiday—the best of the season to you. Don’t forget to leave some cookies for Santa, and carrots for the reindeer.

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Click here for the recipe for Cheddar Herb Pull Apart Bread.

If you’re feeling ambitious but need a bit of cookie baking technique and guidance, read the Butter Flour Eggs Cookie Primer 101 for some basic cookie-baking tips.

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Are you still trying to finish Santa’s List? Check out Laura Loving’s incredible, affordable range of holiday gifts. Each piece of art features her iconic designs and will be cherished for years to come.

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The Ronald McDonald House of New York is an amazing facility which provides a temporary “home-away-from-home” for pediatric cancer patients and their families. The Ronald McDonald House is supported entirely by private donations. Please read about this amazing place, and keep them in mind when considering your year-end charity donation.

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Write to me at the email address below with any questions or thoughts you may have. Thanks!

Let me email you when the blog has been updated! Opt in by clicking the biscotti at right or by sending your email address to michael@butterfloureggs.com

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Maple Walnut Scones with dried papaya: not just for Halloween.

Halloween falls on a Sunday this year. For those of any age who are heavily into the costume drama of the holiday, this reduces the stress of having to run home from work or school in order to change into a vampire bat (or witch, or Spider Man, or Princess.)

When I was a kid we were still allowed to Trick or Treat door to door unencumbered—uh, I mean—unaccompanied by parents. We would run out the door, sometimes with a time limit (“I expect you back in one hour.”) or sometimes with a geographic limit (“No farther than Parker Street, then come home, understand?”) but that was it.

By necessity, parents are now so heavily involved in the Trick Or Treat event that it makes you wonder who is left at home to hand out candy. Living in New York City makes for an amusing Halloween. Streams of costumed little kids, wrangled by their parents (or is it the other way around?), walk up and down West End Avenue, usually on their way to a party. I fear there is very little door to door activity left, even within apartment buildings. It has been years since I needed to buy a bag of mini Trick or Treat candy bars; if I get any spooky visitors this year they’ll get full-sized bars of my beloved Damak Chocolate. Hmmm. What will become of that chocolate if no one rings the bell? (A short lived problem, I promise.)

A Sunday Halloween means that the whole family can start the day together with a good old fashioned Halloween breakfast. What, you ask, is a good old fashioned Halloween breakfast? I don’t know. I’m about to make it up as I write this blog posting. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that I don’t need much of an excuse to mark any holiday or event with food.

You could make a good solid argument for having a good solid breakfast on Halloween. When I was a kid returning from Trick or Treating, my Mom made me eat a good solid dinner before I could inhale all that candy. I think she believed a little meatloaf in my stomach would counterbalance the several tons of sugar I had toted home. Of course, in those days the worst that could happen from eating too much candy was that you’d get “a bad tummy ache.”

Short of eating candy for breakfast, how can you bring a bit of Halloween into the morning meal? It’s a concept-y thing. A restrained dash of kitsch is fine, but please: no scrambled eggs masquerading as brains, and if you insist on calling your strawberry jelly “bloody hearts on toast” at least make sure it’s good toast.

So, no, kitsch is not my cup of breakfast tea. I prefer a bit more subtlety, a wink where others may enjoy a full-on stare; there’ll be time for spooky stuff and candy later on in the day. Halloween is really the first of the big cool weather holidays, the first step in the slide to the Christmas home plate. Why not commit to a weekend breakfast with the whole family present and accounted for? In some families that can be enough of a novelty to make the day special.

Leave your usual harried breakfast on the shelf. I love breakfast cereal, but why not mark this occasion with a scrambled egg or two, some organic breakfast sausage, brew a bit of fragrant hazelnut coffee, and indulge in a few items from the list we call “a little somethin’”

Adding a dollop of canned prepared pumpkin to pancake batter will lend them an autumn hue and flavor suited to the occasion. Cranberry Nut Muffins will give a gentle preview of Thanksgiving a few weeks hence. Sounds good.

My “little somethin’” of choice this year are Candy Corn Scones. The name is a full-on embrace of kitsch, but the scones are indeed a subtle wink: no actual candy corn was injured baking them. The trick is that you can enjoy this treat long after the costumes have been put away. Just what is it that makes them Candy Corn Scones?

I knew I needed a bit of candy corn color, and the question was: what could I add to the scones that would have the right color (unreal autumn orange) and the right flavor (mildly sweet without being icky) but that would not melt away while the scones baked?

A cruise up and down the dried fruit and nut shelves at my supermarket made the choice easy. Dried apricots could have worked, but their pale yellow was a bit too restrained. Dried papaya fit the bill.

A basic scone is a simple, not terribly sweet quick bread. While traditionalists may insist on making scones with cream, I used 2% Greek yogurt, a compromise that provided rich texture and a buttermilk-like tang. Instead of sugar I sweetened the dough with maple syrup which was then echoed in a muddy brown maple syrup glaze that I drizzled on top after the scones cooled. And to reinforce the little nibble aesthetic of candy corn, I cut the unbaked dough into 2” x 2” triangles, insanely small in a world of King Kong-sized breakfast goodies. But the small size makes them somehow less intimidating; if you’ve gone to the trouble to bake scones you don’t want folks’ first question to be, “Will you share one with me?”

And the question remains: should I dress as an astronaut or Zorro…again?

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Click here for the recipe for Maple Walnut Scones.

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Write to me at the email address below with any questions or thoughts you may have. Thanks!

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Challah = "Chalee"

Challah holds an interesting place in the lore of my family. My Mom has been known to speak longingly of her Grandmother who, according to the lore, was a legendary baker. Mom’s Grandmother had two sons and two daughters. If we could transport our selves back in time to visit her kitchen on a late Friday afternoon we would see a kitchen table holding – among other things – a challah for each of her kids to take home to their families, plus mini-challahs for the grandchildren.

(Okay, scorecard: That’s five challahs (one for her), plus several mini ones, plus strudel (which deserves a blog of its own), plus untold other goodies. Oh, and yeah, a little thing called Sabbath dinner too. And that was just Friday. What can I say? The woman, may she rest in peace but frequently haunt me with her skills, was a machine.)

This speaks volumes to me. Here was woman from “the old country” likely carrying out the household “duties” that generations of “her” women carried out and bequeathed to her. Yet the little challahs always make me think that she expressed a great deal of love and caring through the simple execution of her “duties.” It can be tempting to bake something and be boastful about it, but the love expressed through that baking is what really feeds people.

Nothing surprising there. Moms of my generation have more ammunition in their arsenal of ways to express their love. Some still do it by baking bread, others do it by bringing home the bacon, but I’d be willing to bet that “Eat, eat! You look too thin!” is a maternal exhortation that easily crosses generational and cultural lines. I expect that as I write this there’s a Mother Elephant in the African wild trumpeting it to her youngsters.

You could almost say that challah is the mother of all bread. Bread itself is called the staff of life, but there’s something about challah, supercharged as it is with eggs, that seems particularly life sustaining.

(Before we go any further, it is important to explain that the correct pronunciation of challah – at least where I come from – is chalee. I have no idea why or if it is indeed a regional aberration. For the record we did the same thing to matzo. It was always mutzee.) (And don’t stress over the “CH” sound. If you can’t do it, no worries.)

Anyway, the lesser bit of challah lore in my family pertains to the large, elaborately braided, ornamental challah that was served at my Bar Mitzvah. It was baked by my Mom’s Aunt’s Brother-In-Law (did I lose you?) whose last name was Oven. A baker named Oven? I love it!

As you can tell, challah was traditionally a “special event” bread. Besides the weekly Sabbath, a big challah is always ceremoniously broken at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. What is more elemental than symbolically breaking bread with friends and family?

As breads go, challah is a star. Let’s face it, the rich eggy inside and the sweet shellacked crust are almost magic opposites; an odd couple that only the god of French toast could have created. It is no surprise that challah has been transported from an ethnic, special event food to sandwiches everywhere.  Would my great-Grandmother have approved? (I say yes.)

Having now gone to great lengths to sing the praises of a loaf of bread, you may have assumed that I have baked challah before. The truth is that the challah pictured above is the first one I have ever baked. And having now baked challah, I will forevermore consider it my “go to” bread. It’s really easy.

As with any bread, the work is all front loaded. You wonder, “What about all that kneading? Isn’t it hard work?” No: I have a Kitchen Aid stand mixer. It does all the manual labor. I just measure the ingredients. The Kitchen Aid does the mixing and kneading, the yeast does the rising, and then the oven takes over. If anything my skills were organizational more than anything else. I will admit that it is a process that takes several hours, but they are hours you can spend on other tasks. The shiny, imperious loaf you see above? I made that while I watched a movie.

“Ah,” you smirk, “What about the braiding?” Not necessary. The loaf you see above was made for Rosh Hashanah; for this holiday, challah is traditionally shaped into a spiral round loaf. The symbolism is vague: it either represents God’s crown, the spiral progression upward through life’s cycles, or the wheel of the seasons. For other times of the year, I’ll just plunk the flabby, puffy dough into loaf pans and bake them as big, fat loaves. If you’re ambitious and want to braid then I applaud you.

As I scanned the internet to read about challah I did find one tidbit that interested me. Some folks add saffron to their challah. What a brilliant idea! Saffron will add just the right amount of subtle and mysterious character to challah, almost making the eggs “eggier.” My next challah will definitely have saffron.

As I mentioned, challah makes amazing French Toast, but you may get better results if you allow leftovers of this rich moist bread get about 24 hours of staleness under its belt before practicing your French.

Leftovers? Now that’s funny!

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Click here for the recipe for Challah.

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Write to me at the email address below with any questions or thoughts you may have. Thanks!

Let me email you when the blog has been updated! Opt in by clicking the biscotti at right or by sending your email address to michael@butterfloureggs.com

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Savory Prosciutto Gruyere Cake

Parisians and New Yorkers have an awful lot in common. We both take undeserved hits for rudeness (I’m not rude, I’m just reserved), we both live in congested cities that are often crammed full of tourists (I’ll never forget the day I heard a woman at the corner of 44th and 8th yell at the top of her lungs, “GET OUT OF MY CITY!”), and we both love to eat.

I’ll give the Parisians points here. I’ll concede that, as “head-spinningly” great as New York food can be, Parisian food – especially bread and pastry – may be better. Or am I comparing pommes to oranges?

For New Yorkers, a great deal of entertaining is done over shared meals in restaurants. There are a few reasons why: many New Yorkers have small kitchens — small enough that they were built with the thought of limited use. Also, many New Yorkers do not have space for a dining room table, often making due with couple of stools at a counter, or a table for two folded or pushed into a corner.  (Furnishing a New York apartment is a game of constant tradeoffs where potential pieces of furniture compete for finite space. Dining tables often lose out to sofas. Flat panel TVs have been a boon: hang them on the wall and you’ve gotten rid of a major space gobbler, the TV table.)

While this sounds like New Yorkers are living lives of some kind of dining privation, nothing could be further from the truth. The sheer variety of cuisine just down the block or around the corner more than compensates. Only in a big city like New York can your Monday through Friday dinners take you from Down South to Down East to Vietnam, and back, even if you are a Kosher vegan.

The great New York City home buffet is often served from a coffee table, an arrangement I enjoy, as seconds are never far out of reach. Often, during the week entertaining consists of quick cocktails or wine at someone’s apartment before heading out to a restaurant. It is for the latter type of entertaining that Parisians have come up with a great idea: cake salée.

The English translation of cake salée is “savory cake”, and the implications are obvious: instead of fruit or chocolate and lots of sugar, a savory cake is made with hors d’oeuvre ingredients such as meat, cheese, and herbs. The job of a cake salée is to give folks having a little pre-dinner beverage a little pre-dinner – alcohol absorbing nibble. This frees the host from the bondage of preparing a variety of little cracker-borne nibbles.

A sensible idea, I think, although I suspect that if Americans had thought of it first the French may have turned up their noses; the convenience-over-art factor may have offended them. (Or am I paranoid?)

Of course, this is really just a baking powder or baking soda quick bread, not that far from drop biscuits or muffins. I baked a version of this over the weekend, using a variation of my Asiago Cocktail Bread recipe from last year. My version this past weekend stuck to the meat and cheese formula by using gruyere and prosciutto. It was delicious, although to be honest I think the combination lacked a certain spark of originality.

I think the challenge — and here’s where the French would approve — is to bring art to the convenience by choosing combinations that are not, to borrow a phrase from a friend, “typical.” So while the combination of prosciutto and gruyere was delicious, it was also predictable: a little bacony, a little cheesy, with the richness (heft?) that accompanies a double dose of indulgent ingredients.

Better would have been something with a touch of surprise without the extreme my Dad used to call “baloney and whipped cream.”

Roasted figs and rosemary sound like an unlikely pairing, but the intensity of the roasted figs would more than match the power of the rosemary, especially if roasted with a touch of brandy or calvados and a bigger touch of honey before mixing into the cake salee’s batter.

Of course, unroasted figs pair beautifully with Gorgonzola Dolce cheese, but I’ll have to run this cake salée through the Butter Flour Eggs Testing Lab; I’ll happily make this sacrifice as I have a few concerns about how the cheese will appear in the cake.  I’ll likely stick with a Gorgonzola Dolce with minimal blue veins.

Caramelized onion and black olive would bring a great sweet and salty combo to cocktail hour without a sugary hit, and would bring to mind Pissaladière – the classic French onion tart.

The standard 8” x 4” size loaf pan is fine for this bread / cake, but I also experimented with a 5” x 3” mini loaf pan and I think I prefer using the smaller pan. When the little loaves are sliced, each piece is the perfect size for pre-dinner nibbles.

No one will beg you to share a piece with them.

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Click here for my recipe for Savory Prosciutto Gruyere Cake.

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Write to me at the email address below with any questions or thoughts you may have. Thanks!

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Farinata

The diary would start something like this: “Summer, day 2 / 102 days to go.” My summer travelogue diary would record my grand tour of the world’s “must-see” places, and all the amazing sights seen, sounds heard, and foods eaten along the way.

But the big reveal here is that I have neither the wanderlust nor the time that such a grand tour would require. Oh, there’s also a small detail — money — that I forgot to mention. Ho hum.

Well, that’s okay: I need neither time nor money to paint the globe red. In fact, I can pack a whirlwind summer tour into one hot, sticky, (and air conditioned) summer night. All I need is the right food, and a DVD or two. Full disclosure: none of these movies was made after 1960; Europe may have changed a touch since then.

We’ll start in the hot desert, Marrakech to be specific. Marrakech? “Mmmm, sounds like a drink,” to steal a quote from our first film. James Stewart and Doris Day are travelling with their young son in “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” The desert heat wafting up from the North African sand in this Alfred Hitchcock-directed thriller will make you parched and thirsty, so be sure to have a tall, cool drink nearby – this may be a good chance to crack open an icy bottle of Rosé for those so inclined. If, like me, you find your thirst is quenched by something a bit tamer, then join me for a pitcher of iced Red Zinger tea. Red Zinger is slightly sweet, so use a light hand with the sugar, and a heavy hand with the ice. By the way, Doris Day sings “Que Sera” in this flick, and watch for the scene where Day and Stewart try to eat Tagine with their hands.

Next we’re off to historic Rome for a “Roman Holiday” with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. What I have always loved about this film is that it is a lot like a travelogue featuring two movie stars, and – oh yeah—there’s a sweet love story too. If you’ve ever wondered what the big deal was about Audrey Hepburn, this movie will show you. Watch for the scene where she dances with her barber, and he pauses to adjust her bangs: a moment that does nothing to advance the plot, but does everything to advance the charm of the characters. All of this running around sunny Rome will make you hungry for a bit of pasta. I’m craving Orecchiette with Roasted Red Pepper Pesto.

Be careful of too many carbs though, because we’re hitting the beach next; You’ll want to look good in your bathing suit, right? We’re hanging on the French Riviera with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in “To Catch A Thief.” Possibly the most glamorous movie ever made (c’mon, Cary Grant + Grace Kelly + the French Riviera=glamour) this may also be the most humorous of Hitchcock’s films. I don’t know why, but the aforementioned carb warning aside, this movie always makes me crave ice cream. A dab of gelato anyone? While you are eating the gelato, be sure to watch for the scene where Kelly plants a big kiss on Grant – and listen for the wobbly muted trumpet that underscores the kiss. It’s a hint of the frothy romance to follow, and is Hitchcock’s way of saying, “Don’t take this too seriously, folks.”

All of this makes me think of a conversation I had recently with an associate who just returned from the Southern Italian region of Cinque Terre. A busy executive, she spent an afternoon at her favorite area restaurant making pasta with an elderly Italian woman. The elderly Italian woman has been making the pasta there for countless years, and was laughing, having fun, and full of life. All of this reminded my associate that there’s a whole lot more out there than just the world of business. Cooking a good meal will do that for you.

I have never been to Cinque Terre, but I know the rich, green Ligurian Olive Oil that is pressed there. What I have never had is a local favorite snack called Farinata. Farinata is a flatbread made from chickpea flour, and baked in a well seasoned cast iron skillet in a roaring hot oven. It’s easy to make, casual to serve, and –I think—one of the great undiscovered bar foods. Mixed nuts with your cocktail? No thanks. A wedge or two of this savory, deceptively rich flatbread will make that extra dry martini go down cold and clean on a hot summer night. This is one of those great amalgamations of textures, a toasty crust, a crunchy edge, and a soft interior that will draw comparisons to potato pancakes. Very satisfying.

I don’t have a cast iron skillet, and my apartment-sized oven doesn’t get as hot as a real wood-fired brick oven, but my Farinata came out just fine. Keep this easy treat in mind this summer if you want to serve “a little somethin’” with pre-Barbecue drinks.

Cary Grant would approve.

Happy Summer!

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Click here for the recipe for Farinata.

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Write to me at the email address below with any questions or thoughts you may have. Thanks!

Let me email you when the blog has been updated! Opt in by clicking the biscotti at right or by sending your email address to michael@butterfloureggs.com