French Fridays with Dorie: Savory Kek

Just a quick catch-up. Tuesdays with Dorie has been a lot of muffins lately--corn muffins, currant citrus muffins, honey-nut 'brownies' that would have sold much better as honeycake muffins...

French Fridays with Dorie went beyond muffins, into what David Lebovitz swears that the French call 'kek,' a savory quick bread full of scallions, cheese and other nice things. Kek is fun to say. Kek is fun to eat. Actually, I just like to say kek. Kek, kek, kek, kek, kek....

Eight Days and One Month: A Squash Miracle



Photo by Matt Korahais.

Some years, we make gingerbread. Some years, we give gifts. We did those thing this year too, but mostly, we celebrated with squash. A large warty squash brought both light and sweetness into our home this holiday season, doing double duty as a Chanukkiah (that's a Chanukkah-specific menorah, you'll understand when you're older) and as the base for Christmas pumpkin bread. I have a friend (hi Stacey) who says that stockpiling large winter squashes makes her feel safe. In addition to the root cellar element, I agree with her that they are comforting in their very presence, beyond their food potential. The firm knobby heft of the best squashes gives me a feeling of warmth, of substance, and that same solid awe that I feel when touching a stone pillar. Also, they're beautiful, and taste good.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Each night of the Festival of Lights, Matt drilled a new hole into our kurbis friend, and when it was over, I cut off the waxy part and roasted the squash, pureed it, and froze it until Christmas eve.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

 On that night, it met its fate and became pumpkin bread, complete with cranberries, buckwheat flour, and olive oil. Thank you, little squash, for commemorating the return of the light and the birth (give or take) of one of the world's great freedom fighters.


Photo by Matt Korahais.

Pumpkin Bread with Cranberries Adapted from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion
Ingredients:
1 cup (5 1/2 ounces) vegetable oil (I used olive)
2 2/3 cups (18 1/2 ounces) sugar
4 large eggs
2 cups (or one 15-ounce can) pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
2/3 cup (5 1/4 ounces) water
3 1/3 cups (13 3/4 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour (I subbed in about 1/2 cup of buckwheat flour for AP)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon nutmeg (I used considerably more)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup (4 ounces) chopped walnuts or pecans
Approx. 1 cup frozen cranberries

Method:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream together the oil and the sugar. Beat in the eggs, pumpkin and water. Add dry ingredients, stir into egg mixture just until blended. Stir in vanilla, then the nuts and cranberries.
3. Pour the batter into two lightly greased 9 x 5-inch loaf pans. Bake the bread for 1 hour or until a cake tester inserted in the center of one loaf comes out clean.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Many-Splendored Quick Bread

Holy Hyperbole, Batman.

That's a mouthful of a post title. What on earth was this heavenly, many-splendoured, phantasmagorical concoction? Well, the clue is in the second half of the name: it was a banana-squash-carrot loaf. A strange standout in a book full of complex and buttery cakes, this stubby little survivor clearly holds a warm place in Rose Levy Beranbaum's heart. Unprepossessing as it is, it even gets its own glamour shot in the book.

The original recipe called for grated carrots and zucchini, mashed banana, and walnuts. I used grated carrots (some splendiforously colored ones from the CSA), mashed bananas, and mashed winter squash. The walnuts were left out at Liana's request. Now that she lives with us, she gets a vote. The recipe also called for quite a bit of water, and because my morning teacup was sitting on the counter, I just poured in a measure of PG Tips instead (no discernable effect).

The finished project, made in mini-loaf pans, was soft, sweet, mildly greasy, and, to my taste, a little underseasoned. Not my favorite banana bread, but more than passable. I think the real key to this recipe is the addition of a variety of fruits and vegetables, opening up the imaginative possibilities for furture tailored-to-taste combinations. As a cook who often has a bit of this and a bit of that sitting around (see upcoming: juiced fibre muffins), it's a good reminder.

Bread Baker's Apprentice: Corn Bread

In a brief break from yeast, (it won't be long, tomorrow Dorie brings you Brioche Plum Tart), Peter Reinhardt slips in some corn bread into the BBA lineup. This is northern corn bread, sweet and heavy, loaded with buttermilk and honey and wheat flour, and even a little butter, baked in a pan greased with a little hot turkey fat. I didn't use polenta, just coarse ground local corn meal, so I sped up Reinhardt's method somewhat and skipped the overnight soak, also the bacon.

It was moist, crumbly, and very good, dinner and dessert together.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Fresh Mango Muffins

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie Recipe was a sweet and simple quick bread, made with diced fresh mango, golden raisins, and plenty of spices (ginger, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg). My mango didn't so much dice as pulp, and I also threw in a handful of craisins for color, but otherwise I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter. The only variation was accidental--I was making a half recipe, but accidentally added the full amount of the leaveners. I scooped out what I could and just decided to see what would happen. The muffins and mini-muffins did rise aggressively, and in one of them I tasted a slight note of too-much-baking-powder bitterness, but on the whole it wasn't a disaster.

The recipe made pretty muffins, but I thought that they were overly sweet. Matt, as per usual, disagreed with me on this. He said that they were sweet but that it seemed appropriate, and was certainly no problem.

I greased the muffin pans with Bakers Joy, and while I don't usually advocate having single use aerosol sprays in the kitchen, I will admit that when I cave from time to time this one yields excellent results. I didn't have to so much as ease the muffins out with a knife, I just picked them up.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Black and White Banana Bread

After two weeks on a frantic apartment search and two weeks in Cape Cod away from my Baking book, here's a little Tuesdays with Dorie (or Morrie, as everyone in my life insists on calling it, my friends not being the type that care to cater to cutesiness nor accuracy at all times) action. [Pictures TK, my computer is in the shop getting a new soul].

I did actually make a Dorie Greenspan recipe last Tuesday, but it was a re-run and the site managers have discouraged those, so I'll keep it to myself officially, though pictures might appear here all the same. For the interested, it was the pecan sour cream biscuits, with added wild blueberries from Matt's parents' neighbors in Truro, who were having a bumper crop and so nicely shared. I wanted to make them a little thank you, so these not-too-sweet biscuits were perfect. In a daring move, I substituted strawberry yogurt for the aforementioned sour cream, and it more or less worked. (And no, they weren't pink.)

But pecan sour cream biscuits aside, this week's Tuesdays with Dorie selection was Black and White Banana Bread (recipe here), a marbled take on the classic that ups the butter and egg content to create a consistency something like bread pudding. Several TWD people expressed concern at the extreme mushy nature of their loaves, but having been forewarned, I enjoyed it.

The only modification I made to the recipe was to use 2 bananas instead of the recommended 1.5, and to decrease the butter by a corresponding amount (about 3-4 tablespoons). I took the whole thing over to some friends in Astoria, who had called me earlier in the week to say they were having a party. When I got there, I found one of them headed to the laundromat and the other puttering around, having canceled their party and neglected to mention it to me because I'd been vague about my attendance. Regardless, the banana bread (pudding) got eaten, and another Tuesdays with Dorie was fulfilled.

Amish Friendship Bread: Neither Amish nor, Technically, Bread

"But it's full of friendship," you say.

True, couldn't be truer. And it's a great thing to serve your friends, they'll be very very happy with you. My overall feelings about Amish Friendship Bread are mixed, though cumulatively positive.

Let's talk about the recipe/instruction sheet. While the finished product was very good, the instructions were kind of...odd. Not hard to follow, just...odd. While I really liked the repeated admonition to mush the bag, a lot of the rest seemed unnecessary. For starters (get it? see what I did there?), I don't understand why this recipe requires a 10-day fermentation, when it is a quick bread raised by baking powder and baking soda. What does the starter do for it? Flavor? Inconclusive.

Also, there were certain cryptic elements that never made it to the surface. Why, for instance, is it imperative to never never never touch the batter with any metal implements, nor bowl nor spoon nor measuring cup? Does it ruin the flavor? (No, I ignored the direction.) Does it interfere with some chemical reaction? (As pointed out above, the starter is chemically meaningless to the bread/cake.) Do the Amish avoid metal? Not that I know of.

Which brings me to my final point illustrating the mildly bogus nature of this recipe: Amish??? Really? The recipe includes instant vanilla pudding, folks. This seems very un-Amish. I have a sinking feeling that the whole chain letter and its pseduo-arcane instructions are a cruel imposition on the Amish way of life.

All this scoffing led me to ignore a crucial point the first time I mixed the bread, on Saturday. As Jill immediately and sadly noted, I had forgotten to line the bread pans with cinnamon sugar and cover the loaves with a coat of same. It was very good all the same, but I remedied the situation last night with two more sparklingly sugary loaves, using the leftover batter that I am not passing on, and leaving out the vanilla pudding (no noticeable difference).

I did save one starter mush bag for anyone who wants to venture into the world of the 'Amish.' Just let me know, it's in my freezer. Thanks, Tater.