Alpha Bakers -- Perfect Nectarine Galette

Summer is my busy season. While the schools are out, the libraries are full of children. Children gaming, children playing, children bored and causing mischief, children seeking summer reading books of all shapes and sizes (and publication dates). I run daily programs several times a day, and the library also serves as a summer meals site, serving food supplied by the Department of Education to anyone ages 0-18. I have a very supportive staff and a team of summer volunteers, but my limited training skills combined with their youth (many are no more than twelve) means that supervising them is actually the most exhausting part of a summer (well, that and waiting for a new full-time custodian to be appointed after our wonderful custodian's retirement at the beginning of  July (sigh)). 

The summer meals are served on a drop-in basis, with no signups or scheduled attendees. Because of this, it can be hard to predict exactly how many meals we will need, and there are sometimes shortages or overstocks. While most of the leftovers have to be disposed of pretty quickly, sometimes we hit the accidental fruit jackpot. A few weeks ago, I found myself looking at a large surplus of hard nectarines, and a peach galette on the Alpha Baking schedule. This thing pretty much planned itself. 

The fruit is macerated in sugar and lemon juice, and the resulting juices are then caramelized and returned to the fruit with cornstarch (tapioca starch as usual in my case). The whole is then piled onto a round of pie crust, which is folded up around it and the whole is baked and delicious. The pie crust Rose recommends is her flaky cream cheese formula, but I wanted something a little different, so I used the cornmeal crust recipe from the Four and Twenty Blackbirds book.

The caramelized juices were particularly nice. The nectarines don't get as soft as peaches would (I also didn't peel them), but as fruit salvage it was more than satisfactory.

Tuesdays with Dorie: On the Run

In the midst of all the cake, I do keep making all sorts of things from Baking: From My Home to Yours, and they often turn out to be the most popular. I've made nearly all of the recent TWD recipes, but haven't had time to blog them, and sometimes failed to get the picture. But here they are, all in a row.

Maple Cornmeal Biscuits--crunchy drops, not a lot of staying power, but no problems here.

Oatmeal Nutmeg Scones--ahead of the pack. These are more than they seem, nubbly, and nutty, and really, really, good.

Blueberry-Brown Sugar Plain Cake -- like muffins in a pyrex dish. Lovely. With rhubarb. Something about the words 'plain cake' just screams the best part of L.M. Montgomery's Avonlea.  So wholesome yet kind of not.

Caramel Pots de Creme--wonderful on the bottom, grainy on the top where the bain marie didn't quite reach. Breakfast. Seriously, why do people eat muffins for breakfast. It's all about custard.

I might skip today's chocolate biscotti, but we'll see. On we barrel, on the way to looking just like a couple of barrels. Custard ho.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Cornmeal Shortbread

Strange. These cookies came out a little...strange. That's probably because I used a very coarse polenta in them instead of a fine cornmeal, underchilled, and threw in a pinch of Ancho chile powder because I did. Instead of lemon zest. On the theory that what's good for the cornbread is good for the cookie.

Daily Bread: Multigrain Pain au Levain

Testing bread in earnest now.

This morning I baked two loaves of multigrain pain au levain, using Daniel Leader's formula from Local Breads. The multi grains, which soaked for eight hours while the levain fermented, were sesame seeds, flaxseeds, coarse cornmeal, and oats. The dough also contained small percentages of whole wheat and rye flours. I forgot to add the seeds until halfway through kneading, rendering the dough very wet and gloopy, so kneading was a long slow process, with frequent rests.

One of the things that I'm concentrating on now that the weekend's loaves will actually sold to people is my shaping and scoring. I consider the loaf above to be a triumph. It also tasted good, dark and moist. I took it in to the architects' office where I used to work, and they, German, English, Japanese, and American, were very complimentary. I'll be filling in at that office quite a bit in the next month, and am looking forward to re-gaining one of my more enthusiastic and knowledgeable audiences.

Compulsive baking--win friends and influence people.

Campfire Cooking

Blueberry barrens, Maine

This summer, we did some wandering. We wandered all through New England and bits of upstate New York. Sometimes we stayed in houses, sometimes we stayed in a tiny tent, sometimes we travelled by car,and sometimes by canoe, but always we made fires, and we experimented with the art of campfire cooking.

Cooking over a campfire is both simpler and more complicated than cooking in a kitchen. There is no running water, temperature regulation, stocked pantry, or fancy appliances. These limitations, possibly frustrating in the long run, are just the incentive for good ideas in the short. I didn't miss the complications I usually love. We just made food.

This trip was one of the first times I've gone beyond just skewering food or boiling water over a campfire. Yes, we certainly had wonderfully skewered vegetables, even the ridiculously decadent bacon-wrapped steak, but we also tried our hand at dutch oven cuisine--more specifically, cornbread. Of course it burned, but it was a small revelation to me, a confirmation of the truth that I could live well with only a wood fire and one or two utensils, could live well and eat well outside for a long time.

I left this post unwritten for a long time, because our final camping trip of the season was this past weekend. In the end, we didn't cook anything particularly noteworthy, but just being out there burning wood reminded me of all the pleasures of cooking outside, the kind of pleasures a grill never quite duplicates--the gritty ash, the sweet burning smells, the communal attention to the pot and the skewer, the hungry dog blissfully licking the grill, and best of all, waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night in the light of the good fire.

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.

Bring on the Bread Baker's Apprentice--Anadama Bread

Apparently I'm a joiner.

I like assignments and groups. I like Tuesdays with Dorie, which I found myself describing to Matt's mother (with his help) as a kind of book club. Without constant occasions, my baking obsessions can seem purposeless, and while I'm trying to rein myself in, the truth is I may always be the kind of person who has a few too many pans of brownies or fruit tarts to sheepishly push on the neighbors. Having baking book clubs makes this tendency feel a little less aimless. I'm not just making some ridiculous dessert for no reason...oh no, I have an Assignment. As an added bonus, baking book clubs tend to increase my skills, get me to try new techniques, and are largely free of the annoyances of real book clubs (i.e. listening to other people's aimless or forced opinions on books), but with the full complement of interesting shared experience.

It's the modern sort of movement--loosely connected, purposeful, but without a lot of person to person contact. Mostly it's just me and my butter and sugar and flour. And then there are those moments when I have to explain to the rest of the world why I'm crazy and 'just happen' to have 'extra' brownies/ice cream sandwiches/lemon tarts around at all times. Admittedly, there's a part of me that kind of loves that too.

The only thing that's held me back from joining more and more of these groups is a nagging worry that they will take over my entire baking life, rendering this blog merely a chronicle of something that hundreds of other people are also doing, and someone has already put into a book. That would be boring. I've been flirting with Daring Bakers, but they're only once a month. Joining another weekly group is a big step, and it certainly couldn't involve more tart dough or buttercream. Even I have limits.
My resolve of originality was overcome, though, by a new group started by Nicole of Pinch My Salt. This group, somewhat more loosely organized than TWD, is baking its way in order through Peter Reinhardt's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. First, I already had the book. Second, it seemed like a good crash course back to the baked good that started this blog--Bread. Loyal longtime readers may have noticed that bread posts have taken a back seat lately. I still make bread, but not as often or as obsessively, and less frequently from my sourdough starter, which is looking a little weak in the back of the refrigerator these days. Also, it tends to look the same regardless of type, and I don't feel like my photographs are that exciting. It just looks like another picture of the same loaf. It's time to turn that around, take better pictures of the whole process, and try out some variations.
The BBA (as it shall henceforth be known), is kind of an odd book. It starts with an extensive section on technique, and only halfway through the book does it move on to 'formulas'. These vary extensively, and the order in which they appear doesn't always seem to follow a clear logic (the first two recipes are for Anadama bread and for Greek Celebration Bread, neither an obvious choice). I have some issues with the layout--recipes often span several pages, or can be difficult to follow even on one page, but Reinhardt is a master teacher and I am excited to learn from him.

The first week's 'assignment' was an old New England (yeah, New England! Go Celtics!) specialty, Anadama Bread. This bread has many variations, but is always made with some variation on cornmeal and molasses. Reinhardt's version starts with a day-long soaker of cornmeal (I used a coarse polenta) and water. This soaker is then added to a sponge, which is supposed to ferment for an hour. I forgot it and left the house, so it actually spent something closer to 8 hours on the counter. I added a bit more yeast to the final dough in case I'd exhausted it, but the results were very positive. I put the dough into the refrigerator to rise overnight, woke up at 5:30 to put it out on the counter, slept until 9:30, at which time it had nearly tripled. (Are you sensing a theme here?) I shaped it anyway, and stuck it in the loaf pan to proof, then baked it off.
It's not the best bread in the world--(we have Pane Genzanese for that), but it is a perfect sandwich bread, with a soft fluffy texture to rival Pepperidge Farm. I think it might have a future as French toast.