Alpha Bakers - Kouigns Amann

Hear that? That's the echo of over a year of not blogging.

It's been a busy time, and I've been doing a great many librarian things, and may in fact be starting a separate librarian blog if I can ever tame my parentheses usage. At least I now have a large and hungry staff of colleagues to eat my baking (horrible flashbacks to working in an office of two...dancers). This will come in handy because I've gone and joined up with another bake-through. The book in question is The Baking Bible, by Rose Levy Beranbaum. Not only did I already make it through her Rose's Heavenly Cakes, I tested several of the recipes for this current title in a private group, the Beta Bakers. Now we have transmogrified into the Alpha Bakers, a select group indeed, and will be baking weekly, with roundups by Marie Wolf to be found here.

My hero John Thorne has said that his cookbooks function best when he lets them get into a conversation with one another. Baking with a group of opinionated bloggers allows this pleasure on the smaller scale. Some are precise and rule oriented, some mess around, some are just messy (I'm #2 and #3, respectively).

At the risk of sinking back into the smug domestic goddess that I was in mild danger of becoming, here it comes. Our first recipe was the book's cover recipe, and one we had tested together, Kouigns Amann.

Kouigns Amann are hard to pronounce (queen amANN) but easy enough to make. In fact, they're so hard to pronounce that I had been hearing them discussed on podcasts for months without connecting the pastry under discussion to the written name. I used to do that with 'sub-tle' the written word and 'suttle' the spoken word. Was convinced they were different concepts.

Whatever you call them, these pastries are essentially a cross between a croissant and a danish, glazed in caramelized sugar. The dough is a rich but not decadent brioche-style yeast dough, which rises and then is folded and rolled with a room temperature butter package (heh, butter package). Rose calls for bread flour to strengthen the dough and minimize butter breakouts. I used Hecker's brand AP flour, which is fairly high protein, with excellent results--I'll try bread flour next time I have it on hand but Gold Medal brand bread flour is only one or two percentage points off in protein content anyway so I don't know if the difference will be monumental.

 

After a few turns, the dough is rolled again, covered in granulated sugar, which quickly begins weeping moisture, and folded into little packages, which are set to rise in rings, or foil rings, or, in my case, some muffin pans. 

 

I cut mine smaller than recommended because my muffin tins and rings were smaller than the recommended 4". More pastry is not a bad thing.

Finally, they're baked until very brown and crisp. Mine leaked a fair bit of butter--next time I might take a tip from one of the other Alpha Bakers and freeze them for a moment before putting them in the oven.

These pastries have a high return rate for not too much work, although dealing with the wet sugar is a bit of a pain. They're best eaten shortly after baking, but colleagues will eat them the morning after with no complaint.

"You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!" ~M.F.K. Fisher

Bread Baker's Apprentice: Cinnamon Buns

My version of Peter Reinhardt's Cinnamon Buns wouldn't win any bake sale prizes--whole wheat flour gives them a less-fluffy look, and the lack of white fondant icing (which I think is overkill on a good cinnamon bun) completes their rustic charm. They were, however, sweet, fluffy, and lemony, and while not the most decadent pastry I could imagine, certainly enough so for Matt to call them dessert.

I had a surprising amount of trouble with this basic recipe, trouble which I tentatively blame on the flour combination I used. I've mentioned that I find many of the BBA recipes to need a lot of extra hydration. This one went the other way. I ran out of white flour halfway through, and so the recipe was half whole wheat bread flour, with a splash of fine semolina. In my mind, this flour substitution, especially with the absorption breaks I kept giving it, should have meant the dough was dry, if anything. Instead, it was so wet that I couldn't knead it, and ended up gooshing it around more like the ciabatta dough, after adding a good deal more flour on my hands. I finally just got frustrated and set it to rise, figuring it would be what it would be. I then forgot about it and it got a 6-hour rise instead of the two it was meant to have, and it would have been longer except that I happened to stumble on the bowl on my counter while going to make something else. It had more than quadrupled in size, but luckily the yeast wasn't exhausted and they proofed just fine once I had gotten the cinnamon and sugar and pecans and raisins in, and cooked up ok, though whole wheat dough never bakes as pretty as all white in pastries like these.Speaking of pastries, I am really looking forward to getting out of the all butter all the time part of the book (seriously, where's the bread--I miss Daniel Leader, who doesn't mess around), and relegating the butter back to where it belongs--Tuesdays with Dorie. But I have no complaints about these cinnamon buns other than the abysmal time I had kneading them, the flavor is a good mix of lemony and sweet.

Daring Bakers Challenge May 2009: Strudel!

Stroodel. Strooodel. Say it with me. It's fun. I'm having fun saying strudel.
This month, I also got to have fun making strudel. (Strooodel, strooodel...). It's one of those lovely words that quickly loses all sense and just becomes a collection of appealing nonsense sounds.

The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers.

I was happy to see this challenge, not just because saying strudel is so much fun, but because Saveur recently ran an incredible photo spread on Viennese pastry, and I've been having warm thoughts about apfeltortes and the like ever since. Also, the recipe contained a new technique, and what else did I join Daring Bakers for? Lastly, this is exactly my kind of dessert, heaps of butter and fruit, nothing fancy or uber-decorated, and sans icing.
I put off making the recipe, though, for a while, because the dough-stretching process seemed frightening, and involved. It wound up being remarkably easy, but my strudel-luck just wasn't on this month. My first strudel turned into a pile of crumbs because I failed to read the directions and rolled it out on the counter. On a hot day. Paper thin dough does not like that. The rhubarb-apple filling was good, though. My second attempt went more smoothly, at first. I rolled out the dough on a napkin, pulled and stretched and everything went as planned. My filling, though, was not so cooperative--I used white peaches and both taste and texture were a little lacking. It didn't help that I sweetened them with some leftover purple sugar, which left them an unappetizing bluish gray. The peach mixture was so wet that despite the almond flour I subbed for the bread crumbs, I wound up with what Matt called a 'Star Trek Strudel.' I would have said Alien, but the point is clear. It has erupted.

I don't think I've quite mastered the art of strudel yet, but I don't think it's as complicated as I'm making it. The dough is surprising and fun, so I'll probably try again.

Apple strudel
from “Kaffeehaus – Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague” by Rick Rodgers

2 tablespoons (30 ml) golden rum
3 tablespoons (45 ml) raisins
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon (80 g) sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick / 115 g) unsalted butter, melted, divided
1 1/2 cups (350 ml) fresh bread crumbs
strudel dough (recipe below)
1/2 cup (120 ml, about 60 g) coarsely chopped walnuts
2 pounds (900 g) tart cooking apples, peeled, cored and cut into ¼ inch-thick slices (use apples that hold their shape during baking)

1. Mix the rum and raisins in a bowl. Mix the cinnamon and sugar in another bowl.

2. Heat 3 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet over medium-high. Add the breadcrumbs and cook whilst stirring until golden and toasted. This will take about 3 minutes. Let it cool completely.

3. Put the rack in the upper third of the oven and preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Line a large baking sheet with baking paper (parchment paper). Make the strudel dough as described below. Spread about 3 tablespoons of the remaining melted butter over the dough using your hands (a bristle brush could tear the dough, you could use a special feather pastry brush instead of your hands). Sprinkle the buttered dough with the bread crumbs. Spread the walnuts about 3 inches (8 cm) from the short edge of the dough in a 6-inch-(15cm)-wide strip. Mix the apples with the raisins (including the rum), and the cinnamon sugar. Spread the mixture over the walnuts.

4. Fold the short end of the dough onto the filling. Lift the tablecloth at the short end of the dough so that the strudel rolls onto itself. Transfer the strudel to the prepared baking sheet by lifting it. Curve it into a horseshoe to fit. Tuck the ends under the strudel. Brush the top with the remaining melted butter.

5. Bake the strudel for about 30 minutes or until it is deep golden brown. Cool for at least 30 minutes before slicing. Use a serrated knife and serve either warm or at room temperature. It is best on the day it is baked.

Strudel dough
from “Kaffeehaus – Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague” by Rick Rodgers

1 1/3 cups (200 g) unbleached flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
7 tablespoons (105 ml) water, plus more if needed
2 tablespoons (30 ml) vegetable oil, plus additional for coating the dough
1/2 teaspoon cider vinegar

1. Combine the flour and salt in a stand-mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix the water, oil and vinegar in a measuring cup. Add the water/oil mixture to the flour with the mixer on low speed. You will get a soft dough. Make sure it is not too dry, add a little more water if necessary.
Take the dough out of the mixer. Change to the dough hook. Put the dough ball back in the mixer. Let the dough knead on medium until you get a soft dough ball with a somewhat rough surface.

2. Take the dough out of the mixer and continue kneading by hand on an unfloured work surface. Knead for about 2 minutes. Pick up the dough and throw it down hard onto your working surface occasionally.
Shape the dough into a ball and transfer it to a plate. Oil the top of the dough ball lightly. Cover the ball tightly with plastic wrap. Allow to stand for 30-90 minutes (longer is better).

3. It would be best if you have a work area that you can walk around on all sides like a 36 inch (90 cm) round table or a work surface of 23 x 38 inches (60 x 100 cm). Cover your working area with table cloth, dust it with flour and rub it into the fabric. Put your dough ball in the middle and roll it out as much as you can.
Pick the dough up by holding it by an edge. This way the weight of the dough and gravity can help stretching it as it hangs. Using the back of your hands to gently stretch and pull the dough. You can use your forearms to support it.

4. The dough will become too large to hold. Put it on your work surface. Leave the thicker edge of the dough to hang over the edge of the table. Place your hands underneath the dough and stretch and pull the dough thinner using the backs of your hands. Stretch and pull the dough until it's about 2 feet (60 cm) wide and 3 feet (90 cm) long, it will be tissue-thin by this time. Cut away the thick dough around the edges with scissors. The dough is now ready to be filled.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Tartest Lemon Tart

The same winter that I started this blog, I read and was strongly influenced by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon's Plenty, their book on a year of a 100-mile diet in Vancouver. The book heightened my interest in local sources, and re-awakened an obsession with foraging. It did not, however, ultimately turn me into a self-sufficient locavore. I get better and better, but I have not made that leap, and am not sure I want to. What I want to do is live like a locavore, that is, considering the food miles and growing costs of my food, supporting the local farming economy, and making, growing or finding what I can myself. During my brief flirtation with total locavorism, I spent some time contemplating what I would miss the most, or what I would have as my 'exemption' if I didn't choose to go full-tilt.

I would miss tropical fruit. I would miss olive oil and spices. I would miss chocolate and coffee. But one of the things I would have the hardest time cooking without would be lemons. I would really really miss lemons.

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was an excellent reminder of just how wonderful a lemon can be. Tartest Lemon Tart, selected by Babette of Babette Feasts, is a kind of lemon jelly tart using whole lemons; skin, pith, pulp, juice and all. The lemons are blended in the food processor with sugar, butter, salt, and cream (I used buttermilk), and then poured into a par-baked sweet nutty tart shell and baked until firm. Strong resemblance to lemon bars. Some of the TWD bakers complained that theirs were too tart, mine fell on the other side, and even with reduced sugar was barely tart enough. It was also very pretty.

Here it is featured at Mothers' Day breakfast.
Matt and I invited his parents over for a Mothers' Day extravaganza, encompassing Matt's shrimp/asparagus/gruyere toasts on garlic-rubbed whole wheat, easing into sweeter territory with Orangette's buckwheat pancakes, syrup, grapes and strawberries, and then finishing with tiny wedges of lemon tart, because, like Everest, it was there. A group cross-country skype, in which we were informed by Matt's nephew that light sabres are manufactured exclusively in Seattle (of course), rounded out the morning.

It was an impressive day of cooking and eating, and a triumphant return to the entertaining scene from two people who have been largely too harried and busy to invite anyone over. I hope to start rooftop barbeques on a very regular basis soon, and since we always have a willing griller and 'extra' baked goods, I think you'll all fare very well. You're coming over soon, right?

Tuesdays with Dorie: Banana Cream Pie

I'm behind, I'm bewildered, I'm bothered and busy. I barely made banana cream pie. But I love banana cream pie. Only crazy people and custard-phobes don't love banana cream pie. And, I suppose, a few people who unaccountably abhor bananas. But for me, banana cream pie is just great. Cream. Banana. Custard. Pie. This particular pie, which I'd made once before for the great pie extravaganza of 2008, is exceptional in every way, from the cinnamon pastry cream to the sour cream whipped cream. Cream cream cream. Of course, since we're trying pretty hard to eat like normal people and less like pastry chefs, who needs all that cream in the house? And when I'm trying to write five papers in one month and Matt's trying to be in a play, even the time to properly make and admire the banana cream pie is lacking. And it's Pesach. Still, it was banana cream pie.
So I made it. That lumpy thing above is the crust, with some buckwheat subbed in for some of the flour--buckwheat and bananas are a very good thing. I made it in a tart pan because I don't have any adorable little six inch springforms or pie plates. This is something I'm thinking about investing in, though, because seriously, what is the sense of making a nine inch pie for a family of two? Also, I was out of tin foil, so the prebaking was a little haphazard. (Are you getting a sense of what kind of week this was yet?)

I also managed to undercook the pastry cream and not care enough to take the two minutes to fix it, so the bottom layer was runny. After that, I lost patience and fixed the rest by cooking it a little longer, then dumped it on. I like this best a few hours after assembly, so the banana has time to permeate the pastry cream fully. It was a mess, but tasted wonderful.
Some time soon, banana cream pie, I promise to make you with proper attention and love, because you're a wonderful dessert. As it is, I might be scaling back on TWD this month, which is a lot of cakes and cream pies. Next week I may just make the Amaretti for the Chocolate Amaretti Torte. We'll see. As I said, it's going to be a busy month, but I'm still here. When Pesach is over, we'll see what we can do about the next step in the gingerbread project (hint, no one has shared any recipes yet...), and about more thoughtful blogging as CSA season and our rooftop garden get started up.
Meanwhile, there's sponge cake and matzo toffee crunch somewhere around here. Excuse me.

Nigella-Inspired Potato Vegetable Pies

Hopefully, recession cooking is creative cooking, ways to make what you have on hand delicious and interesting. What I had on hand last night was a large selection of root vegetables, some leftovers, and Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess, an uneven but appealing early addition to my cookbook collection that has been overdue for a revisitation. What Nigella had in mind for me last night was comforting and just classically British-little filled pies.

I adapted her crust by subbing in neufchatel for some of the abundant butter (cream cheese makes every dough better), and then improvised a refrigerator filling: potatoes (yukon gold and purple), turnips, kale, peas, carrot, salt, a little butter, a lot of buttermilk, scallion tips, a little minced garlic, onion powder, leftover braised cabbage, salt pepper. I cooked anything hard until it was less hard, and then mooshed it all together and added a lot of Parmesan cheese, filled little pies, and baked them. The buttermilk was a great substitute for the usual bechamel-like sauce in a pot pie, which this basically was.

They were nothing special, but they were good and simple and easy to take for lunch. Thanks, Nigella. I think this book is still amusing me, so look out for a few more Nigella recipes in the near future.

Thanksgiving Mystery Confection, Part II

Ladies and gentlemen...the Princessetarte!Genoise brushed with a sugar syrup, layered with jam, whipped cream, and pastry cream, and topped with a thin layer of marzipan. It's apparently big in Sweden and parts of the midwest, and they sell a frozen version at IKEA. I've made this twice before (actually twice in the same weekend) and it was a big hit, but this version, via Martha Stewart Living, wasn't quite on the ball. It might have just been me, I was doing bits and pieces of it at odd hours, but the cake was tough and eggy, the pastry cream a touch lumpy, and nothing was quite as it should have been. It was still delicious, though, and so much fun to play with.
This is a terrible picture, but I wanted to give some idea of the interior. It just wasn't that popular--a little wet, a little weird, a little green, and the cake a little too tough. Quite frankly, even I, who loves every component of this cake and have loved previous versions, wasn't too impressed. People ate it, though, even as they muttered about all that cream. The next day we nibbled leftovers but mostly stole the whipped cream out for our pumpkin pie. And it wasn't like we were hurting for desserts. Below is just a small sampling, including chocolate layer cake, meringues by Dottie, and brown butter spoon cookies.The star of the show, though, and probably the only thing we needed, was my mother's glamorous fruit platter.

Thanksgiving Mystery Confection, Part I

Thin eggy genoise...

Bubbling cornstarch and egg yolk goo...What am I?

Double Dorie: Rugelach and Kugelhopf

Say that five times fast.
I've been a little behind on the Tuesdays with Dorie train, (was there a major national event somewhere in there...?), but yesterday was catchup day. I woke up around 9:30, and by ten there was rugelach dough chilling in the refrigerator. It's a cream cheese dough, a title which belies the equal proportions of butter also included, and it is made in the food processor, and takes approximately five seconds. Catherine, are you paying attention? Making rugelach is a project consuming less than an hour, tops. You chill the dough, and while it's chilling, you mix up a little kugelhopf.Dorie recommends a mixer for this dough, which is almost like a brioche, but as I don't have one, and didn't have the patience to mix by hand for more than ten minutes, I just beat it up as long as I cared to and called it a day. It was nice to have a brioche-type yeast dough that didn't require extremely messy and sticky kneading. I just stuck the blob in a bowl, let it rise for an hour and half, then stuck it in the fridge and poked it every half hour for a few more hours, then let it alone.After the rugelach dough was done chilling, I rolled it out into a 'circle,' spread a mixture of quince jam and pear butter on it, and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. Then I added chopped almonds. I skipped the chocolate because it seemed like overkill. Sliced the little sucker up with a pizza cutter, rolled up the triangles into messy crescents, e voila! Jam leaks out, but who cares? These are forgiving pastries. You just freeze or refrigerate them for a little bit, then brush them with an egg wash, sprinkle with sugar, and into the oven.Then, when they come out, they look like this:When they look like that, they taste like heaven, and because I made tiny little ones, it's almost impossible to stop eating them.
Later in the day, I tucked the kugelhopf dough into my tiny muffin pan and baked it up. Kugelhopf is supposed to be made in a specially shaped pan, and then brushed with butter and sugar, so what I wound up with is a little more like mini-brioches, but no one is complaining. They were soft and sweet and lovely.

Blogger Incest (& Jam)

A strange realization hit me when I began to plan the week's posts. Nearly every recipe I've made this week (and most weeks) was cribbed from someone else's blog. Not only that, but several of those were cribbed from other blogs.

Looking at it one way, it's a wonderful sharing of ideas that allows a cook to see how several different cooks approach a single recipe. Having gotten a sense of the tastes and biases of each blogger, the amalgamation helps me see the direction I'd like to take the recipe in for my kitchen.

Looking at it another way, bloggers are an awfully incestuous bunch who can't think for ourselves. Also, any mangled keystroke made while typing the word 'blogger' tends to turn it into something that looks like 'booger.'

Ultimately, I suppose using recipes from other bloggers isn't much different from using recipes from cookbooks, in terms of creativity. Either way, I'm not writing them. But it is funny to watch the ripples of certain trends dribble through the blog world.

This week, many of the recipes I was drawn to involved some facet of jam...I love making jam, sauce, and jelly, but don't have a good pot to can in or a real canning confidence, so once I make a jam, I also spend a lot of time thinking about how to use it up. This recipe for a Jam Crostata from The New York Times via The Wednesday Chef via David Lebovitz has proven an excellent solution to this delightful problem. It's flexible, simple, and delicious, and now I've used up almost the whole jar of my homemade quince jam. Looking back, I see that David posted this recipe in July, when I must have seen it and filed it without knowing, because it came back to me out of some mental crevice the other day, and I wound up with this...

Not a bad day's work. For my next tart, if I don't just eat it all with a spoon, I made easy and unctuous (and I never say unctuous, but that's what it is) pear butter with nutmeg and cardamom. No picture here yet, but check out the link, The Traveler's Lunchbox has great photos. Pear butter is amazing. Make pear butter. Now. Simmer it slowly and gloat over its strange candied lusciousness.

Things in Pastry: Empanadas and Tarte Tatin

Dinner last night at my parents' house became a communal effort, a kind of post-fast blitz. I find lately that fasting changes my life more than it used to. Now it doesn't just involve not eating, it is also not cooking. And these days, I spend approximately an hour a day in recreational cooking. A day without menu planning, blog reading, puttering, and eating is a day with a very different rhythm. The next day, of course, it was back to the silliness, and Ellen and my mother and Matt and I made a startling amount of dinner. Pastry began and pastry ended, as I got absorbed in some empanadas and Ellen made a delicious tarte tatin from a hoarded old NYtimes recipe. Here she is rolling her pastry...
Here I am rolling mine.The filling for the empanadas, which could have used some more seasoning and some more juice, was turkey and onions and potato with some corn and paprika. The dough was cooperative but too buttery for the ultimately dry payoff. Some tweaking to be done, but like the dumplings, these are always fun to make and fun to eat.

Being home also means I was able to collect our neighbor's fallen quinces, some of which I already boiled into a very stiff jam, most of which are still awaiting their fate. They smell like fall and taste like a citrus-y apple.
Speaking of apples, I didn't take pictures, but we held a little heirloom apple tasting with local russets this afternoon, and the clear winner if you're a fan of dense and tart apples was the Orleans Reinette. Good thing, too, because I couldn't tell most of the others apart. If I remember correctly, there was a Golden Russet and an Ashmead's Kernel.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Double-Crust Blueberry Pie

Tuesdays With Dorie - Almond Cream Puff Ring

It's a bird...It's a plane...it's....a creampuff. Actually it's an Almond Cream Puff Ring with Chocolate glaze. So there. Actually the moral of this, my third Tuesdays With Dorie baking foray, is that cream puff are almost nonsensically easy to throw together, as well as incredibly good. Next to pie, I love custard and eggy things. It occurs to me after perusing all the other entries that what I've really put together here is a Boston Creme. Go Celtics.The original recipe in the book was made with peppermint flavored whipped cream, but making allowances for taste and the ingredients on hand, I made the switch to almond pastry cream, and was very satisfied with the results.
My discovery: cream puffs are really just popovers. One has a stiff shiny batter and the other a liquid one, one is piped and the other raised in muffin tins, but the ingredients are nearly identical, and the result is similar. Next time I would work on piping a more imposing ring, but the puffs were so perfect I might just go with those. The whole exercise, which took less than an hour to prepare, reminded me of Nigella Lawson's philosophy from her book How to be a Domestic Goddess. She points out (and I'm paraphrasing here) that making a cake is minimal effort compared to the enthusiastic, sometime wildly emotional response it generates in your audience. Again and again as a baker I have found this to be true. For most things that I make, the excitement they generate is seriously out of proportion to the time and effort expended to make them. I like it that way. Everything tastes good, and I get my little share of being fawned on. Everyone wins.

Tuesdays with Dorie: La Palette's Strawberry Tart

My second TWD. And I'm already late. I'm not going to waste time with excuses about the heat wave, the Red Hook Waterfront Arts Festival, nor the Polybe + Seats benefit Monday night. Nor will I weep about my trip to Far Rockaway yesterday. I'll just state for the record that I did make my dessert within the specified 24 hours, and that will have to do for this week.

The dessert itself was perfect for me; an almond short crust, baked and spread with strawberry jam, then topped with fresh cut strawberries, and, in my case, vanilla ice cream. Very messy and rustic and adaptable to all situations (Jill ate it for breakfast with cream cheese). We took the leftovers to the beach in pieces. I love summer. And strawberries.

Strawberries I might love even more than summer. Childhood obsessions never go away. I am actually offended that I am supposed to buy my strawberries in pint or even quart containers in this stupid city, and desperate to go picking. Matt is going up to Vermont for a few days today and it took all my strength not to jump in the car. In reality it is for the best, as I would have made him detour at least five times on the way up. But soon, home and then Cape Cod... I do love summer.