Black Olive Gourgeres

I always get excited about cookbooks that include great tip and techniques. When things are explained in ways that give you choices for customizing recipes and make you understand what affect those customizations will have, it’s eye-opening. Dan Lepard’s latest book, Short and Sweet: The Best of Home Baking, is full of tips just like that. It was published in the UK in 2011, but the US version was just recently released. When I received a review copy, I couldn’t put it down. The Tips and Techniques at the beginning of each chapter not only give you details about ingredients, baking times, etc. they also lead you along the way to making your baked goods your own. For example, when you know how salt, sugar, and different liquids affect bread dough, you can start tweaking recipes for the results you want. In the cake chapter, there are so many recipes I want to try, I might just have to start at the beginning and bake my way through it. The Carrot, Orange and Pistachio Cake is a nice twist on classic Carrot Cake; the Coffee and Ricotta Marbled Cake includes a great tip to prevent it from sinking as it bakes; and I have to try the Marrakesh Express Loaf Cake made with coffee, cardamom, cinnamon, pomegranate syrup, and dates. There are cookies and crackers, doughnuts and crepes, frostings and variations on buttercreams, pies and tarts and steamed puddings, and candies like lovely caramels. And, somehow, after reading about all those delicious sweets and looking at all the tempting photos, I ended up making a savory recipe first. When I saw the page for these Black Olive Gourgeres, I realized it had been far too long since I last made gourgeres, and this version was very different from any I’d ever made. 

You start by quartering pitted Kalamatas and combining them with a minced garlic clove, some chopped, fresh rosemary, olive oil, and salt and pepper in a saucepan. Yes, these gourgeres are made with olive oil rather than butter. When the olive mixture comes to a boil, flour is added and stirred until it forms a ball. It’s at this point in the process of making choux paste that I usually take a tip from Ina Garten and transfer the dough to a food processor for mixing in the eggs. It’s much easier than beating them in by hand. However, with the nice chunks of black olives in this dough, I didn’t want the blade of the food processor to reduce them to tiny bits. I still took a lazy approach by mixing in the eggs one at a time with a hand mixer. Grated parmesan was mixed in as well. The size of the gourgeres is up to you, and the recipe includes baking times for smaller, olive-size ones and for larger tablespoon-size ones. I went with the larger size. I brushed the gourgeres with egg wash and sprinkled the tops with more grated parmesan before they went into the oven for about 25 minutes. 

They were puffy and light just as gourgeres should be, and the black olives and parmesan made them delightfully savory. These were perfect little treats to accompany a cocktail. In the section of the book on choux paste, there’s also an interesting suggestion for making the dough into tiny pea-size pieces for sprinkling over soup or salad like croutons. I wasn’t kidding about all the smart tips in this book. 

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Rosemary-Olive Oil Bread

From the looks of things around here, it doesn't seem like I've been baking much bread. The last time I mentioned baking a loaf of bread was on January 12. The truth is that I have been baking bread. I just haven't been thrilled with what I've baked. You see, ciabatta has become my nemesis. I set out to bake loaves of chewy, airy, holey ciabatta, and my results have been less than perfect. Some loaves have a few holes but not enough, and other loaves have a crumb that looks the same as my sourdough baguette. I've tried different recipes and techniques and eventually got to the point of dreading the moment of cutting into a baked and cooled loaf. Now, I have a freezer stocked with loaves of bread disappointments. I may have to admit defeat eventually, but I'm sure I'll try again as soon as I clear out some freezer space. For now though, I needed to move on, change things up, and bake a different kind of bread. I went back to the Breads from the La Brea Bakery book and chose the rosemary-olive oil bread recipe. In the headnote, this bread is described as having a "multifaceted flavor in which the rosemary is a strong but not overpowering element," and the olive oil coats "the gluten strands and make[s] a softer dough than usual." It was to have a uniform crumb and is basically a white dough flavored with herbs. This was perfect. A holey crumb was not the goal here, and that's the change in bread baking I needed.

As usual, the two-day dough process turned into three days for me because I always need to bring my sourdough starter to room temperature and feed it the day before mixing the dough. Then, on day two, the dough was mixed by combining water, white starter, bread flour, and wheat germ in a mixer with a dough hook. It was left for the autolyse, and there's a fantastic description of exactly what that 20 minute resting period is all about at A Bread a Day. After the autolyse, salt was added to the dough, and then chopped, fresh rosemary and olive oil were mixed in as well. It didn't seem like the olive oil was getting well-mixed into the dough in the mixer, so I transferred it to a board and kneaded by hand until the oil was incorporated. The dough was placed in an oiled bowl, covered, and left to ferment for about three and a half hours. It was then placed on a floured board, cut into two pieces and allowed to rest for a bit. After the rest, each piece was shaped into a boule, both were placed in proofing baskets, the baskets were covered, and the dough was left to rise at room temperature for an hour and a half. At that point, the baskets were covered with plastic and refrigerated for 12 hours. The next day, the baskets were removed from the refrigerator so the dough could warm up for a couple of hours before baking. I baked the two loaves at the same time on a baking stone, and the oven was spritzed with water from a spray bottle during the first five minutes of baking. After a total baking time of about 40 minutes, the loaves were browned and crisp on the surface.

As promised, the flavor from the rosemary was evident but not too strong. The tender texture of the crumb and the crispness of the crust were due to the olive oil. This made me excited about bread again. Not only did I finally have a couple of loaves that weren't failures, they were also very flavorful. This is a bread I'll look forward to baking and cutting into again, and then I'll think about going another round with ciabatta.

I’m submitting this to Yeastspotting where you’ll find some seriously well-made bread.

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Garlic Oil Poached Shrimp with Sun Dried Tomato Pesto

It's no secret that some of my favorite food is of the Italian variety, so when I was offered some products to sample from Nudo I happily accepted. Nudo has been in business since 2005 when the owners finished restoring an abandoned olive grove in Italy's Le Marche region. They produce small scale olive oil with traditional farming methods, and you can adopt an olive tree for a year which allows you to receive all the olive oil produced from it during that year. Nudo's extra virgin olive oils and flavored oils are combined with vinegar, pesto, pasta, and more in a range of gift baskets. My samples included both garlic and basil flavored oils, organic sun dried tomatoes, and organic basil pesto. The oils are packaged in tins which prevent light from affecting the oil, and the options they offer are extra virgin first cold press, organic extra virgin, lemon, mandarin, chili, garlic, and basil. My first idea for tasting the samples was to toast some crostini and top them with goat cheese, sun dried tomatoes, and a dollop of pesto. The mix of chewy, intense tomatoes and basil-scented pesto was great with creamy goat cheese, but I wanted to put the products to another test before mentioning them here. I decided to poach some shrimp in the garlic oil and make a pesto with the sun dried tomatoes. The two would have been fine on their own with the pesto used as a dipping sauce for the shrimp, but I tossed the pesto with some fresh pasta and topped it with the shrimp instead.

For the pesto, I emptied the jar of oil-packed sun dried tomatoes into the food processor and added some chopped garlic, a handful of pine nuts, and a some of the basil oil. That was whizzed into a state of pestoness and set aside. To oil poach shrimp, I used a small saucepan and enough garlic oil to mostly cover ten or twelve large shrimp. The oil was heated just to about 170 degrees F. The oil should just gently cook the shrimp rather than deep fry them. Keeping the oil around 170 will allow the shrimp to absorb the flavor while cooking over the course of about seven minutes. I had some fresh pasta in my freezer, so I cut it into wide ribbons, boiled it, and tossed it with the sun dried tomato pesto. The garlic oil poached shrimp sat on top.

The garlic oil is more subtle in flavor than you might think. It flavored the shrimp just enough while poaching. I also found the garlic oil when used in a vinaigrette for salad left it with just enough garlic flavor and not too much. The plump, sun dried tomatoes made a nice pesto too. These are flavors that are meant to be together, garlic, olive oil, sun dried tomatoes, and when the quality of each thing is as good as it was here, you can't go wrong.

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