Black Sesame Otsu with Soba Noodles and Tofu

The first thing I noticed about Cherry Bombe: The Cookbook was the variety among the recipes. When I started flipping through my review copy, it was immediately clear that there are a lot of different styles and cultural influences here, and I like that a lot about it. The recipes are all tried and true favorites from women who have been featured in or have inspired the makers of Cherry Bombe magazine. And, several of the recipes are family favorites rather than trendy dishes from the latest restaurant menus. The chapters are organized by Mains, Soups and Salads, Sides, Apps Snacks and Sips, Cookies Cakes and Pies, and Sweet Treats. I’ll be watching for the first local beets of fall so I can try the Pink Spaghetti with Beet and Ricotta Sauce by Elettra Wiedemann of Impatient Foodie. Jessico Koslow contributed the Lemongrass and Ginger-Brined Chicken that looks fantastic with a simple arugula salad. The “Million Ingredient” Autumn Salad from Naomi Starkman of Civil Eats includes delicata squash, persimmons, and pomegranate seeds and would be great on a Thanksgiving menu. Speaking of fall menus, the Pumpkin-Swirled Mashed Potatoes with Vegan Rosemary Gravy looks like a delicious way to celebrate the season. For a twist on a classic cocktail, Gail Simmons’ Charred Pineapple Margarita is on my to-try list. And, the Candied Grapefruit Pops, involving grapefruit segments skewered on sticks and dipped into caramelized sugar, looks like such a fun citrusy treat. I started cooking from the book with the Black Sesame Otsu with Soba Noodles and Tofu from Heidi Swanson because the unique black sesame paste drew me in. 

That paste is sort of like pesto but taken in a different direction. Pine nuts and sunflower seeds were toasted in a dry pan on the stove. Black sesame seeds were added to toast briefly at the end. The nuts and seeds were crushed in a mini food processor, but a mortar and pestle would also work. Shoyu, mirin, sesame oil, rice vinegar, and some ground cayenne pepper were added. Drained tofu was to be cut into sticks and browned in olive oil in a skillet. My preferred method for browning tofu has for years been broiling. I toss the tofu pieces with oil, season them, and arrange them on a sheet pan. I place the sheet pan under the broiler, and every four minutes or so, I turn each piece of tofu so an uncooked side faces up until all sides are browned. The browned tofu was set aside while the soba noodles were boiled. Some of the water from boiling the noodles was used to thin some of the black sesame paste. A big spoonful of the sesame paste was set aside to use as garnish. The drained, rinsed, and drained again noodles were tossed with the thinned sesame paste and sliced green onions. The noodles were served with tofu pieces, more sliced green onions, and a dollop of the reserved sesame paste. 

I appreciated this recipe’s use of a couple of very Italian techniques that were reinterpreted with Asian flavors. The sesame paste paired nicely with the soba, and the notes in the book suggest several other uses as well such as serving it with spinach, roasted potatoes, or broccoli. I’d like to try all of those ideas. Or, I might revel in the variety by turning to a recipe found a couple of pages later which is a Caesar Brussels Salad. There’s a lot to explore here.  

Black Sesame Otosu with Soba Noodles and Tofu
Reprinted from Cherry Bombe: The Cookbook. Copyright © 2017 by Cherry Bombe, Inc. Photography by Alpha Smoot. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC.
 
This unique soba noodle salad is refreshing and distinctly Heidi. The writer-photographer-globetrotter-shopkeeper has a knack for creating meditative meals that touch on her travels and delight the taste buds in the subtlest way. Her inspiration here was a dish she discovered at a tiny restaurant in San Francisco, her home base. The umami-packed black sesame paste that flavors this salad can be made a few days in advance and also tastes great on spinach, roasted potatoes, broccoli, and other veggies. 

Makes 4 servings 

1 teaspoon pine nuts 
1 teaspoon hulled sunflower seeds 
1/2 cup black sesame seeds 
1 1/2 tablespoons organic cane sugar 
1 1/2 tablespoons shoyu, tamari, or soy sauce 
1 1/2 teaspoons mirin 
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil 
2 tablespoons brown rice vinegar 
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper 
Fine sea salt 
12 ounces soba noodles 
12 ounces extra-firm tofu 
Olive oil 
1 bunch scallions, white and light green parts only, thinly sliced 

Toast the pine nuts and sunflower seeds in a large skillet over medium heat, shaking the pan regularly, until golden, about 3 minutes. Add the sesame seeds to the pan and toast for a minute or so. Remove from the heat as soon as you smell a hint of toasted sesame. Transfer the nuts and seeds to a mortar and crush with a pestle; the texture should be like black sand. (Alternatively, you can use a mini food processor.) Stir in the sugar, shoyu, mirin, sesame oil, vinegar, and cayenne. Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed. Set aside. 

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Salt the water generously, add the soba, and cook according to the package instructions until tender. When done, reserve some of the cooking water and drain the noodles. Rinse the noodles under cold running water. 

While the noodles are cooking, drain the tofu, pat dry with a paper towel, and cut into matchstick-size slivers. Season the tofu with a pinch of salt and toss with a small amount of olive oil. Cook the tofu in a large skillet over medium-high heat, tossing every few minutes, until browned on all sides. 

Reserve a heaping tablespoon of the sesame paste, then thin the rest with 1/3 cup of the reserved noodle cooking water. In a large bowl, toss the soba, half the scallions, and the sesame paste until well combined. Add the tofu and gently toss again. Serve topped with a dollop of the reserved sesame paste and the remaining scallions.

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Granola Bars

Clearly, I use hiking as an excuse to make homemade granola bars. Last year, I made fruit and nut energy bars which we took with us while hiking in Arizona, and just recently I tried the granola bars from the Flour book for a state park hike closer to home. It's hot here, and it's dry, and it doesn't seem like either of those conditions will be changing any time soon. So, we ignored all of that and went to Pedernales Falls State Park for a hike, a picnic, and some splashing through very little water. As you can see in the photo below, the riverbed was nearly dry in places courtesy of our ongoing drought. It made it easy to walk up and back from one side to the other in several places along the river, but it also made for disappointing splashing after our hike. At least we had plenty of water with us for drinking and plenty of snacks. This version of granola bar is a layered affair with a quickly-made jam between a crunchy bar and a seed-filled topping. Overall, they're a little more tender than other granola bars I've tried, and they taste more like an indulgent treat than a healthy snack.

About that jam, all that's involved is adding water and sugar to a mix of dried fruit, bringing it a boil, and then letting it sit for about an hour. Once the dried fruit softened, the mixture was pulsed in a food processor to make a chunky jam. Dried apples, cranberries, and apricots were suggested, but I didn't find dried apples at the grocery store, so I used dried mango instead. The jam can be made in advance and stored in the refrigerator. When the food processor was cleaned and ready to go again, the base of the bars was made in it with flour, oats, brown sugar, coconut, salt, cinnamon, and butter. After being pulsed together, two-thirds of that mixture was spread in a nine inch by thirteen inch baking pan, and it was baked for about 30 minutes. For a crisper base layer, you could go for a longer baking time. The baking pan was removed from the oven, and the bottom layer was topped with the jam. The remaining granola mixture was refrigerated while the base layer baked, then, when cool, it was broken into chunks and mixed with flaxseeds, sunflower seeds, and hemp seeds. There was supposed to have been millet, and I was sure I had some millet in one of my grain and flour bins at home, but since it wasn't actually there, I used hemp seeds instead. That crumb mixture was sprinkled on top of the jam, and the pan went back into the oven for an additional 50 minutes.

Even though these bars were full of healthy oats, seeds, and fruits, they tasted far more decadent than you would expect. The jam layer and crumb topping helped disguise the bars' granola-ness too. Our hike might have been in unrelenting heat next to a nearly dry river, but there were no complaints about the snacks that day.

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Breakfast Biscotti

Last week, I mentioned that I was baking for the Austin Bakes for Japan bake sale which was held on Saturday. As I wrote about that, I hoped there would be a good turnout, I hoped we’d have a lot to offer at each sale location, and I really hoped the fundraising would be a success. All of those things happened and exceeded our highest hopes. There were beautiful baked goods overflowing the tables at all five locations of the sale, and people kept coming to visit the sales, choose treats to take home with them, and leave behind donations. The positive response and generosity of the community were stunning. Kathryn was our leader of the efforts to organize this event, and all of her hard work resulted in the bake sale going perfectly. The other team leaders who helped with planning as well as overseeing bake sale locations were Carly, Rachelle, Shelley, and Stephanie. As of the end of Saturday, the fund raising total was over $11,400, and because the online giving page is still active, the total is now over $11,700. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this event and for all the wonderful generosity.

So, this being a bake sale, I had a perfect excuse to pull out some recipes and bake several things in a couple of days. Timing was an issue since I couldn’t bake everything at the very last minute, and that’s how I decided on biscotti for one item. They’re cookies that last well, so I baked them two days before the sale. I remembered there were several good biscotti versions in Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies, and that’s where I found this recipe. As with all the recipes in this book, this one included an upgrade option for tweaking the main ingredients. It’s a kind of healthy type of biscotti with whole wheat pastry flour, oats, walnuts, and dried fruit, and the upgrade was the addition of sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, hemp seeds, and flaxseed meal. There were also additionl tips and an overview of biscotti making. For instance, in the US we have adopted biscotti and made it our own. So while the traditional Italian biscotti or cantucci are very dry and crunchy and usually flavored with anise, our American biscotti are slightly cakey in comparison with lots of additional flavors.

This breakfast biscotti recipe is of the American style, and this was an easy cookie dough to prepare since everything was just whisked and then stirred together. All purpose flour was combined with whole wheat pastry flour, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, brown sugar and oats were mixed. Then, milk and butter were heated until the butter melted, and that was added to the oat mixture and left to stand for a few minutes. Eggs and vanilla were added followed by the flour mixture, and then I added toasted chopped walnuts, dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, hemp seeds, and flaxseed meal. The dough was transferred to a silpat-lined baking sheet, and using wet hands, I formed it into a long, rectangular shape, not too wide. By using wet hands to shape the dough, it will become shiny as it bakes. I needed the biscotti to fit into the cellophane bags I had already bought, so I made the shape about four inches wide. The first baking was at 325 degrees F for about 35 minutes. The pan was removed from the oven and left to cool, and the oven was turned down to 300 degrees F. Once cool enough to handle, the baked dough was transferred to a cutting board and cut into half inch or so slices. The slices were set on a baking sheet, on their edges, and the second baking was for 25 minutes. I always worry biscotti might not be completely crunchy, so I moved the cookies around on the sheet and gave them five more minutes in the oven just to be sure.

My biscotti anxiety exists because I’ve tried a few recipes in the past that just didn’t work quite right, but there was no need to worry here since this came from Alice Medrich. Her tips such as using wet hands to shape the dough and standing the cookies on their edges for the second baking as well as the timing and ingredients all worked very well. The biscotti were deliciously crunchy and the nuts and seeds added to that effect. Since I packed them all up for the bake sale, I’m going to have to make another batch just to enjoy at home.

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Flax and Sunflower Seed Whole Wheat Bread

Of the bread baking books I’ve read, they all tend to stick to techniques and recipes for fermenting, proofing, shaping, and baking bread dough of various types. Each one offers a slightly varied approach or unique tips for these processes. I just recently read my review copy of Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread, and there was something different and kind of ingenious about this bread book. After all the the interesting tips and information about making a wild yeast starter and crafting dough and the different types of breads and how to bake them, there’s a section full of suggestions for using day old bread. Seeing several dishes made with bread made the thought of having a house full of home-baked loaves even more delightful. The various, seasonal kinds of bruschetta, sandwiches, uses of breadcrumbs and croutons, and the delicious photos of all those things give you one reason after the next to bake more bread. So, I just had to decide which bread to make first. The beginning of the book is devoted to describing how to make a basic country loaf, and then all of the other breads are some sort of variation on it. I was distracted at first by the brioche dough and the beignets made from it, but I chose to begin with a whole wheat bread packed with flax and sunflower seeds. If you don’t have a sourdough starter in your possession, Robertson suggests a simple enough way of making one, and he recommends feeding it with half white and half whole wheat bread flours. My starter is always fed with white bread flour, so I began by separating some starter and feeding it with the recommended mix of flours for a day before beginning this bread dough.

There were two key elements to the bread making process in this book. One of those was the baking method which I’ll explain more below, and the other was the goal of achieving a not so sour taste in the bread by only using a scant tablespoon of the mature starter when making the leaven. The night before the dough was to be made, one tablespoon of starter was mixed with warm water and white and whole wheat flours and left at room temperature until the next morning. For whole wheat dough, the leaven was then added to more warm water, all-purpose flour, and whole wheat flour, and it was mixed and left to rest for about an hour. Robertson explains that a whole wheat dough requires a longer rest after mixing that a white flour dough. After resting, salt was added, the dough was transferred to a clean bowl for the three hour bulk fermentation, and it was left until the turning began. Every 30 minutes, the dough was folded or “turned.” For the flax and sunflower seed bread variation, one cup of sunflower seeds was toasted, and one cup of flax seeds was soaked in boiling water. I would have expected the seeds to be added with the salt before the bulk fermentation began, but instead they were added after the second turn or one hour into it. Now, soaking the flax seeds causes them to become a little sticky and mixing all those little seeds into the dough takes a bit of squeezing and folding and mixing by hand. That seemed like a lot of working of the dough at that point of the bulk fermentation, so I may try adding them earlier next time. The next steps involved dividing the dough in two and giving both pieces a bench rest, and then each piece was shaped into a boule, rolled in one cup of raw sunflower seeds, and placed in bowls lined with towels that had been coated with all-purpose and rice flour for the final rise. I placed mine in the refrigerator for about twelve hours before baking. And, the baking involved that other interesting technique I mentioned. Rather than introducing steam in the oven with a spray bottle of water or by pouring water into a pan placed on the oven floor, a cast iron pan with a lid was used. The pan was heated in the oven with its lid, the dough was placed in the hot pan and carefully slashed, the lid was placed on top, and the bread began baking at 450 degrees F. After 20 minutes, the lid was removed, and the bread finished baking.

Because this was a rather wet dough, the lidded cast iron pan captured all the steam escaping from the dough as the bread baked and resulted in a crackly, crisp crust. My only disappointment was the lack of the open, holey crumb that I saw in other breads in the book. I suspect that was due to the bread being dense with seeds and the working of the dough in getting those seeds into it. Still, it was a nutty, flavorful bread that worked perfectly for sandwiches or simply toasted and slathered with butter. Now, I have more bread to bake so I can turn back to that last chapter of the book with all those ways of using it.

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

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