I have a little problem. I'm addicted to cookbooks, food writing, recipe collecting, and cooking. I have a lot of recipes waiting for me to try them, and ideas from articles, tv, and restaurants often lead to new dishes. I started losing track of what I've done. So now I'm taking photos and writing about what I've prepared—unless it's terrible in which case I forget it ever happened.
Breakfast has a good hold on maple syrup, and that’s ok because it’s expected there. It’s nice to wake up to the flavor of maple, but I think dessert deserves more maple time than it gets. I occasionally see mentions of cakes or frostings made with maple, but it seems to me there could more occurrences of it in sweet treats at times other than in the morning. I do have a thing for maple, and it’s possible this all stems from there only ever being one lone, maple-glazed doughnut in the assorted dozens we used to get. When I reached into the box and the maple-glazed was already gone, my morning was ruined. So, when I saw an article about maple syrup in Donna Hay magazine a few months ago, I cut out all the recipes to keep. There’s a cake and a cookie that I’ll try soon enough, but this bruleed tart was the first I had to make. The maple syrup is in the custard, and after baking in the vanilla pastry shell, sugar was caramelized on top to give it bits of sweet crunch on the surface. The recipe isn’t available online, so I’ll include it below.
The vanilla pastry was made first with flour, sugar, and baking powder being blended in a food processor. Chopped cold butter was added, it was processed until crumbly, and then cold water and vanilla were added and mixed until the dough formed. After chilling a bit, the dough was rolled out, fitted into a tart pan, and blind baked. To make the custard, milk and half and half were heated until just boiling before being poured over a mixture of eggs, egg yolks, maple syrup, and sugar while whisking. The custard was cooled a bit before being poured into the tart shell. The filled tart then baked for about 25 minutes or until just set. Last, the baked tart was sprinkled with superfine sugar, and I placed it under the broiler for a few minutes to caramelize. This would have been a good time to use a kitchen blow torch for caramelizing the sugar because the edges of the tart shell stood taller than the filling causing the edges to brown at the same time as the sugar. With a torch, you could more easily direct the heat. Hence, I need a blow torch.
At the size suggested in the recipe, this makes a thin tart, but it’s rich enough that you won’t feel the pieces are lacking in depth. This is best served just after being bruleed. The maple will be fragrant in the still warm, smooth custard, and the flavor of the vanilla pastry blends well with it. The crunch of the sugar on top contrasts nicely too. Now, what other ways are there for maple to find its way into dessert?
Maple Brulee Tart (from Donna Hay magazine)
2 eggs, plus 2 extra yolks
½ cup sugar
¼ cup pure maple syrup
1 cup milk
1 cup half and half
superfine sugar for sprinkling (*Note: I’ve found that organic sugar doesn’t caramelize as well for a brulee, so I use conventional superfine sugar.)
vanilla pastry:
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
¼ teaspoon baking powder
13 tablespoons cold butter, cut into cubes
1/3 cup iced water
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
-Start with the vanilla pastry. Place flour, sugar, and baking powder in the bowl of a food processor and pulse to combine. Add the butter cubes and pulse until the mixture is crumbly. With the motor running, slowly pour in the ice water and vanilla and process until the mixture forms a dough. Transfer to plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes.
-Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees F. Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface and then place in an eleven inch, round tart pan. Place tart pan on a large baking sheet to make it easier to move tart pan in and out of oven, cover the surface of the pastry with parchment paper, and fill the tart with pie weights or dried beans. Blind bake for 15-20 minutes, remove from oven, remove parchment and pie weights, and then set aside.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, egg yolks, sugar, and maple syrup. Combine milk and half and half in a small saucepan over low heat. Heat milk mixture until just boiling, and then slowly pour it into bowl with egg mixture while whisking constantly. Allow to cool just a bit before pouring the custard into the blind baked crust, and place the tart back in the oven for 20-25 minutes or until just set in the center. Remove from oven and let cool.
-Sprinkled cooled tart with superfine sugar while pre-heating the broiler. Place tart under the broiler, and leave oven door ajar so you can watch as the sugar browns. Turn the tart to brown as evenly as possible. Or, use a kitchen blow torch to brown the sugar. Serve while still warm and enjoy the wonderfulness of maple syrup for dessert.
A couple of years ago, I read an article on Austin360.com that ended with a call to local food bloggers to send the names of their sites to the author. That was written by our very own Addie Broyles, the food writer for The Austin American-Statesman. Shortly thereafter, I met Addie in person and because of her started meeting several of the other Austin food bloggers. Addie writes Relish Austin which is a printed column for the Statesman and also a blog on Austin360.com. She was recently named one of the top 10 people to watch in Austin in 2011, and she was picked as the top local food celebrity by The Austin Chronicle. Addie is also hosting a new public television show called Austin Supper Club. They’ve just wrapped shooting for the first episode, and it should air on KLRU later this year. After doing so well at bringing together the Austin food bloggers, Addie will present the panel “Building Community in a Blogger-Eat-Blogger Word” later this spring at SXSWi. She’s busier than ever these days, but I was able to grab a moment of her time to ask what are you reading?
Addie:
Farm Cityby Novella Carpenter I'm a little late in reading Novella Carpenter's excellent memoir about how she and her boyfriend created an urban farm in a less-than-stellar part of Oakland. Rather than start from the moment she became a gardener and backyard chicken fanatic, she starts the book from when she's already relatively experienced in producing her own food. Her writing really carries the book; there have been dozens of similar books about people discovering their love of growing and producing food that have come out in recent years, but hers has been the most enjoyable to read.
Rocky Comfortby Wayne Holmes Talk about off the radar. Wayne Holmes is a noted storyteller and author who grew up in the same small town in southwest Missouri that I did. He is still living outside Aurora, pop. 7,000, where he wrote this memoir of what it was like growing up in rural Missouri during the Depression.
It was an honor to be hand-gifted this book from Wayne at my grandmother's 80th birthday party last year, where I got a chance to ask him some food-related questions about his youth. This was a time when, if you didn't have much money, you lived off the land, which means you ate off the land. His family regularly ate possum, rabbits and squirrel they killed, and his retelling of killing a jackrabbit for Thanksgiving reminded me of why I so loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that were written about a time only 70 years before Holmes was born. He captures the language and spirit of Missourians in a way I've never read before ("Even the littlest squirrel or rabbit will make the gravy stink," he writes about killing young wild animals.) and that made me find a new appreciation for the state I call home but don't know if I'll ever live in again.
High Flavor, Low Labor: Reinventing Weeknight Cooking by J.M. Hirsch. Cookbook-wise, I've been enjoying this book from J.M. Hirsch, who is the Associated Press food editor. He's a gifted recipe writer and, because he is a busy working parent, too, he knows the pressures that families face when trying to come up with weeknight meals. The book has tons of quick, easy and (here's the tricky part) inventive recipes that I feel like cooking after a long day of work.
Thank you for participating, Addie. Check back to see who answers the question next time and what other books are recommended.
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.
The current issue of Saveur is #135, and this recipe is from issue #60, so it’s been filed away for a few years. I’m so glad I recently unearthed it though, because it’s from a great story about the food at the exclusive China Club in Beijing. I cut out a few of the recipes from that story, and I have the page with deep fried prawns with garlic chile sauce waiting to be tried next. This Sichuan classic shown here today is a quick stir fry of chicken, dried chiles, and peanuts or kung pao chicken as we usually see it listed here, and this is always my choice on a take-out menu. Slowly but surely, I’m overcoming my fear of the wok and more precisely of stir frying. I loved the simplicity of making this since the most complicated part of the process was opening all those bottles of soy sauces, oil, vinegar, and shaoxing. This really was faster than waiting for take-out.
You start with boneless chicken breasts and cube the meat to be mixed with cornstarch and soy sauce. That was left to marinate while everything else was prepped. Meanwhile, I steamed some rice to serve on the side. A sauce was made by stirring together soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, chicken stock, Chinese black vinegar or the mix of brown rice vinegar and balsamic I used, sesame oil, and dark soy sauce. I didn’t make up the substitution of balsamic for Chinese black vinegar; that’s suggested in the recipe. Also, a garlic clove was peeled and sliced, scallions were sliced, and ginger was peeled and minced. Then, if you have your dried chiles stemmed and chopped in half crosswise, you’re ready to stir fry. Oil was heated to the smoke point in a wok, and the dried chiles were added. They were quickly followed by the chicken, garlic, scallions, and ginger. After a few minutes, the soy sauce mixture was added and allowed to thicken. The peanuts were added, and the dish was ready.
The dried chiles gave the dish a nice undercurrent of heat without making it too, too spicy, and I always like the mix of nuts and chicken in a stir fry. I mentioned this was faster than take-out, but it’s also nice to be able choose your ingredients and know all about each item that’s added to the dish. Kurt gave this a definite thumbs-up with his only request that it be made even spicier next time. I can do that, and there will be many next times of this for sure.
I’ve actually had a Bermudian rum cake in Bermuda, but I’d never made my own until now. This one is from The Greyston Bakery Cookbook. It’s similar to a holiday cake that gets soaked in a liquor-filled glaze only this is much simpler. In this case, you only apply the glaze once rather than several times over days or weeks, and the cake batter is one of the easiest ever to whisk together. The rum and orange juice and zest in the cake and the finely chopped pecans that end up coating it give it fantastic flavor before the rum glaze is even applied. Rum cakes that are soaked multiple times can end up tasting very boozy and I do quite like the taste of rum, but it’s not overwhelming here. In the glaze, the rum melds with melted butter and brown sugar into a lovely butterscotch with just a hint of rum. Soaking the cake with the glaze also extends the life of the cake. It gets better as it sits, and it lasts a few days longer than it would otherwise. To gild each serving a bit more, I whipped cream with Grand Marnier to top the cut pieces.
This simple whisked batter started with flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt being combined in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, milk, orange juice, vegetable oil, eggs, orange zest, and rum were whisked together and then added to the dry ingredients. The batter was stirred to combine and then carefully poured into a bundt pan that had been buttered and sprinkled with toasted and chopped pecans. You want to pour the batter slowly to as not to dislodge the pecans. The cake baked for about an hour, was left to cool, and was placed on a serving platter, and that’s where I learned a lesson. You should place the cake on a rimmed platter. I somehow believed that the cake would absorb every single bit of the glaze, and I foolishly chose a flat platter. The glaze was made by melting butter in a saucepan, adding sugar and water and stirring while simmering for five minutes. The rum was added off the heat. The cooled cake, on a platter with a rim, is then pierced all over with a wooden skewer before you slowly spoon the glaze over top. Most of the glaze will be absorbed, but some does collect around the base of the cake and that could work its way to the edge of a platter without a rim and dribble all over your dining room table. Whip some cream with a little sugar and Grand Marnier to serve with the cake.
The finely chopped pecans held their place on the surface of the cake and gave it some crunch, and the Grand Marnier whipped cream added more orange flavor. Certainly, a rum cake in Bermuda comes with a much better view, but this homemade rum cake was fresher, lighter, and even more delicious. Obviously, the best solution would be to pack up a homemade cake and go back for another visit to Bermuda.
When I read a cookbook, there are always recipes that stick in my mind, that I continue to think about for weeks. When they're recipes for things that aren't in season at the time, I make mental notes about what future occasions would be good opportunities to serve each particular dish. So, last year when I read Ad Hoc at Home and saw a lovely looking cream of cauliflower soup with beet chips, the winter vegetables and red and white colors made me think of Christmas. This being a Thomas Keller recipe and my first time trying this recipe, I didn't want to be making this on the actual day of Christmas. Instead, I chose a day during the holiday season when I had plenty of time to work my way through each step, use each and every pot, pan, and utensil I own, and then wash all of those dishes after dinner. Yes, it is a little bit of a process to follow the recipe exactly, but it all came together nicely to make a velvety smooth soup with crispy, crunchy, and tasty toppings.
The first step is to chop the cauliflower. Most of the cauliflower, including the stems, were cooked and pureed, but some florets were set aside for a garnish. For the puree, onion, leeks, coarsely chopped cauliflower, and some curry powder were cooked in melted butter. Equal amounts of milk, cream, and water were added, and it was left to simmer until the cauliflower was tender. The mixture was pureed in batches. To make things easier on the day you plan to serve the soup, this puree could be made in advance and just re-warmed before serving. Next, a red beet was peeled and thinly sliced on a Japanese mandoline. I used a candy cane striped chioggia beet from our farmers' market. The paper thin beet slices were fried in oil in a small saucepan and left to drain on a paper towel-lined rack. Then, the reserved cauliflower florets were blanched in water with a little vinegar. Keller notes that the vinegar helps keep the cauliflower white. The drained, florets were then sauteed in melted butter. At the same time, I also made the requisite torn croutons which were slowly browned in a mix of garlic oil and melted butter with the goal of the croutons absorbing the flavor of the oil and butter while taking on a crisp outer texture. The soup was served in wide bowls topped with the florets, then some torn croutons, a stack of beet chips, and a swirl of extra virgin olive oil. The other garnishes held the beet chips up and out of the soup so they stayed crisp.
All of the parts and pieces did make a spectacular soup. The rich and smooth puree was even better with the chunky and crunchy textures of the garnishes. Certainly, the soup puree could have been made in advance, but the beet chips are best when just fried and still crisp and warm. The croutons can be re-warmed, but they do become drier and lose the bit of give they have after just being browned. This soup was a great example of how simple, humble vegetables can become a dish that's the star of a meal.
A year ago, I had every intention of baking panettone for the holidays, and then somehow Christmas was gone in a flash and my kitchen saw not a single loaf of festive, fruit-filled bread. So this year, I was determined to make it happen. I even earmarked some of the candied orange peel I made in November for this very purpose. I used the panettone recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice which is a two-day process unless you need to bring your sourdough starter to room temperature and feed it before you get started in which case it becomes a three-day process. The first two days’ tasks are minimal, but the waiting time between days is necessary. This panettone recipe is made with a fairly rich dough with an egg and an additional egg yolk and half a cup of butter, and even though the dough is soft and a little sticky, it wasn’t difficult to knead or shape. The fun part was mixing the dried and candied fruits with rum, Gran Marnier, and vanilla so they could sit overnight to plump and absorb great flavors before being mixed into the dough. I made one big loaf in an eight inch springform pan and used the rest of the dough for muffin tin-sized mini panettones.
So, step one was making a wild yeast sponge with a barm or starter, milk, and flour. The sponge sat at room temperature to ferment for four hours before spending the night in the refrigerator. Also, on that day, the dried and candied fruits were soaked in rum, an orange or lemon extract and I chose to use Gran Marnier instead, and vanilla and left to sit overnight. I used dried sour cherries, dried cranberries, golden raisins, and chopped candied orange peel. The next day, the wild yeast sponge was brought up to room temperature before mixing the dough. I used a stand mixer and combined flour, sugar, salt, and instant yeast before adding the sponge, the whole egg, and an egg yolk. Water was added until the dough came together, it was allowed to rest for a bit, and then softened butter was worked into the dough before the soaked fruit mixture was added. It was kneaded with a dough hook for a few minutes, and then transferred to a floured board. The almonds were worked in while kneading by hand. Because this is a sticky dough and you don’t want to add too much flour while kneading, I used a bench scraper to lift and turn the dough while kneading with the other hand. It was left to ferment for two hours, shaped into one big loaf and some muffin sized pieces, and then all of that proofed for two more hours. For the big loaf in the springform pan, I placed a parchment collar around the sides and a parchment circle in the bottom of the pan. Last, the big loaf baked for about an hour, and the minis were pulled from the oven after about 25 minutes. The bread should reach 185 degrees F in the center.
If this bread counts in any way as a fruitcake, then it’s my favorite fruitcake ever. In fact, I’m thinking this should become an annual tradition. I can try different dried and candied fruit and different liquors or liqueurs each time, and I may never make the same panettone twice. The soft, brioche-like bread was irresistible warm from the oven, and it keeps well wrapped in foil too. It was so enjoyable simply sliced and toasted over the next few days, I never got around to trying it as French toast or in bread pudding, but that’s just another reason to make it again next year.
I’m submitting this to Yeastspotting where you’ll find some seriously well-made bread.
by Novella Carpenter
by Wayne Holmes 
by J.M. Hirsch.
, 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.
. It’s similar to a holiday cake that gets soaked in a liquor-filled glaze only this is much simpler. In this case, you only apply the glaze once rather than several times over days or weeks, and the cake batter is one of the easiest ever to whisk together. The rum and orange juice and zest in the cake and the finely chopped pecans that end up coating it give it fantastic flavor before the rum glaze is even applied. Rum cakes that are soaked multiple times can end up tasting very boozy and I do quite like the taste of rum, but it’s not overwhelming here. In the glaze, the rum melds with melted butter and brown sugar into a lovely butterscotch with just a hint of rum. Soaking the cake with the glaze also extends the life of the cake. It gets better as it sits, and it lasts a few days longer than it would otherwise. To gild each serving a bit more, I whipped cream with Grand Marnier to top the cut pieces. 
and saw a lovely looking cream of cauliflower soup with beet chips, the winter vegetables and red and white colors made me think of Christmas. This being a Thomas Keller recipe and my first time trying this recipe, I didn't want to be making this on the actual day of Christmas. Instead, I chose a day during the holiday season when I had plenty of time to work my way through each step, use each and every pot, pan, and utensil I own, and then wash all of those dishes after dinner. Yes, it is a little bit of a process to follow the recipe exactly, but it all came together nicely to make a velvety smooth soup with crispy, crunchy, and tasty toppings.
which is a two-day process unless you need to bring your sourdough starter to room temperature and feed it before you get started in which case it becomes a three-day process. The first two days’ tasks are minimal, but the waiting time between days is necessary. This panettone recipe is made with a fairly rich dough with an egg and an additional egg yolk and half a cup of butter, and even though the dough is soft and a little sticky, it wasn’t difficult to knead or shape. The fun part was mixing the dried and candied fruits with rum, Gran Marnier, and vanilla so they could sit overnight to plump and absorb great flavors before being mixed into the dough. I made one big loaf in an eight inch springform pan and used the rest of the dough for muffin tin-sized mini panettones. 
