Monday, March 19, 2012

Decidedly NOT Irish

So the recipe for this week's Baking with Julia group is Irish Soda Bread - NOT something that interests me, in terms of either the technique or the final product. But, not baking for a month is quite obviously out of the question, so I decided to try a couple of other recipes.
There is nothing I enjoy so much as spending a day in the kitchen, baking, just for the fun of it, and listening to a good book. So last week I made Country Bread and Challah, both from Baking with Julia.
I had made Country Bread many times before, using Jeffrey Hamel's recipe. Both recipes require an overnight pre-ferment. This recipe produced a little heavier, denser bread than Hamel's, with an almost sour dough taste.

I liked it but I also like Hamel's. The Official Taster, however, declared this superior. The recipe calls for shaping the dough into one large boule, but take my advice, that would be a VERY large boule, so better to divide it into two reasonably sized ones.

The second recipe, Challah, is not like anything I've made before. I've been wanting to make brioche and decided, for some reason, at the last minute to make challah, which the recipe says is like "eastern European brioche". It uses several eggs and lots of butter! The technique sounds a little daunting, but isn't really. It mixed up beautifully. What a lovely dough to work with - rich and supple. The real fun was in the shaping - in this case, a braid.

It looked somewhat underwhelming when I left it to rise the second time, but enlarged quite a bit. However the really impressive rise was in the oven! The loaves were HUGE, and, thanks to the wash applied before and during baking, beautifully shiny and dark.

The Challah tastes good- it's almost sweet, very rich and tender. My only problem is trying to decide what you actually DO with it. It's not the kind of bread you have before or with a meal; it wouldn't taste right as a sandwich. My daughter keeps saying "French toast" and "bread pudding" - neither appeal to me. Perhaps I'll try Bostock, a recipe in Cyril Hitz's book that calls for applying yummy things like almond paste to brioche and baking it....or perhaps that's just too decadent, even for me. It might be interesting toasted. Whatever - I need to figure it out because I have two very large loaves in my freezer at the moment!

Finally, I made Royal Wedding Scones, from Food52, which are really just blueberry scones. I found the directions really explicit and helpful in avoiding the over-working that is such a temptation with scones and biscuits. For example, the dry ingredients are mixed in the food processor, then the very cold butter is pulsed. After the wet ingredients are added, the mixture is folded with a fork and then a plastic bowl scraper into a ball shape. (As an aside, those little plastic half-moon bowl scrapers are worth their weight in gold.) This gentle handling really paid off! They were perhaps the most tender scones I've ever made, and they rose to a satisfying height. This recipe recommended freezing them until solid and then baking. Cyril Hitz always letting scones sit for 30 minutes before baking. I did neither - just couldn't wait. I should have conducted a controlled experiment, freezing one third, allowing one third to sit for 30 minutes, and baking one third immediately...but I only thought of doing that later, while I was eating them. Guess I'm not much of a scientist.


I made some changes to the recipe. Nobody needs that much heavy cream! I used 3/4 cup of fat free buttermilk and 1/4 cup of 18% (coffee) cream. Unfortunately, I didn't substitute regular for the recommended Kosher salt....but I will the next time. I find those little bursts of salt offputting in a sweet blueberry scone. And of course, I used Nova Scotia wild blueberries because, as we all know, they are the world's tastiest :)

Next up for the Baking with Julia group is Pizza Rustica - a double crusted cheese pie, with proscuitto. I'm looking forward to trying this different dish (complete with lattice crust), although I'm ambivalent about the proscuitto - I never eat pork or beef - so perhaps this will be a dish for a dinner party or for the Official Taster to keep all to himself....Stay tuned...

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Adventures with Rugelach

As usual, I made this week's recipe early. Does this mean that I'm not baking enough? Perhaps I should make something from Baking with Julia every week? Aw, that wouldn't work - there's no one here to eat the output! But I digress..

Recipe number three from the book; recipe number three that I wouldn't make again. This doesn't mean it wasn't tasty - it was (is - there are still two dozen in my freezer) - but it was a complicated recipe and all you get out of it is....cookies. This feeling of disappointment has led me to re-examine my assumptions about cookies. So, let's talk about cookies.

Cookies are, to my way of thinking, sweet little things that you have with a cup of tea after dinner, or a mid-afternoon snack. There are so many cookies that you can make in literally 18 minutes from start to finish (I know, I've timed myself making chocolate chip cookies), that I cannot understand why one would want to spend a couple of hours making a single batch. NO cookie is good enough to merit that much time - it's just not possible. Perhaps I am unfairly biased against cookies, but there you have it. This attitude obviously influenced my assessment of the rugelach.

The recipe requires multiple steps - I am still confused by it, despite having read it at least ten times. This confusion was compounded by the frustration created by having to flip back and forth to the recipe for lekvar, the recipe for dough, and the instructions for putting them all together. I will admit that I listen to audiobooks while baking, so perhaps my mental processing capability was compromised but surely the instructions could have been written more clearly. I actually misunderstood the recipe and ended up with not enough nuts for the filling. So, what the heck - I left them out; my husband hates nuts in things anyway. The only nuts I included were those that were finely chopped and mixed with the cinnamon sugar for the coating. I figured he could brush those ones off, if he wanted to.

I made the apricot lekvar, which is pretty tasty. I didn't use all of it, so have spread some of it on previously-made stollen. It tastes like a low-sugar jam. Yum.
For the filling, I used a combination of golden and Thompson raisins, dried cranberries, blueberries, and cherries, with a few prunes thrown in. I did the "plumping" as suggested.
The real star of this recipe is the cream cheese dough. It has been described as a cross between pastry and dough; it is rich, almost flaky and flavourful. I intend to make it again in an attempt to replicate Mary's Bread Basket cinnamon rolls (these are legendary where I live). I found it rolled out easily, a little messy but the cookies were fairly forgiving. I think it would have been challenging to fit all the filling in, if I had added nuts, but since I didn't - it was fine.

The only real difficulty was trying to determine when the cookies were baked. Because of the cinnamon sugar coating, they were already dark. Consequently, I over-baked (big surprise) the second batch a tad. Nevertheless they tasted fine. They aren't the best looking cookies I've ever made, though!



So, bottom line on this recipe:

- the recipe itself is not written in a user-friendly manner
- there are several steps involved, making it a somewhat time-consuming and messy endeavour
- the cookies are very tasty (even the nut-averse Official Taster liked them) - just not tasty enough for this distracted baker to make again
- BUT the cream cheese dough rocks

Jessica at http://mybakingheart.com/ and Margaret at http://www.theurban-hiker.com/ are the hosts this week and their posts will have the recipe. Also, their final products look waaaay better than mine :)

Next up is soda bread. I'm skipping this one but will make something else from Baking with Julia - perhaps the brioche - mmmmmmmm