Monthly Archives: October 2009

World’s Best Braised Green Cabbage

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Currently cooking from All About Braising by Molly Stevens

img5_1My next book goes hand-in-hand with fall and winter. All About Braising was made for long, cold evenings, when your body craves slow-cooked comfort food. I love to make these kind of dishes, where you do a little prep work at the beginning, but the majority of the time, the dish bubbles away either on the stovetop or in the oven, unattended.

According to Stevens, braising is basically putting food into a heavy pot with a little bit of liquid, covering the pot and gently simmering everything until it is tender. By cooking food in a covered pot, all the liquid that the food releases is trapped, so it mingles with the braising liquid, creating a flavorful sauce. In addition, by cooking the food slowly and gently, you can use tougher, cheaper cuts of meat that tend to turn dry and stringy when cooked in other ways (think pot roast).

This is another book I’ve had for some time, but hardly ever used (probably because there are no baking recipes in it). The one and only recipe I’ve made from it is this green cabbage dish. I don’t have a picture because I forgot to charge my camera battery. So just imagine a pile of light green cabbage wedges, lightly charred and draped with soft onions and dotted with chunks of carrots. Yes, this dish is as good as it sounds.

You start by coring and cutting a green cabbage into eight wedges. The cabbage is arranged, in a single layer, in a 13″x9″ dish. Over the top of the cabbage, you scatter a sliced onion and a carrot cut into rounds (I usually use 3-4 carrots, because those are my favorite part of this dish). The whole dish is drizzled with olive oil and chicken stock and seasoned with salt, pepper and red pepper flakes. You cover the dish with tinfoil and  braise the vegetables in the oven for two hours. At the end of the braising time, you remove the tinfoil and cook the dish for another 15-20 minutes, just until the vegetables start to brown.

This dish is good warm or at room temperature and is even better the second day.

Fresh Fruit Muffin Recipe

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final_fruit_muffinFinally, I have the recipe for the Fresh Fruit Muffins. I made these one last time last week, just to make sure that I was satisfied. I was.

A couple of notes: First, I found that if I used too much fruit, I couldn’t get the muffins out of the pan. About a cup of frozen blueberries was just about right. If you want to use more fruit in your muffins, I’d recommend using paper liners. Secondly, keep the size of the fruit smallish. If you are using larger fruits, like strawberries, I would cut the fruit into small pieces. Third, I only tested this recipe with blueberries (except for the batch with mixed berries, including huge strawberries and blackberries, hence tip #2) but any fruit, as long as it isn’t too wet, should work well. And finally, I liked the texture that topping the muffins with either a crumb topping or a streusel gives. This step is certainly optional.

Recipe after the jump.

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Macrina’s Fancy Focaccia

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focacciaCurrently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Making this focaccia was a mistake. A HUGE mistake. See, Bryan is trying out a gluten-free diet, so anything I bake I try to get rid of before he gets home. So I made this focaccia, and all my regular baking recipients weren’t answering their phones or doorbells. For awhile, I thought I’d have no choice but to eat it all myself. In fact, I gave it a pretty good shot before my neighbors got home and took the rest of the bread away from me.

Oh, this was good. So good, in fact, that the next day I made another batch of the dough and froze it. This focaccia will be the first thing I make  when Bryan reintroduces gluten back into his diet.

The recipe starts out by mixing up a biga. A biga is a runny combination of flour, water and yeast. The almost liquid dough is left in the refrigerator for up to four days. This resting period gives the yeast time to ferment and creates a lot of flavor.

So the day before I baked these beauties up, I mixed up the biga and left it overnight in the fridge. The next day, I took about half of the biga and added more water, flour and yeast to create the focaccia dough. The dough was soft and smooth and a dream to work with.

After the initial rising, the dough is divided in half and pressed out into oval shapes. After another rest, the dough is dimpled with your fingertips, brushed with olive oil and topped with whatever strikes your fancy. The bread is baked for about  25-30 minutes, or until it is golden brown.

Since Mackie’s recipe made two focaccias, I wanted to try something different. For the first focaccia, I followed her instructions to top the dough with thinly sliced roma tomatoes, salt and pepper. The only change I made was to use fresh rosemary instead of basil. This focaccia was very tasty. I liked the freshness of the tomatoes. My only quibble is that the dough under the tomatoes remained kind of wet and soggy. Mind you, I still ate almost half of it, so it didn’t bother me all that much.

For the second focaccia, I brushed the dough with melted butter instead of olive oil and covered it with thinly sliced pears and cinnamon sugar. Yes, it was very, very good. Yes, I ate more than half of this one. Yes, I had a hard time handing it over to the neighbors, and yes, I will be making this recipe over and over again. The possibilities are endless as far as toppings and flavors go.

This is the last recipe out of  Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook. Overall, I really liked the book and had mostly successes. I think Mackie did a good job converting her bakery-sized recipes to ones the home cook can easily make. This is a cookbook that I’ll return to over and over.

Fresh Fruit Muffins v4 & 5

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fruit_muffin_v4Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Versions four and five of my fresh fruit muffins went from complicated to simple, but got better as a result.

For the fourth attempt at tweaking this recipe, I increased the maple syrup to 1/4 cup and decreased the amount of milk by the same amount. Once again, I got nicely domed tops with a tender, sweet crumb. The maple flavor was subtle and went nicely with the blueberries. As I was considering this version though, I realized how complicated it had become. I was using two different dairy products (milk and sour cream), oil and butter, and three different sweetners (white sugar, brown sugar and maple syrup). There had to be an easier way.

So, with the next version I simplified. I used all buttermilk instead of the sour cream and milk and I nixed the maple syrup. The flavor it added wasn’t enough to justify the extra ingredient. I also increased the white sugar and the oil a bit. This version was good. I didn’t miss the maple syrup and the muffins were just sweet enough. I kept the struesel topping as I liked the added crunch it gave the muffins.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that as I was researching other muffin recipes after this fifth attempt, I came across a recent Cooks Illustrated blueberry muffin recipe. Lo and behold, their recipe and my recipe are strikingly similar. They do some other things to increase the blueberry flavor, like add a homemade blueberry jam, but the basic muffin recipes are very close.

No matter. I’m going to tweak this latest version once again and will post the results soon.

Challah

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challahCurrently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Challah (a traditional Jewish bread, usually braided) was one of the first breads I learned to make in baking school. We liked making it, because it could be mixed, left to rise and then baked in the five hours we were in class. Some of the other breads took days before they were done.

Me, impatient? Nah . . .

Mackie’s challah recipe is pretty straightforward. Challah is an enriched bread, meaning the dough contains some fat and sugar. Besides the usual flour, yeast and water, this recipe calls for eggs, honey and some vegetable oil. The dough is kneaded, then left to rise. After the first rise, the dough is divided into three parts. Each portion of dough is rolled into a rope and all three ropes are then braided. Before being baked, the dough is brushed an egg wash and sprinkled with poppy seeds.

The dough was easy enough to mix and knead (thank you, Kitchen Aid mixer). The only problem I had was that it was incredibly sticky and soft. I even added another 1/4 cup of flour to the recipe. Mackie states that the dough will be wet, so I wasn’t too concerned. After the first rise, the dough was easier to handle, but it was still very, very sticky. I had to use a lot of flour in order to roll and braid the dough.

The bread baked up very nicely. It had a dense crumb with a firm bite to it. It was soft and fairly neutral flavored – perfect as toast or spread with butter and jam.

Lemon Butter Cake

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Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

fallen_cakeWhat to do when the baking gods give you a cake that looks like this?

You make trifles. You take the lovely, lemon butter cake that showed such promise as a batter but then bombed in the oven and cut it into cubes. You take the lovely lemon syrup you made and soak the cubes. Then you take the lemon frosting you made that turned into a runny pudding, along with some homemade raspberry jam, and you layer the whole thing into plastic cups so you can give them away to your husband’s softball players. They’ll eat just about anything.

Yeah. The baking gods didn’t like me on this day.

trifle

Dulce de Leche

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dulce_leche

Almost exactly a year ago, I was wandering around the Borough Market in London. It was my first trip to London, and I was having a fantastic time. The market was full of people and food, and I probably looked like a dolt as I snapped picture after picture. One of the stands I wandered by was selling dulce de leche and giving out free samples.

Now, I’ve had dulce de leche, and it was good. But this stuff was amazing! It was tangy and creamy, with none of that overwhelming sweetness you sometimes find in dulce de leches. I bought a bottle, brought it home and shared it with Bryan. Then I pretty much forgot about dulce de leche until now, when I ran across this recipe here.

With tastebuds tingling at the memory of the dulce de leche from London, I set out to make my own. This really couldn’t be easier. You submerge a can of sweetened condensed milk in boiling water and simmer it for three hours. That’s it. The only hard part is remembering to add water to keep the can submerged. At the end of three hours, well, four hours since you want to let the can cool down, you are rewarded with dulce de leche.

Was it as good as the stuff I got in London? Not quite. That dulce de leche had a tang to it that mine didn’t. Maybe it was made from scratch, or maybe they used goat’s milk. But no matter. This was mine, and it was perfectly lovely spread over the first apples of the season.

Nectarine and Almond Crumb Tart

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nectarine_crumb_tartCurrently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Right from the start, me and this tart didn’t get along. It all started when I went to the market to get some plums. You see, the original recipe calls for plums, not nectarines, and for several days running, the market had piles and piles of beautiful plums. Except for the day I went to buy some. On that day, not a plum in sight. But they did have nectarines . . .

Next up was the crust. Mackie calls it a sweet almond dough that is pressed into the pan, rather than rolled out. The dough is made by combining ground almonds, sugar, flour and melted butter. The mixture is crumbled into a tart pan and pressed into place. Sounds easy. Should be easy. It wasn’t. The dough started hardening up right away and made it hard to cover the pan evenly. Eventually, after a lot of swearing and pressing, I got a fairly even crust. That went into the oven to blind bake until golden brown.

After 25 minutes of baking, my crust, when I peeked underneath the beans, was still white and wet. Out came the beans. In about 10 more minutes of baking, I had a browned crust. While the crust cooled, I started on the filling.

Cream cheese, eggs, sugar, lemon zest, cornstarch and nutmeg (basically a cheesecake batter) are mixed and spread onto the crust. Then the fruit is laid on top of the filling and the whole thing is covered with a crumb topping (flour, sugar, cinnamon and chilled butter mixed until crumbly). Again, sounds fairly simple.

My filling was very liquidy and it poured into the crust. And my lovely, beautiful nectarines had no flavor. None. Zip. At this point, I was going to finish this recipe come hell or high water. So, on went the sliced nectarines where they promptly sank into the filling. Adding the crumb topping only submerged them further, but at this point, I didn’t care. I popped the whole thing in the oven and started scraping bits of crust dough off my kitchen floor.

The tart baked for just over an hour and the thing actually had the gall to look and smell really lovely. I let the tart cool for a couple of hours and then cut a slice. Really, I didn’t have any hope that it would taste good (those nectarines . . .). I took a bite. Not bad. I took another bite. It was actually pretty good. Another bite. This is delicious. Something happened while that tart baked. The nectarines got some flavor, the filling firmed up and the crust and crumb topping gave the tart some texture and bite.

In the headnotes to the recipe, Mackie says this is an “easy-to-prepare” tart. Don’t believe it. It has multiple steps and components, not including cooling times. But the end result is completely worth the time and trouble. I was prepared to hate the tart, after all the work and trouble it caused me, but the result was worth it.

Fresh Fruit Muffins v3

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fruit_muffin_v3Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

For my next attempt at the fresh fruit muffins, I looked for ways to add flavor and texture to the muffin.

I decided to stick with blueberries for the fruit component. To add more flavor, I added a tablespoon of maple syrup to the batter. I also added the zest of an entire lemon to the batter (that’s about a tablespoon; Mackie’s recipe calls for 1 teaspoon). I liked the additional zest, but neither me nor my tasters could detect the maple syrup. Next time, I’ll increase the maple syrup and decrease the white sugar.

The other major change I made this time was to add a sprinkling of cinnamon streusel to the top of the muffins. This was a big hit with the tasters. It added another flavor to the muffin and gave it some crunch.

Lemon-Sour Cherry Coffee Cake

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lemon_cranberry_coffee_cakeCurrently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Here’s another cake where I liked the batter better than I did the baked version. The recipe starts off by combining butter, sugar and lemon zest and beating the heck out of them. Eggs, lemon juice, yogurt and dry ingredients are then added. At the end, plumped sour cherries are folded into the batter. The whole thing is baked in a bundt pan for just over an hour. To up the lemon flavor, a glaze of powdered sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice is poured over the cooled cake.

I had to make a few changes. I couldn’t find any sour cherries, so I used cranberries instead. Also, when I went to get my yogurt from the fridge, it was, uh, slightly past it’s due date. I’m pretty sure I had a good crop of penicillin growing in there. I ended up using the same amount of sour cream instead.

The cake was moist and tender and it had a really good lemon flavor. I found the cranberries to be somewhat intrusive, even though I had chopped them a bit. I think I’d actually like the cake better plain, or with the add-ins sprinkled on top, with the glaze. Speaking of the glaze, it really added a nice lemon burst to the cake, and it’s worth the extra effort.