Tag Archives: Quick Breads

Cornmeal Biscuits

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Currently cooking from The Complete Cook’s Country TV Show Cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I really like food that includes cornmeal. I also really like biscuits (and I’m gradually getting better at making my biscuits look more biscuity than hockey pucky). So it probably comes as no surprise that I’ve made this recipe twice in the past two weeks. The simple addition of a little bit of cornmeal elevates these biscuits from good to great.

You start out by soaking cornmeal (the recipe tells you to avoid using coarsely ground cornmeal as that will make the biscuits gritty) in buttermilk and honey to soften the cornmeal just a bit. While that soaks, you use a food processor to combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt) and then to cut in the butter. Once your flour resembles coarse meal, you stir it into the buttermilk mixture and mix until a rough dough forms. Finally, you briefly knead the dough until it holds together, pat it out and cut out the biscuits. The biscuits are baked in a very hot oven (start them at 450 degrees and then, after about 5 minutes, turn the oven down to 400 degrees) until they are golden brown.

The cornmeal gives these biscuits a soft, golden hue and just a bit of corn flavor. Softening the cornmeal and using a finely ground cornmeal combine to make the cornmeal disappear into the dough so that you don’t encounter any hard bits. The honey adds just a tough of sweetness and the buttermilk gives them a little tang. These are big biscuits, tall and fluffy, but quite rich from all the butter. They aren’t the least bit tough, even those biscuits that I cut out after rerolling the dough. The only thing I might change is to try using a little less butter. The recipe calls for a stick and a half of butter, and while my tastebuds love that, my hips don’t (especially since I can’t stop at just one biscuit).

What’s cooking in my kitchen

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Here’s what I’ve been cooking and we’ve been eating over the past few weeks.

Key Lime Pears from Michael Recchiuti’s cookbook Chocolate Obsession. I’ve been making these for Christmas for the past few years, and it’s my go-to recipe when I have an excess of pears. My friend Missy gifted me with a box (a BIG box) of the fruit last week, and I’ve been struggling to use them all before they go bad. I’ve lost count of how many batches of these key lime pears I’ve made, but we keep eating them faster than I can make them. You take green, very firm pears and slice them thinly, then soak the pear slices in a key lime sugar syrup. The pear slices are then baked (I use a rack set over a cookie sheet, but Recchiuti just lays them on a silpat-covered cookie sheet) until crisp. Recchiuti dips them in chocolate, but I prefer them plain. I think the chocolate overwhelms the pear/key lime flavor.

Pear Bread from Bake or Break. When the pears got too ripe for key lime pears, I decided to give pear bread a try. This is like zucchini bread, except with pears. There are lots of pear bread recipes floating around, and the only reason I picked this one was because I had all the ingredients on hand. I made a few changes. First I substituted brown sugar for half of the sugar, and I added about 1/2 teaspoon of freshly ground nutmeg. Finally, I left out the nuts because I didn’t have any. I ended up with two loaves of fragrant, sweet, dense quick bread. I didn’t really taste pears, unfortunately. I’m going to keep playing with this recipe, especially as my pears continue to ripen.

Corn with Tons of Herbs from Dana Treat. One night I was looking for a side dish to serve with dinner, and I remembered reading about this dish. Corn sauteed with butter, shallots and a ton of herbs, basil and cilantro in my case. Use the best corn you can and fresh herbs only, please. I liked the basil here, but not the cilantro. Thyme would be lovely as would dill.

Cherry Tomato Orzo Salad from Simply Recipes. We’ve been living off of this salad for the past few months, and every time I make it, I make it a little bit different. I’ve moved away from orzo and now use macaroni pasta; its a little more substantial. I also like this with parmesan instead of feta, and I don’t limit myself to just cucumbers and green onions. Any veggies I have languishing in the fridge tend to make their way into this salad. I especially like bell peppers, frozen peas and avocados.

Honey Corn Muffins

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Currently cooking out of Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Let’s get one thing straight. No self-respecting southerner would consider these muffins proper cornbread. But I’m not a southerner, so I’m comfortable saying I loved these sweet, tender muffins.

The recipe is a pretty standard muffin recipe, using cornmeal for part of the flour, honey and brown sugar as sweeteners and buttermilk for the liquid. The muffins came together quickly and in about 30 minutes, from start to finish, I was enjoying warm baked goodness.

I had a few problems, though. As you can see from the picture, the muffins didn’t rise. At all. I think there might be too much leavening in the recipe, so next time I make them, I’ll cut it down a bit. In addition, the muffins were quite crumbly.

Double Chocolate Loaf

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Currently cooking out of Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

I think this may be one of the easiest recipes out of Baked Explorations. It isn’t quite a dump and stir recipe, but it is pretty darn close. And the end product is a dark, tasty, not-to-sweet cake. Or is it a quick bread? I can’t quite decide. Whatever it is, it is delicious.

You start of by combining cocoa powder, brown sugar, granulated sugar, flour, salt and leavening in a mixer bowl. In a separate bowl, you whisk a couple of eggs and a yolk with buttermilk, oil and vanilla extract. This gets poured into the mixer bowl with the dry ingredients, and the whole lot is mixed just until everything is combined. Finally chopped chocolate (or chocolate chips if you are lazy like me) is stirred into the batter, and the cake/quick bread bakes for nearly an hour.

As you can see, my loaf fell in the middle. I’m blaming the leavening, even though I cut the baking soda down by half. Next time, I’ll cut it down even further. My loaf started to burn around the edges, and it was very crumbly. Despite that, though, it was still very good, especially when spread with peanut butter or nutella or both! The recipe includes a spread of peanut butter and cream cheese, and I’d bet that’s be fantastic. I was too lazy to go to the store for cream cheese.

Nutella Scones

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Currently cooking out of Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

These scones need to come with a warning. Something like this:

WARNING! These scones may be hazardous to your health if you like chocolate or hazelnuts.

Or maybe this:

WARNING! If you have uncontrollable urges when in close proximity to an open jar of Nutella, avoid these scones at all costs.

Holy crap, they are that good, especially if you like Nutella, that chocolatey hazelnutty goodness that I would totally make out with if I weren’t so busy spooning it straight into my mouth.

Besides being really, really good, these scones are super easy to make. They are a pretty standard scone recipe with some cocoa powder added in with the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Butter is rubbed into the dry ingredients until it is pea-sized, then heavy cream and an egg is mixed in until a rough dough is formed. For some added crunch, chopped hazelnuts are kneaded into the dough. Finally, the dough is patted out into a square, and Nutella is spread over it, before the dough is rolled up, pattted out again and cut into triangles (or squares or circles or whatever shape blows your skirt up).

Once the scones are baked, more Nutella is dripped over the top of them, taking their yumminess factor up by about a zillion.

Lewis and Poliafito have hit a homerun with this recipe. These scones aren’t too sweet (only 1/4 cup of sugar to 1/4 cup of cocoa powder), they are tender without being greasy, and they have a great texture due to the chopped hazelnuts. If you’d rather not gild the lilly with that last application of Nutella, these would be divine with raspberry jam. Fresh strawberries would also taste mighty good.

Did I mention there is Nutella in there?

Corn and Gruyere Muffins

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Currently cooking from Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce

Did you know there is such a thing as corn flour? Not cornmeal, not polenta, but flour made from corn? This stuff is as fine as regular flour, but full of nutty corn flavor. Corn flour gives you the corn taste, but without the grittiness or the small hard chunks you sometimes get with cornmeal.

On its own, corn flour is gluten free. If you want to use it in something (breads, muffins) that needs some structure, you’ll need to mix the corn flour with wheat flour (or use a gluten-free baking mix). I can usually find corn flour in my grocer’s natural foods section.

These muffins caught my eye because I was looking for something to accompany a bowl of chili. There are a few extra steps to these muffins. To begin with, you toast whole cumin seeds with butter, then saute sliced green onions in the butter until the onions are tender. This mixture then needs to cool to room temperature.

The muffin batter is fairly straight forward. Equal amounts of corn flour and whole wheat pastry flour (or all-purpose flour if that’s what you have) are sifted together with baking soda, baking powder, brown sugar and salt. Grated gruyere cheese and the cooled green onion mixture are added to the flours. The wet ingredients (sour cream, eggs and melted butter) are stirred into the dry ingredients and gently combined. With sour cream as the primary liquid, the batter looked very, very thick, and I was worried it would be too dry. I needn’t have worried; the batter came together quickly and easily.

The muffins baked for about 30 minutes and came out of the oven looking all toasty and brown. They didn’t puff up into a domed top like regular muffins, but they smelled delicious. The muffins were tender without being crumbly and quite moist from the cheese.

Cumin, green onions, gruyere and corn go together really well. Except . . .

Yes, there is an “except.”

I thought the cumin flavor was a bit overwhelming, and I would cut it in half next time. Bryan disagreed, saying that the amount of cumin was perfect. I made a half batch and would  have liked more green onions in the muffins. By cooking the onions first, the harsh onion flavor mellowed out and was a perfect match to the gruyere cheese.

Easy Yogurt Corn Bread

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Currently cooking out of The Carefree Cook by Rick Rodgers

To go along with Bryan’s very tasty chili, we wanted some sort of bread. And what goes better with chili than cornbread? I decided to revisit The Carefree Cook for the cornbread recipe.

I come down on the northern side of the cornbread divide. I like my cornbread more sweet and cakey, but this recipe is distinctly southern. That is, there is only a tablespoon of sugar in the recipe. It is an easy recipe, using equal parts cornmeal and all-purpose flour. The liquid is primarily supplied by yogurt, an egg and a bit of milk.

We ended up with a pretty good piece of cornbread to go with the chili. It wasn’t overly dry and had a nice corny flavor. After a few bites, though, I missed the sweetness. Raspberry jam ended up adorning the rest of my cornbread.

Chipotle Cheddar Biscuits

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cheddar_biscuitsCurrently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

The biscuit curse struck again! Not familiar with the biscuit curse? See this and this. One day, I may come to the realization that I was not put together in such a way as to produce a lovely biscuit (or scone, for that matter).

Back to these biscuits. I had to make a couple of substitutions. First, I couldn’t find chipotle powder anywhere, so I used chili powder. Secondly, the only cheese I had in the house was colby jack cheese, so that’s what I used. I also cut the recipe in half, because I didn’t want to end up with leftovers.

These days, leftovers seem to be going straight to my thighs.

This is a standard buttermilk biscuit recipe, with chipotle powder and grated cheese added. I don’t know if my changes are to blame, but I found these biscuits to be boring, and oddly enough, chewy. As is standard for me, they spread out, instead of up. To be fair, I should probably make these again, without all my changes.

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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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.