Saturday, October 24, 2009

Bread


I’m excited that real, artisan, hand-crafted, organic bread is now available Fridays at South End Market, just up from the library in Bradford, where Calista is carrying Red Hen Bakery products, but you have to pre-order.  Red Hen breads come in paper, not plastic, bags, are crusty on the outside with a wonderful yeasty flavored crumb inside.  Different products have different crusts and crumbs, but every one I’ve tasted has been delicious.  On bread day, the seeded baguette I get on my way home is half devoured when I arrive.

During my youth in the 1950s and 1960s in Bradford, Mom made traditional  white loaf bread often, but Wonder Bread or its equivalent was available in the stores, so it was in the pantry in the bread box,  You know, it’s still around, with it homogeneous cake like interior inside a non-existent “crust.”  Spread it with peanut butter and marshmellow fluff for the quintessential “Fluffer-nutter,” but pardon me, the bread is insipid. 

Industrial America has figured out how to make a bread that had little human interaction with the product once the basic ingredients are mixed together.  It produces bread in a few hours from start to finish, whereas flavor and texture can only be developed over time.  It is not just in America that bread experienced a significant decline during this time, and many of those signature products of that earlier time persist even today.  In Europe, commercial bakeries’ cheap products bankrupted traditional shops, and inferior bread became prevalent for many years, with, of course, some vestiges of the past preserved in certain enclaves.

Fortunately, in the 1980s and ever since, the rise of traditional approaches to baking breads has been revived.  The methods of mixing the ingredients, manipulating the dough whether by kneading or turning, fermenting the dough, retarding the dough, shaping the dough, proofing the breads and baking them have been developed to maximize taste, aroma, structure of the crumb, texture and flavor.  These methods take time and some labor, but the resulting products are so much more than industrial breads that there is no comparison.  They have body, heft and a satisfying goodness that nourishes more than the body alone.


Now big bread companies have figured out how to make an artisan-like product by following similar production techniques and par-baking their breads before freezing them.  These breads can now be finished in a hot oven at the store for sale as baked on the premises breads, and some of them aren’t all that bad. 

There are many books on breads out there, but I will mention here some of my favorites.  The Bread Builders by Dan Wing, from Corinth, and Alan Scott tells not only the science of bread making, but also how to build your own wood fired bread oven.  The Taste of Bread by Raymond Calvel is an English translation from the original French and is one of the definitive texts on bread.  If you want to learn about real bread, read this book.  Yeast, water, flour, salt. Perhaps the American version of Calvel’s classic is Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman of King Arthur in Norwich.  Also worth noting are both of Dan Leader’s books, Bread Alone and Local Breads, his latest offering, as well as Joe Oertiz’s The Village Baker, and Maggie Glezer’s Artisan Baking Across America

Monday, October 12, 2009

Sunday Dinner with pommes Anna




It’s Sunday and my daughter’s family and my brother Peter are coming by after the Giants’ game for hors d’oeuvres and dinner.  While it’s not cold out, it is rainy, so we’re going to have some fun appetizers and a comfy chicken with dumplings dinner.

I’ve poached two chickens in water with onions, celery, carrots, bay leaves, fresh thyme, parsley sprigs and a dozen whole peppercorns.  I removed the meat from the bones, which I returned to the stock for another hour of simmering, before I reduced what’s left to about 4 cups of rich broth.  The chicken meat has been cut into bite sized pieces and stashed in the fridge till later in the day.  I have cubed butternut squash, green beans, and fresh corn to simmer with the meat and thickened broth while the dumplings cook on top.

I picked some basil and made a batch of pesto with toasted pine nuts, garlic, olive oil, salt and parmesan cheese.  I roasted a Marina di Chioggia squash and pureed the flesh for squash gnocchi.  I moved on to pommes Anna, a potato dish for my Irish son-in-law, which we’ll eat with the starters. 

Pommes Anna requires the use of clarified butter to facilitate a non-stick result.  This is a classic French dish where thin slices of potato are layered in concentric circles in a cast iron or non-stick skillet before being baked in the oven.  The result is a beautiful, crisp potato cake with creamy interior. 


Clarifying butter requires melting it, (sweet, unsalted butter is best) and when the moisture has bubbled away, decanting the resulting liquid from the milk solids that remain in the bottom of the saucepan.  This butter has a much higher smoke point than non-clarified butter, so it’s ideal to cook with when one wants a butter flavor, but wants to avoid burning the butter.


The potatoes must be sliced very thin and uniformly for this dish to be successful.  I use a mandoline to accomplish this task.  While I have a stainless steel French mandoline, I opt for my plastic Japanese mandoline for most everyday jobs.  Both of these instruments have a blade that can be adjusted up or down to make thinner or thicker slices.  All come with a hand guard, which I recommend you use, as it is very easy to cut oneself deeply on these utensils. 

The skillet is placed over medium heat, buttered, and the potato slices are arranged in circles starting from the outside of the pan.  Each layer is sprinkled with salt and pepper (and grated onion &/or grated parmesan cheese) and brushed with the clarified butter.  A total of 6 to 8 layers of potatoes are used, the potatoes are compressed by pushing them down firmly, and the pan is placed in a hot oven to finish cooking.  When removed from the oven, it is inverted onto a serving plate and sprinkled with a little minced parsley.  Served in wedges, it is good hot or at room temperature.

Lastly, I’m making some gougeres, a cheese puff made with pate a choux, which is used to make éclairs.  Milk and egg are mixed and cooked with flour before allowing the dough to cool and then eggs are beaten in one at a time.  Flavored with Gruyere cheese, they are formed into spoon sized dollops, and double in size when baked in a hot oven.  These are also good hot or at room temperature.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Fall Foods



So it’s clear that we are in early fall from the colors bursting forth on our hillsides.  The mornings are crisper and wood smoke is in the air.  The apple and winter squash crops are filling the farmers’ markets.  Last year I wrote about Craig Putnam’s Echo Hill Farm which was selling a large Italian squash known as Marina di Chioggia and what great squash gnocchi they make.  While I picked up one of these squashes this weekend from Craig, the market abounded with a large variety of unusual winter squash, beyond the traditional buttercup, butternut, acorn, Hubbard and delicata.

I saw Banana squash, Musque de Provence, Spaghetti squash, Pie Pumpkins, Muscat de Provence, Galeau d’Eysines, Red Kuri, Jarrahdale, Sunshine, Valencia, Amish Pie Squash and others whose names I can’t remember.  I was delighted with the abundance of varieties produced right here in the Upper Valley. 

If you look back to September and October of 2008 you will find columns on winter squash, so I won’t repeat that information here.

All the root vegetables are now also showing up in the markets including turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, carrots, red and golden beets, celeriac, red, yellow and sweet onions, shallots and potatoes.  These are the basics for some heart warming, stick to your ribs, comfort food, which warm not only our kitchens, but also our souls.  Casseroles, shepherd’s pie, pot roast, short ribs and similar dishes abound during this time of year.  The churches are having chicken pie and ham dinners with lots of fruit pies for dessert. 


Chicken pot pie is a favorite with many people. This time of the year, and before the frost kills off our gardens, you can still include green beans, spinach or Swiss chard, as well as roasted butternut squash or potato with the chicken and gravy that simmer while the crust cooks to a golden brown.  We also like chicken with dumplings, in which I include parsley and thyme from the garden to make the dumplings more flavorful.

This is the beef stew season and the number of recipes for this universal dish abound.  I’m inspired to make Boeuf Bourguignon, the classic French stew made with red wine after seeing Julie and Julia, the movie about Julia Child’s life and a young lady who blogs about cooking every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a single year. 


A classic Italian dish appropriate for this time of year is braciole in which thin slices of beef top or bottom round are stuffed with pork stuffing with cheese before being browned and braised in wine or stock. 

This is also the cabbage season, whether its green cabbage, Savoy cabbage or red cabbage.  Cole slaw with carrots and raisins is a classic, but we like our cabbage braised or steamed as a fall vegetable.  Stuffed cabbage leaves cooked in tomato sauce is heart warming on a cold evening.  Cabbage is also great in soups or as an addition to stews, and, of course, this is the time to make some sauerkraut, where the cabbage is fermented in its own juices created by salting the shredded vegetable.