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. 

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.

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.

Eggplant

We’ve been harvesting eggplants from our garden for a number of weeks now.  I was first introduced to eggplants when I worked at the Blair Mansion Inn in Silver Spring, Maryland in 1971, while I was courting Rosemary in the District of Columbia area.  We made Eggplant Parmigiana there, and I remember prepping eggplants a bushel at a time.  We’d cut them into slices, salt the slices, let them sit for 30 minutes or more, then brush off the salt and liquid they had exuded, and bread them by dredging in flour, then beaten eggs, and fresh breadcrumbs.  Thereafter the breaded eggplant slices were par cooked in hot oil and frozen for future use.  When an order came in, the chef would splash some Marinara sauce on a sizzle plate, layer the eggplant with grated mozzarella, parmesan cheese, and sauce, and roast in a hot oven until the cheese was melted and browned and the eggplant cooked through. 

Eggplant, known as aubergine in Europe and the Middle East and brinjal in its native India and Pakistan, is a member of the nightshade family, Solanaceae, and closely related to tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco.  A perennial plant in temperate climes, Solanum melongena is grown as an annual in New England.  While we know it primarily as a dark purple, elongated ovoid, it also grows in a variety of shapes (short and squat to long and thin, often curved, to even egg shaped ones) and colors (pink, yellow, green, white and stripped).  As it is related to tobacco, historically its nicotine alkaloids contributed to a bitter flavor, which was purged by salting the sliced flesh.  Over the years, breeders have selected against the bitterness, so while today it no longer remains a problem for cooks, salting eggplant before cooking still has benefits in lessening the absorbent properties of its flesh.  Anyone who has sauted some eggplant knows it will soak up all the oil you put in the pan before it starts to brown. The application of salt collapses the cell walls of the eggplant flesh, expelling air as well as liquid, and leaving less space for oil to enter and become trapped. 

One of the most famous Arabic eggplant dishes is Iman bayaldi, “the priest fainted.”  In this dish, the eggplant is stuffed with onions and tomatoes and cooked in copious amounts of oil, most of which it absorbs.  Supposedly the priest fainted either because the dish was so delicious, or later when he heard how much oil his wife had used to make the dish. 

In an earlier column I wrote about Ratatouille, the French dish comprised of eggplants, tomatoes, zucchini and onions.  The Greeks have their Moussaka, a native dish that combines lamb with eggplants, tomatoes and cheese, the Italians their Melanzane alla parmigiana with eggplants, tomatoes and cheese, and the Middle East its baba ghanoush where creamy roasted eggplant is combined with tahini (ground sesame seeds), lemon and garlic.  These are just a few examples of world class dishes comprised of eggplant, so if you haven’t tried any lately, they are available from local sources now, so it’s a good time to check out this savory vegetable known as “vegetarian’s meat.”

Melanzane alla parmigiana

Eggplant Parmesan

Serves 6

3 Eggplants

2 Tablespoons salt

3 eggs, beaten

1 cup all purpose flour seasoned with a 1/2 tsp. salt & a grinding of pepper

2 cups of bread crumbs and possibly more

2 quarts canola or vegetable oil

2 cups Marinara sauce

1 1/2 cups grated mozzarella

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

1/3 lb sliced sharp provolone

Slice the eggplant into 1/2" rounds.  Sprinkle with the salt and drain in a colander for 30 minutes or more.

Place the seasoned flour and bread crumbs in separate bowls.  Beat the eggs in a third bowl.  Pat the moisture off the eggplant, dip each piece of eggplant in the flour, shaking off the excess.  Place floured eggplant in the eggs and turn over to coat both sides.  Place in bread crumbs and turn over to coat.  Place breaded eggplant on a rack while you do the rest of them.

Deep fry the breaded eggplant in 375 degree oil for a minute or so on each side, until the bread crumbs are browned and the eggplant is just cooked through.  Drain on an absorbent towel.

Select a baking dish and cover the bottom with a layer of Marinara sauce.  Place eggplant over the bottom, sprinkle on half the grated mozzarella and 1/2 the parmesan cheese.  Cover with a layer of Marinara sauce and repeat a second layer, ending with sauce.  Cover the top with sliced provolone.

Bake uncovered in a 375 degree oven for 20 -25 minutes or until hot and bubbly with the top browned.

Let rest for 15 minutes at least before serving.  Good at room temperature, and better the next day.

Apples

This year’s apple crop is starting to hit the markets.  I bought a peck bag that included my choice of Ginger Gold, Macoun, McIntosh, Honey Crisp and Paula Red, some for eating and some for an apple tart.  I know, it’s “American as apple pie,” but Rosemary makes the pies and I make the tarts.  She’s Fanny Farmer and I’m Julia Child, or maybe Paul Bocuse.

Apples, which are related to pears, are part of the rose family.  Malus demestica consists of 15,000 or more varieties, or which some 2,000 are American.  Originating is Asia Minor, apples are grown all over the world, and are the most popular fruit not only in the US, but also Britain, France and Germany.  China, of course, is the world’s leading producer, the US second while Iran and Turkey vie for third. 

The apple is propagated primarily by the asexual act of grafting, as planting an apple seed will not result a seedling with the same characteristics as its parent.  In fact, the result is often radically different.  When Johnny Appleseed hastened westward to keep ahead of a burgeoning population, planting his orchards of apples, the settlers found that most of the apple crop consisted of “spitters,” that were so astringent as to be inedible, but they made great cider, which converted into alcohol, so his coming was legend.  While hard cider is fermented, applejack, apple brandies and Calvados are distilled apple liquors.

Cider apples (real tart) are one of the four apple groups, the others being dessert or eating apples (crisp and juicy), cooking apples (tart when raw, balanced when cooked), and now dual purpose apples like Golden Delicious and Granny Smith. 

Apples are most associated with desserts, and American originals include apple crisp, apple grunt, and apple pandowdy.  Applesauce, flavored with cinnamon, is eaten with pork, and apples are stewed with red cabbage and braised with chestnuts, and included in Waldorf Salad.  Sliced apples, chutneys and cheese are a common appetizer, but most apple concoctions are for after the main meal.  Apples, with their cell-wall pectins, have good jelling characteristics when cooked down, so they are often made into apple jelly.

Sliced apple will oxidize to an unappetizing brown in a short time if left untreated.  This browning can be prevented by tossing peeled, or sliced apples, with an acidulated liquid like lemon juice, where the high acid environment slows down the natural browning process.

Most varieties of apple store well in an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, which restricts ethylene gas from ripening the fruit prematurely, so even local apples are available well into the winter and early spring after a fall harvest. 

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” may be an old saw, but it has a lot of truth in it.  While apples are not high in Vitamin C and other antioxidant compounds, they show preventive properties relative to cancers of the colon, prostate and lungs.  As they are cholesterol free, contain fiber and are bulky, they assist with bowel cleansing, heart disease and weight loss, which many of us could benefit from.

So be it a glass of cider, an apple pie or the crisp crunch of a snappy new McIntosh, now is the time to enjoy our most prolific fruit that grows all about us.

Apple Golden-Brown Betty

Serves 6-8

Vegetable oil cooking spray

1 1/2 cups dry, stale cornbread crumbs, finely crumbled

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup white or Turbinado sugar

1 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground allspice

1/4 tsp ground  ginger

1/8 tsp ground cloves

A few gratings of nutmeg

7 or 8 (3 lb) apples, peeled, cored, and sliced into 1/3" wedges

2 lemons, halved

1/3 cup frozen apple juice concentrate, thawed

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

Ice cream, custard sauce, yoghurt or whipped cream

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Spray a shallow 8 1/2" X 11" glass or enamel baking dish with vegetable oil and set aside.

Toss together the crumbs, sugars and spices in a medium bowl.  Set aside.

Place the apple slices in a second medium bowl.  Squeeze the lemons over the apples, straining out the seeds.  Toss the apples so they are all coated with lemon juice.  This will prevent browning.

Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of the crumb mixture on the bottom of the prepared dish.  Follow with half the apples.  Pour the apple juice concentrate over the apples, then scatter about half the crumb mixture.  Dot with half the butter.  Repeat a layer of apples and then the rest of the crumb mixture and the rest of the butter.

Cover the dish tightly with aluminum foil and bake until the apples are tender, 30 to 40 minutes.  Remove the foil, increase the heat to 400 degrees and let bake until the top crumbs are deeply golden and crisp, about 10 minutes.  Serve, warm but not hot, with one of the accompaniments.

Tomatoes II

Since last week, the late blight has ravaged our tomato crop so bad that we’re destroying all our plants except a few cherry tomatoes, mostly Sun Gold, which still seem to be doing OK. We’ve enjoyed the shortened harvest, and some fruits are still ripening on our porch, but for the most part a very promising crop has been laid low as so many of our neighbors’ crops have also.

Fortunately, many area farmers cultivate a large part of their plants in hoop or green houses, and these enclosed environments are better able to keep the late blight spores from infecting their crops. There were many heirloom varieties available at the farmers’ market his past weekend, and they should continue to be available for a number of more weeks. So stock up if you’ve had blight problems so you can enjoy some local products this winter when all you’ll see are California or Florida tomatoes in the store.

While China is the largest grower of tomatoes, the US is second in worldwide production, with California growing over 90% of the processed tomatoes, meaning plum or sauce tomatoes, which are available canned year round.

Some tomatoes are determinate, meaning they grow to a specific height and set their fruits, most of which ripen at or about the same time. Indeterminate tomatoes continue to grow until either frost kills them, or the gardener cuts off their top. Indeterminate varieties have their fruits ripen as they grow, so they can produce a continuous crop over a long period of time. At Longwind Farm in East Thetford, David Chapman fills his greenhouses with a single planting, which bears fruit from early March through the middle of November.

Tomatoes are considered a vegetable, a term that is culinary in nature and has no scientific meaning. Botanically tomatoes are a fruit, however they don’t share the common characteristic of most fruits, sweetness, and they are not used in desserts, where most fruits appear in a meal. Rather, the tomato is typically served as part of a salad at the beginning of a repast, or they are included in the main meal itself.

While the tomato is naturally acidic, and this makes it any easy plant to can for home gardeners as a hot water bath is all that needed, not a pressure canner, it was the suspected source of a major salmonella outbreak a couple of years ago. While the FDA and the USDA were never able to pinpoint the source of the contamination, Mexico was a suspect, although Serrano and jalapeno peppers were also identified as a possible source of the infection.

Tomatoes contain lycopene, a powerful anti-oxidant that has cancer preventing properties. It has been positively identified as beneficial in preventing colorectal, breast, endometrial, lung and pancreatic cancers. In fact, organic ketchup is found to have much more lycopene than non-organic ketchups, so a word to the wise the next time you need this condiment.

In addition, tomatoes have been shown to provide benefits in preventing heart disease, and lowering cholesterol profiles. They are a great source of Vitamins C, A and K as well as manganese and potassium and they are low in calories.

So enjoy the local vine ripened harvest while it’s still available, and put some up for winter if you can. They’re delicious right now!

Tomatoes

You have been able to purchase local tomatoes for quite a while now, despite the tomato crop devastation brought on by the late blight.  This disease struck many farmers hard in August just as their field crops started to bear fruit.  Many heirloom varieties that would normally be crowding farmers’ markets and roadside stands right now, while still available, are found in smaller quantities and with fewer varieties. 

We’ve been pretty lucky so far at our house, for while we lost some plants that Rosemary planted on the periphery of the herb garden, our main crop in the vegetable garden is daily bearing a variety of fruits from sauce tomatoes, to heirlooms like Black Russian and Green Zebra, to red and Sun-gold cherry tomatoes to large lobed Brandywines and oval yellow Lemon Boys.   I love the tomato harvest;  tomato salads with Vermont farmstead blue cheese, tomatoes with fresh mozzarella, basil and extra-virgin olive oil, fresh Marinara sauce, BLTs on toasted Red Hen bread with pesto, arugula, Hogwash Farm’s pasture raised bacon, and a slab of Big Boy tomato still warm from the sun, oven dried plum tomatoes with garlic and fresh thyme, or noshing down a ripe Cherokee Purple right out in the garden.  Yum!

Solanum lycopersicum is a member of the nightshade family, and long suspected of being poisonous (its leaves and the roots of many of its cousins are poisonous).  It is grown as an annual plant in our clime, producing the ovary of a fruit, which we refer to as a vegetable.  Usually colored red, many varieties are yellow, orange, purple, black, pink, mottled green and yellow, or red and green, and some are almost white.  Their shapes can be large and round, to heavily lobed, to cherries, grapes or currants; from smooth to having pronounced ribs, to elongated and plum shaped to squat and flat.  There even is one called the Ugli Tomato, which was banned in Florida due to its multi-ribbed appearance, in spite of its excellent taste.  

   Penne with fresh tomato sauce and parsley


Heirloom varieties have made a strong come back recently, as their taste and texture are superior to commercial varieties bred more for their shape, size, and color, and mutated to resist natural pests.  This is the time of the year to really enjoy a good local tomato, ripened on the vine.  What is in the supermarket was picked green in California or Florida, “ripened” by ethylene gas which turns it red, but doesn’t really ripen the flesh, and shipped in a refrigerated container across America to your local store.  NEVER, and I mean never, refrigerate a tomato!  It not only dulls and kills its taste and muddies its texture, even when returned to room temperature, it will not improve.

The tomato originated in South America, probably Peru, before migrating to Mexico, where explorers returned to Europe with seed in the 1500s.  Here it was grown as an ornamental plant until its culinary properties were realized, particularly in Italy, Spain and the Middle East.  Today the tomato is central to the Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes lots of fresh vegetables and fruits, olive oil, cheese and yoghurt with moderate amounts of seafood and poultry, and modest quantities of red meats and wine.
 

Next week we’ll continue to look at this flavorful “vegetable” that is used so commonly in everyday cuisine.

                                             Peeled fresh tomatoes for sauce