10 Grain Hearth Bread

17 Mar

When the price of gas hits $4 a gallon, you start to see people make real changes in their lives.  People who never dreamed of carpooling start calling up friends and finding ways to combine routes to work.  Avid bus-avoiders start putting on their game faces and choosing which magazines they are going to read on the way to work while someone else does all the driving for them (and, one hopes, they also begin to realize that riding the bus might not be such a bad thing after all).  Routines change, people learn new things, and fresh habits get formed.

The same thing happened to me, only the catalyst was when the price of my favorite multigrain bread hit nearly $5 a loaf.  I was panicked.  Standing in front of the bakery’s bread display, I would stare at the piles of fresh bread, silently willing them to go down in price so I wouldn’t have to shell out MORE than the cost of a gallon of gas just to be able to eat my favorite hearth bread.  In the end, I walked away.  I gave up on the bread, mostly because I couldn’t justify the price, but also, not surprisingly, because I knew that at home I had an empty bag from the bread, and on that bag was a list of ingredients I could mine to make my own bread.

The ingredients, of course, as in the case of all great bread, were simple: flour, whole grains, salt, water, yeast.  By some small miracle, I happened to already have all of those ingredients in the pantry, so now all I had to do was find an actual bread recipe that might come close to approximating the full taste and chewy texture of the bread I had abandoned.

I consulted with the books of my standard trio of go-to bread people–Reinhart, Berenbaum, Hensperger–but wasn’t able to find a recipe that resulted in the combination of an artisan loaf that was packed full of hearty grains and strong flours.  Berenbaum came close, but her multi-grain torpedo loaf relied too heavily on white flour.  I wanted a bread that was dark and flavorful, almost like a Russian rye bread, only with a more pronounced crust and a heavy dose of 10 grain cereal.  It started to become clear to me that if I was going to get the bread I wanted, I either had to break into the bakery that made my favorite bread and skulk around until I could find a copy of the precise recipe and steal it, or take the less dastardly approach of building my own recipe.

My first step to avoiding a life of crime was to open up the America’s Test Kitchen Baking Book, a great source of step-by-step instructions for turning out wonderful hearth breads at home.  As it turned out, this was also my last step.  One of the first recipes I came across was for a loaf of country bread, a free form bread that began with a starter sponge of both rye and wheat flours.  The recipe made no mention of adding extra grains, but I figured that with a rye starter and some ingenuity, I could definitely take this bread where I wanted it to go.

 

And boy did I.  This bread has structure, crunch, and softness all at once.  It’s great for making sandwiches, but eating a slightly oven-warm slice of this bread, lightly buttered, is positively dreamy.  Perhaps even a little bit, dare I say, habit forming.

10 Grain Hearth Bread

Inspired by The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book

This bread requires that you make a sponge a few hours before you start making the bread (I generally do it the night before), but don’t panic.  Making a sponge is incredibly easy, and requires nothing more of a person than simply mixing some flour, water, and yeast together, then walking away.  That’s it.  You can totally do that.

Sponge

1 cup warm water

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/2 cup medium or dark rye flour

1/2 teaspoon instant or rapid-rise yeast

To make the sponge, stir all of the ingredients together in a medium bowl until combined.  Cover with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature until the sponge has risen and fallen, at least 6 hours, or up to 24 hours.

Bread Dough

2 3/4 – 3 cups bread flour

1 cup uncooked 10 grain cereal mix (Bob’s Red Mill is a great source for this ingredient)

1 teaspoon instant or rapid-rise yeast

3 tablespoons honey

1 1/3 cups warm water

1 1/2 teaspoons sea salt

1 egg white gently beaten with 1 teaspoon of water

Combine 2 3/4 cups of the bread flour, 10 grain cereal mix, honey, and yeast in a standing mixer fitted with the dough hook.  With the mixer on low speed, add the water and mix until the dough comes together, about 2 minutes.  Stop the mixer, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and let stand at room temperature for 20 minutes (this allows the dough to relax a bit before you really begin to knead it).

Remove the plastic wrap, add the sponge and salt, and knead the dough on medium-low speed until it is smooth and elastic, about 8 minutes.  If after 4 minutes more flour is needed (if the dough is not starting to firm up, come together, and release from the sides of the bowl), add the remaining 1/4 bread flour, 2 tablespoons at a time, until the dough clears the sides of the bowl, but sticks to the bottom.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter and knead by hand to form a smooth, round ball.  Place the dough in a large, lightly oiled bowl and cover tightly with greased plastic wrap.  Let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Line a large rimless (or inverted) baking sheet with parchment paper.  Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter and press it into a 10-inch square.  Fold the top corners diagonally toward the middle.  Using your fingertips and starting at the top of the dough, pull the underside of the dough up over the top, stretching it considerably, and begin to roll the dough up into a rough log.  With each roll, press the seam firmly to seal.  Continue to do this, forming the dough into a taut log, 5-7 more times.  What you are basically doing is rolling and folding, rolling and folding, until the dough resembles the shape of a tight rustic loaf of bread.  Pinch closed any loose openings.

Place the dough seam side down on the prepared baking sheet.  Mist the loaf with vegetable oil spray, cover loosely with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place until nearly doubled in size and the dough barely springs back when poked with a knuckle, 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Meanwhile, adjust an oven rack to the lower-middle position, place a baking stone or heavy sheet pan on the rack, and heat the oven to 500 degrees F.  Let the baking stone or baking sheet heat for at least 30 minutes, but no longer than 1 hour.

Score the top of the loaf with a razor blade or sharp knife, and spray the loaf lightly with water.  Carefully slide the loaf and parchment onto the hot baking stone or hot baking sheet.  Immediately reduce the oven temperature to 425 degrees F and bake until the center of the loaf registers 210 degrees on an instant-read thermometer and the crust is deep golden brown, 35-40 minutes.  Halfway through baking, rotate the loaf and brush it all over with the beaten egg white and water mixture.

Transfer the loaf to a wire rack, discard the parchment, and let cool to room temperature before serving (or, if you live in my house, let the bread cool for 30 minutes, then slice it open and grab some butter).


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Samosas in Phyllo

9 Mar

There are few words that exist on a sliding scale as slippery as that of the word “difficult.”  Some things are deemed difficult because they require a certain familiarity of skills before one is able to instinctively tackle them.  Other things can be referred to as difficult because they are time consuming and they ask a person to dedicate a great deal of effort and focus.  To me, something that is difficult is most often not really difficult at all (in terms of skill or effort), but rather simply unpleasant.  I may have no problem at all producing a trifecta of desserts for someone’s birthday, but I will not, under any circumstances I can currently think of, deep fry anything.

It’s not like I haven’t deep fried things before.  I’ve made fried poppadums, homemade sweet onion rings, and wonderfully crispy pakoras, but the problem was, I did not enjoy making any of those foods once I completed the preparation stage and was then forced to move on to the actual cooking stage.  Deep frying things makes your house smell like a soggy old french fry depository.  It is hot, messy, and, obviously, greasy, and I am always at a loss over what to do with all that spent oil.  Fortunately, my deep dislike of submerging things in hot oil never seemed to hold back my progress in the kitchen, so all was well.

Until, that is, I got it into my head that I was going to make samosas for a small event I had agreed to cater.

Though I knew I hated to fry things, I was convinced that I would be able to come up with a simple way to wrap and cook samosas that would not only avoid the step of having to deep fry anything, but also guarantee me a generous amount of wrapped samosas that were amenable to being frozen until the time arrived when I needed to bake them.

Taking inspiration from a wonderful tapas cookbook I often look to for ideas, I decided to wrap each samosa in a dual layer of phyllo dough.  It was my hope that brushing butter in between each layer of dough would make for a crisp finished product, and making sure to securely wrap each little package of spiced potatoes would ensure an end result that would both freeze well and take to baking straight from the freezer.

To make this long story short, I don’t know why I didn’t try this sooner.  The samosas, both baked after being frozen and baked immediately after being wrapped (for purposes of, ahem, quality control), were crisp, light, and lacking in any sort of heaviness or greasiness.  As an added bonus, the delicate nature of phyllo really allows the flavor of the perfectly spiced potato filling to take center stage, completely convincing me that, at least until I break down and decide to tackle a Spanish tortilla de patatas, my deep frying days have come to an end.

Samosas in Phyllo

Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey Indian Cooking

4-5 medium potatoes, boiled in their jackets and allowed to cool

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 medium sized onion, peeled and finely chopped

1 cup shelled peas, fresh or frozen (if frozen, defrost them first)

1 tablespoon peeled, finely grated fresh ginger

1/2 to 1 fresh, hot green chili, finely chopped

3 tablespoons very finely chopped cilantro

About 3 tablespoons water

1 1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon garam masala

1 teaspoon ground, roasted cumin seeds (if you only have regular ground cumin, you can toast the teaspoon of cumin in a dry pan set over high heat.  The cumin will take only seconds to toast, so watch it carefully for browning and then immediately take it off of the heat and place it in a room temperature bowl or dish)

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons lemon juice

20 phyllo sheets, thawed if frozen (my sheets were 8.5″ x 13.5″ and, layered and cut into fifths, yielded 50 samosas)

4 tablespoons butter, melted then cooled

To make the filling, peel the potatoes and cut them into 1/4 inch dice.  Put 4 tablespoons of oil in a large frying pan and place over medium heat.  When hot, put in the onions.  Stir and fry them until they begin to turn brown at the edges.  Add the peas, ginger, green chili (1/2 or the whole thing, depending on how spicy you prefer things), cilantro, and 3 tablespoons water.  Cover, lower heat, and simmer until the peas are cooked.  Stir every now and then and add a little more water if the frying pan seems to dry out.

Add the diced potatoes, salt, ground coriander, garam masala, cumin, cayenne, and lemon juice.  Stir to mix.  Cook on low heat for 3-4 minutes, stirring gently as you do so.  Check balance of salt and lemon juice.  You may want more of both (I added more lemon juice, but felt the salt content was just fine).  Turn off the heat and allow the mixture to cool.

To fill and wrap the samosas, preheat oven to 375 degrees F (if you are wrapping and freezing the samosas, you can obviously skip this step).  Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper.  Cover phyllo stack with a sheet of plastic wrap and then a dampened kitchen towel (this will keep the phyllo from drying out as you work).  Take one phyllo sheet from stack and lay it down on your work surface with a long side nearest you (keeping remaining sheets covered as you work) and brush lightly with butter. Top with another phyllo sheet and brush with more butter. Cut buttered phyllo stack crosswise into 5 strips (my sheets were 13.5 inches long, yielding 5 strips that were not quite 2.75 inches wide).

Place a tablespoon of filling near one corner of a strip (on the end that is nearest to you), then fold corner of phyllo over to enclose filling and form a triangle. Continue folding the strip (as one would fold a flag), maintaining a triangle shape. Put fully wrapped samosa triangle, seam side down, on a parchment-lined large baking sheet. Repeat process, making more triangles in the same manner, until you’ve used all the phyllo.

The samosas can be baked in a 375 degree oven, one sheet at a time, for 20-25 minutes, or until they are golden brown.  Cool them slightly on a wire rack before serving

If you plan to freeze the samosas, place them in the freezer on their parchment-lined baking sheets, and freeze for one hour.  Remove the samosas from the freezer, and stack them in an airtight container, separating each stack with a layer of parchment or wax paper.  The samosas will keep in the freezer for up to 1 month.  When you are ready to bake the frozen samosas, follow the baking directions for fresh samosas.  There is no need to adjust the baking time.

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Lemon Bergamot Bars

7 Mar

I will never claim to be a fan of big surprises or intense fanfare.  Preferring to live a life that is relatively free of drama or explosive displays of showiness (all I have to do is hear of people getting engaged via a line of skywriting or announcing their pregnancy by hiding a positive pregnancy test in someone’s birthday present and I start to feel all sweaty and embarrassed) might explain why I am so fond of foods that contain a bit of the unexpected.  A rich brownie with a subtle undercurrent of cardamom and chipotle.  A complicated Thai curry with a kick of lime that comes in at the end and smoothes out its blend of coconut and spice.  And now, what currently stands as my favorite example of a sneaky flavor, a hint of bergamot concealed within a batch of brightly tart lemon bars.

Hailing from Tartine, the inaugural cookbook from the incredible San Francisco bakery of the same name, this is a lemon bar that pulls no punches when it comes to flavors.  The meltingly delicious shortbread base is baked to a deep golden brown, giving it the taste of mellow, nutty brown butter.

The thick lemon custard that rests on top is fresh and tart, and does not make the mistake of masking its lemony sourness under a cloying sweetness.  The bergamot (an addition made optional in the cookbook, but now considered by me to be an utter necessity) cuts through the clean taste of the lemon, dotting each bite with the pleasant sensation of subtly bitter orange.  (Bergamot oranges, a hybrid citrus fruit that contain elements of both Mediterranean lemons and Seville oranges, provide the distinctive citrus undertone found in Earl Grey tea, and it creates a similarly aromatic and companionable effect here.)

I may not be one for surprises, but I can’t say I have ever shied away from the pleasures of variety.  Eating one square of this lovely pastry is like taking a taste tour of a pastry case (brown butter shortbread cookies!  Lemon custard!  Candied orange!), providing your taste buds with thrills aplenty, minus even the slightest possibility of social discomfort.

Lemon Bergamot Bars

From Tartine

Crust

1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature

Filling

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

2 1/4 cups sugar

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons lemon juice

zest from 1 small bergamot orange, grated or finely chopped

6 large whole eggs

1 large egg yolk

pinch of salt

confectioners’ sugar (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Butter a 9×13 inch baking pan.

To make the crust, sift the confectioners’ sugar into the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment.  Add the flour and stir to mix.  Add the butter and beat on low speed just until a smooth dough forms.  Transfer dough to the prepared pan and press evenly into the bottom and 1/2 inch up the sides of the pan.  It should be about 1/4 inch thick.  To help even out the crust, use the flat bottom of any type of cup, pressing down firmly.  Line the crust with parchment paper and fill with pie weights (dry beans or about a cup’s worth of pennies will provide the same effect as pie weights).  Bake the crust until it colors evenly to a deep golden brown, 25-35 minutes.  Rotate the pan 180 degrees is the crust appears to be baking unevenly.

While the crust is baking, make the filling: Sift the flour into a mixing bowl.  Add the sugar and whisk until blended.  Add the lemon juice and bergamot orange zest and stir to dissolve the sugar.  In a separate mixing bowl, whisk the whole eggs and egg yolk with the salt.  Add the eggs to the lemon juice mixture and whisk until well mixed.

When the crust is ready, pull out the oven rack holding the crust, remove the parchment paper and pie weights, and pour the filling directly into the hot pan.  (It is easiest to pour the custard into the pan if the pan is in the oven.)  If the crust has come out of the oven and cooled before you have finished making the filling, put it back in for a few minutes so that it is hot when the custard is poured into it.  Reduce the oven temperature to 300 degrees F and bake just until the center of the custard is no longer wobbly, 30-40 minutes.

Let cool completely on a wire rack, then cover and chill well before cutting.  If you like, dust the tops of the squares with confectioners’ sugar.  They will keep well in an airtight container or well covered in the baking dish in the refrigerator for up to 4 days.


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