Posts Tagged ‘baking’

Starting last summer, I set a few fun personal goals with a couple close friends. Among my culinary goals for 2014 is baking 20 pies. Each fully from scratch.

The inspiration came from my mother’s Christmas present of  The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book. This book had made it onto my Amazon wish list through lunch time reading of some top cookbooks of 2013 list.  At the start of 2014 I had made exactly zero pie crusts from scratch and the idea of trying intrigued me. Once I paged through the book I was hooked. Drawn in by the mouth watering photographs, I knew I had to figure out how to take on this task.The number 20 seemed like a great balance between sufficient practice and achievability.

Since I received the book in the mail about five weeks ago, I’ve made it through four pies: a butter milk chess pie, a pear anise pie, a juniper pear pie, and a lemon chess pie. My first attempt on the buttermilk chess succeed in having a fully formed crust and filling in the shape of a pie. My problem with the maiden voyage was various errors in rolling out the crust (many surrounding too little flour) cause me to over work the dough which resulted in a hard not flaky crust. But with each attempt I’ve learned more (e.g. let the dough rest in the fridge–cold dough is much easier to work) and gotten better results.

As a cookbook, The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book is a decent stand alone starting source for a pie newbie with 20+ illustrated pages dedicated to technique. The book advises against machine working the ingredients. I was fine avoiding the cost of finally biting the bullet of buying a food processor. Rather, a small investment in a simple hand held pasty blender did just fine. Other than that, I found no other special tools necessary. Just some simple ingredients and I was off baking. [I’m still rolling around the best way to represent the actual pie recipes here.]

And I’m still hooked. I’m able to achieve tasty results (lets face it, even with a mediocre pie crust like my first, a pie is still a pie) but I see room from improvement on each baking (let’s make it look more like the picture, form a more prefect lattice, keep the edge of the crust from browning too much, etc.). And, still paging through the book, I’m dreaming of spring at the farmer’s market and new fresh ingredients.

‘Tis the season.  Summer.  Where the table life of bananas drops to days.  I can’t think of a better way use those aging bananas than banana bread.  The recipe below comes from America’s Test Kitchen and yields a tasty moist loaf.

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Ingredients:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 very ripe bananas, mashed well
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/4 cup plain yogurt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Adjust the oven rack to the lower-middle position and heat the oven to 350 degrees.  Generously coat an 8 1/2 by 4 1/2-inch loaf pan with vegetable oil spray.
2. Whisk the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt together in a large bowl.  Whisk the mashed bananas, melted butter, eggs, yogurt, and vanilla together in a separate bowl.  Gently fold the banana mixture into the flour mixture with a rubber spatula until just combined.  Don’t over mix; the batter will look thick and chunky.
3. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.  Bake until golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with just a few crumbs attached, about 55 minutes.
4. Let the loaf cool in the pan for 10 minutes before unmolding onto a wire rack to cool for 1 hour.

There is an option where you can add nuts (1/2 cup walnuts, toasted and chopped), if you’re into that kind of thing.  As a person of moral character, I am not.

I made bread.  Let me type that I again.  I made bread!  And I am embarrassingly satisfied with myself for accomplishing  something that billions have managed to pull off ever since humans first gave-up hunting and gathering for this whole civilization experiment.

Baking bread, and baking in general, has always been a bit of a barrier to me.  Something outside my core competency.  I’ve seen people make bread, but the recipes just seemed doomed to failure in my hands.  But last week I was reminded of a supposedly simple can’t fail recipe.  I had the ingredients about and figured I’d give it a shot.

Ingredients:

• 3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
• 1 pack instant yeast
• 1¼ teaspoons salt
• 1 1/2 cups water (the original NY Times recipe called for 1 5/8 – I think that’s a really annoying measurement and 1 1/2 works just fine)

In a large bowl combine the flour, yeast, and salt.  You can also add ingredients as desired (raisins, nuts, etc.).  Add water, and stir until blended. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours,  but preferably about 18, at room temperature.The dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles.

Lightly flour a work surface and place the dough on it. Sprinkle the dough with a little more flour and fold it over on itself twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

Using enough flour to keep the dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape into a ball. Put the dough down on a re-dusted work surface and dust with more flour, bran, cornmeal or whatever you’d like. Cover with a cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will have more than doubled in size.

At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide the dough into pot.  It might look like a mess, but that’s just fine. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf has browned.

The Results:

Bread!  And a house that is filled with the smell of fresh baked bread. For almost zero active work!

After playing with the basic recipe I’m convinced you would have to intentionally try to make it fail.  At four in the morning, after a night of poker playing and more than my fair share of whiskey, I tried some “creativity.” I’m told I looked like Muppets’ Swedish Chef–arms and flour flying everywhere–and sounded much like the same.  In my enlightened state, I decided beer is better than water and substituted a cup of it in.  A few tablespoons of brown sugar seemed like a good idea, as did a small palm full of black finishing salt.  The next night I was almost afraid to bake the monstrosity.  But, though a little on the salty side and runny before baking, the bread turned out perfectly enjoyable!  (They say a four year old can make it and now I believe it!)

I’m very excited to experiment with additions and twists to this recipe and to have fresh bread around as the weather cools in these dark winter months.

A while back I tried my hand at an apple cobbler.  Having some cranberries in the freezer I decided to give them a try this time around.

The prep was as insanely easy as before and the result was a tart, sweet, doughy goodness that was fantastic with a little ice cream.  I think blueberries could work great as well, when they finally come back in season.

I think next up may be looking at some other cobbler batter recipes to start figuring out the differences how this whole baking thing works.

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Ingredients:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup butter
• 2 cups cranberries (frozen or fresh)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Melt the butter in a 9 x 9 inch baking dish.  Mix together the flour, baking powder, sugar, and milk. Pour the batter in the baking dish over the butter. Sprinkle cranberries on top of the batter, do not stir. Bake for 1 hour or until golden brown.

A couple weekends back, when my fall mood inspired a chili and corn bread dinner, I decided I needed something sweet to pull the meal together. Last Thanksgiving, Iggy made an apple pie. Having way more apple filling than pie crust and pie dishes we froze a big bag of it.  It seemed time to put that to use.

Cobbler offers a easy, forgiving, and flexible dessert.  In this case I had apple pie filling around, but any fruit filling would have worked just as well.  I have a bag of cranberries in the freeze that may next in line.

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Ingredients:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup butter
• 2 cups sliced apples seasoned for pie (I might have actually had somewhere between three and four, but it seemed to work well)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Melt the butter in a 9 x 9 inch baking dish.  Mix together the flour, baking powder, sugar, and milk. Pour the batter in the baking dish over the butter. Sprinkle fruit on top of the batter, do not stir. Bake for 1 hour or until golden brown.

I’m not much of a baker. In fact, I probably owe readers a report of some epic fails on a couple of bread baking attempts over the last year.  And cakes have been off my radar for years. But, I like eating baked things, especially freshly baked things, so lately I’ve been trying more simple baking recipes.  Ones that even I can’t mess-up.  Ones that allow you to play with them a little.

For last weekend’s chili cook, I baked-up a batch of corn bread.  I’ve posted this recipe before, but it’s a bit buried and corn bread is an easy bake that can go with a range of fall eats.  Plus, I’ve been told recycling is good for the environment.

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I know true corn bread is supposed to be dry.  But I’m not particularly a fan of the dry stuff.  To get past this dryness, Mike and I developed the below in some long ago gumbo cooks.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup butter
• 2/3 cup white sugar
• 3 eggs (most would have use only 2)
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 cup cornmeal
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 can of creamed corn
• 1/2 cup shredded sharp cheddar

Directions

Combine the dry ingredients in their own bowl.

In a separate medium bowl whisk the eggs.  Next, whisk in the buttermilk (if you don’t have buttermilk around you can make a good substitute by mixing one cup milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice).   Let that mixture get up to room temperature.  Next, melt the butter in large skillet. Remove from heat and stir in sugar.  Then add the sugar and butter mix to the room temperature egg/buttermilk bowl.   (Note: if you didn’t let your eggs and buttermilk get up to room temperature everything will fail here, the sugar and butter will get cold and start turning back into a solid.)  Whisk the liquid for a bit.

Now slowly whisk in large handfuls of the dry ingredients into the liquid and keep whisking until there are little or no lumps.  Next, put the batter into a greased baking pan.  Spoon a smattering of creamed corn onto/into the batter.  Finally, sprinkle the sharp cheddar on top and bake for about 30 minutes at 375 (or until it browns and a toothpick comes out clean).