Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Matzos
April 21, 2015 at 12:01 am | Posted in BWJ, groups, quick breads, savory things, snacks, tuesdays with dorie | 5 CommentsTags: baking, savory, snacks
The Matzo recipe from Lauren Groveman is bread at its most basic. Really, it’s just flour, salt and water, hand-kneaded and with no real resting period required. A little ground pepper and some sesame seeds are technically optional, but I wouldn’t skip them…they make a boring-sounding dough interesting and flavorful.
The instructions say to roll the dough as thin as possible. When I make crackers, I like to roll them out on my pasta machine rather than with a wooden pin. I did that here, too, and because the machine cranks out long, narrow, strips, I wound up cutting them into smaller pieces than the large, plate-sized matzos shown in the book’s photos. The smaller pieces seemed also more easy to deal with using the kinda scary-sounding baking-and-flipping-on-a-blazing-hot-sheet-tray technique called for in the recipe. I only burned myself once, so I’d call that a success!
I got matzos that were much more thin and delicate than the store-bought ones I’ve had. And did I already mention how good the sesame seeds are in here? I made a little smoked salmon, dill and cream cheese spread to go with the matzos, and the combo was every bit as addictive as chips and dip.
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan (there’s also a video of the episode). Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Eastern European Rye
January 20, 2015 at 3:31 pm | Posted in BWJ, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 12 CommentsTags: baking, bread
Before making Lauren Groveman’s Eastern European Rye, I began to daydream about a turkey reuben on homemade bread. Liz Lemon is not the only one with very specific food fantasies. I was out of rye flour, though, so I bought a bag of local (okay, not NYC, but NY state) farmer-ground organic rye flour from the Greenmarket and got to mixing. I saw a tip to mix the dough in a stand mixer for 3 minutes, turn it off and let the dough rest for 10 minutes, then back on again for about 12 more minutes of kneading. I did this mixing method, and the dough rose nicely, and apart from my three slash marks, it didn’t split open in the oven. The final dough shaping and rising instructions are a little wacky when you read them in the book, but in this video, Groveman demonstrates those same steps on her pumpernickel loaf recipe. They are still wacky, but are at least understandable after seeing them on video.
The bread that I wound up with was not the Levy’s-like sandwich loaf I was expecting, but a rustic loaf with more of a true whole grain bread feel and a craggily crust. I couldn’t really get nice sandwich-sized slices from it, so no homemade turkey reuben for me this time (since I have a one-track mind, I did go to Mile End yesterday and get one!), but the bread does have great rye and caraway flavor and it’s nice with salty butter or a bit of good cheddar. I think it’ll make a good tomato soup dunker, too.
I assumed that the whole grain rye I used was the culprit for the denser loaf that I got…after reading Alisa’s post this morning, if I make this again I’ll either just reduce the amount of rye I use or sub a bit of it with some extra white flour and see what I get .
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. Finally, don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Onion Bialys
February 11, 2014 at 12:01 am | Posted in breakfast things, BWJ, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 15 CommentsTags: baking, bread
A toasted bialy with salty butter is my idea of a very fine breakfast. I’m sure a number of my fellow Americans have never heard of a bialy– I hadn’t before I moved to New York City. Then after about six years of living here, someone *finally* brought a sack of them in from Kossar’s at the first restaurant I worked for, and I was hooked. I now know that I can find bialys at almost every bagel shop in the city, but they’re usually pulled out of a plastic bag, and I get the feeling that they aren’t made fresh in-house. To get my fix, I stock up at Kossar’s anytime I have errands to run on the Lower East Side. I was pumped to be making Lauren Groveman’s Onion Bialys for TWD this week! BTW, I feel like every other week we’re making another recipe from Lauren Groveman…
I’d call bialys cousins of the bagel, although they are not boiled, they are flatter than bagels (despite the fact that mine came out looking like balloons), and instead of holes they have awesome caramelized onion-filled centers…so on second thought, even though they have a similar dough, they are really not really like bagels at all. Speaking of the dough, it was soft and lovely (I didn’t need all the flour called for) and easy to work with. Of course my bialys took off in the oven, but I’m sure it was my fault. I did prick the heck out of the centers, but next time I’ll hand stretch them a little more, too. I don’t really care– they tasted great and had perfect texture. Fresh from the oven, they are even better than Kossar’s!
For the bialy recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
TWD BWJ Rewind: Challah
December 31, 2013 at 11:06 am | Posted in BWJ, groups, sweet things, sweet yeast breads, tuesdays with dorie | 12 CommentsTags: baking, bread
Happy New Year! Have you made any resolutions for 2014? Normally I wouldn’t, but I have a couple of “situations” that I should get under control STAT. Resolving to use up my current kitchen cupboard and my bathroom beauty products before buying more is something that has to happen. I do not need four eye creams or six bottles of hot sauce open at once. I don’t have the storage space for that, and the clutter on my counters is driving me bananas!
What does Lauren Groveman’s Challah have to do with this? It’s going to help jam population control (five jars open in the fridge, with four more in the cupboard…sheesh). The group made this bread in early December, but I didn’t have my act together that week. I’m glad I got it together, though, because it’s delish. I just made one loaf, which was a half-recipe, and it’s a huge beauty! A three-strand braid is so simple to do and it really looks great, but maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to try my hand at five or six. Maybe. Even though I’m notoriously stingy with egg wash (I never want to use up a whole egg for it, and unless I have a bit of extra egg left over from something else, I usually pilfer a tiny bit from the eggs in the recipe), it still came out with a gorgeous crust. And the insides are perfectly soft and slightly sweet. I’m looking forward to challah French toast in a couple of days…topped with jam sauce, of course.
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. Note that this challah recipe uses melted butter, if that’s a concern for you (although I suspect it could be replaced with oil). Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll to see if anyone else did a rewind this week, and see the links page from challah week at the beginning of December!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Pumpernickel Loaves
November 5, 2013 at 12:12 pm | Posted in BWJ, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 11 CommentsTags: baking, bread
I really thought about skipping Lauren Groveman’s Pumpernickel Loaves. I was annoyed at the thought of having to make prune butter first. I didn’t have any caraways seeds. And then there was some crazy stuff about S-hooks and slings. I sucked it up and went to the store, made the prune butter (using the lekvar recipe that’s in the book) and thought about a way to form the bread that didn’t involve a sling.
I made half a recipe for one big loaf. Since I had a smaller batch, I mixed it in my KitchenAid. I found that I didn’t need quite the full amount of flour to get a nice dough. This pumpernickel gets its color (and a lot of flavor) from dark things like chocolate, espresso powder, molasses and, of course, that prune butter. Who knew that stuff was in there? After giving the dough two rests in a bowl, I shaped it and put it in a 9.5″x4.5″ loaf pan for its final rise (I sprayed and dusted the pan with cornmeal first).
I actually was expecting it to look darker than it turned out to be…I’ve had store-bought pumps that were almost black. The flavor from the caraway seeds is lovely and the crust is great.
There’s an accompanying recipe for Reuben sandwiches in the book, and I made those for dinner the other night. Yesterday I just had a plain turkey and cheese for lunch. Both were totes yum, and my husband was extremely excited about having homemade pumpernickel. I have this problem with slicing whole sandwich loaves, though. I can never get a straight slice, so my sandwiches are always lopsided (I tried to disguise that in this picture)!
For the bread recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. It’s also here, and there’s even a video of Lauren and Julia making pumpernickel together. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Bagels
October 16, 2012 at 12:01 am | Posted in breakfast things, BWJ, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 12 CommentsTags: baking, bread, breakfast
I eat my fair share of bagels. Frankly it’s hard not to when you live in New York City and there are bagel shops all over the place (Bergen Bagels being my favorite close-to-home joint). I’m not just a bagel-eater, I’ve actually made a lot of bagels, too, at my first restaurant job where we’d get slammed with weekend brunch crowds who all seemed to want the smoked trout with quail egg and a mini bagel….so Lauren Groveman’s recipe wasn’t totally Greek (or should I say Yiddish?) to me.
There were a couple of things I did differently than the recipe, just out of old habits. After boiling the bagels for about a minute on each side, I removed them from the water and placed them on a cooling rack set over a baking sheet. I baked them on the rack as well, because it allows the oven heat to circulate underneath the bagels. I didn’t bother brushing them with the egg white glaze before baking. They may not have been laquer-shiny, but they still browned very nicely and the toppings held in place. Also, in the bagel dough, I used half sugar and half barley malt syrup for the sweetener, which Groveman did on the TV show, but did a little differently in the book (which calls for only sugar).
I wasn’t super-prepared in the toppings department, so I just went with poppy seeds on some and grey salt on others. The salt ones were my favorite. I stirred some dill and chives into cream cheese to jazz up my schmear a bit. These were chewy and had a nice crust….with a cup of coffee, these bagels made for a perfect New York breakfast.
If you’ve never had a super-fresh, warm bagel before, you can really make great ones at home, so give it a go! You can make the dough the night before and it’s ready to shape and cook off the next morning. For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan or read Heather’s Bytes (it’s also here). And there’s even a video of Julia and Lauren making bagels together. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Rugelach
March 6, 2012 at 12:01 am | Posted in BWJ, cookies & bars, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 42 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
This week, Tuesdays with Dorie is celebrating Purim with Lauren Groveman’s Rugelach! (I know it should be hamentaschen, but that one’s not in the book.) Anyway, we made rugelach in the last round of the group, but that was years ago now, so I was more than ready to make them again this past weekend. This version’s quite different, as it turns out. Most noticeably, these rugalach are round spirals, not cresent-shaped. They’re formed from slice-and-bake-style rolled logs. And they are stuffed–almost bursting– with good things. Things like cinnamon sugar, nuts, dried fruits and apricot or prune lekvar (a thick jam/fruit butter). I went with walnuts, golden raisins and prune butter.
What with making the cream cheese dough and prepping the list of fillings, this recipe has a lot of steps, but you can make it a little easier on yourself if you want. I made my dough the night before, and toasted my walnuts then, too, since I already had the oven on for dinner. The one big shortcut I took was that I used a plum butter that I had bought at the Grenemarket in place of making my own lekvar. I’d had that little jar of plum butter open in the refrigerator for months, so I was glad for the excuse to finish it off. It was the consistency of a thick prune paste, anyway, so I thought it would work perfectly, and in fact any thick store-bought jam would likely do just fine. Also, I admit I didn’t measure anything related to the fillings. I used good judgement and eyeballed it all. I also eyeballed the amount of filling I put into each dough roll-up. I know when enough’s enough and I didn’t want my spirals to unravel or explode.
These taste great. The flavors are big and warm, so I’m glad we made them while it’s still chilly where I live. They’re thick cut, so they’re nice and sturdy. And I am in love with the prune swirls…it looks like a letter “C” in each cookie. So cute that even though the cookies are supposed to be completely coated in cinnamon-nut sugar, I didn’t want to hide the tops. Instead kept the sugar concentrated on the outside of the cookies and just sprinkled a bit on top.
Here are my rugelach pointers: With all the cream cheese in the dough, it gets soft fast, so I didn’t hesitate to left it have a rest in the fridge at different stages of rolling and filling. The dough rolls up best if the chunky things like nuts and dried fruit are chopped pretty fine. When these guys bake, there’s a lot of jam and sugar that gets caramelized on their bottoms, and it’s best to get them off the baking sheet and onto a cooling rack as soon as you can so they don’t get stuck. They’re sturdy enough to handle almost right out of the oven.
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan or read Margaret’s The Urban Hiker and Jessica’s My Baking Heart, as they are co-hosting this week. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.
P.S.: For something totally unrelated, enter my BOOK GIVEAWAY for a chance to win a copy of Marshmallow Madness!
Baked Fresh Weekly
Blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.
a whisk and a spoon 