CSA week five - Mushroom bread pudding

This is only marginally a CSA recipe; I used the oyster mushrooms, but lots of other mushrooms too. This was, as I said on Saturday, more about using up half a loaf of staling bread and too many eggs, a task at which it succeeded quite well. As usual, I looked at a bunch of different recipes and cobbled together my own version of the dish. Many recipes suggested using this as a side dish to steak, but, as my own innovation, I decided to incorporate the beef into the dish proper.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 Tablespoons butter
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 small onion, finely diced
1 pound of assorted mushrooms
I used:
3 1/2 ounces oyster mushrooms, chopped
8 ounces cremini mushrooms, sliced
4 1/2 reconstituted assorted dried mushrooms including criminis, porcinis, cloud ears, shiitake, chanterelle and oyster mushrooms, chopped. Save a little of the soaking water.
1/4 pound sirloin tip, sliced against the grain into strips and cut into 2-inch lengths
1 handful parsley, chopped

6 cups semi-stale bread, cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes
The bread I had on hand was a 5-minute-a-day recipe with good amounts of whole wheat and rye. It had a dense spongy texture good for sandwiches, but not really ideal for this application. For the record, I wasn't entirely thrilled with the bread and I'm going back to normal no-shortcuts baking.

6 extra large eggs
2 cups cream
1 cup milk
1/2 cup finely shredded Parmesan cheese plus a little more
salt
pepper
hot sauce
Worcestershire sauce

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and lightly salt the sirloin tip.

1. Heat butter and olive oil in a medium cast iron (or non-stick) pan over medium-high heat. When the butter finishes sizzling add the onion and cook until softened and translucent, around 5 minutes. Push to one side and add a quarter of the mushrooms and a pinch of salt. Cook until softened, golden (and a little browned) and any expressed liquid has evaporated, around 5 minutes. Don't stir too much. Push to the side with the onion and add the next quarter of the mushrooms. Continue until all the mushrooms and cooked. Empty the mushroom/onion mixture into a bowl leaving a little fat in the pan if possible.

2. Meanwhile, cube the bread if you haven't already and put them in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk together the eggs, cream, milk, cheese and seasonings.

3. Add a little more olive oil to the pan if necessary and add the sirloin. Cook for a few minutes, continuing to restrain yourself from fussing with the pan so the meat can sit still and brown. When the meat is browned add it to the bowl with the mushrooms. Also add the parsley and stir well. Deglaze the pan with a quarter cup of the mushroom soaking liquid and add that to egg mixture.

4. Butter or oil an 8x11-inch baking dish. Add the mushroom mixture to the bread cubes and stir well. [I found my bare hands to be the best tool for this.] Dump the mixture into the baking dish and spread out evenly. Pour the egg mixture over top and let sit at least 10 minutes to soak. [If you're using dense bread like I did, over night would be better. Lighter bread needs less time, but you could soak a brioche or french bread overnight to let a lighter bread fall apart to create a more pudding-like texture which is not a bad option.]

5. Top with the extra Parmesan and bake at 350 degrees for an hour until a knife inserted into the center comes out almost clean. Let cool a bit before cutting.


You might have gotten the impression that I wasn't entirely happy with how the bread I used turned out. It's not actually bad, it's just distinct and the wide range of textures--crisp, tender, creamy, chewy--it gives the dish is actually a pleasant effect. I would like a more integrated flavor, though. As it is, it's very much a steak and mushroom omelet with a side of toast. Now there's certainly nothing wrong with that (although I wonder where the richness of all that cream went), but I feel like it could have been better. Barring using a different bread, I probably should have processed it down into coarse bread crumbs and let it soak longer. That's a tweak for next time; This turned out pretty tasty as is.

Speaking of hearty brown bread...

as I did in passing near the end of my last post, I baked a loaf recently. It's just the second half of the batch of batter bread dough I made last month, but I baked it with a substantially different technique and got substantially better results, although, to be honest, I'm not sure why.

If you just re-read that first post or if you've got an exceptionally good memory, you'll recall that the batter bread was made without kneading which naturally resulted in a soft, crumbly texture from the lack of gluten. Since then I've given some thought to the matter and I wondered if I could adapt techniques used for other low-gluten breads made from batters like cornbread.

I've only recently started freezing dough so I'm not sure of the most appropriate way to get it ready for baking. What I've been doing is defrosting in the refrigerator overnight, putting the dough into a loaf pan in the morning and letting it sit, lightly covered, on the counter until I get home from work to give it enough time to come up to room temperature and then rise.

This time, instead of a loaf pan, I used an 8x8 inch baking pan. This dough, I figured, would be loose enough to spread out. I neglected to take a 'before' picture, so you'll just have to imagine a sizable lump of what looks rather like clay in the center of the pan. Here's the 'after' picture. The dough spread out nicely and rose to just about exactly fill the pan. There was a bit of a rise above in the middle, but the dough stuck to the parchment paper I used to cover it so it deflated a little when I removed it.

I was hoping for one of our usual summer afternoon thunderstorms to keep the room humid and blot out the sun, but it was a bright dry day and the dough crusted over in the oven-like heat of my kitchen. That, no doubt, hampered the rise, but this dough didn't have the structure to hold itself up very far anyway. I spritzed the top with water and olive oil to soften it up before baking.

Instead of the wacky baking method in the original recipe, I used a more standard cornbread/cake method of baking it at 350 degrees until a knife inserted in the center came out clean. It took about 40 minutes. There wasn't any extra rise in the oven; In fact it looks like it shrunk a little and the top crusted over hard.





On the other hand, take a look at the texture inside--dense and bubbly with a bit of chew. Even the crunchy barley bits softened pleasantly. Miles better than the texture I got from this same dough last time. Maybe I accidentally used the no-knead method and got gluten to form just by leaving a loose dough to sit?

I'd experiment more, but all this rigmarole hardly seems worth the effort if the point is to simulate a loaf properly made in the first place. Might be a good way to salvage a poorly kneaded loaf, but then so is kneading. Maybe I'll just write this off as a one time thing unless you guys see some practical upshot of all this.

Banana chocolate bread pudding

Before we get into the recipe here, I want to talk a little about how I came to make it. It's fairly typical for me and I suspect other people go through the same process, but I don't recall ever seeing it written up.

So, my batter bread was a few days old and I still had a quarter of the loaf sitting there starting to get stale. Its flavor was a bit too strong and distinctive for me to want to make bread crumbs and it was too soft and crumbly to slice for french toast.

Bread pudding might work, but savory or sweet? With all the molasses in the bread, it could make an interesting savory bread pudding with pork and barbecue flavors, but I wasn't going to have time to cook a pork shoulder until the weekend and didn't think the bread would last that long. Still a good idea for the other loaf of the batter bread that I've got in the freezer. But for now, sweet.

As the bread as aged, it's started to smell kind of like cocoa--lord knows why--so I think a chocolate bread pudding would be a good choice. I quite like how the dark chocolate worked in the oat bars so I'll use the rest of that if I've got enough. After looking at a few recipes, I don't think I do have enough, but I have got a bar of Lindt dark chocolate that can fill it out. The infused chili oil will actually be a nice touch. Now, if I had more chocolate and not enough bread, this dish would have turned out more interestingly as I would have added some of the corn muffins I have in the freezer. There's a Mexican drink called tejate mixing chocolate, corn masa and spices that I could use as a flavor guide. That would have been pretty cool and I regret that I couldn't go in that direction. Maybe next time.

I've got banana in the freezer that should work well with chocolate and the flavor of the bread so I look around to see if such a thing as banana bread pudding exists. Indeed it does, and banana chocolate bread pudding at that, so I won't have to invent anything new. On one hand, that means its more likely to work out, on the other hand, I don't get to experiment as much unless I deliberately leave myself ignorant of what others have done which I prefer not to do.

When I'm making something that's a known codified dish, I find a bunch of different recipes and examine the similarities and differences. It usually boils down specific choices at various aspects and steps. Here, it's questions like: what ratio of dairy to bread do I use? do I slice or mash the banana? melt the chocolate or leave it in pieces? There are also basic versions and more complex ones that add frills like nuts and spices. There may be different schools of those that pull the dish into various cuisines. Not so much in this case.

Once I've got my options in mind, I sometimes decide what I want to do and write the new recipe out and sometimes I just wing it as I go along. I went with winging it this time and, entirely accidentally, most of the choices I made were the same as Emeril Lagasse's version of the dish. I didn't so much follow the recipe as we were both headed in the same direction.

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter, cold and cut into small dice
2 large eggs
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 cup half and half [This is a rather low amount of dairy for the amount of bread so feel free to increase but don't decrease the ratio.]
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon [I considered adding nutmeg and/or allspice, but I go to that too-obvious flavor combination to often.]
1 ripe banana, mashed [frozen and defrosted is even better.]
1/4 cup pecan, chopped
2 1/2 cups bread, diced [baguette or brioche is tradional. My batter bread made a substantial difference in flavor and texture. It's not far off from pumpernickel so that would be a fine substitution here.]
3 ounces dark chocolate, chopped

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Brush an 8x8" baking dish with the melted butter.

1. In a large bowl whisk eggs with sugar, half and half and vanilla until sugar is dissolved and eggs incorporated. whisk in cinnamon and banana until no banana chunks are in evidence. Stir in pecans, bread and chopped chocolate. Make sure the bread is well coated in the egg mixture and leave a few minutes to overnight for it to soak through. [I just did the few minutes.]

2. Pour pudding mixture into prepared baking dish and bake until just firm and a knife inserted into the center of the pudding comes out just about clean, around 1 hour.

3. Cool pudding in dish until warm. Cut into squares and serve with confectioners' sugar and/or whipped cream and, preferably, a cup of coffee.



I quite like how the flavors of the banana and the bread merged and, for that matter, how the bread, banana and custard physically merged into one solid mass. You can see in the picture that the insides have a texture more like the caramel of the graham cracker gooey bars I made a couple months ago than a standard bread pudding. That only happened because of how soft and crumbly the crumb of this particular loaf was. I don't think a baguette would work nearly the same way.



The pudding had plenty of roasted banana flavor without the chocolate fully distributed so keeping that in chunks was the right choice to give some nice flavor and textural contrasts (the nuts help there too). And, on the textural end of things, the crispy edges were very nice and I wish the top had gotten crisp too. Maybe a minute under the broil would have done it, but I'm afraid I might have burnt the chocolate. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with the results. I don't think it was as fabulous as my coworkers said it was, but it was pretty good.

Multigrain batter bread

I've got a few bread cookbooks I don't look at much. For the most part I just want to make variations on a French country loaf with, these days, increasing amounts of various whole grains thrown in. But that doesn't give me anything to talk about here and I need the material. And that's why I was leafing through those cookbooks looking for something different.

The recipe I started with today was from Real Bread by Maggie Baylis and Corlie Castle. They've got a whole section on breads that you never knead. You just beat it vigorously as you build up from a wet batter to a dough that's stiff but very wet. The pumpernickel bread I made a while back used a similar method, but I didn't realize that it was an actual category of bread. OK, I'll give it a try.

The recipe starts with 1 1/3 cups of oatmeal, but it turns out I'm nearly out so I used the half cup I had along with some barley, polenta and bulgar wheat to fill out the amount. To that I added 2 Tablespoons melted butter, 2/3 cup molasses, 1/2 Tablespoon salt and 1 1/3 cup warm water. The recipe uses boiling water and a half hour soak, but I'm soaking overnight so warm should do. And as long as I'm soaking whole grains, I added the 2 cups of whole wheat flour and 1/2 cup of gluten flour too.

That means, in the morning all I had to do was mix in another 1/2 cup of water, 1 Tablespoon of yeast and 2 1/2 cups of bread flour. This became hard to work quite rapidly so I switched to the mixer and let it do the work. I think this is the right final texture. It's still quite wet, but it's holding together and not sticking too the bowl too much. It's climbed right up the dough hook which means there should be plenty of gluten worked up in there.

I let that rise for an hour (it would take two hours in a cooler kitchen), scraped it out of the bowl, formed two loaves, put one in the freezer, and let the second rise to fill a loaf pan. I wish I had a slightly larger pan as this started a little too full and I couldn't get all the rise I wanted before it started mushrooming over the lip.

The recipe calls for starting with a cold oven, setting it to 350 degrees and baking for 35 minutes but there's no way that's going to work so I tacked on 20 minutes more. That turned out to be just right to get to 210 degrees internal temperature so well done me.

After getting it out of the pan, I put the loaf back in the oven (turned off but not cooled down) for another 10 minutes to crisp up the sides and bottom a little.



The texture is quick-bread soft, but less crumbly. It is holding together nicely even if it hasn't got the chew a well-kneaded bread would have. There's some good hole formation (from being so very hydrated) so the loaf is fairly light.

The barley hasn't softened quite as much as I'd hoped so there are crisp little bits dispersed in there--not toothbreakingly hard, thankfully, but hard enough to disconcert. Lesson learnt there.

The flavor is molasses-y bittersweet and buttery, but not quite as hearty as I had hoped. This is the first loaf I've made using large amounts of white whole wheat and it's living up to it's mild reputation. Maybe I should use half white and half red as a compromise in these sorts of loaves. I think I went a little light on the salt, too. Beyond that the flavor balance makes it a good bread for sandwiches; it's assertive enough to frame the filling without being a full partner. Unfortunately, it's too soft for a good clean slice. Maybe it'll work with stews?

In all, it's decent enough, but I miss the chewy texture. I suppose this might be a good choice for people who aren't comfortable kneading, but the method has challenges of its own. I'm curious how this category of breads came to be. The information I've found on-line touts them as a good intermediate step for bakers just learning to work with yeast; maybe they only exist as bread-baking training wheels? Any ideas?

Mauritian beef curry and faratas

One last recipe with curry leaves for now and then I'll lay off, OK? I've managed to dry the rest of them by the simple expedient (recommended in a YouTube video on the subject) of leaving them spread on a plate in the refrigerator for a week. They're far less aromatic, but they do seem to have retained some flavor. I'll store the dried leaves for a few weeks before testing them out.

This recipe is from Mauritius which should make for a change of pace. I found it at the Recipes from Mauritius website by Madeleine Philippe.

Mauritian beef curry

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 Tablespoon crushed garlic
1/2 Tablespoon crushed ginger
1/2 Tablespoon chopped thyme leaves
1 sprig curry leaves
1/2 medium onion, finely chopped
1 1/2 Tablespoons curry powder (hot or mild depending on your preference)
8 ounces canned finely crushed tomatoes
1 pound beef, cut in 1 inch cubes
1 cup or so hot water
2 Tablespoons coarsely chopped cilantro

1. Heat oil in a deep medium saucepan over medium high heat. Add garlic, ginger, thyme, curry leaves and onion and cook, stirring frequently, until onion becomes translucent.

2. Add tomatoes and half the cilantro. Turn heat down to medium low and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes until tomato looks and smells cooked. Add a little hot water if the tomatoes start to stick to the bottom of the pan.

3. Add curry powder. Cook for five minutes more.

4. Add beef along with 1/2 to 1 cup of hot water depending on how thick you like your curries. Simmer until the beef if tender. How long this will take depends on the cut of beef you chose. I used the generic stew beef from Whole Foods so it took around an hour and a half. If the sauce is the thickness you want, cover the pot. If it's too thin, leave the cover off until it gets where you want it.

5. Garnish with cilantro and serve with rice or faratas.



Faratas are the Mauritian versian of parathas are they're pretty simple to make.

Start with a soft, but not sticky dough: about 1 cup flour to 1/2 cup water (plus half a teaspoon salt) although I had to add a good bit of extra flour to get the right texture. Knead it up well and then divide into three for traditional 12-14 inch faratas or four (70-some grams each) if you're cooking them in an 8" pan like I am. Melt a few Tablespoons of butter (or ghee if you've got it).

Roll them out thin and brush or drizzle with butter generously on the top side.




Fold in half and butter again.




Fold in thirds and butter again.




Roll it up and stand it up.




Squish it flat and roll it out again. You can still kind of see the spiral there in the middle.

Butter generously once again and lay butter-side-down in your hot pan. Cook for a minute or two until the bottom is getting golden brown and the layers are starting to puff up.

Butter the top and flip it over. Let it cook for another minute or two.

Take it out and let it cool just slightly before serving it with your curry. Got any butter left? You know what to do with it.


The curry, to start off is beef in tomato sauce. Nothing wrong with that. The flavors of the herbs and spices are subtle, but always there adding an aromatic layer above those two. I should have crushed the garlic and ginger to bring them out more. A bit more (or a bit fresher) curry powder would hurt either. You're not going to mistake this for an Italian dish, but the tomato does dominate. Not the best curry I've ever made, but not bad and an interesting departure from the usual cuisines. You know, this is just the sort of dish that gets better in the refrigerator; I should withhold judgment until I try the leftovers.


The faratas are crisp and flaky in the middle and a bit chewy at the edges. Not loaded with flavor, but nothing a little whole wheat wouldn't cure. A very nice accompaniment to the curry and hard at all hard to make.

I had no idea flaky dough was so easy. I may be ready to try making croissants now.

New York bagels (or some approximation)

Back in my Parisian bagels post I listed a handful of alterations to the recipe that would bring it closer to the New York version. Not that the Parisian version was at all bad, it just wasn't New York and that's what I want to try to make. Today I marked up the recipe with the modifications and gave it a try.

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups bread flour
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
[Using whole wheat wasn't actually one of the modifications, but I bought some white whole wheat and I've been wanting to try it out. It's supposed to have the physical properties of whole wheat without the flavor. Now that I write it out, it doesn't sound like such a great thing.]
2 1/4 teaspoons yeast
3 Tablespoons malt syrup
[I found malt syrup at Whole Foods. It's not particularly sweet so I was generous with it and cut back on the water to compensate.]
1 Tablespoon salt
1 cups hot water

water for boiling
1 1/2 Tablespoons malt syrup

various toppings


I preheated the oven to 425 degrees--a little hotter than last time--hoping to get the bagels a little crispier.

I mixed the dry ingredients and then carefully added the wet just until the dough came together to make sure the dough stayed stiff. That made the 10 minutes of kneading a bit of a chore, but since I used the whole wheat, it needed the full time to get the gluten worked up.

Once it formed a tight ball, I put it in an oiled bowl, covered it with plastic wrap and let it rise. Some recipes only give it twenty minutes for this step, but since it's for flavor production I figured I should give it a full hour.

I punched down the dough and cut it up into pieces for the individual bagels. I decided to make eight 2-ounce mini-bagels this time so I can have a whole one for a snack. I tried rolling out a rope and making a loop to form them, but the dough isn't at all sticky and I was a bit over-generous in the oiling earlier so I have troubles there. Instead I gave each piece of dough a good knead to work out bubbles, let them rest a couple minutes, and then flattened them, poked a hole in the middle and formed them into a bagely shape. I think that worked well enough in deflating them, but they really don't want to be reshaped at this point they're not nice well-formed loops.

Once they were shaped, I boiled them in the malt-water for a full three minutes with a flip in the middle.


When I took them out of the water I skipped the egg wash and just dunked them into a bowl of mixed sesame seeds, poppy seeds, kosher salt and diced onions. It made kind of an ugly mess so I changed to sprinkling the mix over the top for the later ones.

They sat for ten minutes and then into a 425 degree oven for 20-25 minutes. I think I took them out at 22.

The toppings didn't work quite the way I had hoped. There's too much and since the onions aren't on top, they didn't brown. Well, I can always scrape off the excess.



The outside of the bagels have the appropriate chew, but they aren't crisp. I think that's because the excess toppings insulated it and because I skipped the egg wash, but another few minutes in the oven wouldn't have hurt.



The texture inside is dense, but soft. They seem more like soft pretzels than bagels. (Using too much salt in the toppings only increases the resemblance.)

The recipe for soft pretzels is almost exactly the same as for bagels. I wonder what the key difference is. Maybe the texture inside is like that because my misshapen bagels had lots of vents. A proper bagel's interior should be sealed inside a thick skin created by the boiling. But so should a proper pretzel. The fact that I made these bagels so small might have had some effect since pretzels are almost always thinner than bagels. This is going to require some more experimentation to find out. Any-which-way, it still beats light and fluffy.

The whole wheat must have had some effect too, although there's nothing in the texture and only the slightest hint in the flavor you can point to as recognizably whole wheat. There is a hint of the malt there, too. Malt also shows up in a lot of soft pretzel recipes and I think it struck me as part of the pretzely flavor. Maybe I've had more properly made pretzels than bagels in my life so that's where my memory of malt goes.



Overall, these aren't bad beyond the trouble with the toppings. There's some good texture on the outside at least and the flavor is about right, but they aren't quite what I was aiming at either. I think the first batch turned out better overall. I'll have to change some elements back to see if I can bring out the best of both versions.

After that, though, I see some bagel recipes that use a sponge for extra flavor. It's not clear, but that may be the Montreal style which I've been curious about. That's going on the to-make list.

Whole wheat sesame millet sandwich bread

This is a recipe adapted from the Fanny Farmer Baking Book by someone who did a guest post on the TheKitchn blog. I've adapted it further by using Peter Reinhart's soaker and sponge technique.

Makes two smallish loaves

For the soaker:
2 cups whole wheat flour
1/3 cup millet
3 Tablespoons roasted sesame seeds (if what you've got hasn't been pre-roasted a brief toasting on the stove-top will suffice)
1 Tablespoon kosher salt
1 cup hot water
1/3 cup honey
1 Tablespoon vital gluten

Mixed, covered and let sit out overnight.

For the sponge:
2 cups white bread flour
1 cup hot water
1/4 teaspoon yeast
1 Tablespoon vital gluten

Mixed, lightly kneaded, covered and let sit in the refrigerator overnight.

When I was splitting up the ingredients from the original one-day recipe I wasn't sure where to put the honey. I ended up choosing the soaker but I didn't have a good reason for that and the soaker was rather wetter than the other Reinhart recipes I made. Seemed to work out OK, though.

In the morning I brought the sponge out and let it warm up. Once it was close to room temperature I tore it into small pieces and mixed it into the soaker. The soaker was so wet it didn't hold together at all so that began easily. But the sponge was surprisingly resilient. I probably shouldn't have put the gluten into it. That meant that getting the two halves to mix homogeneously was a bit of a trial. At the same time, the whole was so wet that I worked in over another half cup of white flour to get a proper workable dough out of it. I wish I could have gotten a picture of it, but my hands were covered with bread-muck. The mixer couldn't handle it at all so I had squeeze and stir and knead handfuls to get it to come together. I also added around another teaspoon and a half of yeast. The original recipe calls for a Tablespoon, but I had less in the house than I thought. That just meant a longer rise time; no big deal.

Once I finally got the dough together, I kneaded it as best I could (It was still pretty wet and sticky), and put it in an oiled bowl to rise for a couple hours. When it was about doubled I poured it out onto a floured board, punched it down a bit and cut it in half. I rolled both halves into loaf shapes, wrapped one up in plastic wrap and then foil to go in the freezer, and put the other in a loaf pan for the second rise.

A couple more hours later it had doubled again. I attempted to slice the top and baked it in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes until it reached 210 degrees inside. I poured some melted butter over top after 25 minutes too.


There wasn't any rise in the oven. In fact, it looks like it might have fallen a little. So the bread is pretty dense. But it wears it well. It has a spongy texture with lots of tiny bubbles and a strong gluten structure. It holds up to spreading unsoftened butter and has a very nice hearty chew to it with little crunchy bits from the seeds and whole grains. You can smell the whole wheat just a bit, but the flavor doesn't hit you over the head; it tastes more like a country white loaf: sweet, buttery and nutty. It's got a lot of flavor, but not so much or so unusual that you couldn't use it for sandwiches. Pretty darn good, especially considering it's half whole grains.

On a related note, I was thinking of maybe submitting a guest post for The Kitchn too. Is there anything I've posted about that you think I should use? The black sapote bars were the biggest sensation, but not many folks have heard of sapotes and they're out of season anyway. Maybe something about radishes? It's the start of CSA season for a lot of folks who could use ideas on using them. Or maybe I could write up something about how I went from no-knead bread to machine mixing to doing everything by hand with slowly increasing confidence in my abilities. What do you think?

Parisian bagels

I wish I could remember how I came across this recipe. I wasn't looking for bagel recipes; I can't imagine I'd settle on a Parisian one if I was. It comes from a radio show I've never heard of, adapted from cookbook I've never heard of, from a recipe by someone I've never heard of. Perhaps some blog I have heard of pointed to one of those three?

Anyway, if you're interested in any of those here's a link. And here's the recipe. It looks complicated, but it was actually pretty simple and quick as bread recipes go. The cook's notes are from the original. Everything went so smoothly, I don't think I have any notes myself.

"JO GOLDENBERG’S PARISIAN BAGELS

Now, how elegant is this?! A French bagel! Actually, in Paris there is a huge Jewish community (more than half of all of France’s 500,000+ Jews live in Paris) and the MOST famous bagel restaurant-deli is that of Jo Goldenberg at 7 rue de Rosiers. It’s a Paris institution less than a mile from the famous Cathedral of Notre Dame.

Our listener Caryn started all of this (be sure to check out her picture – and her bagels’ picture - on the “Look at Us” page – menu at left) and the subject proved so interesting that the recipe is our feature this week. It turns out to be lots of fun to make bagels – and not difficult at all.

To make things even easier, the making-a-rope technique for shaping bagels, used by professional bakers, is NOT the one we’re using here. It’s very difficult to make that rope of dough perfectly even in thickness, as it wraps around the baker’s open hand, being rolled back and forth expertly. For the home baker, this recipe simply calls for making a ball of dough, then pushing a hole through the center – you’ll see, below. There are also some Cook’s Notes, and a few suggestions for variations (this recipe is for plain water bagels) in case you’d like to make onion or sesame or poppy seed or other flavors….variations follow the recipe…more of the "fine points" will be discussed on the show.


MAKES 10 LARGE BAGELS

3 1/2 cups (approximately), bread flour [or substitute all-purpose flour]
2 packages, dry yeast
3 tablespoons, sugar
1 tablespoon, salt
1 1/2 cups, hot water (120-130 degrees)
3 quarts water
1 1/2 tablespoons, barley malt syrup [or substitute sugar in the same amount]
1 egg white – beaten with 1 teaspoon, water
topping of choice, if any (see Variations, below)
cornmeal for sprinkling on the baking sheet


Make the dough: In a mixing bowl (or the bowl of an electric mixer) measure 3 cups of the flour and stir in all the remaining dry ingredients. Pour in the hot water, and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon (or with the flat paddle attachment of the electric mixer at low speed) and beat for about 2 minutes.

Add the remaining half-cup of flour, a little at a time, stirring by hand. When the batter becomes thick and heavy, attach the mixer’s dough hook (if using) or lift the dough from the bowl and place it on a lightly floured work surface for kneading by hand.

Knead the dough: Knead the dough at medium low speed on the mixer – or by hand (using a push, turn and fold motion, energetically) for about 10 minutes – or until the dough is firm and solid when pinched with the fingers. Add flour as needed if the dough is sticky in your hands, or sticks to the sides of the mixing bowl (if using electric mixer).

First Rising: When dough is kneaded enough, place it in an oiled mixing bowl, cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap, and set aside at room temperature until it has doubled in volume – about 1 hour.

Prepare water bath: Near the end of this rising time, bring the 3 quarts of water to the boil in a large saucepan. Add the malt syrup or sugar; then, reduce the heat and leave the water just barely moving – at a slow simmer.

Shape the bagels: When the dough has doubled in volume, turn it out onto a lightly floured work surface and punch it down with extended fingers to remove excess gas.

Divide the dough into 10 pieces (each will weigh about 3-4 ounces). [I halved the recipe and made my bagels on the small side so I ended up with six.] Shape each piece into a ball. Allow the balls to stand and relax for a few minutes – then flatten each one with the palm of your hand.

With your thumb, press deep into the center of the bagel and tear the depression open with your fingers. Pull the hole open, pull it down over a finger and smooth the rough edges. It should look like a bagel! Form all of the bagels and place them on your work surface.

Second Rising: Cover the shaped bagels with wax paper or parchment paper. Leave them at room temperature just until the dough has risen slightly – about 10 minutes (this is called a “half proof”). [Cook’s Note: If the bagels are allowed to rise too much during this “second rise” – they will not sink when put in the simmering water; but, if that should happen, just pretend that they DID sink – and cook them for the same 1 minute as described below. The difference will be unnoticeable to most anyone.]

Prepare the baking sheet: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. [Cook’s Note: If using a convection oven, reduce the heat by 50 degrees.] Grease a baking sheet with shortening (or use a non-stick baking sheet, or line a baking sheet with “Silpat” or similar material) and sprinkle the baking sheet with cornmeal.

Water-bathing the bagels: Into the gently simmering water prepared earlier, slip one bagel at a time (use a large skimmer, and gently lower them into the water). Simmer only 2 or 3 bagels at a time – do not crowd the pan. The bagels will sink and then rise again after a few seconds. Simmer gently for one minute, turning each bagel over once during that time. Lift each bagel out of the water with the skimmer, drain briefly on a towel, then place each bagel on the prepared baking sheet. Repeat until all bagels are simmered, drained and on the baking sheet. [Cook’s Note: Thanks to the malt syrup or the sugar that was added to the simmering water, the bagels will be shiny as they come from the water.]

Baking the bagels: If toppings are desired, (see “Variations” below) now is the time to add them, by sprinkling the desired topping over the bagels. Brush each bagel lightly with the egg-white-water mixture first, then sprinkle the topping if desired – or leave unadorned, for water bagels.

Place the baking sheet on the middle rack of the preheated oven for 25-30 minutes. When the bagel tops are a light brown, turn them over to complete baking. This turning-over step will keep the bagels in a rounded shape, instead of their being flat on the bottom. When brown and shiny, remove the finished bagels from the oven.
Place the bagels on a metal rack to cool.

Variations:
Toppings may include: coarse salt, shredded onion, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, caraway seeds, or other flavors of your choice. Sprinkle toppings over before baking bagels, as described above. [I made sesame, salt, onion and everything bagels. All out of poppy seeds.]

Another tasty treat: slice each bagel crosswise into 4 thin rounds. Return the rounds to the oven and bake the rounds until dry throughout, and just beginning to brown – about 20 minutes. Remove the rounds from the oven, immediately butter them and salt lightly – then return to the oven for about 5 minutes until the butter is absorbed by the rounds. Serve hot or at room temperature as a snack.

Recipe adapted from Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads (Simon and Schuster)"

And here they are:


The outsides looks great, but inside, that's not quite what the inside of a bagel should look like. After taking a bite, the crust has just the right crunch then chew you want in a bagel. My jaw hurts which means either I did this right (This is Jewish food: all joy brings pain.) or I should stop putting off my dental check-up. On the other hand, the inside just squishes to nothing. That part needs work. The flavors are good though, even through the onion and sesame, cream cheese and tomato (no lox today; making the bagels was a spur of the moment decision and you have to travel to find good lox.) you can taste the distinctive warm, hearty and slightly sweet bagel flavor. Not bad at all for a first try.

I do want to improve the insides, though, so a little more research is in order. ... Done. Here's what I've learned:
* First, my dough wasn't stiff enough. A good bagel dough should be very hard to work. That should give a denser crumb in the final product.
* Second, my bagels were puffy because the simplified forming method gets out fewer air bubbles than the traditional method of rolling them out into a rope and then joining the ends.
* Third, the recipe I used had a particularly short poaching time in the sugar water. An extra minute or two would cook the outer surface more, increasing its chewiness and keep it tight so the dough couldn't rise in the oven, further reducing its puffiness.
* Fourth, a more traditional recipe uses malt syrup or powder instead of sugar, both in the dough and in the water. I'm not entirely clear how that effects the result, but the bagels I had in New York certainly used it so it couldn't hurt if I'm trying to match them.
* Fifth, a slightly higher baking temperature will get them crunchier, and
* Sixth, mixing some of the toppings into the dough isn't a bad idea.

I wonder how much of the differences are Paris vs. New York and how much from over-simplification for the home cook (something you really need to look out for if don't know where your recipes are coming from). They all seem to be easy fixes for next time, although I may have to go to a brewing supply store for the malt. Still, even without those refinements, these bagels are easily the best I've had in Miami. Of course, fresh from the oven counts for a lot. The real test will be how they freeze, defrost and toast. [And the result: eh. Not bad; could be better.]

CSA week 19 - German leek bread

Well, German onion bread with leeks substituted in, anyway.

Ingredients:
Leek filling:
3 cups thinly sliced leeks (or yellow onions) [Luckily enough, that's exactly how much came in the CSA share.]
1 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons oil
1 Tablespoon butter

Sponge:
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 Tablespoons brown sugar
1/4 cup milk
1 cup water
2 Tablespoons butter, softened

Dough:
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 cups flour

[You'll notice that I'm measuring this in volume instead of the better practice of measuring by weight. Partially that's because that's how the recipe I'm adapting is written, but given the uncertainty of the moisture level of the cooked leeks there's no real way to be precise. Use the volumes of flour and water as a rough guide.]

1. Mix all of the sponge ingredients and let it sit somewhere warm for an hour or twenty. Well, with the dairy in it, twenty probably isn't a good idea. Let it sit for as long as you're comfortable with.

2. To make the leek filling, melt the butter in the oil over medium heat. When it's stopped sizzling add the leeks, salt and sugar and cook, stirring occasionally, until golden brown and reduced in volume by two thirds. [I cooked mine just a bit too long, but it still turned out fine so don't worry too much about it. My deep brown leeks were crispy, but I don't think that's what the recipe is aiming at.] Remove leeks, draining out most of the oil. Set aside to cool.

3. Mix three quarters of the leek filling with the sponge, flour and salt [holding back a little flour to give you some room to adjust the texture]. Adjust flour and water until you get a soft, but not sticky dough. Let sit for 20 minutes to autolyse then knead until gluten is well formed.

4. Let rise in a bowl covered with a damp cloth until doubled in volume. Stretch and fold and form into the final loaf. [I chose a wide flat shape to make the next step easier. The original recipe cuts it into six pieces and rolls those out into eight-inch lengths to make horseshoe-shaped rolls] Press the remaining leeks into the top of the loaf, cover and let rise until doubled again. [Only 45 minutes with my rather active yeast.]

5. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 450 degrees (with your cast iron dutch oven in it if you're using that). When the dough's ready, bake for 30 minutes at 450 and 30 at 375 until the internal temperature reaches 210. The usual method of tapping the bottom to listen for a hollow sound doesn't work with this loaf. [My intention was to lower the heat from my usual method to avoid burning the leeks on the top of the loaf, but I neglected to turn down the heat for the first half hour.]


You can see the leeks on the outside blackened. They taste a little burnt, but they aren't too bad. And they come right off when cutting slices so they're kind of a waste anyway. Otherwise, the crust is light, crisp and flaky and the crumb is dense and soft with a bit of chew to keep it from wadding up like Wonderbread. The flavor is rich, hearty and a little sweet. It's not a flavor that calls out for snacking on its own; (A welcome change. Maybe I won't eat half the loaf within the hour for once.) It requires cured meat. Sausage is the obvious choice, but I think lox or smoked herring would work really well, too. Stinky cheeses are also a suitable accompaniment.

I've never made a specialty bread like this before. I wonder if I'll get tired of it before it gets stale.