Archive for March, 2006
There are times when the best recipe is the most straight-forward. I mean, there are many breads that pair perfectly with different types of meals. For example, you might only like challah (link) for french toast and might perfer a hearty rye bread (link) for soups. A lighter loaf, like honey buttermilk or wheat (links), could be your prefered bread for sandwiches. This bread can be used for all of that. It is a simple, suprisingly flavorful white bread that is outstanding for everything from mopping up soups to making toast, though it may have to be trimmed to fit into your toaster.
I will also take this opportunity to mention how important it is to follow all the steps of a bread recipe. Generally, the process is as follows: mix, knead, rise, knead/shape, rise, bake. The trickiest part is the kneading and shaping after the first rise. When the dough is mixed, you want to handle it firmly, kneading vigourously to develop the gluten and produce a satiny, elastic dough. After that first rise, the dough must be handled more gently. Air pockets have developed in the dough and, to achieve the best textured bread, you do not want to force them out. On the other hand, the air pockets will be irregularly distributed and overly large if you skip this step and go straight into a second rise. This is why the majority of bread recipes instruct you to “gently deflate” the dough after that first rise. It lets out excess air and distributes the rest evenly. It also makes the dough easier to shape. Shaping takes practice and nothing else will be able to completely compensate for experience.
What happens if you don’t deflate the dough? Click here to see. In my bread, I “shaped” it too gently – by which I mean that I didn’t shape it at all – and got a huge pocket in my final result. I took it, very, very gently, from the bowl it was rising in and placed it on a cookie sheet to rise again. This probably won’t happen with your bread and I have since made this loaf many times without problems, so don’t worry about getting a strange outcome like this one. But it does illustrate my point that gently deflating is necessary.
This bread also has a sponge, which means that the yeast is given extra time to ferment before being added to the dough. It adds an extra step at the beginning of the recipe, but doesn’t change anything about kneading and shaping the dough.
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I really like pudding cakes. The combination of the light, moist cake layer with the bubbling sauce underneath is just delightful. I like the fact that you never need an extra topping or garnish with a serving of pudding cake (though whipped cream would work, if you like), either. I also like the fact that this dessert dessert is relatively low in fat. Using whole milk will make it richer, but it’s not necessary.
Pudding cakes only take about 5 minutes to put together and can be served almost straight from the over. Personally, I don’t mind waiting about 10 or 15 minutes, since I don’t like to burn my tongue, but it’s entirely up to you.
Orange is a nice change from the more typical lemon and chocolate pudding cakes because it’s a little bit different. The vanilla flavor comes through a bit more strongly and the whole thing is light and sweet. There is less of a tang than in the lemon pudding and less dense richness than in the chocolate pudding. I also like variations on a theme, since this is essentially the same recipe as the lemon pudding cake. It means that I have more dessert options without having to deal with a whole new recipe.
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Peanut butter can go on scones, but isn’t usually a part of the scone. It is a fairly dense product and the goal of a scone is to be light and tender. If you treat the peanut butter like butter, however, and cut it in to the flour mixture, you can create a scone that is not only tender but that has a peanut butter flavor.
The peanut butter flavor is not as strong as it would be if you simply smeared a few tablespoons of peanut butter onto your scone because it is incorporated with the flour and the butter, so it is possible that someone tasting these might simply think that they were eating an unusually rich-tasting scone without identifying the source of the flavor. The majority of people, though, will recognise the peanut butter flavor. They’ll like it, too.
A food processor is the best way to bring all the ingredients together in this recipe because the peanut butter is a bit hard to handle by hand. If you have one of those tools that is used to cut butter into flour, that will work, too. Try not to use your fingers.
These scones are light, with a definite melt-in-your-mouth quality from all the butter and peanut butter in them. Make a batch and take them into the office to share with your coworkers. They make great snacks and are less suited to putting butter or cream on them, though I suspect you could get away with jelly or jam, should you be so inclined. The mini chocolate chips add just the right amount of chocolate, in my opinion, and I would recommend using them instead of full-sized chocolate chips if you can get them. They’re delicious!
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Don’t be fooled by the title of this post. I didn’t accidentally cut myself as I worked, or anything in that vein. My result here was a happy accident, or perhaps discovery would be a better word, and the blood comes from the blood oranges that I used. There are several varieties of blood oranges and some are more red on the inside than others. The ones I used for juice here were nearly black, resulting in this delightfully colored jelly. Other blood oranges will work perfectly well, but the result will probably be more orange than pink.
This jelly came about because I wanted to make a blood orange version of Donna Hay’s lemon souffles, which I have made in a lime version already. For the souffle base, citrus juice is cooked with sugar and thickened with cornstarch. The mixture chills in the refrigerator before being folded into egg whites and baked. The blood orange base seemed to thicken more than the lime base, possibly due to the presence of more natural sugars in the orange itself. It was firm and silky smooth after a few hours in the refrigerator. I dipped a knife into it and felt a remarkably jelly-like texture. To test it, I spread it onto a few crackers and then I decided that I didn’t need to make a souffle after all.
I really liked this as a jelly/jam. It was sweet, with a slight zing from the citric acid in the orange juice. The little crackers in the photo are appetizer crackers that I picked up at Trader Joe’s, but this was really best on toast. After about a week in the fridge, the leftovers seemed to separate a bit, so I recommend using this within a few days. This is, in my opinion, a small price to pay for something that tastes so good. And a few more pieces of toast and jam never hurt anyone. Besides, you can always make a souffle with the leftovers.
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Irish soda bread is dead easy to make. It can have as few as four ingredients and uses no yeast, relying instead on the reaction between baking soda and buttermilk for leavening. This produces a reliable rise every time, no matter how inexperienced you are are baking. The four base ingredients are flour, buttermilk, baking soda and salt.
Irish soda breads are slightly denser than most breads because they have no yeast. They do no have the means to develop any of the nice, open holes that can be seen in, for example, french baguettes. The loaves are very quick to make, however, and the slight denseness makes them tasty and unique. Ths hearty bread pairs well with soups and meat dishes. The crust that develops as it bakes means that it makes outstanding toast, too.
Another good thing about soda bread is that it is versatile, especially in terns of flavors. While the base can be very plain, you can add carraway, which is fairly traditional, or currants for a sweeter bread. I like adding a mixed variety of raisins to mine and a pinch of sugar, which helps with browning. Some people use all whole wheat flour in their soda breads and others like to keep them lighter by using only all-purpose flour. While any combination of all purpose and whole wheat flours will work, the best variation, in my opinion, uses 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat flour and 1/4 cup oat flour. The whole wheat flour gives it a distinctive taste and the oat flour keeps the bread a little bit moist.
Whip this up when you walk in the door after work and let it cool while you prepare dinner. The bread should be cooled completely or almost completely before slicing.
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