Archive for January, 2010
One of the hardest things about bread-making – especially with artisanal breads that involve multiple slow rises – is the timing. The recipes are stretched out over many, many hours and I’ve heard of people waking up at all hours of the night just to feed their starters, knead down a first rise or get a loaf into the oven. To be honest, hearing stories like this makes breadmaking seem intimidating, when it’s really not all that difficult to do! Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day breaks down bread-making into simple and easy to follow steps that remove the stress from trying your hand at artisan breads. And Reinhart does it all without “dumbing down” the recipes, instead relying on clear explanations and detailed instructions to encourage the reader to bake and produce great results.
As I said, the recipes are very easy to follow. While Reinharts previous books are detailed, this book approaches the task of artisan bread baking looking for new techniques and new methods that will make the process simpler but still produce great results. Many of the breads have starters, most call for long rises and they are all shaped by hand before baking. The instructions simply serve to reassure you as they guide you. Want to do a 4 hour rise? A 48 hour rise? No problem. Just leave the dough as the book tells you and come back any time for the next step. There is none of the buildup (high stress for many would-be bakers) of having to stick to a set-in-stone timeline as you work.
The book is filled with beautiful photos, showing the breads in progress as well as the finished loaves. When shaping techinques are called for, such as braiding a loaf, photos showing the steps accompany the instructions. The recipes are divided into Sourdough Breads, French Breads, Enriched Breads and Rich Breads, and there is also a chapter that discusses the methods used in the book and breadmaking in general to start things off. The breads range from simple sandwich breads to whole grain sourdoughs and sweet brioche. Finally, if you have Reinhart’s other books, keep in mind that the recipes and techniques, even for the same breads, are different in this book, so it’s work getting if you’re a fan of his work. Otherwise, it’s a well-rounded book that should appeal to experienced bakers and for those just looking to get their feet wet.
After eating a sub-par muffin at a diner I really like recently, I realized that it has been far too long since I made a batch of muffins at home. It’s funny to have gotten out of the “habit” of making a batch every week or two, since they’re so easy to make, but then again there is nothing like an absecse (of muffins, in this case) to make the heart grow fonder. I wanted to make use of some of the oranges from my tree, so I decided to go with orange blueberry muffins.
For some reason, lemon ends up paired with blueberry much more often than orange. It’s true that tarter lemon makes a nice contrast with the sweetness of the berries, but oranges are plenty zesty and really brighten up an otherwise plain muffin. I used both fresh orange juice and plenty of orange zest in these, giving a great orange backdrop for the blueberriesin this muffin. Fresh orange zest will go a long way in providing orange flavor, but you can use store-bought orange juice if you don’t have fresh juice at the ready.
The muffins are moist and sweet enough to stand on their own without needing jam, honey or other toppings. They have a great orange flavor to them, too. These will keep well in an airtight container (or a ziploc bag) for a couple of days, so you can enjoy a batch over the course of several mornings without worrying that you have too many muffins around. Fresh and frozen berries will work in these muffins. If you do use frozen, try not to over-mix them into the batter, or you’ll risk the berries thawing slightly and streaking the batter with purple!
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The most difficult thing about making sandwich cookies, whether you’re making an Oreo-type sandwich with crispy cookies or a whoopie pie with cake-like cookies, if getting all the cookies to be about the same size and shape. When they’re not, your sandwiches will look less than perfect, and you’ll often end up with a cookie leftover that just doesn’t fit well with anything else. My solution to this problem is practice. When you form enough balls of cookie dough, your eye gets used to a certain size. Weighing the dough out works even better, although you still have to shape them into balls.
The Whoopie Pie Pan from Williams-Sonoma makes things even easier. It looks a lot like a muffin-top pan, with shallow rounds for dough that limit how big your cookies can get. All you need to do is place your dough into the rounds and you’ll end up with cookies that are all the same size every time (though it is possible to get different thicknesses if you significantly over or under-estimate the amount of dough you need). The pan is nonstick and can be used with a variety of cookie doughs, from whoopie pies to brownies. It would be great for making ice cream sandwiches, too, and can hold a loose batter together when simply dolloping the batter onto a baking sheet can’t. Still, most of the time you’ll be able to make cookies like these without a specialized pan, but if you make them often, this will definitely speed up the process for you and might be worth the investment!
This month, Girl Scouts around the US will kick off their annunal cookie sales. Some councils have already started, and some will be gearing up in the next few days. This is a time of year that most cookie-lovers look forward to because it means we can pick up a few boxes of our seasonal favorites. The Girl Scout Cookies are produced by two different bakeries, Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Smart Cookies, so the distribution of the new cookies flavors varies by region and which bakery supplies cookies in your area. Samoas (Caramel de Lites), Thin Mints, Tagalongs (Peanut Butter Patties), Do-Si-Dos (Peanut Butter Sandwich), Trefoils (Shortbread) are available everywhere. Lemon Chalet Cremes, a lemon-filled cookie, and Lemonades, a lemon iced cookie, are back for another season but are available in different regions. Thanks-a-Lot, a chocolate-dipped shortbread cookie and the 100-calorie pack Daisy-Go-Rounds are also back from the ABC Bakery, while the Dulce De Leche shortbread cookies return from Little Brownie Bakers. One new cookie this year is called Thank U Berry Munch, light and crispy cookies with dried cranberries and puffed rice cereal in them. As much as I like the new cookies, I still think back to some of my favorites from years gone by and hope that some of them – like Lemon Coolers, Golden Yangles, Aloha Chips and Juliettes – will make a return!
While I’ll be on the lookout for Girl Scouts to support (and new cookies to try), I’ll also be baking my own at home as I do every year. Homemade Girl Scout Cookie recipes make it easy to have cookies any time of year and, since they tend to cost less than the boxed cookies, where only a percentage goes to the troops, you can donate the savings directly to your favorite group of Girl Scouts (and maybe encourage them to have their own bake sale) to support them.
If you had an Easy Bake Oven growing up and liked it for the fun of baking small batches of miniature dessets, but are now a little bit too old to appreciate the unique flave and texture of the teeny cake mixes that come with such a gadget (or are looking for something a little hotter than a lightbulb to do the baking), you might want to get yourself a Mini Cupcake Maker to play around with. The machine looks a bit like a George Foreman grill from the outside. Inside, it has 7 nonstick mini muffin cavities. Put your batter in, close the lid, and you’ll have a small batch of miniature cupcakes, muffins or brownies in just a couple of minutes. It’s also not a bad idea if you’re looking for a little more portion control and don’t want to make a dozen or two dozen cupcakes at a time, although since most recipes aren’t scaled for such an amount, you’ll have to experiment with halving recipes when you work with one of these.
I think that you’re still going to get the best results with a “real” oven, but if time and space are at a premium, one of these little gadgets might not turn out to be such a bad thing – especially if it means you can have freshly baked cupcakes at a moment’s notice!
