breakfast

Orange-Pecan Sticky Buns with Dates and Cranberries

I looked at the ingredient list for this month’s Paper Chef, and this is what it said:

dried dates • cranberries • flour • candied orange peel

This is what I read:

dried dates • cranberries • candied orange peel

And I thought, Hm, only three ingredients. Aren’t there supposed to be four? Apparently I have come to take flour completely for granted. Like air.

Paper Chef is a creative challenge where the month’s host draws three ingredients at random from a collectively-compiled list and adds a fourth of his or her choosing. I haven’t participated often, since the list is apt to include ingredients like salmon or liver, which don’t particularly lend themselves to bread. But this month, I couldn’t resist the combination of fruits that turned up in the lottery.

[Read more…]

Conchas de Colores Naturales

Walk into any Mexican panadería, and there are plenty of them around here, and I guarantee your eye will be caught by a colorful array of conchas. This sweet roll, whose name derives from its sugar-paste topping scored to resemble a shell, is the most visually fun, and maybe the best-known, pan dulce of all.

You might notice that the colors of my conchas are more muted than those you often see. Not being a big fan of food coloring, I experimented with more natural ways of coloring the topping. I used (clockwise from upper left) coarsely ground cacao nibs, dehydrated raspberries and blueberries (finely ground in a spice mill along with a bit of granulated sugar to keep them from clumping), and acai berry powder:

This is how the corresponding finished conchas looked:

[Read more…]

The Difference Between Panettone and…

About three years ago, it came to my attention that my pressurized toilets were, literally, ticking time bombs. Nothing bad happened, but it was only a matter of time. I knew this because the company was offering to replace those toilets with new (plain old, non-pressurized) toilets. Free shipping and everything. You’d have to pay for the plumber to install the new ones, but still, replacing them seemed like a no-brainer when you read things like “worst case, they explode and flood the house.”

A simple phone call and everything was arranged, no questions asked. My new toilets would be sent out by UPS within a week. All I had to do was sit back, relax, and hope my back end didn’t meet that worst-case scenario before those babies arrived.

Sure enough, a few days later I came home from work to find one of those UPS post-its on my front door. The gist was, “We tried to deliver your toilets but you weren’t home. We’ll be back tomorrow. Please be home.” Well, I wouldn’t be home tomorrow either, but surely this could be fixed with a phone call to the UPS Lady.

Me: Can you please leave my toilets in my driveway tomorrow?

UPS Lady: I’m sorry, ma’am, those items require a signature. We can’t leave them unless someone is home to sign for them. You have five business days to take delivery before we have to send them back.

Me: Can I waive that signature thing?

[Read more…]

Pandoro

pandoro

Let’s begin with the name: is it “pandoro” or “pan d’oro?” In The Italian Baker, Carol Field writes, “Although the name suggests pan d’oro (golden bread), pandoro is actually a dialect word for a Veronese dessert made more than two centuries ago.”

My own choice of appellation owes more to laziness than a commitment to historical accuracy. “Pandoro” is easier to type, and doesn’t require me to constantly edit after I’ve hit the semicolon key instead of the apostrophe. Let;s face it, I;m a slacker.

Whatever you call it, though, “golden bread” is definitely an apt description for this sweet, egg-and-butter-rich Italian holiday bread.

[Read more…]

Bagels Revisited

bagels

I am not a bagel expert. I do not claim to know how to identify or bake an authentic bagel. However, I do know what I like, and I like dense, chewy bagels. Bready bagels are just bread in the shape of a doughnut. What’s the point of that, please? And to get a chewy bagel, you need one thing: gluten, and lots of it.

I make bagels often, and normally use high-gluten flour (King Arthur Flour’s Sir Lancelot) to achieve the stiff, smooth, incredibly strong dough that yields optimal chewiness. This time, however, when I went to reach for that flour, I came up empty-handed. And because it was the hottest day of the year, I just had to have bagels. (You’re the same way, right?) Vital wheat gluten to the rescue.

Vital wheat gluten looks like flour but is essentially pure gluten. It is readily available, packaged or in bulk, in many grocery and natural foods stores, or can be ordered online. I found that replacing the high-gluten flour in my usual sourdough bagel recipe with a mixture of 97% flour (the regular flour I use for bread) and 3% vital wheat gluten gave me a bagel that was virtually indistinguishable from the original.

There are two schools of thought regarding bagel shaping. As with boxers vs. briefs, Mac vs. Windows, or over-the-roll vs. under-the-roll, people seem to fall uncompromisingly into one camp or another. Yes, I have tried the punch-a-hole-in-a-ball-of-dough-and-stretch-it-out method, but the roll-the-ends-of-the-snake-together method is far superior. It just is.

[Read more…]

Pain d’Épices

The challenge for this month’s BreadBakingDay #18, hosted by Mansi (Fun & Food Blog) and Zorra (1x umrühren bitte), was Quick Breads. When I think of “quick bread” I usually think of a giant loaf-shaped muffin, not really a bread at all. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I wanted a bread. Or as close as you can get to bread without involving some sort of yeast.

I thought of soda bread, but with Saint Patrick’s Day well over by the time I got to doing this, it just didn’t seem right. I scanned my books and settled on Pain d’Épices from Nick Malgieri’s A Baker’s Tour. The recipe contains no fat whatsoever (no eggs, no butter, no oil, no milk) so I knew it would not bear much resemblance to a muffin. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was how much I would love this.

There’s no question that this a very homely looking loaf, but the plain-Jane appearance belies its seductive nature. The flavor derives mainly from anise, complimented by mustard powder and cinnamon, and from honey. I’m going to be living and breathing that anise-mustard-cinnamon-honey combination for quite some time to come. I’m going to be sleeping with it and injecting it into my veins. If I run out, I’m going to be trading my first-born child for it. Really.

[Read more…]