recipes

Chocolate Salami (Grandchildren Not Included)

Have I mentioned that some of my favorite blogs are in French? Le Pétrin, Bombance, …au levain! and Makanai are some fantastic francophones that you must check out if you don’t know them.

You don’t speak French? No problem, neither do I, really. Oh, my high-school French serves in a pinch and yours probably does too, but why knock ourselves out when Google Translate is such an able servant? Thanks to this tireless polyglot-bot, a mouse click gets you the translation of any text or web page in any of 45 languages.

This came in very handy the other week when I spotted Sandra’s dazzling and decadent chocolate salami and had to have it. Feeling lazy, I called upon our trusty GT to produce the English translation of the recipe, and commenced reading through the ingredient list:

200g dark chocolate 70%. Check. I actually had exactly this amount left over from my Christmas baking. Sitting untouched for over a week in my cupboard. I amaze myself sometimes.
100g butter. Check.
2 egg yolks, extra costs. I checked the fridge. Yes, my eggs were from Whole Foods, and those are more expensive than Safeway eggs. So I was good on the pricey egg yolks.
2 tablespoons Amaretto. Check. (In the end I only used one tbsp.)
2 pinches of dried chili flakes. Check.
8 grandchildren butter (80g). What?

What is a grandchild of butter? Read on…

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?

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Stollen (With Just a Few Sour Grapes)

stollen

Today’s post was supposed to be about this year’s panettone, but we’re not going to talk about that right now. If you must have panettone, fine, go, get out! And don’t bother coming back!

Stollen is much easier than panettone. None of this fussy sweet Italian levain business, none of this persnickety adding of the sugar in stages so you don’t overhwhelm your poor fragile gluten, none of this namby-pamby hanging upside down after baking so the sissy little bread doesn’t collapse under its own weight.

No, with stollen you just throw everything into the mixer and mix the hell out of it. The hardest part is shaping the loaf so it looks like the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in the manger. (I think I did a pretty good job with that. I mean, I really see the resemblance there, don’t you?) And you won’t catch our little Lord collapsing under his own weight any time soon, now, will you?

sliced stollen

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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.

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Holiday Pocky

Pocky - chocolate dipped breadsticks

Quick, for 10 points: Pocky is/are:

a quintessentially Japanese snack
a thin sweet bread stick coated with chocolate and optionally topped with something else delicious
a fun alternative to traditional holiday cookies
easy to make at home
all of the above

(Hint: it’s E.)

I got the idea from Not Quite Nigella’s enchanting Pocky Christmas Forest, and used her recipe. Finely diced candied orange peel, shredded coconut, chopped pistachios, and crushed peppermint candy make fine toppings, but the possibilities are limitless.

pistachio-peppermint

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Fruit and Nut Bread, and Bread Matters Giveaway

fruit & nut bread

If you’re wondering why bread matters and what’s the matter with modern commercially-made bread, Andrew Whitley spells it out in Bread Matters: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own, and he doesn’t mince words. He spends the first 50 pages or so explaining why the commercial bread baking process (specifically in Britain, although I think it largely applies to most industrialized societies) is “a nutritional, culinary, social, and environmental mess.”

But maybe you knew that already, if you’re into baking your own bread. In that case, you might be drawn to this book’s unassumingly beautiful and wholesome breads, its chapter on gluten-free baking, or the recipe for kvas, a slightly alcoholic Russian drink made from rye bread, sourdough starter, and molasses.

Aside from looking like it would be just plain delicious (which it was), the recipe for Fruit and Nut Leaven Bread intrigued me because it includes the nuts (along with the dried fruit) in the soaker. This is unusual — most recipes call for nuts to be toasted or untreated — and Whitley promised the soaking would lend them “an almost buttery eating quality.” Also, the fruits and nuts constitute a wonderfully high proportion of the overall dough. I must say this was a really satisfying loaf to bake and to eat.

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