recipes

Teff Trials

teff poolish bread

To anyone wondering: YES, I am still in baking school. YES, I am a little behind in writing about it.

Does six or seven weeks count as a little behind? Because here’s what we did six or seven weeks ago: We raised bread with sourdough starters made from several ancient grains: amaranth, sorghum, quinoa, millet, and teff.

My favorite of these was teff. It’s best known for the Ethiopian staple flatbread injera, but it makes a wonderful addition to loaf breads as well (although it contains little or no gluten, so a 100%-teff bread would require some of that gluten-free expertise that I don’t have yet). I’ve heard the flavor variously described as chocolate-y coffee-y, nutty, earthy. You could just call it tasty and leave it at that. And it imparts a lovely reddish crust color in the bargain.

teff poolish baguettes

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Pumpkin Brioche Apple Tart

pumpkin brioche apple tart

Bon Appétit has invited food bloggers (including me, wow!) to participate in their Blog Envy Bake-Off, which features a lineup of holiday treats, mostly gorgeous and mostly from people who know how to bake dessert. Now, we know I don’t do a lot in the way of desserts, but an invitation from Bon Appétit cannot be taken lightly. There are, however, certain requirements to consider.

Bon Appétit’s requirement:

Must be a holiday dessert.

My requirements:

Must have yeast (either that or change my name to Wild Chemical Leavening).
Must have fruit (hello, is it dessert without fruit?).
Must be a dough I love (so when I screw up the first pass on the tart — did I mention I don’t do desserts? — I don’t mind mixing the dough again).
Must be rustic (the culinary equivalent of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”).

This tart, made with a soft spiced pumpkin brioche crust, pumpkin seed (pepita) cream, and sweet-tart fall apples, fits the requirements, but is it worthy? I’ll leave that up to you. If you think so, I’d love it if you would vote for it here.

Note that the pumpkin brioche dough and pepita cream recipes make more than what you need for the tart. I used the extra of both to make cinnamon rolls — coming soon!

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Focaccia

focaccia

I don’t usually bake on request — I’m just curmudgeonly that way — but there are exceptions to everything.

Last weekend I visited North Carolina for a family meeting and was treated to fall leaf color and some wonderful Southern hospitality from my cousin P and her husband J. Grits, creamed home-grown corn, and barbecue complete with Southern-style cole slaw were just a few reasons why my palate was very happy I made that cross-country trip. When P mentioned that they were looking for a good focaccia recipe, I thought it was the least I could do.

I think I got the better end of that deal — thank you, thank you! — but the focaccia is still pretty good.

Focaccia can be crisp or soft, plain or topped, or even sweet. This one is soft, and delicious with a sprinkling of salt and fresh herbs.

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Rye Crostini

rye toasts

SFBI Update: It’s the end of week four, and we’ve been off baguettes for a week, but that doesn’t mean we have any less bread at the end of the day. Plain sourdough four ways, sour rye, multigrain sour, buckwheat levain, ciabatta, overnight baguettes (did I say we were off baguettes? liar!), egg bread, Portuguese sweet bread, more baguettes (I kid you not!), pan sandwich bread.

I give away as much of the stuff as I can. My freezer is now almost completely ruled by bread. Torta di Pane was good but didn’t make an appreciable dent in the supply. Only one thing to do: make toasts. Or if you’re Italian, call them crostini.

What’s not to love about thin crisps that can be made from even stale bread, keep for days-to-weeks, and serve as a platform for just about anything else you might feel like putting in your mouth?

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Torta di Pane

torta di pane

Am I a food blogger? If I am, I am a very bad one. What self-respecting food blogger would fail to document one of the most interesting restaurants she has ever visited?

About a year ago, we visited Lugano, Switzerland, and a college there that my daughter M was interested in. One evening, as the sun was setting, we boarded a boat that ferried us across Lake Lugano to a grotto, a traditional tavern typical of Ticino (try saying that five times fast), Lugano’s Italian-speaking canton. This grotto was accessible only by boat, and appeared to be built right into the lakeside mountain. The night was warm, and we were seated on the side of the dining room that opened out onto the water.

It was too dark, even inside, for photos, but if I had been taking better notes (or any notes at all, actually) I would have been able to tell you the grotto’s name (which, thanks to Google omniscient, I believe was Grotto dei Pescatori).

I would have been able to remember the names of some of the dozens of antipasti — fish, meats, vegetables, cheeses — laid out on the colossal wooden table from which we served ourselves in a cool room adjoining the dining room.

I would have been able to describe in detail the delicious fish our host brought after I responded “pesce” to the question “carne o pesce,” which was as close as things ever got to ordering from a menu. (Actually, I would have been able to remember the Italian for “meat or fish?” without having to use an online translator just now. And I do hope I got it right; I’m sure I’ll hear about it if I didn’t.)

And I would have been able to say with certainty that dessert was torta di pane. It’s a good bet that it was, though, because according to Nick Malgieri, in whose lovely book A Baker’s Tour I found this recipe (as I was browsing my cookbooks looking for something to do with all the baguettes I have lying around lately):

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Plum-Ginger Upside-Down Cake

plum-ginger upside-down cake

How do you know when someone is a true friend? I suppose there are lots of ways, but here’s one that worked for me last week: I showed up at my friends Erika and Roger’s house for lunch with this plum-ginger upside-down cake in one hand and my camera in the other. They didn’t bat an eye when I said I wanted to get a photo of a slice of the cake once we cut into it. They didn’t say, “Susan, you are a pathetic dork.” They didn’t say, “Put the damn camera down and let us eat our dessert.” They didn’t say, “What do we look like, Olan Mills?” Just, “Which would you prefer, a white plate or a patterned one?” And on top of that, Erika let me win at Upwords. You guys are the best.

I bought the plums with the idea of making some sort of upside-down cake, but I was prepared to have to search for a recipe. As luck would have it, Mimi (Delectable Tidbits) posted a lovely fig upside-down cake that very day, and it proved to be the perfect starting point for my cake. I replaced the figs with plums, added some crystallized ginger to the dough (yes, it’s really more dough than batter, which of course suits me just fine), and scaled it to a 7-1/4-inch size. Now this is my kind of cake: rustic, fruity, swarthy (as Mimi put it), dense and moist. Mimi, you’re the best too.

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