From Apple Jam to Crabapple Jelly

We've been listening to George Harrison's All Things Must Pass a lot recently, including its largely improvisatory Apple Jam sides ("Out of the Blue"!).

 fig. a:  George's Apple Jam

But, when it comes to making tasty jams (or jellies, as the case may be) of our own, we've been singularly focused on crabapples of late.

 fig. b:  crabapples

In part, that's because there's nothing quite like crabapple jelly:  that colour, that tartness, that natural set.  Most other jellies are either notoriously finicky, or they're just not nearly as pretty.

But, mainly, it's because we've had access to a particularly fruitful crabapple tree.  When the wild turkeys haven't been shaking it down (literally), we've been free to harvest this tree to our hearts' delight.

 fig. c:  crabapple tree

 fig. d:  freshly picked crabapples

At work, Michelle makes large quantities of crabapple jelly to serve with terrines, mousses, and pâtés.  With these crabapples, she makes small batches of jelly to spread on our toast.  Either way, the method is essentially the same.

Crabapple Jelly à la Michelle

Stem, clean and sort through the crabapples, removing any that are rotten. 

Place in a medium/large pot, depending on how many apples you have. 

Just barely cover with water.  You should be able to press down on them, getting the water to cover them when you do. 

Cook for 20-25 minutes at a simmer until your crabapples are falling apart and fragrant.
Pour through a chinois and let drip.* 

For every 10 parts juice, add 6-7 parts sugar, depending on the tartness of your crabapples. 

Place the juice and sugar in an appropiately sized pot, bring to a simmer, and cook at a simmer until you reach the gel stage. 

A drop of liquid should come off the spoon in a sheet rather than a droplet. 

Place in sterilized jars and seal according to proper canning procedures. Or simply pour into any clean glass container and let set, then store in the fridge.   

Voilà!

* You can also use a jelly bag for this step, but Michelle prefers to use a chinois because it speeds up the process.

And, either way, the results are beautiful--to the eye, and to the palate.



 figs. e & f:  crabapple jelly for breakfast

Of course, it pays to have homemade bread on hand to enjoy your jelly with,

 fig. g:  pain de campagne

but that's another story.

Act fast:  crabapple season is already in full swing.

aj

Top Ten #53

1.  The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974), La Soufrière (1977), and The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984), all directed by Werner Herzog, plus Herzog on Herzog, ed. Paul Cronin

2.  Destroyer, Il Motore, February 7, 2014

3.  Grand Budapest Hotel birthday dinner, featuring Hungarian goulash, Hungarian home fries, roasted carrots, salad, sausage, cheese, and Sour Cherry Torte



4.  sweet memories of  Charleston



5.  Tim Hecker, Virgins (Kranky)

sample track:  "Amps, Drugs, Harmonium"

6.  the pleasures of cucina povera

7.  Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (Viking)



8.  The Incredible String Band, Earthspan (Reprise)

sample track:  "Sunday Song"

9.  ongoing experiments with whole wheat and rye



10.  The Clock (2010), dir. Marclay, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal

aj

You can't always get what you want...

 fig. a:  Old Nova Scotia

A few weeks I got caught up in a small-scale research project of sorts.

A friend of mine, S., was on the lookout for Nova Scotia-style brown bread.  S. hails from New Scotland, and she had a hankering for a taste from home.  She thought there must be somewhere in Montreal that baked or offered Maritimes-style brown bread, but I wasn't so sure.  After all, it's nearly impossible to get loaves that have deep roots in Montreal--like a true caraway rye--let alone loaves from beyond Quebec, and especially loaves from other provinces.

Now, at first I thought she had something along the lines of Boston brown bread in mind.  S. had mentioned molasses and I was fairly certain that steamed brown bread could be found in the Maritimes, too.  I was right about that,* but it turned out she had a more conventional baked bread in mind, one that came topped with rolled oats.

All of a sudden, I could picture it.  This Maritimes-style brown bread was definitely something I'd seen in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island a few years ago.  In fact, I was convinced I'd tasted it, too.  And I was pretty sure I could smell its sweet, homey aroma.

Now, as it turns out, I'd been on something of a molasses kick in my bread baking.  For a few months, a good percentage of the loaves I'd made on my weekly adventures in baking were either corn rye or Danish rye loaves, both of which featured the lovely rounded flavours of molasses.  So I decided to take up the quest for Nova Scotia-style brown bread as a challenge, and I told S. I was doing so.  My only caveat was that, no matter what I discovered, I was going to develop a sourdough version of brown bread.

Now, that might sound a little ungenerous, but I was fairly certain that at some point in the past, sometime before the advent of industrialized yeast, Nova Scotia brown bread had been made with sourdough starter.  S. is a historian--I was hoping she'd understand.

When I began to research Nova Scotia brown bread online, I became even more set in my ways.  It might just have been the quality of the photographs in question, but I wasn't crazy about the kinds of recipes I was finding--or the way the results of those recipes looked.

Well, it turns out I was wrong, or, at least, the predominant method for baking Nova Scotia brown bread was altogether different from what I'd imagined.  Apparently, traditional bread baking in the Maritimes had been accomplished with homemade yeast.

As Marie Nightingale explains in our copy of Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens:

For the wise mother who still insists that home-made bread is a necessity for her family's health and enjoyment, bread-making is an easy task as compared to that of earlier days.  Today we begin with prepared yeast, either in cake or granular form, but in the old days the yeast had first to be made before thought could be given to making bread.

Making the yeast starter from hops and potatoes was a process that involved days, so care had to be taken to keep a supply always on hand.  Kept tightly corked in stone jars and stored in a cool place, the yeast would stay sweet and fresh for a couple of months.

As intrigued as I was by the idea of making homemade yeast, I had a sourdough starter on hand, and it was definitely sweet and fresh, so I stuck to my plan.  And, basically, I used this project as an excuse to overhaul my whole wheat bread recipe, which I'd always found a little ascetic.

This is what I came up with:

 fig. b:  is for brown & bread

AEB Brown Bread 

200 grams leaven (20%) 

630 grams water (80º F, ideally) + an additional 50 grams of warm water (68%) 

100 grams fancy molasses (10%) 

[total hydration:  780 grams (78%), including the molasses] 

600 grams whole wheat bread flour (60%) 

400 grams AP flour (40%) 

[total flour:  1 kg (100%)] 

20 grams kosher salt (2%) 

rolled oats (as needed)

Notes:  Top each loaf with untoasted rolled oats before the final rise.  I don't bother slashing my loaves before I bake them, as the topping of rolled oats makes this too difficult.  I just let these loaves go freeform.

 fig. c:  rolled oats

I've mentioned this before, but my sourdough method is borrowed directly from Chad Robertson's from Tartine Bread.  For optimum results, you should follow his directions closely.  Here, I'm just providing the measurements (in weight) and baker's percentages that you need to make two large loaves (roughly 2 pounds each).

Anyway, I was pretty thrilled with the results.

 fig. d:  sliced bread

In fact, this brown bread instantly became our house favourite, a loaf that made particularly great sandwiches, not to mention a loaf that had us bolting out of bed in the morning (well, at least it had me bolting out of bed in the morning) to make toasts with only butter on them.  Nothing else is needed.  Except maybe a soft-boiled egg.

 fig. e:  e is for egg

Or possibly the occasional drizzle of honey, but somehow that usually seems like gilding the lily to me.

S. liked it, too.  Because, of course, as soon as I tested it, I invited S. and J. over for dinner and baked her her very own loaf.  Nova Scotian verdict:  "super tasty!"

I took that to mean success.  But mostly I saw it as another example of how you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, well, you just might find you get what you need.  We certainly did.

aj

* Steamed Brown Bread shows up sixth in Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens' section on Breads, after Anadama Bread, Rolled Oats Bread (one of the inspirations here), French Bread, Salt Rising Bread, and Sally Lunns.

Corn Rye

Corn and rye make for one of my all-time favourite combinations, but this recipe has nothing to do with corn mash or bourbon.  It's just a really nice recipe for a sourdough rye, featuring a couple of ingredients that are quintessentially American:  corn and molasses.

I got the idea after picking up some beautiful stoneground corn meal from Dexter's Grist Mill in Sandwich, MA back in August when we were visiting Cape Cod.

 fig. a:  corn meal

This corn meal was excellent, but it was also much coarser than I was used to, and a little too coarse to make my corn bread with.  (Read:  rustic!).  I had the idea of using it in a sourdough mixture so that the corn meal and its kernels would have the time to go through a slow fermentation process, retaining their size and their colour, but becoming more pleasantly edible.  I've always loved the combination of corn and rye, and bringing them together with molasses in a riff on my Danish sourdough rye made a lot of sense to me.

The results have been fantastic.  The kind of bread that you can't wait to turn into hot buttered toast in the morning.  The kind of bread that makes lunchtime a true joy.  The kind of bread that has you running home in the evening so that you can enjoy some more with your dinner.  That kind of bread.

My sourdough method is borrowed entirely from Chad Robertson's from Tartine Bread.  Moreover, my rye loaves--like my basic rye, my caraway rye, my Danish rye, and now this Corn Rye--are all based on Robertson's sourdough rye recipe from the very same book.  For optimum results, you should follow his directions closely.  Here, I'm just providing the measurements (in weight) and baker's percentages that you need to make two large loaves (roughly 2 pounds each).

Sourdough Corn Rye 

200 grams leaven (20%) 

600 grams warm water (80º F, ideally) + an additional 50 grams of warm water (65%)

100 grams fancy molasses (10%)  

[total hydration:  750 grams (75%), including the molasses] 

600 grams AP flour (60%) 

300 grams rye flour (30%) 

100 grams stoneground corn meal (preferably coarse) (10%) 

 [total flour:  1 kg (100%)]

20 grams of kosher salt (2%)

Photographic documentation:

  fig. b:  after first shaping

Here, the loaves have been given their initial shaping.  They've rested for 30 minutes.  They're just about to get their final shaping.

 fig. c:  after second shaping

Here's loaf #1 after its final shaping.

 fig. d:  before dusting

This loaf has received its final shaping and it's been placed in a rice flour-dusted towel in a bowl.  It's also upside down.  It will get dusted with more rice flour, it will get covered by the towel, and it will then go through its final fermentation process over the course of a few hours.

 fig. e:  dusted!

Now the same loaf has been dusted, and it's waiting to get wrapped in the towel.

 fig. f:  half loaf, full loaf

These are the two finished loaves.  One is already half-gone.

 fig. g:  corn rye

Finally, this is an interior view of that half loaf.  You can see plenty of evidence of the coarse corn meal.  And it it looks moist, that's because it is.  In fact, it's a real keeper.  Still delicious days after baking (if you haven't eaten it by then).

This would  make a great loaf for a Thanksgiving feast.  It could also make for an excellent bread stuffing, so you might want to bake some extra and let it stale a little before the Big Day.  Just stick with those traditional, honest-to-goodness American flavours when you construct your stuffing.

Happy baking.  And happy Thanksgiving!

aj

Corn Bread Nation

 fig. a:  What?  Chestnuts?

I've thought a lot about this map since the first time we posted it way back when.

I've thought about its telling aspects, like the Great Plains and (the absence of) bison.  But I've also thought about some of its more mysterious elements--like the fact that "Corn Bread & BBQ" somehow excludes the entire state of North Carolina, and that most of Tar Heel State is said to be defined by "Chestnut" instead.

Of course both corn bread and barbecue are hotly divisive issues across much of America, but regardless how you feel about North Carolina corn bread and/or North Carolina barbecue, North Carolina's certainly got a pretty strong claim on both.  After all, this is a state that people regularly claim has the strongest connection to the American barbecue tradition.*  This is a state that when people talk about "the family tree of barbecue," and how it has spread all over the country--and, believe me, plenty of people do--many of them claim that "its deepest tap root" is right there, in North Carolina.**

This is also a state that's serious about its cornmeal and its corn bread.  In fact, the North Carolina tradition is to serve barbecue with two principal accompaniments:  cole slaw and some variation on corn bread, be it actual corn bread, cornpone, cornsticks, or, most commonly, hush puppies.

These people eat a lot of pork, much of it in the form of barbecue.  They also consume great quantities of cornmeal, often with barbecue.  If North Carolina isn't a part of Corn Bread & BBQ Nation, something's truly gone amiss.

Anyway, the point is that when I started to plan a short BBQ Odyssey a couple of weeks ago (more on this later), I got so excited I did two things.  I fired up the smoker and made my first batch of 2013 season barbecue.  And I broke out the cornmeal and made some real skillet corn bread.

I spent a good chunk of my life south of the Mason-Dixon line, but only just south of it, and our family was essentially a family of Northern Virginia carpetbaggers.  I didn't grow up in a true Southern household.  I don't have particularly deep ancestral ties to corn bread.  (I've got maple syrup in my veins, not cornmeal.)  But I do have deep personal ties to corn bread.  Corn bread was just about the first thing that I started cooking when I was a kid.  It was certainly the thing I was most excited to make for years.

The kind of corn bread I made for a long time was typical carpetbagger fare.  It was the kind of corn bread that came all gussied up with too many eggs and too much sugar.  The kind of corn bread I make these days is much more minimal.  It's not sweet at all, and it's really all about the cornmeal.  Which can be a difficult thing to find here in Maple Syrup Nation.  I mean, it's not particularly difficult to find cornmeal, but it's exceedingly difficult to find the kind of cornmeal you need to make a true Southern-style corn bread.  You need to keep your eyes open for real old-school, stone-ground cornmeal, especially when you're in the States, like the Old Wye Mill "Golden Run Yellow Cornmeal" you see below, or some brand of white "Old Virginia Style" cornmeal, depending on which side of the fence you're on.

 fig. b:  true cornmeal

It pays to be picky, because, again, with a true Southern corn bread, it's the cornmeal that's the star attraction, and a mediocre cornmeal results in an insipid corn bread.

I also used to bake my corn bread in a 9" x 9" baking dish, but I've long since preferred to bake it in a cast-iron skillet.  There's something about the ritual of it.  But for that you need a nicely seasoned skillet.

Otherwise, making a true Southern-style corn bread couldn't be easier.  And once you've assembled necessary ingredients, the process is very fast, and very satisfying.

 fig. c:  true skillet corn bread

Skillet Corn Bread 

4 oz. stone-ground cornmeal (this works out to about 1 cup, but I highly recommend weighing your cornmeal)
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 large egg
3/4 cup buttermilk (preferably whole buttermilk)
1 tbsp peanut oil, bacon fat, or lard 

special equipment:  an 8-inch well-seasoned skillet 

Preheat your oven to 425º.  Measure the dry ingredients into a bowl and whisk them thoroughly to break up any lumps.  Break the egg into a separate bowl and whisk it lightly.  Add the buttermilk to the egg and whisk to blend. 

Five minutes before you are read to bake your corn bread, add the fat to skillet and place it in the hot oven. 

When four minutes have elapsed, add the egg and buttermilk blend to the dry ingredients, whisking just to blend (in other words, do not blend too much!).  One minute later--at the 5-minute mark--take the skillet from the oven (remember, it will be HOT) and carefully swirl the fat around the bottom of the skillet and along the sides so that the skillet is evenly coated.  Immediately pour the batter into the skillet, using a circular motion for even distribution.  You'll notice that the batter sizzles and climbs up the sides of the skillet slightly.  That's a good sign.  

Return the skillet to the oven and bake the corn bread for about 20-25 minutes, until it is nicely set and golden brown on top.  Remove from the oven and quickly, but confidently flip it out onto a cutting board.  Cut into wedges and serve. 

Makes one 8-inch corn bread. 

[recipe from John "I know a thing or two about Corn Bread Nation" Thorne's Serious Pig [I've tried a lot of different recipes, but this is the one I go back to the most)]

Highly acceptable variation:  w/ real smoked bacon bits (preferably from the strip/s you used to produce the necessary bacon fat).

Now, this is an ideal corn bread to serve with all kinds of Southern fare, including barbecue, and I also like to serve it Southwestern fare, such as chili, but one of my favourite treats involves taking this thoroughly unsweet skillet corn bread straight out of the oven and piping hot and giving it a friendly shove in the sweet direction:

Cut a wedge.  Slice the wedge in half to form a wedge-shaped sandwich.  Pour some sorghum molasses inside.  Close the sandwich.  Pour a bit more sorghum molasses on top.  Devour.***

It's kind of like a Southern-style treacle tart.

 fig. d:  skillet corn bread snack

It would be great with vanilla ice cream, too.

Hmm, might be time to bake another batch of corn bread...

aj

* Jane and Michael Stern, for instance.

** Jim Auchmutey, of The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook fame, has claimed this very thing.

*** If you don't have any sorghum molasses on hand, or don't care for the stuff, a quality honey makes for another delicious option.

Got bread?, pt. 1

fig. a: bread, bread

Good. Me too.

Of course, with bread this good, you barely need to do anything to it. But, then again, there's no need to be a puritanical about it. If you don't have access to "elemental bread" from a real, artisanal bakery (like Tartine, Red Hen, or Bohemian) you can bake your own, any time you like, no matter where you live.* So, go ahead, dress it up a little.

There are obviously plenty of different ways you could put those beautiful loaves to work, but Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread really is a great cookbook on top of being an exceptional baking book. It's chock full of all kinds of tempting recipes involving fresh and staled bread, including soups (white gazpacho, sopa de ajo, North African breakfast soup, etc.), salads (panzanellas, kale caesar, escalivada, etc.), sandwiches (pan bagnat, meatball sandwiches, bruschetta of all sorts, etc.), and a number of other mains and sides (tomates provençales, porchetta, savory bread pudding, etc.).

One that's become an instant favorite here at AEB, and that happens to be particularly seasonal at the moment, is Robertson's fresh chickpea hummus, which he serves as an open-faced sandwich on fried bread with olive oil-packed sardines, hard-boiled egg, and cilantro (!). Sounds inviting, right? It is. And his fresh chickpea hummus is unlike any hummus we've ever had before--lighter and more herbal (vernal, even), with a real chlorophyll punch.

Where to begin? Well, first you're going to need two pounds of fresh chickpeas. Dried and canned chickpeas are pretty much ubiquitous at this point in time, but fresh chickpeas aren't. So you'll probably have to hit up one of your better Mediterranean/Middle Eastern greengrocers. We got ours at Chez Nino, at Jean-Talon Market, and they looked something like this.

fig. b: fresh chickpeas by the bag

Then you're going to have to shell them. This takes a while, because there's no way to cheat and do them en masse--you've got to do them one by one, with your fingers. They're not nearly as finicky as fava beans, though, so don't worry. Just put on a record, pour yourself a drink, relax, and start peeling. Get a friend to help you, and it'll go twice as fast.

Once you get into it, it's actually kind of fun. There's something of the pleasure of popping bubble wrap to them, but this is endlessly more rewarding. Trust me. Instead of being left with plastic and air, you're left with something that's pretty and edible. The best are those nice full ones. They tend to be easier to shell, but they're also ripe and obviously full of flavor (try a raw one, if you don't believe me), and they also do a better job of filling your bowl. The very best are the twins, which are as cute as... well... two peas in a pod.**

fig. c: little twin peas

When you're done, you'll have a pile of freshly shelled fresh chickpeas that looks something like this.

fig. d: fresh chickpeas, shelled

And once you have those, and you've assembled all the other ingredients, you can really get started.

Open-Faced Sandwiches with Fresh Chickpea Hummus and Sardines, a.k.a. The Hummus Sardwich

For the hummus:

2 pounds fresh chickpeas (a.k.a. garbanzo beans), shelled
3 cloves garlic
3 tbsp sesame tahini
12 fresh mint leaves
juice of 1 lemon
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

For the sandwiches:

olive oil
2 slices fresh or day-old bread (Robertson recommends his Whole-Wheat Bread, but we've found that his Country Bread is our favorite)
1 hard-boiled egg
one 3.75-oz can olive oil-packed sardines
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro

To make the hummus, bring a pot of water to a boil. Fill a bowl with ice water and place it nearby. Add the chickpeas and garlic to the boiling water and cook for 2 minutes. Drain and transfer to the ice water to cool them, then drain again.

Put the chickpeas, garlic, tahini, mint, lemon juice, and salt in a food processor. Process until smooth. With the motor on, add the olive oil in a steady stream until the hummus has the consistency you like. Adjust the seasoning.

Pour 1/4 inch of olive oil into a skillet and heat over medium-high heat. Add the bread and fry until deep golden brown and very crisp, about 3 minutes. Turn and fry until deep golden brown and crisp on the second side too.

Press the hard-boiled egg through a sieve like this.

fig. e: boiled egg, sieve

Spread the hummus on the fried bread and top with sardines. Garnish with the sieved egg and chopped cilantro and serve.

fig. f: hummus sardwich

Enjoy. Heartily.

Serves two, with plenty of leftover hummus to be used as you see fit.

[based very closely on a recipe entitled "Sardines and Fresh Garbanzo Hummus" in Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread]

If you're not big on the idea of sardines, just leave them out and make the fresh chickpea hummus. It really is something else. Serve it on its own, as you would a traditional hummus. Or make a sandwich with grilled vegetables, like artichoke hearts, red peppers, or asparagus.

Just make sure to make it sometime soon. Spring is slipping away, and so is the season for fresh chickpeas.

aj

* Well, maybe not exactly "any time you like" and "no matter where you live," but nearly.

** Not unlike these guys:

fig. g: two peas in a pod

Club Med

fig. a: Neptune knows how to stay cool*

We didn't have it nearly as bad as many of you to the west and the south, but for a while there, it was so steamy hot that it was affecting activities here in the AEB Test Kitchen. This was not necessarily a bad thing. We're of the persuasion that if it doesn't ever get HOT! at some point in time during the summer, then you really haven't had a summer. And in recent years, here in Montreal, more often than not, that's been the case--we really haven't had much of a summer.

How hot are we talking about? It has to get to the point where all you can think about is grabbing an ice cream cone or going for a swim. And the thought of cooking a meal over a hot stove, or using a hot oven, is just plain out of the question. It's got to get to the point where all you really want is a cool bowl of gazpacho.

We had that kind of weather back in July, and now the heat is back, minus the humidity (ed: I take that back--the humidity's back too). It's not nearly the scorcher that it was last month, but it is hot enough that a cool menu is very much in order.

A few weeks ago, we threw a little dinner for some friends. Now, luckily, it wasn't during the hazy, hot, and humid heights of a heatwave, but it was right after one, so using the stove & oven wasn't really an issue, but we were still leaning towards a meal that could be served at room temperature, and that's when we came up with the following Med spread.

As you may have noticed over the years, we have a tendency here at AEB to come up with meals with strong themes to them. Meals like our grand aïoli. Or our homage to España. Or our DIY cabane à sucre. This time we wanted a meal that had a theme to it, but we didn't want it to be overbearing, we just wanted it to go along with the Provençal wines we'd lined up to drink. We considered going Spanish, or Southern French, or Italian, or Greek. Then we realized, why don't we just go "Med"?

Here are some of the highlights, perfect for a warm, late-summer evening. Ideal for Labor Day weekend...

We've showcased a gazpacho recipe before here at AEB, but that one was a little new-fangled. This one, on the other hand, is as classic as they get--the tomato gazpacho of your dreams. And now is really the time to make it. It's a recipe that calls for the "ripest, most flavorful tomatoes possible," Italian frying peppers and red bell peppers, and all of these ingredients are currently at the height of season.

fig. b: gazpacho

Classic Gazpacho

2 cups cubed day-old country bread, crusts removed
2 medium-size garlic cloves, chopped
1 small pinch of whole cumin seeds
kosher salt
3 lbs ripest, most flavorful tomatoes possible, seeded and chopped**
2 small cucumbers (Kirby, Lebanese, etc.), peeled and chopped
1 large Italian frying pepper, cored, seeded, and chopped
1 medium-size red bell pepper, cored, seeded, and chopped
3 tbsp chopped red onion
1/2 cup fragrant extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup chilled bottled spring water (or filtered tap water)
3 tbsp sherry vinegar, preferably aged, or more to taste

garnishes:
finely diced cucumber
finely diced Italian frying pepper
olive oil croutons (see note)
slivered basil leaves

Place the bread in a bowl, add cold water to cover, and let soak for 10 minutes. Drain the bread, squeezing out the excess liquid.

Place the garlic, cumin, and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a mortar and mash them to a paste using a pestle.

Place the tomatoes, cucumbers, Italian and red peppers, onion, soaked bread, and the garlic paste in a large bowl and toss to mix. Let stand for about 15 minutes. Working in two batches, place the vegetable mixture in a food processor and process until smooth, adding half of the olive oil to each batch. Once each batch is finished, puree it finely in a blender, then transfer it to a large mixing bowl.

When all the gazpacho has been pureed, whisk in the spring water and vinegar. The soup should have the consistency of a smoothie. Taste for seasoning, adding more salt and/or vinegar as necessary. Refrigerate the gazpacho, covered, until chilled, about 2 hours. Serve the soup in bowls with garnishes.

Note: This recipe calls for the crusts of the bread to be removed. Instead of discarding them, use them to make croutons to garnish your soup. Dice the crusts. Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add a crushed garlic clove, and sizzle it for about one minute. Add the crusts and sauté them gently for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until they are golden and crispy. Season with a pinch of salt and set aside.

[recipe from Anya von Bremzen's The New Spanish Table]

We were seriously impressed by Saveur's recent special issue on Greece, but we've yet to have the time to work through its many, many tempting recipes. One recipe that's become an instant hit around here, though, is this smoky, spicy melitzanosalata recipe.

fig. c: Italian eggplants

Melitzanosalata

2 lbs eggplant, preferably baby Italian eggplants
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 green bell pepper, cored and chopped
1 jalapeño pepper, stemmed, seeded, and chopped
1 cup flat-leaf parsley leaves
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
3 cloves garlic, minced
kosher salt
freshly ground black pepper
crusty bread or toasted pita

Build a hot fire in a charcoal grill. Grill the eggplants whole, turning, until charred and soft, about 20 minutes. Let cool. Cut the eggplants in half and scoop out the flesh, discarding as many seeds as possible. Drain the eggplant flesh in a strainer for 30 minutes.

Heat 1/4 cup of the oil in a 12" skillet over medium-high heat. Add the peppers and cook for 10 minutes. Add the jalapeños and continue cooking until golden brown, about 5 minutes. Transfer to the bowl of a food processor along with the eggplant, the remaining oil, the parsley, the vinegar, and the garlic. Process until slightly chunky. Season with salt and pepper. Chill for 30 minutes to meld the flavors. Serve with crusty bread or toasted pita.

[recipe from Saveur, August/September 2010]

A crusty loaf of bread goes well with gazpacho. Melitzanosalata demands fresh bread to sop it up with, and a crusty loaf is just the ticket. Why not make your own? Jim Lahey's now-legendary No-Knead Bread recipe makes it so easy. And the results look like this:

fig. d: god bless no-knead bread!

The A16 cookbook has yet to steer us wrong, and this recipe is what the Lee Bros. call a "Quick Knockout": minimum effort, maximum flavor. The combination of the grilled pork, the soffritto, and the bitter greens is phenomenal, but it's worth checking out the recipe just for the grilled pork technique, which couldn't be any easier, but works some serious magic.

fig. e: pork loin spiedino

Pork Loin Spiedino***

2 pounds boneless pork loin, cut into 1-inch cubes
about 1 tbsp kosher salt
1/2 cup dried currants
3/4 cup pine nuts
1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
2/3 cup garlic cloves, minced****
3 oz arugula or dandelion greens
wooden skewers

Toss the pork with the salt in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate for at least overnight or up to 3 days.

To make the soffritto, soak the currants in just enough warm water to cover for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, add the pine nuts and 1/2 cup of the olive oil to a small, heavy pot and place over low heat. Gradually bring to a low simmer, stirring frequently, and cook, stirring, for about 5-10 minutes, or until the pine nuts have started to turn a golden brown. Stir in the garlic and continue to cook on low heat for about 8 minutes, or until the garlic is a light golden brown. Watch the soffritto carefully--the pine nuts and garlic can burn easily and turn bitter. Drain the currants, add them to the pot, stir and remove the pot from the heat. Let the soffritto cool to room temperature. It will keep, tightly covered, in the refrigerator for 2 weeks.

About 30 minutes before cooking, remove the pork from the refrigerator. Soak the wooden skewers in water. Prepare a hot fire in a grill, stacking the coals to one side so you have two areas of heat, one for direct heat, the other for indirect heat.

Drizzle the remaining 1 tbsp olive oil over the pork and toss to coat evenly. Drain the skewers, and thread about 5 pieces of pork onto each skewer.

Place the skewers over the coals and grill for about 1 minute on each side, or until well-seared. Move the skewers to the cooler side of the grill and continue to cook over indirect heat for 8 to 10 minutes, until cooked medium-well but still juicy.

Arrange a bed of greens on a platter (we've been using dandelion greens, because that's we've got in our garden at the moment, but most bitter greens would do). Place the pork skewers on top. Drizzle some of the soffritto over the top of the pork and the greens. Pass the remaining sauce at the table. Serve immediately while the pork is still hot.

[Recipe from A16: Food + Wine by Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren]

There were a number of other small courses, including stuffed zucchini blossoms, mixed olives, and a killer cheese plate, but the dessert was another real highlight. And for that recipe (in your choice of a 140-characters-or-less Twitter version or a standard version), all you have to do is click here.

aj

* He also knows how to party. Thanks to our friends at BibliOdyssey for the lovely image.

** We've neglected to seed the tomatoes on occasion, especially when the tomatoes are at their absolute peak, and we haven't noticed a difference in the deliciousness of the end product.

*** Those of you with ties to the Binghamton, NY might recognize spiedino as the root of the "spiedie" phenomenon.

**** This is a substantial amount of garlic. We've made the recipe with substantially less (say, 3-4 cloves) and found it very satisfactory indeed. But if you're a garlic fiend, and you've got the time, by all means, mince away.

Relatively Quick Breads 2: Boston Brown Bread

A few days later, I was rereading John Thorne's wonderful chapter on baked beans from Serious Pig for the umpteenth time, when I suddenly realized that I'd never done anything other than gloss over his brief section on Boston Brown Bread that appears roughly midway through the chapter. I'd read the beginning of the chapter, of course, and the last several pages of the chapter--"A Note On Maine Bean Types," "First Find Your Bean Pot," and "Bean Hole Beans" (Thorne is nothing if not thorough)--but, inexplicably, I'd always just skipped over the section on Boston Brown Bread. Not this time, though. This time I read the Boston Brown Bread section closely and I could hardly believe what I was reading. The combination is an unlikely one, and Thorne draws attention to this: "At first, theirs seems a strange alliance. Brown bread, a chocolate-colored, raisin-studded soda bread made of whole wheat, rye, and "injun" [corn meal] is just as soft, dense, and carbohydrate-heavy as baked beans themselves--and yet, somehow, the two manage to paly off, even enhance, each other's goodness." But what really caught me by surprise was that Boston Brown Bread is traditionally a steamed bread--and one that's most commonly steamed in a coffee can.

fig. a: clean, empty coffee can

Like everyone and their brother, I knew about Boston Baked Beans. Like a lot of people, I'd heard of Boston Brown Bread. But somehow I never got the message that Boston Brown Bread gets steamed on the stovetop (in a can!) while your pot of Boston Baked Beans bakes in the oven. Talk about "Yankee ingenuity."

I'd already decided that I needed to make Boston Brown Bread that very night--after all, my Down East Baked Beans were baking in the oven and they still had a good 3-4 hours to go--but when Michelle got home I asked her what she knew about Boston Brown Bread. "What do I know about Boston Brown Bread?," she asked. "I've been wanting to make it since I was a kid, that's what." Turns out that at roughly the same age that I was obsessing over Johnny Cake down south of the border, Michelle was north of the border, dreaming of Boston Brown Bread. When I told her I was thinking of making it that very night, she got pretty excited. I had no problem convincing her to run off to the health food store for rye flour while I went to the supermarket in search of molasses, buttermilk, and a 1-pound coffee can.

15 minutes later we reconvened and Michelle started to assemble the dough while I got to work on the coleslaw (the third part of Thorne's baked beans trinity).

Boston Brown Bread

1/2 cup rye flour
1/2 cup cornmeal, preferably white flint
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
6 tbsp fancy molasses (not blackstrap)
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup raisins or dried currants
butter for greasing a 1-pound coffee can

About 2 1/2 hours before your baked beans will be ready, bring a large kettle of water to a boil. In a mixing bowl, stir together the rye flour, cornmeal, whole-wheat flour, baking soda, and salt until well mixed. Pour in the molasses and buttermilk, and work into a smooth batter. Fold in the raisins or dried currants [raisins are traditional, but Thorne prefers currants]. Carefully butter the inside of your empty, clean 1-pound coffee can (a 14-oz can will do). Pour in the batter and cover the can with a doubled piece of aluminum foil. Press this down so that it stretches tightly across the top and reaches partially down the sides, and secure it in place with a sturdy rubber band.

Put a small wire rack (if available) on the bottom of a deep pot. Set the filled coffee can on the rack or simply set it on the bottom of the pot. Pour the boiling water around the can

fig. b: adding the boiling water to the pot

until it reaches a little more than halfway up the sides. Bring the water back up to a murmuring simmer, cover the pot, and gently steam the bread for 2 hours, or until a straw inserted in the middle of the bread comes out clean. Remove, set on a cake rack, and let cool until the beans are ready to serve, then unmould the bread and serve warm. Brown bread is traditionally cut with a string, but dental floss works well too.

fig. c: still life with Boston Brown Bread, a coffee can, and dental floss

Serve buttered, alongside--or, if you prefer, under--the baked beans.

Makes 1 loaf of delicious Boston Brown Bread.

Total time: about 2 1/2 hours.

John Thorne has never let us down. Fresh, hot Boston Brown Bread with butter + baked beans was a revelation. I'd always been partial to sourdough with my baked beans previously, but now it's going to be hard to go back. And Boston Brown Bread is much more than just a sidekick to your baked beans--it makes for an ideal loaf of morning bread too. Again, all you need to do is toast it and add butter, the bread does the rest.

With a cooking time of 2 hours, Boston Brown Bread can hardly be accused of being the quickest quick bread, but it's one of the easiest, most satisfying bread recipes you'll ever find, and it's hard for me to imagine a better recipe to get kids interested in cooking. Think about it: piping-hot homemade bread in only 2 1/2 hours. Plus, when was the last time you steamed a loaf of bread? In a coffee can, no less.

aj

Breakfast Week 3: Soda Bread & Scones (& Mineola Marmalade, too)

Irish Soda Bread

Just when you thought we'd forgotten and moved on... Breakfast Week 2006 continues (and concludes)...

For some reason we were possessed to celebrate St. Patrick's Day this year, so we threw an Irish brunch. Between the two of us we have exactly one ounce of Irish blood (I've been known to claim 1/32nd or 1/64th Irish heritage, though the facts behind this claim are sketchy to say the least). Our guests didn't exactly amount to the Hibernian League either. One of them started spouting off about having Black Irish blood midway through the afternoon, but that was only after the whiskey started getting passed around. Stranger still, we threw our St. Patrick's Day brunch two days after St. Patrick's Day, on Sunday the 19th.

Okay, maybe our St. Patrick's Day brunch wasn't that big of a mystery. We'd both been reading the Saveur special issue on Ireland intently, and Montreal is home to one of the oldest St. Patrick's Day parades in all of North America, and this year's parade (the 182nd) was held on Sunday the 19th, and we were looking to have some folks over for brunch anyway, so I guess things did kind of add up. Neither of us really buy that old line about everyone being Irish on St. Patrick's Day, and we're not real big on face-painting or those big green Madhatter's hats you unfortunately see dudes wearing from time to time around March 17th these days. We love a good breakfast, though, and we're all for the Irish culinary renaissance, so we threw a brunch instead.

The menu:
freshly baked Irish soda bread
butter
boiled eggs
colcannon cakes
Irish salmon gravlax
sour cream with Zubrowka
triple ginger scones
mineola marmalade
Irish breakfast tea
Irish whiskey

The menu was a big hit. The warm loaves of Irish Soda Bread were a great way to get things started right--they were a perfect morning bread: quick, simple, a bit rustic, satisfying. As people started to tear into the gravlax we served the colcannon cakes and the boiled eggs. The colcannon cakes are a great way to make use of leftover colcannon from the corned beef feast you might have had the night before and they made a nice break from hash browns or homefries--and, as it turns out, they were particularly good with the Zubrowka-laced sour cream, which had been meant exclusively for the gravlax. Aside from "Irish tea"--tea with cream, sugar, and a shot of Jameson's--we finished the meal with a 1-2 punch that would have made Jack Dempsey blush: Triple Ginger Scones and Mineola Marmalade.

Our Irish Soda Bread/Breakfast Bread recipe came from the March 2003 issue of Saveur, which also had an extensive spread on Ireland.

Irish Soda Bread/Breakfast Bread

2 3/4 C bread flour
2 3/4 C whole wheat flour
1 3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp butter, softened
2 3/4 C buttermilk
1 egg
2 tsp pinhead oatmeal

Preheat your oven to 350° F. Whisk the bread flour, whole wheat flour, baking soda, and salt together in a large mixing bowl. Using your fingers, work the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse meal. Gradually add the buttermilk, stirring with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface. Dust your hads with flour and knead the dough with the heels of your hands until the dough is semi-smooth. This should take about 1 minute. Divide the dough in half. Shape each piece of dough into a 6" round. Cut each dough round into 3 equal triangles and arrange on a large ungreased baking sheet 3-4 inches apart.

Beat the egg and 1 tsp of water together in a small bowl. Using a pastry brush, brush the tops of the triangles with the egg wash and sprinkle each with a little oatmeal.

Bake the loaves until deep golden brown and hollow sounding when tapped, about 1 hour. Set aside on a wire rack to cool for at least 15 minutes before serving.

Triple Ginger Scones

This is one of Michelle's favorite recipes. They're delicious and they always turn out perfectly, but be careful because they also have the power to bring people to tears (tears of joy, thankfully). The recipe she uses is a slight variation on Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rich and Creamy Ginger Scones from The Bread Bible. Michelle's annotated the recipe in her copy as follows: "the best." Enough said.

Rich and Creamy Ginger Scones, a.k.a. Triple Ginger Scones

12 tbsp unsalted butter, cold
3/4 cup heavy cream
2 cups unbleached flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp ground ginger
1/8 tsp salt
1 tsp grated lemon zest
1 tsp grated ginger
2/3 cup crystallized ginger, cut into 1/4 inch pieces

topping:
2 tsp heavy cream
1 tbsp sugar

Cut the butter into 3/4-inch cubes and refrigerate for a minimum of 1/2 an hour, until very firm. Whip the cream until soft peaks form when the beater is lifted. Cover and place in the refrigerator.

30 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 400° F. Place an oven rack at the middle level and set your baking stone or baking sheet on it before preheating.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, ground ginger, salt, grated ginger, and lemon zest. Add the butter and rub it between your fingers until the mixture resembles fine meal. Stir in the crystallized ginger. Make a well in the center of the mixture. Add the whipped cream to teh well and, with a rubber spatula or a dough scraper, stir the flour mixture into the cream until all of it is moistened. Knead the dough in the bowl just until it holds togeter, then turn it our onto a lightly floured counter. Knead it about 8 times, until you can shaped it into a smooth ball.

Cut the dough in half. Shape each half into a smooth ball, press it into a 3/4-inch-thick disk about 6 inches in diameter, and wrap well with plastic wrap. Freeze for 15 minutes, or refrigerate for 1 hour.

With a long sharp knife, cut each disk into 6 or 8 wedges. Brush the tops with the heavy cream and sprinkle evenly with the sugar. Lift the wedges onto the prepared baking sheets, leaving at least 1 1/2 inches between them.

Place the pan on the hot baking stone or baking sheet and bake the scones for 15-20 minutes, until the edges begin to brown and the tops are golden brown and firm enough so that they barely give when pressed lightly with a finger. Check the scones after 10 minutes of baking, and they are not browning evenly, rotate the baking sheet from front to back. Do not overbake. They will continue to bake slightly when you remove them from the oven and they're best when slightly moist and soft inside. With a spatula, transfer the scones to a wire rack to cool completely.

Once again, these scones turned out wonderfully. They were amazing just by their lonesome, maybe even a little bit better with some additional butter, and possibly even better still with a little of Michelle's mineola marmalade. Of course, the marmalade was pretty impressive on the soda bread, too.

Mineola Marmalade

If you're not familiar with Mineolas, they're one of the new citruses on the block. Part of the tangelo family, all of which are tangerines crossed with some other citrus fruit, Mineolas are tangerines crossed with grapefruit. This recipe is very straight-forward and it works like a charm. Making marmalade has never been so easy. This recipe produces a sweet-sour preserve with none of the pithy bitterness most "serious" marmalade lovers prize. Mineola marmalade is a perfect preserve for kids or those trying to build themselves up slowly to "serious" marmalade snobdom.

Mineola Marmalade

400 g Mineolas
200 g sugar
1 lemon, juiced

Boil the Mineolas in enough water to cover in a medium-sized widemouth saucepan for 1 1/2 hours. Drain, chop finely, add the sugar and the lemon juice and boil gently, stirring frequently, until the setting point. Place in sterilized jars and can.

Mineola season is just about over. Act fast.

am/km

On "Saturday Afternoon Bread" and New York-Style Rye

Between the two of us, we had some limited experience with baking bread at home and even a little professional experience*, but when Michelle decided that she wanted to get into bread baking more seriously almost a year and a half ago now, she discovered that it was even more demanding than she’d imagined. She started to collect some of the essential literature on the subject, she did a lot of reading, and she acquired things like a proper baking stone, she even got some help from a professional when it came to her sourdough starter, and all of these preparations resulted in some very good loaves of bread, but the loaves were few and far between, and the problem had to do with fitting complicated methods into a busy life. Because of this, Michelle felt vindicated when she came across a review of a half-dozen of the top North American books on bread baking in the last issue of The Art of Eating (#70) by no less of an authority than James MacGuire, the Montreal-based professional who owned and ran Le Passe-Partout for over 20 years and who now lectures at the CIA (not “the Company,” the other one), among other places. MacGuire’s generous review encompasses everything from a comparison of baking habits in North America and Europe, to a brief history of the challenges encountered by the North American artisanal bread baking movement that began in the 1980s, but for the most part he carefully examines each of the titles under discussion, and doesn’t mince words in his appraisals. MacGuire notes serious problems with most of the books reviewed, and some books even get a drubbing, but one of his biggest gripes has to do with how overly and (in some cases) needlessly complicated these bread books tend to be. He quips that with some of these books, “the necessary dedication might lie somewhere between that required by a serious hobby and a minor religion,” before singling out Nancy Silverton’s Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur: “in one recipe she suggests that readers begin work at six o’clock on Saturday morning in order to have the loaves ready by about ten o’clock that night.” What mystifies MacGuire is that most of these books are both overly technical and riddled with inaccuracies and, from time to time, outright mistakes, and he ends up pointing out that there the market is sorely in need of something that’s both solidly grounded and practical:

Missing from the lineup is a short book that someone could use to bake a few loaves of bread on a Saturday afternoon, a book that would explain what is genuinely essential but still leave room for chores, errands, or even a nap.

With all this in mind, we’ve recently decided three things: that we want to bake bread more often, that we want to bake bread together, and that we want to focus on recipes that are manageable. Oh, and if we can bake something that’s hard to find or altogether missing from the local bread market (believe me, as good as Montreal’s bread can be at times, this isn’t difficult), all the better. That’s why we made our first experiment as part of this new order rye bread. We’re both serious about our caraway rye, and if there’s really a serious rye available in Montreal at present, neither of us know of it. It’s certainly been a while now since there was a true European-style rye bread (MacGuire describes these as having a minimum of 60-65% rye flour) available in Montreal, but these days it’s even hard to find a good North American-style rye (20-30% rye flour). In fact, I'd be surprised if your average Montreal rye loaf (the kind of stuff they use for the smoked meat sandwiches at Schwartz's, say) has more than 10-15% rye flour. Try to find a good caraway rye and your success rate bottoms out entirely.

After consulting a number of recipes, we settled on Rose Levy Beranbaum’s recipe from her The Bread Bible. Now, MacGuire reviewed this book, of course, and he criticized it for “pseudoscientific precision” as well as for “an admissibly low” ratio of rye to wheat flour “for anything approaching real rye bread,” but we’d decided that weren’t even going to try to make a true European-style rye, that we wanted to make a New York-style rye with plenty of caraway seeds, and we wanted to be able to make our loaf within a matter of a few hours (more or less). We liked the way Beranbaum’s recipe read and it met all the above criteria.



“Levy’s” Real Jewish Rye Bread

note: keep in mind that we’ve only included the directions for the electric mixer version of this recipe. Michelle got a brand-new KitchenAid mixer for Christmas, so she might as well use it, right?

special equipment: a half sheet pan, sprinkled with cornmeal (Michelle used a piece of parchment instead)

a baking stone OR baking sheet

a mixer

Sponge:

3/4 cup bread flour
3/4 cup rye flour
1/2 tsp instant yeast
1 1/2 tbsp sugar
1/2 tbsp malt flour
1 1/2 cups water (at room temperature, 70º F to 90º F)

In a mixer bowl or other large bowl, place the flour (both kinds), yeast, sugar, malt, and water. Whisk until very smooth, to incorporate air, 2 minutes. The starter will be the consistency of a thick batter. Scrape the sides of the bowl. Set aside covered with plastic wrap while you make the flour mixture.

Flour mixture:

2 1/4 cups bread flour
1/2 tsp + 1/8 tsp instant yeast
2 tbsp caraway seeds
1/2 tbsp salt
1/2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tsp cornmeal for sprinkling

Combine the ingredients for the flour mixture and add to the sponge. In a large bowl, whisk together the bread flour, rye flour, yeast, caraway seeds, and salt. Gently scoop it onto the sponge to cover it completely. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and allow it to ferment for 1 to 4 hours at room temperature. (The sponge will bubble through the flour mixture in places while you’re waiting. Don’t worry, this is fine.)

Add the oil and mix with the dough hook on low speed (#2 on a KitchenAid) for about 1 minute, until the flour is moistened enough to form a rough dough. Raise the speed to medium (#4 on a KitchenAid) and mix for 10 minutes. The dough should be very smooth and elastic, and it should jump back when pressed with a fingertip. If the dough is at all sticky, turn it out onto a counter and knead in a little extra flour. (The dough will weigh about 2 pounds, 1.7 ounces.

Now it’s time to let the dough rise. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter and press it down to flatten it slightly. Round the dough into a ball about 5 1/2 inches by 2 1/2 inches high and set it on the cornmeal sprinkled baking sheet (or parchment paper). Cover it with a large container or oiled plastic wrap. Let the dough rise until almost doubled, about 1 hour to 1 hour and 15 minutes. It will be about 7 1/2 inches by 3 1/2 inches high, and when pressed gently with a fingertip the depression will very slowly fill in.

Preheat the oven to 450º F one hour before baking.

With a sharp knife or single-edged razor blade, make 1/4- to 1/2-inch-deep slashes in the top of the dough. Mist the dough with water and quickly but gently set the baking sheet on the hot stone or hot baking sheet (if you use parchment paper, just slide the loaf onto the hot baking sheet directly). Bake for 15 minutes. Then lower the temperature to 400º F and continue baking for 30 to 40 minutes or until the bread is golden brown and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean (an instant thermometer inserted into the center will read about 190º F).

Remove the bread from the oven, and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Being fans of a hearty, full-flavored rye, we followed Beranbaum’s “Ultimate Full Flavor Variation,” which meant that we allowed the sponge to ferment for 1 hour at room temperature, then refrigerated it for almost 24 hours.

Because Canadian unbleached all-purpose flour is higher in gluten than its U.S. counterpart, and therefore a lot closer to bread flour than it would be in the States, we opted to use it instead of bread flour. Michelle feels like she’s already got too many different types of flour on hand without having to buy yet another one.

Also, Beranbaum actually recommends a method whereby a cast-iron skillet or sheet pan is placed on the floor of the oven, then filled with 1/2 cup of ice cubes at the point when you begin baking the bread (the skillet or sheet pan should be pre-heated, of course). This method adds steam to the baking environment and makes for a better crust. We would love to use this method ourselves, but our oven won’t allow for it. Our crust turned out wonderfully anyway.

As indicated earlier, Beranbaum’s rye is very much a New York rye, not at all like the rich, dark ryes I got used to when I lived in Germany (and which Michelle quickly fell in love with when she came to visit). It’s got a good rye flavor, if a subtle one, and it contains just the perfect amount of caraway. It’s also remarkably sweet—not cloyingly sweet, mind you, but it’s definitely got a perkiness to it. That being said, this is an excellent loaf, and one that’s very manageable. I wouldn’t quite characterize it as a “Saturday afternoon bread,” but it’s pretty close.

Just how good is this rye? Well, Michelle’s mom (a.k.a. Helen) danced after she tasted the 1/2 loaf Michelle brought to her. Helen doesn’t suffer poor loaves of rye gladly and she doesn't dance very often, so that's saying something.

Next up: true pumpernickel.

As for that "as yet unwritten Saturday afternoon bread book"--if only MacGuire would write it. Just imagine.

aj

*Ha, ha. That’s a laugh—I was the temporary, fill-in bread baker at a vegetarian take-out restaurant in London in the early 1990s. I had some previous experience in the kitchen, so I did a reasonable job. I did make improvements to the house cornbread recipe, though, using my American know-how. When the regular bread baker came back from “vacation” (he’d had a nervous breakdown), I was moved to food prep in the kitchen because they liked me and I was competent. I remember that the regular bread baker was a bit difficult, prone to frustration and fits of rage. The rumor was that he had a plate in his head, and that when things got hot (literally) in the kitchen/bakery, well…

Hello, Greengage plum butter

Well, that jar of Baby Crawford peach jam from Andy’s Orchard disappeared in a hurry, and we had such a good time with it that we decided to bust out another of our California souvenirs. This time, however, we didn’t open up one of our can-as-you-go specials (although we do have a couple of those kicking around), we opted instead for one of the beauties Michelle bought directly from June Taylor last August, the day she got her personal workshop: Greengage plum.

We were familiar with the lore that surrounds Greengages, but neither of us had actually ever tried one until we visited Andy’s. Greengage season was effectively over by the time we got our tour of Andy’s Orchard, but Mr. Marinari managed to rustle up a few specimens for us nonetheless, even if they were past their prime in his eyes. Like everything else we had at Andy’s, they were outrageously good, so much better than Andy’s disclaimers would have led you to believe, and easily among the very best plums we’ve ever had. Obviously, this had a lot to do with Andy’s Orchard and the way they were cultivated, but it also had a lot to do with the variety itself, whose perfectly rounded honey-sweetness is the stuff of legends.

Alan Davidson notes that the Greengage originated in Armenia, by most accounts, but that the variety had reached France by the time of the reign of François I, where it was received very warmly indeed and was soon named after François’ wife, “Reine Claude,” the name by which the variety is still known to this day in that part of the world. By the early 18th century the variety had been introduced to England, where it also took hold, and where it became known as the Greengage (or Green Gage) because of its color and because of Sir Thomas Gage, who was one of the earliest horticulturists to develop the variety on English soil, having purchased a number of fruit trees from the monks of Chartreuse, one of which turned out to be a Reine Claude plum tree. Our favorite fruit book of the moment, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America by A.J. Dowling (1845), lists numerous other varieties of plum bearing the name “Gage,” including Autumn Gage, Bleecker’s Gage, Hudson Gage, Imperial Gage, and Yellow Gage, but the Greengage is the one that predated all the rest and the one that has largely outlasted the rest, and in both cases the reason has to do with its famous taste. Dowling goes so far as to write, “The Green Gage is universally admitted to hold the first rank in flavour among all plums, and is every where highly esteemed… It is pronounced… the best plum in England, and we must admit that we have no superiour to it here [in New York],” and he describes its fruit as “exceedingly melting and juicy” with a “flavour, at once, sprightly and very luscious.” We couldn’t agree more. Davidson, for his part, has the following somewhat contradictory comments to make: “Greengages, being the finest of dessert plums, should be enjoyed in their natural state. They also make the most luxurious of plum jams.” We were lucky enough to have had them both ways, but opening a jar of Greengage plum butter in February (on a –20 C night, no less) was like a godsend.

So much so, that we decided to celebrate their unveiling.

1. We brewed ourselves a pot of tea to accompany our reading material.



2. We put the finishing touches on a loaf of rye bread [recipe soon to follow], then baked it in the oven.



3. And, finally, we slathered butter and generous amounts of the Greengage plum butter on our still-warm slices of bread.



No question about it. This was the best dessert I’ve had in weeks (sounds crazy, I know, but you're going to have to trust me on this one). I remember June Taylor telling us about how she often feels stumped when asked for recommendations on how to use her wonderful line of jams and butters. Look no further, June.

aj