Sourdough Bread with Cornmeal

Bread and soup, soup and bread…that’s dinner around here on winter nights. Everybody wants a hot meal but nobody wants to bother about it too much. Husband might be relaxing with a book – the Little One giggling on the phone with a friend – and I peering earnestly into the screen, too wound up with some project to start banging pots and pans around in the kitchen. What will we eat? Well, bread and soup.

Which I’d cooked earlier, when energy was running higher and there seemed to be more time. I set a plate with two kinds of cheese next to the bread, and call the hungry ones to the table.

NOTE: Israeli Kitchen has moved. You’ll find the recipe for Sourdough Bread with Cornmeal on my delicious new blog:

http://www.israelikitchen.com

All the old posts and recipes are there – and new ones, too. See you there!

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Doodling Around With Sourdough

Last night, I opened the fridge and there was my sourdough starter, looking sort of reproachful. It had somehow migrated from the back of the fridge to the front, where I could see it and feel guilty about it. C’mon, little guy, I know you’re strong, I thought to it. You’re surviving. You don’t really need me to refresh you every week … do you?

I haven’t quite reached the stage of talking to inanimate objects, although the day is probably not too far off. Thing is, a sourdough starter isn’t inanimate; it’s full of live yeast culture, and I’m supposed to take care of it instead of leaving it in the back of the fridge for weeks at a time.

At least it didn’t think anything back at me.  But it did look neglected. So I shlepped the jar out, mixed the hooch back into the starter and removed a cupful to another bowl.

NOTE: Israeli Kitchen has moved. Read about all the things I did with my sourdough on my delicious new blog:

http://www.israelikitchen.com

All the old posts and recipes are there – and new ones, too. See you there!

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Sweet, Light Challah

This is the challah I most often bake.  Husband and The Little One favor its just-sweet-enough taste, close crumb, and golden crust. When it’s just the three of us for Shabbat, I bake four big rolls instead of two braided loaves.

NOTE: Israeli Kitchen has moved. You’ll find the recipe for my Light, Sweet Challah on my delicious new blog:

http://www.israelikitchen.com

All the old posts and recipes are there – and new ones, too. See you there!

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Flim-Flam Flan

The Big Move is behind me. With the High Holidays over and Sukkot  just around the corner, I’ve been thinking about meals and menus without much interruption. Plenty of time to think about all that because for the past several days I’ve been lying in bed, blowing my nose.

Oh, woe. If I’d only drunk my daily cup of kefir, I could have avoided this cold and gone to a post- Yom Kippur breakfast, met some interesting new people…and look, I had even made some flan to take.

Many food historians claim that this elegant dish goes back to the ancient Romans and an egg-and-honey custard. Although the ancient Romans had a sophisticated cuisine, I suspect that flan in some form, under other names, existed long before them. We don’t know who first baked bread, brewed beer, or pickled olives; nor do we know if the ancient Phoenicians invented custard and brought it to Spain, where the Romans first sampled it. I lean towards the last theory – it evokes an even more ancient time, when some barefoot farm wife found herself with an excess of creamy milk, not enough to make cheese but a few dipperfulls. And say her hens had just laid an unusual number of  eggs. It wouldn’t have taken much imagination to mix the two in a clay pot, bake the mixture in the embers of a fire, and douse the custard with honey. People have always loved sweet things and that would have been a treat for a seafaring husband, something to make him miss home.

NOTE: Israeli Kitchen has moved. You’ll find the recipe for Flim-Flam Flan on my delicious new blog:

http://www.israelikitchen.com

All the old posts and recipes are there – and new ones, too. See you there!

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Cheese Tartlets and A Blast from My Brazilian Past

See that book? It’s  Comer Bem – Eat Well, by a possibly fictitious ” Dona Benta”. It was the “Joy of Cooking” of the Brazilian home when I lived there, 40 years ago.  Like the “Joy,” it provides recipes but also teaches measurements, temperatures, substitutions, and menus.

It’s meant to be the manual of the beginner cook, leading gently on to fine recipes. And like the “Joy,” most homes had a copy of it on a kitchen shelf. For all I know, it’s still sold in updated editions. My well-worn copy, complete with sort of livid-looking photographs, was published in 1969.

We used to refer to Dona Benta as if she were really the grandmotherly figure on the book’s cover:

“Dona Benta says never to cook fish with garlic.”

“Don’t care if she does, I’m putting garlic in.”

Looking at it four decades later, I recognize a retro style that presumes the reader to be a stay-at-home woman. Here, for example, is the heading of the chapter on seasonings and condiments. Arch advice for the Little Wife:  No olvides que a veces más puede un guiso bien sazonado que el más sabio de los maquillajes.  (“Don’t forget that sometimes a well-seasoned stew is more powerful than the most artfully applied makeup.”)  Oy. But perversely, I love it.

Why a quote in Spanish for a Portuguese-speaking reader, I don’t know, but sprinkled throughout the book are quotes and phrases in French and English, too.

I was leafing through the book, enjoying the casual instructions (“add enough flour to make a dough you can roll out”) and looking for something interesting to serve with an eggplant soup I’ll be making tonight. And there were these cheese tartlets. Quejadinhas. A crisp, delicate pastry crust containing a savory cheese filling, devoured while still warm. Overcome by a wave of nostalgia – I’ve eaten plenty of quejadinhas in my time – I had to make them. Here they are.

Quejadinhas – Brazilian Cheese Tartlets

Makes 12 muffin-sized tartlets

Ingredients for Pastry:

1/3 cup hard cheese, grated. Parmesan is good; I used a local Kashkeval.

3 Tblsp. butter

4 Tblsp. milk

1/2 tsp. salt

12 Tblsp. flour. This is an annoying amount which I tried to measure into cups – it came out to 1/2 cup plus 1/3 cup of flour. See what I mean? Easier to just keep track of of the spoonfulls as you measure.

Method for the Pastry Shells:

Grease a 12-mold muffin tin well.

Preheat the oven to 200°C – 400°F.

1. Mix the cheese, butter, milk, and salt in a medium bowl.

2. Add the flour by tablespoons, mixing occasionally till you obtain a soft, pliable dough that holds its shape. It may take more or less than the 12 tablespoons. You don’t want a stiff dough like for bread, rather a tender paste.

3. Roll the dough out onto a lightly floured surface or a sheet of baking paper. Stretch it out with the rolling pin till it’s 1/4″ thin.

4. Cut out circles. I used a tuna-can ring, but realized that the resulting circle would be too small, so I just rolled each circle again to make it 4″ – 10 centimeters wide.

You can re-roll the unused parts to make new circles. Once you have your 12 circles, save any extra pastry to fix tears or build up shells that look low in the muffin tin.

Ingredients for Filling:

150 grams – just under 1 cup – grated cheese. Can be sharp and dry, like Parmesan, or heavier and milder, like Gouda.

1 cup milk

4 eggs, lightly beaten

More grated cheese for sprinkling on top – if using a sharp, dry, light cheese, 4 Tblsp. will do.

Method for Filling:

Just mix it all up together.

Line the greased muffin molds with the pastry circles. They are now shells.

Fill each shell up to halfway with the cheese/milk/egg mixture.

Sprinkle a little more grated cheese over each filled shell.

Pop into the hot oven and bake for 18-25 minutes or until the tartlets are golden-brown.

Allow them to cool in the muffin tin and remove carefully.

They may be frozen and reheated in a hot oven for a few minutes. Best served warm, with cold white wine or beer.

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Should I Put Commercial Yeast in My Sourdough?

A reader (“Q”) left a question on my How To Make Light Sourdough post. As her dough didn’t double in size, should she have added some fresh yeast?

My answer was so long it turned into this post.

I don’t advise boosting the sourdough starter with commercial yeast. That’s because I’m a sourdough snob. Commercial bakers sometimes add fresh yeast in order to schedule rising and baking times predictably, but for the home baker, the whole idea is to use the time-proven sourdough method to create a delicious loaf in her/his own kitchen.

My feeling is, if there’s commercial yeast, it’s not real sourdough. But like I said, I’m a snob. Who cares if it’s “real” or not except for yourself? For me, using sourdough is like having captured the soul of the wheat. But people eating the bread just want it to be satisfying and taste good.

There are several streams of thought. Some home bakers just want bread with that sourdough tang and don’t mind mixing yeasts. (I also make certain breads using “old leaven” or a “chef” – a small ball of dough from a previous baking that’s been left to mature and sour.) Some must cater to someone who’s allergic to fresh yeast but tolerates sourdough. Some seek the satisfaction of mastering a basic wild ingredient and getting great natural  flavor, texture, and digestibility. There is so much beautiful bread to make – my best advice is to go with what seems appetizing to you, master that technique, and go on to the next intriguing recipe.

But returning to “Q”‘s problem with a non-riser.

Was your starter recently refreshed and active? And did the sponge become light and spongey? If the answer is no to either question, there might not have been enough yeast to make the dough rise. An inactive starter might look impressive because there’s a lot of it, but it won’t do its job if most of the yeast cells in it are dead.

An alternative reason for a sad dough might might be insufficient flour to keep the yeast fermenting. If the dough was too sloppy to handle, you did the right thing in adding flour. If you’re outside of Israel, your flour will have a different quality than mine, and your recipe will need to be adjusted. In other words, from country to country, flours differ in ability to absorb water. There are other differences too, but that’s outside the scope of this post. Like every living thing, wild yeasts  need nutrients: the sugars in the flour, and oxygen. So with a very loose dough, you could either allow more time for it to rise – hard to say how long, but it could be several more hours – or sprinkle in more flour till you have a pliable, responsive dough.

Where was your dough rising – in a warm environment or a cool one? Too cold an environment will retard the fermentation of the dough, which can be desirable sometimes (allowing it to rise overnight in the fridge) – or not, if you’ve set a schedule.

It does take practice to create a good sourdough loaf. If you haven’t grown up watching Mom or Big Sis handle sourdough, you’ll need to acquire the feeling for the right temperatures, rising times, feel of the dough – by practice. Here’s a tip, though: the way you can tell if your dough will rise is by judging its feel under your hands. A good dough will feel tender yet firm, keeping its shape and even springing back a little under fingertip pressure, right from the beginning. A “loser” stretches out in broad ribbons and just flops back into the bowl; it feels heavy and dead.

If you’re unsure, add fresh yeast, I guess…but don’t put any into your sourdough starter, for it will “fight” with the natural yeasts and beneficial bacteria, spoiling it.

There’s so much sourdough wisdom out there it’s positively intimidating. But here, here, and here are a few of my favorite sourdough sites. Read through, choose your own way, and enjoy.

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Cherry Cobbler

Jam, clafoutis,  ice cream,  pie…visions of home made delicacies crammed with cherries floated through my mind as I searched my cookbooks for recipes. While I hesitated, the cherries sat in a bowl looking plump and juicy and radiating crimson sweetness. Everyone passing through the kitchen just had to pop a few of them into their mouths. Before they disappeared altogether, I pitted some for a cobbler.

My cobblers are usually a rich biscuit dough covered with hot fruit, but this recipe calls for batter spooned over the quickly-stewed fruit. We liked it.  It was just enough buttery, lightly sweet crust to offset the rich, juicy cherries. And being cobbler, it’s easy to make, quick to bake.

The original recipe called for 1 1/2 cups of sugar. I could tell it would be too sweet for us. But if your cherries are tart or you just like your desserts very sweet, use the whole amount.  These Bing cherries were sweet so I halved the sugar, and the cobbler was very delicious.

Source: About.com southern food

Ingredients:

Filling:

4 cups of pitted cherries

3/4 cup sugar

3 Tblsp. corn starch

Dough:

1 cup flour

1 Tblsp. sugar

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

3 tablespoons margarine or butter

1/2 cup milk

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 400° F – 200° C.

2. Cook the filling : in a medium pan, blend the sugar, corn starch,  and cherries. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until the mixture releases liquid, thickens, and starts to boil. Allow it to boil 1 minute, stirring constantly to prevent scorching.

3. Make the dough: Blend all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the marg/butter and the milk. Stir till the fat has incorporated into the dough and you have a sloppy dough.

4. Pour the hot fruit into your pie dish or casserole.

5. Drop big spoonfuls of the dough onto the fruit – 6 spoonfuls is good because then you have 6 servings clearly outlined.

6. Bake 25 to 30 minutes or until the top is golden brown.

Serve warm, with whipped cream, vanilla ice cream, or just plain (which is how we prefer it). Eat it up the same day or at the most by lunchtime the following day, as cobbler doesn’t keep well. If you must keep it overnight, stash it away in the fridge and heat it up next time, covered lightly with tin foil. Cool it down again to just warm, and serve right away.

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How To Make Light Sourdough – SD Walnut Herb Bread

Sometimes I want a loaf that has only a little tang, one that’s much lighter than the typical sourdough loaf.  I get a SD bread that’s positively fluffy following these five steps:

1. Refresh your starter before making the dough. In other words, remove about half of the starter in your jar, and refresh it. Let it grow light and frothy. How long this takes varies on the kitchen temperature. In the summer, it takes about 1 1/2 hours for me.

Note: if your starter has been ignored in the fridge for a long time, it’s well to refresh it twice. That is, once the starter shows plenty of activity, throw out half again and start over. I hate dumping all that water and flour down the sink, but the results are a healthy, active starter with an aroma that’s only a little sour. Of course you have to figure in the extra time when you refresh twice. Better to refresh your starter routinely so you don’t have to do this.

2. Remove 1 full cup from the refreshed starter and put it in your mixing bowl (and refresh the stuff in the original jar so you don’t run out next time). Most recipes calls for 1/2 cup of starter, but I think the full cup of sweet, active starter does the trick.

3. Make a sponge of the cupful of starter, 2 cups of water, and 3 cups of flour. Nothing else. Cover it with plastic and let it rise till very light and bubbly: around 8 hours. Basically what you’re doing is creating a big batch of new starter. It isn’t dough yet.

4. Then stir it down and add the rest of the flour and other ingredients. Knead or stretch and fold, shape into boules. Now you have dough.

5. Let it rise again till light – maybe 3 hours – and bake in a preheated 350° F – 180° C.

So that’s what I did.

Sourdough Walnut Herb Bread.

2 round loaves

At step 4, I added:

3/4 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

1 Tblsp. olive oil

1 Tblsp. salt

1/2 Tblsp. sugar

A few grinds of black pepper. If shaking pepper out of a jar, add 1/4 tsp.

1 tsp. dried thyme

1 tsp. dried, crumbled oregano

1 large, finely-chopped scallion: about 3 Tblsp. You can substitute onion or 1 large clove minced garlic.

- and stretched and folded till everything was incorporated.  I added maybe another 1/2 cup of flour,

sprinkling along till the dough was just firm enough to manipulate. Shaped my boules.

At step 5 I brushed the boules with an egg mixed with 1 Tblsp. cold water and sprinkled coarse salt all over them.  Then I carefully slid them into the hot oven and waited.

The loaves were so light that they took only about 25 minutes to bake.

Tender crumb, delicate herb/onion flavor, and the salty crust…well, it was all very delicious. In fact, irresistible. Especially eaten while still warm, with a film of good butter over each slice. I had some creamy goat’s cheese that was quite, er, aromatic - also very good. Of course the flavors develop as the bread cools and it’s better to eat it cold…but who could wait?

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Fresh-Corn Muffins

“Wait till you see what Mami made,” I heard my husband tell the Little One. He’d seen the corn muffins cooling off on the kitchen table.

Corn is in season now. I like to buy it still in the husk to steam, cut off from the cob,  and mix up a colorful corn salad. Or get fancy with a soufflé. When it’s not just eaten on the cob, with butter. But lately I’ve been using up my fresh corn in these tender, kernel-studded cornbread muffins. My family likes to eat them at breakfast.

Enough for 12 conventional-sized muffins or 6 large ones.

Ingredients:

1 cup flour

3/4 cup yellow corn meal

2 Tblsp. sugar

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

A few grinds of black pepper, or a pinch of cayenne

2/3 cup buttermilk

3 Tblsp. oil

1 egg

2/3 cup cooked corn kernels cut off the cob – about 1 ear of corn. You may, of course use canned corn (but it’s never as good).

Method:

Preheat the oven to 450° F., 250° C.

1. Grease your muffin till very well.

2. Take a large bowl and in it, blend the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, salt, and pepper.

3. In a smaller bowl, blend buttermilk, oil, and egg.

4. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and pour the liquid mix into it, stirring gently till everything is just blended. Don’t overstir; that will make a tough muffin. That’s a thing we all wish to avoid.

5. Mix the corn kernels in, gently.

6. Fill the muffin cups. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the muffins are uniformly golden brown.

7. All the muffins to cool 5 minutes, then lift them out of the cups – run a knife between the muffin and the cup to loosen it up if you have to – and set them on a rack to cool.

Very good to eat when warm, with a little butter or some cheese on the side.

♥

My old, favorite cornbread recipe is one I’ve baked dozens of times – and it’s here on the blog, but there’s a glitch with the link. To find the recipe, do a search for “cornbread” and it’ll appear together with a post titled “Mama’s Little Babies Love Za’atar on Bread.”

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Potato Bread from Elizabeth David

The recipe for this delicious, light bread came from  Elizabeth David‘s English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Browsing through that book is a pleasure. I start reading for fun, absorbed in food history, almost hearing Ms. David’s distinctive, elegantly British voice, and then hit the recipes. Oh, those crumpets and muffins, those brioches and yeast buns!

Every time I go through it, another recipe catches my eye. This time, it was potato bread. Ms. David took old recipes and adjusted them to her modern English kitchen. Here in Israel, I took this recipe and did the same.

One of the adjustments I made was to keep this loaf pareve (containing neither meat nor milk). Ms. David suggests using a mixture of warm milk and water for the liquid. Note: there is no fat nor commercial sugar in this bread.

Potato Bread

1 large loaf

Ingredients

White flour: 450 grm or 3 1/2 cups

Salt: 20 grm. or 2 tsp.

Warm, dry, mashed and sieved potato: 120 grm or 1/2 cup, firmly packed. One medium-sized potato should do it.

Yeast from fresh cube: 15 grm. or 1 Tblsp.

Water, warm: 280 grm. or 1 cup plus a little less than 1/2 cup

Method:

1. Boil the potato, in its skin, till it’s quite soft, but not disintegrating.

2. While the potato is cooking, put the yeast in a small bowl with the warm water. Allow it to dissolve.

3. Measure 3 cups of flour into a bowl and add the salt to it.

4. When the potato is done, drain it and bring the cooking pot back to the stove, shaking it over the flame to dry it out well. Remove the potato to a dish and let it cool just enough to handle. I didn’t peel my potato, but if you want to, go ahead. Mash it and force it through a sieve to eliminate lumps in the dough.

5. Rub the sieved potato through the flour as if it were fat for a pie crust, till the potato is “thoroughly amalgamated.”

6. Make a well in the center of the potatoey flour and pour the yeasty water in. With a spoon, throw flour from the sides over the liquid and mix it in.

7. Keep stirring and mixing. You will get a loose, sloppy dough. Don’t let that worry you, just cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rise. Between 2 and 3 hours later, it will look like this:

8. Knock it back and sprinkle in, a little at a time, another 1/2 cup of flour. Lightly knead, or fold and stretch the dough till it’s a cohesive mass. Cover the dough with a damp towel and let it rest for 15 minutes. Both of these parts are important: you let the dough rest to absorb the new quantity of flour, and the damp towel is there to keep the top crust a little moisturized lest you get a crust too hard to cut.

Preheat the oven to 425° F 225°  C.

9. While the oven is heating, shape the dough into a loaf. You can place it into a loaf tin or leave it free-form. What I did was shape the loaf on a floured sheet of baking paper and roll the paper back and forth a few times under it. The normally bottom, seam side stayed up on purpose to let the loaf open along the seam – instead of slashing the loaf on the top side.  Let the loaf rise till light – again, covered with a damp towel – another 20 minutes or so.

10. Spritz, or brush the loaf with water.

11. Bake it for 45 minutes.

Cool on a rack. Wait till the bread is entirely cool before slicing into it. In fact, it’s better the next day. Good to eat plain or toasted; good for sandwiches; good for croutons. Just darned good bread.

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