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Have to Have a Challah

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October 6, 2011 By In breads & breakfast, eat me

One of, um, okay, probably the only benefit to my oven being temperamental lately is that when things are baking I now must stand sentry by its side throughout the cook time just in case it should decide to start turning itself off again. From this location, my typing is especially inspired, what with all the lovely baking smells wafting my way.

This effect was particularly potent during the baking of an Apple and Honey Challah the other morning. I had spotted the recipe on Smitten Kitchen and wanted to try it out immediately, but who wants to spend hours prepping bread dough only to be thwarted by an uncooperative appliance? Feeling braver after my pot pie success, I set out the ingredients and got to mixing. Despite the complex-looking braiding, the entire process was surprisingly simple.

Apple and Honey Challah
Pretty much as seen on Smitten Kitchen

2/3 cup warm water
2 t instant yeast
1/3 cup honey
1/3 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs plus 1 large yolk
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
4 1/4 cups or 578 grams bread flour (Weighing flour is by the far the best, no-stress way to go when it comes to accuracy and neatness in flour measuring. If you bake often, consider investing. I have never looked back.)

2 medium baking apples, peeled, cored and in 1/2-inch chunks
Sprinkle of lemon juice, to keep them from browning

1 large additional egg, beaten, for bread wash

In a large bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer, whisk yeast and water. Add the oil, honey, and eggs, and thoroughly combine. The add the flour and salt, and stir till dough pulls together. In the mixer or by hand, knead until smooth and developed, about 6 minutes. Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover, and allow to rise until almost doubled in sized.

(The original recipe used active yeast and suggested this would take an hour. My kitchen was chilly and my yeast was instant, so I left mine a little longer and in the end I wished I’d allowed the first rise to run even longer, but I got impatient.)

Let dough fall out of the bowl onto a clean counter and spread out into a wide disc, similar to a thick pizza crust, spread 2/3 of the apple chunks on the bottom half and fold the dough over, pressing it down and sealing in the fruit. Place the remaining fruit on to of half the dough again, and fold it over, pressing it down, sealing and tucking it into a boule shape. Invert and place the now-empty bowl over top of the dough and allow it to rest for 30 minutes.

There are many ways to braid a challah, and I really enjoyed the Smitten Kitchen’s braiding suggestions. You can get detailed photos and step-by-step instructions over her way. Basically, you cut the dough into quarters like a pie (a bench scraper works well for this, slicing cleanly through the dough), seal in the apple chunks, and stretch each into a foot-long log. If pieces of apple try and escape during this step, don’t panic. Just poke them back into the dough. I honestly expected this to be of comedy of errors, but there didn’t end up being a great deal of runaway fruit to deal with. Weaving the four strips over and under one another in front of you in the shape of a # sign, you then lift each “under” leg over top of the leg to its immediate right, doing this a total of 4 times as you move around the bread. Then you take the leg you didn’t braid yet and move it to the left. For me, this was all the braiding that was needed, so all that remained was to tuck the ends securely underneath the loaf. Move the bread to a sheet of parchment, and brush it with the egg wash. I slipped mine onto the back of a baking sheet for ease of transfer and covered it with greased plastic wrap. Let it rise again for an hour.

Preheat the over to 375˚F. When the final rise is complete and the oven is hot, remove the plastic, brush again with the egg wash, and bake for 45 minutes (tenting with foil if bread darkens quickly–mine always seems to.) When done, the inside of the bread should register at least 190˚F. My loaf ended up needing additional time, the middle still undercooked due to the fruit, so best to check.

Falling Back Into Soup

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September 18, 2011 By In breads & breakfast, csa & vegetables, eat me, soups

Crisp temperatures required that I actually dig proper shoes out of the closet before hitting the farmer’s market this weekend. Suddenly sweet potatoes and squash sounded appetizing. Weird how nature works like that. Summer, it seems, is saying her farewells.

When I got my weekly produce haul home and out on the counter, I spent fifteen minutes dreaming up multiple, complex culinary projects that would suit a blog post here before I stumbled on Yotam Ottlenghi’s recipe for Broiled Vegetable Soup and realized I had the exact combination of veggies needed for this single, elegantly simple dish. It was irresistible. Some people play sudoku; I get a little jolt of dopamine when I read through an ingredient list and realize I have just enough of this and that and that other thing to make it work out perfectly.

Aside: the eggplant is a vegetable that I want to love unreservedly, but that I frequently despise because I have cooked it poorly. No more! When prepping it for soups and spreads, the “hour under the broiler” method Ottlenghi suggests will be my new go-to. Doing so chars the outside to a crisp so that you then literally crack it open to scoop out the beautifully cooked meat inside.

Okay, back to the soup. While I said I had just enough of everything, my available ratio of nightshades definitely favored the tomato, so unsurprisingly my soup led with that on the palate. Still, the rich and smokey eggplant on the base and the fresh basil on the top notes make this soup a stand out. My real coup here, however, was that I had scored a bag of fresh lima beans, so no canned mush in my ladle. The resulting bowl was a perfect match to the season.

You cannot (or at least I certainly will not) have soup without bread, however, and I had just seen a recipe I wanted to try out that used left over dill pickle juice as part of the liquid. You might have noticed that I’ve been making a few pickles here and there this summer, so I have spare dill-spiked brine all over the place. It seemed a similar-enough thing when I started, but I began to change my mind as I worked. I think the sweet, less vinegar-y commercial dill pickle juice that was suggested in the recipe would have suited this project fantastically, but my homemade pickling leftovers were a little too pungent. Still, it got me out of my rye bread rut, so all was not lost. And it makes great toast!

Broiled Vegetable Soup

From Plenty by Yotam Ottlenghi

3 medium eggplants
2 red bell peppers, stems and seeds removed (I used 2 roasted red peppers out of jar on hand)
3 medium tomatoes
2 red onions, diced
2 T olive oil
3/4 basil leaves, torn
2 oregano springs, leaves only
10 garlic cloves
1 qt vegetable stock (I had less eggplant and only ended up needing 3 cups to get a good consistency soup)
salt and pepper
4 cups cooked lima beans (fresh, if you have them)
yogurt or lemon to garnish

The best part of this recipe is the taste that the broiling of the vegetables gets out of them (or at least that’s what Ottlenghi writes and, after sampling, I would have to agree). Set the broiler on high. Prick the eggplant a few times with a fork and place in a foil-lined pan. Broil for 30 minutes.

At the 30 minute mark, turn the eggplant over with tongs and add the 2 peppers to the pan. Broil for 15 more minutes, turning the peppers half way through.

Place the tomatoes in a second foil-lined pan and at the 45 minute mark, add them to the oven on a rack beneath the already broiling vegetables. Broil for an additional 15 minutes, and then remove all vegetables from the oven, wrapping the peppers in foil. Once the peppers are cool enough to handle, peel them and roughly chop. Scoop out the flesh of the eggplant, leaving the charred skin behind.

In a stock pot , saute the onion in the olive oil on low for 20 minutes, until soft and golden (I started this when I put my tomatoes in the oven and the timing worked out well). To this pot then add the scooped eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, stock, oregano, half the basil, salt and peppers and simmer for 15 minutes. Blend until smooth and add cooked lima beans, reheating as needed. Adjust seasoning to taste and serve topped with yogurt or lemon and the remaining basil leaves. A slice of freshly baked bread on the side won’t do you wrong, either.

Bless This House

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May 8, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

Bread, that this house may never know hunger. Salt, that life may always have flavor. And wine, that joy and prosperity may reign forever.

I’m not sure how the tradition of bringing bread, salt, and wine as a housewarming gift got started among my highly transient cohort (I guess, like most people, we heard it one too many times during the annual Christmas screening of It’s a Wonderful Life). Regardless, two sets of wonderful Baltimore friends made moves at the end of April, so I cracked open Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice yesterday and got to work on a couple of challah loaves to celebrate these new homes.

Like all traditions, variations pop up. I just came across a version that substitutes a new broom for the wine, “to sweep your troubles or sorrows away,” which sounds both poetic and practical. Honestly, with friend’s like mine, I’d always thought we had added the wine part on ourselves (along with a nice cheese and a container of olives, of course).

Miles To Go

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February 12, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

I feel as if I’m getting to the point in my bread-making experience where I’ve done just enough to know how very far I have yet to go before I’m really good at it. I take some small comfort in the idea that, having learned to play the violin as a child, the patience to pursue this slow curve is already trained into my hands. Here’s hoping the muscle memory kicks in as easily as it did when I was ten.


Feeling confident but not yet cocky about my basic country loaf, for try #4 out of the Tartine bread book I decided to mix it up just a bit and do a run of the baguette recipe using the fendu shape (also the version that appears on the cover of the book, I believe). In the end, I got bread alright, and plenty of it, but I also learned a lot of things. While nothing I did destroyed the end product, I think it will be a lot better next time when I mix the initial dough a bit more carefully (myself and my available bowls were overwhelmed by the sheer weight and volume of dough on the table) and, now that I have a a better feel for the flour and crease shape, I think I have a clearer understanding of how to get the correct look from the final loaf. Alas, I’ll just have to do it again. And again. Not to mention start purchasing flour in the large burlap-sack size.

I used to get seriously distressed when recipes didn’t work for me the first time out, and yet I have trouble following instructions to the letter. I learned to play music by ear and I find myself cooking more by picture and smell and feel than by any amount of typed direction. The more comfortable I get in my kitchen, the more value I place on making time to practice and play around with what I’m doing so that I’m actually learning something for the takeaway–risking mistakes for the chance of stumbling onto something more personally satisfying. It doesn’t make the occasional complete failure  any less frustrating, but I’m just starting to understand that I’ve been in this place before.

Tartine Basic Country Loaf: Try #1

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January 21, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

At 8 a.m. I began mixing the dough for my first Tartine Basic Country Loaf. Well, you could say that I had been mixing it for going on two weeks, since it took that long to get my starter into shape. Now, with just flour and water and patience (and a bit of salt), I was going to make bread.

There was much measuring of flour and water (weight and temperature!). My nurtured starter proved itself ready for the task at hand. Much stirring and folding and folding and folding (every half hour, for most of the morning). And shaping and resting and rising and then…

After all that work and what I thought was a careful flouring of the towel lining my rising bowl (I’ve done the no-knead bread dance more than once), the dough napped for four hours and adhered itself firmly to the material in the process. So there I was, poised over a 500 degree dutch oven with an entire day of careful work flashing through my mind and a teardrop of dough stuck to a towel in my hands. In just the 3 seconds it took to flip the dough over, I thought all was lost. Foul language was used.

In the end, however, the bread forgave me this error, even if it did trade the attractive baker’s slashings for a surface more, um, rustic. Slicing into the first loaf, the crust was flaky and crisp, the inside boasting huge holes, a chewy texture, and a slight but extremely addictive sour note. I pronounced it excellent and made some cream of tomato soup to go with it on this chilly night.

You can check out the photographic play-by-play here. I need a rest, but then I am totally giving this one another run.

UPDATE: Try #3

Okay, I think I’m getting a handle on this process now. And even though it takes time, I like the work of the tasks involved. And it seems especially worth the investment when it comes out of the oven all golden and crackling.

Step One: Training the Starter

January 19, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

I’m declaring 2011 my year of making bread. Sure, I’ve kneaded a yeasty loaf in my day, but now I’m getting serious. There will be flour, and I will weigh it accurately if it kills me.

To kick things off, I thought I’d start by cracking the cover on my copy of Tartine Bread–a book of certifiable food porn if ever there was one. Page follows page of photography that’s tastable (visually, at least) while the text relays the backstory on Chad Robertson’s quest to make great bread. Now that he has found success, the book is essentially his guidance on how to make some for yourself at home.

So I tore myself away from drooling over the images to actually start training my starter up (as outlined in the book’s initial pages) a little over a week ago. So far, so good! Now, I wait. To help pass the time, here’s a beautiful video about the bakery and the process.