smitten kitchen » Bread

grilled eggplant and olive pizza

deb — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:59:02 +0000

A few months ago, a friend called to say that she was telling her office mates about how I love to grill pizza and they set to searching for my recipe on this site and couldn’t find it. Gulp, I said, I’ve just never written it up! From that day forward, I made it my Summer Priority to walk you through pizza on the grill, but I have failed at each turn. Either we’ve made the pizza too late in the evening and the pictures came out anything but appetizing, or the day I decided to try again, it has rained. Seriously. If you want thunderstorms to suddenly threaten, let me promise to make you grilled pizza for dinner.

Last night was the final straw, or the day I finally threw my hands in the air and declared that a proper introduction to grilled pizza will probably have to wait until next summer. (Fortunately, Jen and Dietsch at Last Night’s Dinner won’t make you wait that long.) I have had this grilled eggplant and olive pizza on the agenda even since I spied it in this month’s Gourmet and knew that it immediately needed to get in my belly. Four days later (a typical time lag these days from “idea” to “execution”, sadly) I had the ingredients amassed, the energy to give it a try and even a friend’s yard to grill in, thus of course, the weather went downhill. But I persevered, climbing into the far reaches of our linen closet where we stash kitchen stuff that doesn’t get much use (whispering hello to my 12-inch wedding cake pans and canneler molds), unearthing my cast iron panini pan (hey, close enough, right?) and setting to grill to my heart’s content, weather be damned.

... Read the rest of grilled eggplant and olive pizza on smittenkitchen.com

lemony zucchini goat cheese pizza

deb — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:02:19 +0000

I’ve been at a bit of a standstill in the kitchen this month. It’s not really a lack of ideas vexing me, but a lack of desire to spend any time in front of a stove or oven now that the weather is so delicious, I believe I at least owe it the courtesy of spending time out in it. Sure, there are savory tarts and summery salads and even another burger bun recipe on my agenda; there’s a cake in my fridge that’s so pretty I will not be the least bit offended if you mount a protest that I am waiting until next time to tell you about it, but I need to level with you: I have not cooked a real dinner for us in over a month. A month! Perhaps longer.

None of this has stopped me from bringing home mounds of produce each week from the markets. My current (boring) preggo cravings are green beans and summer squash, and I’ve made countless batches of this salad and this sauté but a proper meal, they are not. Today I staged an intervention with myself once and for all. I figure it can’t just be me that is unmotivated to cook a decent, light summer meal and that the only solution would be to create something worth rallying myself — and others — over.

... Read the rest of lemony zucchini goat cheese pizza on smittenkitchen.com

light brioche burger buns

deb — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:44:40 +0000

Do you know what this is? This is It. This is the hamburger bun recipe I’d been obsessing, dreaming and fretting over when I had my Incident back in May, which was namely that I’d spent a ridiculous amount of time and ingredients fighting a no-good recipe with a decidedly average finish. Since then, my frustration has faded somewhat, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that perhaps they weren’t the end of the world, they just weren’t the thing I was looking for: they were more of a limp white bread bun — the kind so easily purchased at a store under any generic brand, it made little sense to eek them out at home — and I wanted something a little more moist and rich. I wanted something better, the kind of thing that you knew you weren’t going to get in any plastic bag.

In the six weeks since, I have waded through nearly 100 burger bun recipes, all submitted by you kind folks with promises that they’d be better. I saw white bread buns and challah buns and whole wheat sourdough buns and you-name-it buns and, gah, I barely knew where to begin. And then, just as I was halfway through the early steps of a totally different hamburger bun recipe that, if all goes well, will be a wonderful, unusual complement to these, I dropped that effort completely in the pursuit of the Light Brioche Buns run in the New York Times article this week on the elements of a perfect burger.

... Read the rest of light brioche burger buns on smittenkitchen.com

cinnamon raisin bagels

deb — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:58:18 +0000

There are a whole lot of foods that I’m not sure are even worth the trouble of making at home, though I suspect this list varies by what you have accessible in your neighborhood. I feel fairly certain I won’t be making any falafel sandwiches in our new kitchen, especially now that I’ve discovered our proximity to the $2.50 perfection at Mamouns. I’m not even sure I’ll ever make pirogi again, after finding my fluffy, light pirogi nirvana this weekend at the Ukranian National Home. And in general, I’ve never seen a whole lot of purpose in making bagels from scratch in New York City — save a one-time baking frenzy — and certainly not when we lived less than two blocks from our bagel ideal, Murrays. (I’m a little lost for a decent bagel in the East Village — anyone? I think we’ve been spoiled.)

But all bets are off when you’re at a cattle ranch 90 minutes from the nearest city in Northeastern Oklahoma, where I’m pretty sure your best bet to land a decent handmade, water-boiled bagel is to tackle them in your own kitchen. Plus, when you’re visiting someone who had just recently discovered her fervent passion for bagels with cream cheese and lox, it is your New Yorker duty to come armed with fresh, delicious cream cheese and lox from Russ & Daughters. And so we did. But then we demanded she make her own bagels.

... Read the rest of cinnamon raisin bagels on smittenkitchen.com

black bread

deb — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:54:13 +0000

It is ridiculous to think that on a site where I have shared twenty-nine bread recipes that I have yet to tell you about my favorite bread. Way to hold out Deb, right? I mean what were the other breads, just teasers? Well, yes.

I’m not sorry, though, because my favorite bread contains perplexing things like chocolate, bran, molasses, shallots and fennel seeds, things that any sane person would know are completely insane to intentionally put in the same place. It has seventeen ingredients, which also goes far to explain why I don’t make it more often. (Remember, I’m the person who ran out of cinnamon making cinnamon rolls; do you actually think I can be counted on to have seventeen things at once?) Put all of that together and you’ll see why I know this bread is a hard sell.

... Read the rest of black bread on smittenkitchen.com

bialys

deb — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:56:27 +0000

Growing up, I never gave bialys much thought. The bagel shop where I briefly worked in high school had us front-end people take bagels off the machine rollers, pinch together the centers, schmear them with the onion filling and leave them on a tray for the professionals to bake, and that was about far as I'd considered them -- a bagel variant. Oh, and that they were excellent toasted with salted butter.

It was reading The Bialy Eaters, Mimi Sheraton's pursuit of the chewy, onion-topped kuchen from Bialystok, Poland to Paris, Argentina and Miami Beach, Florida, that was a turning point for me. Although though the book is true to the subject at hand -- bialys -- the subtext is really about the narratives from the scattered remnants of Bialystok -- only a handful survived the pogroms and Holocaust -- recalling what they can about the rolls they used to make and eat. I hadn't realized exactly how scarce they were, and became a little obsessed.

If you're not from New York City, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. You've probably heard of bagels, I'm sure, but bialys, often sold in the same shops, but usually relegated to a neglected lower shelf, rarely get any love. As well most of them shouldn't, as the state of the current bialy in New York City, or at least Manhattan (I hear there is a place worth checking out in Brooklyn and will keep you posted) is less than ideal -- most are spongy with weak indentations, and if you get more than two scrap of onion in the center, you've beaten the odds. Even Kossar's Bialys on Grand Street in the Lower East Side, which Sheraton had proclaimed the most authentic and best current example of bialys in New York City has gone downhill, with her softening her praise in 2007 to say that "times have changed." (P.S. The pletzels there are still delicious.)

As you can see, bialys are crying out to be made at home, and out of the blue, likely due to a rare combination of deadlines having been met and having already gone to the gym, I decided Thursday was the day. I was thrilled to discover that Rose Levy Beranbaum's Bread Bible had a version, and that she learned her recipe and technique from a baker at Kossar's. (Yes, the same Kossar's, but nearly ten years ago, when it's reputation was intact.) Because they didn't require boiling before baking, they were especially easy to make. And although I will never know if they do the originals any justice, we thought they were perfect -- chewy and soft, onions caramelized and impossible to resist.

One year ago: Swiss Easter Rice Tart

Two years ago: Rich Buttermilk Waffles and Arugula Ravioli

caramelized onion and goat cheese cornbread

deb — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:49:47 +0000

Let me just get the obvious out of the way: this is no proper Southern cornbread. Please, do not bring it to a North Carolina or Texas barbecue dinner, they’ll be horrified by the presence of sugar and honestly, at that point, it may be in your best interest to not even bring up the goat cheese within.

And while we’re on the subject of proper Southern cornbread — no sugar, cooked in a skillet that has often been swirled with bacon drippings — you know, I have tried to find love for it many times. I made a batch in January that all of my Southern friends (and their visiting parents) heartily approved of. It had crisp edges. It went great with the barbecue dinner. It was a cinch to make.

... Read the rest of caramelized onion and goat cheese cornbread on smittenkitchen.com

pita bread

deb — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:00:31 +0000

Oh, am I so happy to finally have a great pita recipe. You see, pitas themselves aren’t hard to make. Most recipes very closely, or even exactly, resemble a standard pizza dough and they’re not much more difficult to assemble. No, the trouble comes when you pop them in the oven and pray for the kind of puffiness you can pop some falafel into and end up with flatbread. Delicious, warm, toasty flatbread, but definitely not a pita.

But this works! These babies puffed up like a mouth-watering poori bread in the oven, coming out closer to balloons than pizzas — at last. The technique, which should be 100 percent attributed to Rose Levy Beranbaum’s brilliance, and not my own, puts indiviuals pitas on a searing hot baking stone (or if you’re me, and have busted another one I don’t want to talk about it a cast iron skillet) and bakes them for just three minutes. I found that spritzing the tops with water guaranteed a perfect puff, but really, that’s all there is. It’s that easy.

... Read the rest of pita bread on smittenkitchen.com

meatball sliders

deb — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:25:46 +0000

Nearly two years ago, when I was a sprightly young thing who planned elaborate birthday weekends for myself, Alex and I went to The Little Owl to celebrate, an infinitesimally small and adorable restaurant in the West Village that has an Italian/New American thing going on. Never ones to study up on a restaurant before going, we simply ordered whatever sounded good (in fact, I tried unsuccessfully to replicate my fideos appetizer at home) which went really well until we told people what we’d eaten the next day and they near-universally gasped “You didn’t have the meatball sliders?”

“Um, no?” I’d eek out, ducking.

Apparently, the meatball sliders at The Little Owl are All, the embodiment of everything great about the restaurant in three golf balls on buns and to skip them is to may as well have not gone at all. The good news is that the chef, Joey Campanaro, turns out to be incredibly generous with his recipes and nearly a year later, I had a chance to redeem myself when I found the recipe for his beloved meatball sliders in two places, New York Magazine and Bon Appetit.

... Read the rest of meatball sliders on smittenkitchen.com

soft pretzels, refreshed

deb — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:32:45 +0000

Now, I know it has been barely two years since I told you about making miniature soft pretzels at home but according to my calculations, at least three-quarters of you weren’t around back then and that means you might be missing out. And that would be terrible.

Because making pretzels at home is such a fun weekend project. It’s a little more time-consuming than your standard loaf, but given the dismally dry, flavorless state of pretzel stands these days, so incredibly more worth your time. While the dough is a fairly standard one — flour, water, yeast, salt and sugar — the magic comes when you drop your little knots into a bath of boiling water and baking soda, as the second the little roll hits the bubbles, your kitchen will smell like a pretzelrie.

What, no such thing exists? Such a shame. I’d open one and serve these and bretzel rolls and spicy mustards from around the world and chocolate chip blondies with bits of hard salty pretzels baked inside and rich German beers and live happily ever after. Ahem, not that I’ve given this any thought or anything. In the meanwhile, there are these. And you should totally make them.

... Read the rest of soft pretzels, refreshed on smittenkitchen.com