smitten kitchen

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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