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Entries Tagged as 'Baking'

Alice Medrich, Cookie Queen.

December 11th, 2010 · 4 Comments · Baking, Books, Chocolate, Cookies

There are some cookbooks I read at the shop and fall madly in love with, but refuse to take home until I can no longer resist them because I know that I’m doomed when I do. Doomed! [Don't worry, they win out at the end, I assure you.] Alice Medrich’s ‘Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies‘ is one of those books.

This is because if there is any problem worse than my “cook-book problem”, it is my “cook-ie problem”. I am the type of person who will eat an entire batch of cookies if proper safeguarding precautions are not taken. And, as I’ve been giving in a little too often to my cookie problem, the one pair of jeans that I can still fit into are threatening to burst. I’m holding out as long as I can, damn it.

Alice came to Omnivore to talk about the book, and after spending a whole hour with the Goddess of Chocolate, it has taken every effort of mine not to bring it home and immediately start baking. My resolve was even further weakened by actually eating cookies made from the book:

For the talk, Celia made her Alfajores, a sweet and slightly crispy Latin American cookie filled generously with dulce de leche. Crispy and Gooey? Yes, please! She tweaked the recipe slightly to add some nuts and a little bit of extra salt. I had four, and would have had more had my mother not ingrained the principle of sharing. This was difficult. Had I been only a *slightly more selfish* and greedy person, there would have been none left in minutes.

A few reasons why you need this book:

1. It’s by Alice Medrich. **(see below)

2. The broad organization. The book is a play on textures and flavors. You get to choose from Crispy, Crunchy, Chunky, Chewy, Gooey, Flaky, and Melt in your mouth. Alice Medrich is a “crispy” girl. I’m a “chunky” girl myself. Yes, I said that. The more chocolate hunks or nuts, the better.

3. It’s all in the details. “Cookies seem deceptively simple. But success with cookies is success in the details,” Alice noted. When you give the same recipe to ten cookie bakers, even experienced ones, you might just come out with ten completely different versions.

This book seeks to streamline your baking. If you can conquer at least some of the variables, you will make better cookies. A user’s guide, quick start, FAQ’s, ingredients, equipment, are all there to make cooking baking more precise and successful.

The quick start gives the five most important details about successful cooking baking: amounts of flour, types of flour, oven temperatures, preheating the oven, and types of baking sheets. The FAQ’s go into even more detail about basic ideas: how to toast nuts, why you would chill cookie dough, what the best way to flatten dough, etc.

And yes, Alice Medrich wants you to get a scale. (And so do I. I got mine at Ikea for 12 dollars. What are you waiting for?) The measurements in the book are also in cups, but using a scale will give you great, consistent results.

4. The “Smart Search”. Even better than just an index, there is a brilliant section called the “smart search”. Need Wheat-free cookies? She lists the 40 or so options for you. Whole-Grains? Dairy-free? Ditto. Ridiculously Quick and Easy? Same.  Don’t have time to bake during the holiday season? Well, there’s a whole list of ‘Doughs that Freeze Well’ and ‘Cookies that Keep At Least 2 Weeks’. Yes, there are even low-fat. Although, I’ve become wise to understand that low-fat doesn’t in any way mean that you should eat the whole batch.

5. Simplicity. After 8 cookbooks, things are getting more do-able for the home-cook. That doesn’t mean that she skimped on the fun stuff. “Anything I do, I need to learn something, and I need to teach something,” Medrich says. There are classics, and new twists on old favorites. “I didn’t want it to be something that an ordinary home baker with kids wouldn’t want to pick up and bake from”.

6. Well tested recipes. If you are familiar with any of her older cookbooks, including her IACP winning book ‘BitterSweet‘ you know first hand that her recipes work. When she wrote her first cookbook, she did a huge series of ‘Side-by-Side’ testing in a kitchen with a friend to compare how they interpreted the written recipes, and tweak to get more consistent results. (A fairly genius idea.)

Medrich also teaches cooking classes. “The teaching helps, because I do the recipes and get to see what questions come up.” Teaching is also useful to help a recipe writer guide the reader in the recipes. Learning how people interpret words on the page teaches her to be a better writer and learn to use more specific explanations. And the difficult part of testing? “First, too much tasting, and second, knowing when to stop.”

7. Well written recipes. Often, recipes take for granted things that are intuitive if you’ve had a lot of practice in the kitchen, and the author forgets to write down steps that the novice might not yet know. When you read through any of Alice Medrich’s recipes, it’s like you have a perceptive friend guiding you through things, so you don’t forget the basics while under fire.

It was rumored that Julia Child once said to Flo Braker “Write what works for you, Dearie”, and Medrich re-emphasizes that. “The good writers are the ones who ignore how it’s always been done and explain it in a way that makes sense to them.”

8. The personal touch. Alice has been on the set since book one cooking and styling her own dishes for the photo shoots. (For those less familiar with cookbook production, this is rarely the case). “It’s the thrilling part of the process in this book!” she said.

** While it’s important to focus on the merits of the cookbook itself, I take great pleasure in knowing the history of cookbook authors. It sweetens the deal when you get to use a book written by an inspirational (and smiling!) woman like Alice Medrich.

The Backstory:

When Alice Medrich was twenty, she went to Paris. It was there that Mme. Estelle, her land-lady, taught her about the Truffle, “that smooth, bittersweet statement about chocolate” that unbeknownst to her, would lead her to great things.

Upon coming back to Berkeley, her future still unclear, she opted for the rational lifestyle choice of putting off the real world… and heading to business school. Given that I almost went to business school right after graduating college, I can understand the impulse. (Though I’m glad I didn’t.)

At business school, she spent her free time making cocoa dusted chocolate truffles for the new Pig-By-The-Tail, Victoria Wise’s charcuterie shop. It didn’t take long to realize that she was becoming more interested in creating a dessert repertoire than dealing with case studies, and soon dropped out of b-school.

Before opening a pastry shop, Medrich did her due diligence. She headed back to Paris to take classes at Lenôtre, the famed pastry school, where she was often the only woman in her pastry classes.

She learned timing, temperature, and the physicality of multiplying recipes by trial-by-fire: at Pig-By-The-Tail, she would come up with a weekly special at the beginning of the week, an elaborate pastry that could be pre-ordered by six lucky customers. Without actually knowing if it would work, Medrich set about learning the recipes as she went – theoretically she would get enough practice by the end of the week to make at least six!

In 1976, she opened her shop, ‘Cocolat’.

I’ve heard more than one Bay Area native wax poetic about Cocolat and moan desperately about Alice’s legendary truffles. Celia (@omnivorebooks) used to head to the shop with cash from her co-workers in each pocket to pick up a bounty on her breaks. Mary (@mcs3000) recalled saving money to buy Alice’s first cookbook and making her Strawberry Carrousel Cake.

As a newcomer to San Francisco, it’s stories about shops like Cocolat that make me regret having not grown up here. By the time I moved here, Cocolat was no longer. (Pig-By-The-Tail, and Fran Gage’s Pâtisserie Française are others that I tragically missed out on.) I can’t live my life dwelling upon the fact that I’ve lived in the wrong era, but stories about the truffles and Cocolat’s ‘Reine de Saba’ make it hard not to. Another good reason for cookbooks like ‘Chewy Gooey” to help keep a legacy alive!

Alice’s Quick Bites:

That’s a lot of chocolate! In the early days, it wasn’t so easy to find quality ingredients. She used to send friends and family to purchase all the Ghiradelli Semisweet chocolate from the supermarkets (the best you could find at the time), until she realized that she used enough to get wholesale. Soon, Fifty pounds of chocolate wasn’t enough, and by the time she opened Cocolat, she was getting 300, even 500 pounds a month of chocolate delivered to her door!

Her favorite baking chocolates? “The most important thing is to use what you like the taste of. I still use Scharfenberger, because I like the taste a lot,” Alice says. (While I love using Valrhona myself, for chocolate chips I use Ghiradelli 60% cacao, which are flatter discs because of a higher fat content.)

Who eats all the recipes she tests? Her neighbors have been next door from her for more than thirty years, and they don’t accept treats anymore. (She fondly remembers the day that they sat down and ate an entire cake together.) Nowadays she gives them to whoever will take them – the new neighbors on the block, the synagogue down the street, a friend’s softball team.

On Inspiration: Inspiration comes from everywhere. Sometimes easily: “A lot of new recipes come from a recipe that is good already rather than a recipe you want to fix.” Other times, more abstractly:  “I once developed a recipe from a salad from one of Paula Wolfert’s cookbooks.”

Her next project: Already in the works, a baking book for people more comfortable with cooking than with baking. Recipes that work the way cooks work, with a little bit more flexibility.

Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies
by Alice Medrich
384 pages
Artisan Books

http://alicemedrich.blogspot.com/

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Fall Traditions: Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt

November 13th, 2010 · 12 Comments · Baking

Each year when I put together my fall to-do list, there is one item always at the top: the Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake.

This bundt is the perfect cake for fall: moist, spiced, hearty and chock-full of chocolate chips. It’s the type of cake you want to eat at the end of a long day raking leaves or cleaning your closets. It’s also the kind of cake you want on a crisp Sunday morning, huddled with a steaming mug of coffee and a wrapped in a thick blanket.

Of all the recipes my mother makes, this one is my favorite. She found it in the Harrowsmith Cookbook v. 3, which she purchased for $17 from L.L. Bean on July 21st, 1988. Yes, she made a note of it.

The Harrowsmith Country Life magazine was a popular Canadian living magazine in the 1980s, which catered to hippie environmental homesteaders. They put out three excellent cookbooks, with recipes from editors, contributors, and readers alike. My mother has cooked out of this one on many occasions, always going back to the simple pumpkin bundt, everyone’s favorite.

When I moved to California, one of the first things that I bought for my own kitchen was this shiny bundt pan from Cookin’ on Divisadero, so that I could make the cake as soon as seasonally appropriate.

[Not that fall is necessarily the season - every year, my mother would ask me what type of birthday cake I would like her to make for me, and each year, the decision was brutal. Oreo ice cream cake with mint chocolate chip? Or a pumpkin bundt? Growing up in New England, either could be suitable for my May birthday  – sometimes the thermometer read 90 degrees, other times there would be frost visible on the ground.]

I’ve made this cake many times in my life, first at home with my mother, later as a teenager to take on hiking trips, or in college for the ladies of Dower House, my home at Wellesley for three years. Sometimes I’d make the full bundt, but more often than not, the batter became muffins, perfect to wrap in foil, and tuck in someone’s bag as a surprise. Muffins were also the practical fix, if, say, you ate too much of the batter to make a full bundt.

This year I started a new family tradition. I baked the cake, and sent half in the mail to my brother, John, a freshman at George Mason. He is living without a dorm kitchen, and was craving the Pumpkin Bundt as much as I was. Another good thing about this cake, is that it holds up fairly well in the mail for a few days.

The recipe itself has just a handful of ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, pumpkin, oil, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, and chocolate chips.

I set about preheating my oven to 350 degrees, and greasing and flouring my beautiful bundt pan. [This is key, otherwise your cake will stick to your bundt.]

The first step was sifting together all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Then, in a large bowl (or in my case, the bowl of Martha my KitchenAid mixer), I beat the eggs and sugar together.

Then, I added the oil and the pumpkin to the egg mixture, making sure to mix well. This takes a little bit of effort if you are stirring on your own, but it can be done!

I stirred the flour mixture into the wet mix, (on the slowest speed on the mixer to avoid a flour explosion), and lastly, folded in the copious amount of chocolate chips (and pecans, if you’d like them). I generally just use chocolate chips, because that’s what my mother does. (Mostly I believe, so that she could send this to school with me without worrying about children with nut allergies.)

I poured it all into my bundt, (which I double-triple checked that I had greased and floured first!). The hardest part about this recipe is fighting yourself from eating all the batter.

After an hour in the oven, I took the bundt out to cool for ten minutes in the pan before turning it out onto a rack. I listened to my mother’s voice in my head: “Just wait patiently!” This step is fairly crucial – waiting makes the difference between a bundt in one piece, and one that will fall apart.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake
The Harrowsmith Cookbook v. 3
The recipe comes from Gladys Sykes, of Regina, Saskatchewan.

While the recipe below can be done by hand, I do it in my kitchen aid mixer with much success. It also calls for sifting the dry ingredients twice, but one good sift will do.

3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
4 eggs, beaten
2 cups sugar
1.25 cups canola oil
2 cups cooked, mashed pumpkin (or one 15 oz. can)
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (or 1/2 cup chocolate chips and 1/2 cup chopped pecans)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F, and butter and flour a bundt pan and set aside.

In a bowl, sift the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt) together.

Beat the eggs and sugar together in a large bowl, or the bowl of your stand mixer. Add the oil and the pumpkin, mixing well, and blend in the flour mixture. Fold in the chocolate chips and pecans, if using.

Bake in the greased and floured bundt pan, for 60 minutes.

Let cool in pan for ten minutes, then turn out onto a cooling rack.

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French Fridays With Dorie: Marie-Hélène’s Apple Cake

October 29th, 2010 · 10 Comments · Baking, French Fridays

[First there was 'Tuesdays With Dorie', where each week food-lovers across the internet united to bake a recipe from Dorie Greenspan's 'Baking: From My Home to Yours'. And now Dorie is out with a wonderful new cookbook 'Around My French Table' where she shares her favorite French recipes, and I've decided to cook along. Check out French Fridays with Dorie if you'd like to join the fun.

This week's recipe is 'Marie-Hélène's Apple Cake' . Dorie describes the recipe as "rather plain, but very appealing in its simplicity". The recipe was shared by her friend Marie-Hélène Brunet-Lhoste, a wonderful hostess (and a top editor of the Louis Vuitton City Guides in Paris).]

One thing that I particularly miss from my childhood are the spectacular falls in New England.

There is nothing quite like taking a long walk in the woods, and breathing the cool earthy air. Admiring the foliage: the leaves turning golden, auburn and brown. Noticing the way the light reflects on the water, the colors vibrant and saturated. And then coming back into a warm home the first evening you light the fireplace, and drinking a mug of steaming hot cider…. and watching football. Sorry for the break in romanticism there – GO PATS!

Fall is the reward for long hard winters, and sticky-hot summers.

New Hampshire is a state rich in history. The pilgrims made a home for themselves here, but rather than puritan beliefs, religion has more to do with perseverance and braving the long winters. Our motto: “Live Free or Die” says a lot about the people who live in New Hampshire. To this day it is populated by good folk of hearty stock, rewarded for the climate by both beautiful fall weather, and the perfect location – countryside surrounded by Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont – seven miles of coastline, a short drive to the mountains, an hour away from Boston, and just four from New York.

Fall is a time of appreciation. Fall is about getting in the last of your fun before the air turns frigid.

Fall is also when you get your apple on. Each fall we picked apples at Applecrest farm, took hayrides, ate sugary cider donuts, and drank copious amounts of apple cider.

After moving to San Francisco, I found myself skipping fall rituals all together. One moment it is freezing here (summertime, of course), then a flash of heat, and the next moment  we have more winter. And then rain. So, in order not to skip out on the things that I hold dearly, I began a fall to do list. There is something deeply satisfying in list making: part reflection, part aspiration for your future. Here is mine:

:: Fall To-Do List ::

1. Bake a Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt.
2. Go apple picking; make desserts – a tarte tatin and caramel apples.
3. Find fall foliage, drive north through Napa.
4. Make a big pot of pumpkin turkey chili.
5. Fall care packages to friends and family.
6. Clean out refrigerator, straighten pantry. Go through spices, restock, and replace old ones.
7. Flush drains with boiling water.
8. Start thinking about Thanksgiving.
9. Clean out my closet, consign or give away things that don’t fit.
10. Go through catalogs and magazines to recycle, debate new subscriptions.
11. Eat Rancho Gordo Beans. (Use as many beans as possible to make room for more.)
12. Read: biography, motivational, history + pulp fiction. Sookie!
13. Hike the Dipsea Steps.
14. Raw Brussels Sprouts Salad/ Roasted Sprouts with Bacon
15. Give back to my high school, and college, and make a list of donations for the year.
16. Start amaryllis and paperwhites to enliven the house.

While I have yet to go apple picking, I have become over-run with apples. Some from my farmbox, and others from Celia’s tree in Tomales. It was fortunate that this weeks ‘French Friday’s with Dorie’ had an apple cake on the docket: Marie-Hélène’s Apple Cake.

The recipe is perfect for an afternoon where you are cleaning the house or doing errands, because the cake batter whips together in just a few minutes, and then bakes in the oven for an hour. That’s the key really to some of the best fall foods – they require minimal work, and you cook them low and slow while getting fall chores done. By the time the food has finished cooking, you’ve earned it.

The ingredients are minimal: just flour, baking powder, salt, eggs, sugar, rum, vanilla, butter and apples. Using multiple varieties of apples gives both textural and flavor contrast to the cake, and the rum adds a wonderful depth without tasting “boozy”. Not that that would be a problem…

The steps are quite simple. You whisk together the dry ingredients in a small bowl. Then you peel, core, and cube the apples. Then you whisk the egg and sugar together. Add the vanilla and rum, then you alternate pouring the flour mixture and the melted and cooled butter into the eggs. Fold in the apples, pour into an 8-inch springform, bake for an hour, and voila!

Like Dorie says, this cake is simple, but that is the beauty of it. The apples are the stars. The only additions that would make it better are Dorie’s own suggestions of either a dollop of whipped cream or a scoop of vanilla ice cream. My only problem with this cake? I didn’t bake two.

Recipe:  Marie-Hélène’s Apple Cake

In accordance with ‘French Fridays With Dorie’ rules, I’m not posting the recipe – you must buy Dorie’s book to get the details. But believe me, it will be money well spent.

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French Fridays With Dorie: Hachis Parmentier

October 22nd, 2010 · 11 Comments · Baking, Books, French Fridays

[First there was 'Tuesdays With Dorie', where each week food-lovers across the internet united to bake a recipe from Dorie Greenspan's 'Baking: From My Home to Yours'. And now Dorie is out with a wonderful new cookbook 'Around My French Table' where she shares her favorite French recipes, and I've decided to cook along. Check out French Fridays with Dorie if you'd like to join the fun.

This week's recipe was Hachis Parmentier - what Dorie describes as "a well-seasoned-meat-and-mashed potato pie that is customarily made with leftovers from a boiled beef dinner, like pot-au-feu. Her headnote in the recipe attributes inspiration from the famed chef, Daniel Boulud, who despite spending his days cooking luxurious meals at his haute cuisine restaurants, thinks of nothing better than going home and eating Hachis Parmentier - the perfect comfort food.]

Michael Chiarello was at Omnivore Books this week, and said something I believe to be very wise: “Taste happens in your mouth, but Flavor happens in your mind, intellectually.” This is why I cook – not just to produce something which tastes delicious (although, I assure you, this particular dish excites the palate), but for the comfort of food that connects me with my family, my culture, and to a larger global history.

One thing I have learned about comfort food, is that it tends to pop up in variations around the world. Nearly every culture has versions of a healing chicken soup, or a steaming bowl of noodles. These foods were often the food of poverty – simple dishes cooked with care, making the best use of ingredients often harshly rationed.

Although pies can be traced back to the Egyptians in 9500 BC, and potatoes were cultivated over 10000 years ago in Peru, the modern version of shepherds pie is actually a more recent invention. The dish did not become ubiquitous until the potato was heralded as an edible crop in the late 18th century.

In fact, the french name for the dish ‘Hachis Parmentier’ comes from Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the French scientist famed for studying the potato, and readily advocated it’s nutritional value as a potential boon crop for feeding the poor.

It’s not surprising this dish made it’s way in some version or another around the globe, because it makes successful use of really any type of meaty leftover, and can be made at minimal cost, with little effort. And it is oh-so-satisfying.

My own nostalgia for the dish comes from eating it regularly at my uncle Allan’s table.

Allan grew up in Tangiers, Morocco, and is the consummate host. Family dinners at his house were always a treat. Sometimes there would be fish braised with onions, tomatoes and lemon. Other times, mini meatballs (my favorite) with peas and rice. There were even elegant Moroccan dishes such as b’stilla, a sweet and savory flaky pastry with meat (traditionally pigeon). And of course, there was his Sheperd’s pie.

Curious to its provenance, I emailed my uncle to clarify, and he responded: “Yes, in French it is called hachis parmentier. We never really thought of it as a British dish, or a French one for that matter. We usually called it pastel de patatas in Morocco, and indeed it was a pretty common dish back then.”

Having the chance to recreate a family favorite, and learning more about the global reach of this dish with some delight, I set to work with gusto, making my Hachis Parmentier à la Dorie Greenspan.

So often these days my cooking is limited to recipes of the simplest variety with few steps. After a day of working in a cookbook store, or testing recipes at home, invariably I am too hungry to wait for a slow cooked meal. But with two days off, I set to work making things from scratch, a veritable foreplay for the main event.

My first step was to assemble the broth that is the basis of the filling. This can thankfully be done in advance, so I headed to Drewes, my local butcher shop to purchase the steak that the recipe calls for. Dorie specifies either cube steak or chuck, and because I rarely buy or eat beef these days, I had to clarify with the butcher, shamefully, that chuck roast is the same as chuck steak. (It is.) They packed me up the steak from Marin Sun Farms, and when asked if I would like anything else, I decided the addition of marrow bones would help to enrich my broth, and provide me a tasty snack as a reward for my first day’s work. A few Sicilian sausages went into the bag as well and I headed out.

For the rest of the ingredients, I went to Rainbow Grocery (a vegetarian worker-owned co-op here in San Francisco). My first step was heading over to the cheese department. The recipe specifies using Gruyère, Comté, or Emmental cheese, so I decided to ask the advice of Pete, one of the ever-knowledgeable folks, for a recommendation. After a satisfactory taste, I ended up leaving with a French Gruyère de Comté, made from raw milk and aged for 3 months. (I also could not resist a small piece of Pleasant Ridge Reserve, extra-aged, the recent winner of best in show.)

Wednesday was the perfect afternoon for making broth, my apartment chilly enough that I was still wearing my sweater and scarf. I put my meat, bones, onion, carrot, parsley, garlic, peppercorns and a dash of salt in the pot. I set it to boil, turning it down to a simmer in order not to melt my marrow bones.

After double checking logistics for broth making in both the ‘River Cottage Meat Book‘ and Harold McGee’s ‘On Food and Cooking‘ (and to ensure that I wouldn’t be poisoning myself somehow by boiling bones for just an hour and a half) I sat reading a temporarily stolen Wednesday New York Times food section from my neighbors, as my broth simmered slowly on the stove.

After an hour an a half of simmering, I partook greedily in my wobbly marrow. [Unlike the chicken liver, which I was taught to be polite and share, I take comfort in the fact that nobody in my household now actually eats the stuff other than me.] I packed everything up, cleaned up the kitchen, and headed out to Omnivore to host Michael Chiarello at our little shop.

The next day I picked up where I had left off: sauteing the sausage with tomato paste, adding the boiled beef, and some of the broth until warmed. I spooned the mixture into two individual buttered ceramic ramekins and one larger casserole.

Then I set to work on the mashed potatoes, using some large russets which I peeled, quartered, and boiled in well salted water. There’s nothing that gets me quite as excited as generous quantities of warmed milk, heavy cream, and butter stirred into the tubers. Butter and cream make everything better. After they were done, I spooned them into the ramekins, topped with generous amounts of cheese and baked for a half hour.

The Hachis Parmentier came out of the oven golden and bubbling. The perfect dish for this early fall weather! Devon and I ate contentedly, forking at the layers of salty beef and sausage. The soft carrots had cooked in the broth, and the silky smooth and creamy potatoes were as good as mash gets. Keeping with le French theme, I paired it with some mustard leeks vinaigrette, which provided a nice acidic foil to the richness of the dish.

Recipe:  Hachis Parmentier

In accordance with ‘French Fridays With Dorie’ rules, I’m not posting the recipe – you must buy Dorie’s book to get the details. But believe me, it will be money well spent.

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Omnivore Books Stone Fruit Contest

July 17th, 2010 · 7 Comments · Baking, Challenge, omnivore books

Another smiling shot of the winners (Aleta and Lilly) of an Omnivore Books Food Contest. This challenge: Stone Fruits. The entries were all diverse (okay, except maybe for a noticeable trend of peaches) and everything was delicious. Despite my resolution to keep my tastes to a minimum, I end up trying everything, and eventually went back to seconds. Damn deliciousness breaking my willpower…Here are all photos of all of them to drool over.

The winning dish?

An Assortment of Galettes. These charming galettes were the clear favorite. Excellent dough, and creative fillings. The dough was a
Pâte à Foncer dough from ‘Advanced Bread and Pastry A Professional Approach’ written by Michel Suas. I’ve attached the recipe at the bottom – perfect for summer baking!

The runner up was Lisa’s individual Financiers with Peaches, Almonds, and ‘lotsa Butter! Let me just say that these were some of my favorites – I’m a sucker for classic french pastries.

Our own Paula brought a lovely Peach Cobbler, which had the glorious addition of a little bit of almond extract, that I must remember to add to my own. It’s a wonderful marriage of flavors.

A savory Peach and Nectarine Salsa was served with chips in this absolutely adorable vintage serving dish. I’d like to get one of these! The salsa was incredible, but the entire presentation was a feast for the eyes. I can see bringing this to every summer cookout.

A Two Plum and Peach Pie was served elegantly on a raised platter (points in my book for presentation), and I loved particularly the way the plums were treated – they had an intense flavor.

A jar of plum jam. Sweet and to the point. I could see this being consumed very quickly in my house, probably equally on toast and stirred into a morning yogurt parfait.

Peach and Nectarine Pie – quite a classic pie, with nice addition of cutout circles of dough adorning the top of the pie there.

Apricot Clafoutis – one of my favorite French desserts. And so easy to make! This version with Apricots was lovely. (The chef also recommends chocolate and cherry clafoutis. I think I’d have to second that – maybe it will be my next baking project.)

Italian Pistachio Plum Cake (and it was vegan!) – a delightful, almost spongy (in a good way!) pistachio cake dotted with the perfect little plums. And it came with a delicious jam (with an extendable spoon to boot – making for the perfect competition servingware) .

Savory Plum Tarts – the last entries into the competition, a little late but they certainly held their own! Came in two flavors – one with thyme, rosemary and lavender jam, and the other with basil, honey, and balsamic.

Jealous?

Don’t worry! We have another contest coming up next month: Tomatoes!

Tomato Cooking Contest! Omnivore Books – August 14th – 4-5pm. Bring a tomato dish, sweet or savory, or just come to eat with $5 dollars in hand ready to judge your favorites. Winners split the door money and earn serious bragging rights.

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Pâte à Foncer

from ‘Advanced Bread and Pastry A Professional Approach‘ written by Michel Suas

Don’t be put off by the metric measurements – baking in metric is much more precise and yields better results. And it’s incredibly easy to find a kitchen scale – mine that tares from metric to standard US I purchased at Ikea for about $12.

yields about 6-7 5inch galettes

Ingredients:
395 grams Pastry Flour
296 grams Butter
79 grams Milk
16 grams Egg Yolks
8 grams Salt
6 grams Sugar
Method:
1. Preheat oven to 425ºF along with a sheet pan or pizza stone (385ºF for convection oven).
2. Allow butter, milk, and egg yolks to come up to room temperature. Butter should be almost mayonnaise consistency.
3. Soften the butter and mix with the paddle attachment.
4. Add the salt, sugar, yolks, and milk, and then add the flour. Mix until just incorporated; dough should look a little bit shaggy.
5. Refridgerate dough for 1 to 4 hours.
6. Divide dough into 7 pieces. Roll dough out to about an 1/8 of an inch thick about 6-7 inch rounds. Fill with either sweet or savory filling. Egg wash crust.
7. Bake until golden about 25-35 minutes.

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