Date filled cinnamon rolls

A friend sent me Bon Appetit's recipe for Cinnamon Date Sticky Buns, and since we love dates, cinnamon, and home baking, I couldn't wait to try them, with some modifications--looking at the recipe, they seemed way too sweet for our taste, we prefer whole grains, unrefined nut oils, and there were a lot of steps to the recipe that I weren't sure would produce enough results for us that it was worth the effort.  The ingredients for the dough are non-negotiable, they say?  Not for me.  Our version of the recipe produces a incredibly fluffy roll where the dough has a lot of flavor from our freshly ground whole wheat flour and unfiltered, unrefined nut oils.

Dough ingredients:

1/2 oz. (14 g) fresh yeast or 1/4 oz. (7 g) dry yeast (or sourdough starter)
3/4 c. (180 ml) buttermilk (or milk)
6 tbsp. (106 ml) unrefined peanut oil, or nut oil of your choice
1 egg

1/4 c. (60 ml) honey, agave syrup, or sweetener of your choice
3/4 tsp. (4 g) salt
13 oz. (375 g) whole wheat flour
butter to grease pan

Filling ingredients (makes approximately 1/2 c. puree):

approximately 6.5 oz (180 g) whole medjool (or similar) dates
1-1/2 c. (360 ml) boiled water
2 tbsp. (30 ml) unrefined peanut oil, or nut oil of your choice
2 tsp. (5 g) ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. (1.5 g) salt
1 tbsp. (15 ml) vanilla extract

Place yeast in bowl, add buttermilk, and let sit about 10-15 minutes so yeast dissolves.  Add rest of wet ingredients and salt, and mix thoroughly.  (I do all this in a KitchenAid mixer.)  Add flour, and mix until you have a sticky dough.  Cover bowl (I put a plate on top of the bowl) and refrigerate for 8 hours or more (overnight is fine) for a long, slow rise--it won't rise very much.

You can also make the filling the night before and refrigerate it also.  To make the filling, slice the dates in half and remove & discard the pits, and place them in a heat-proof bowl.  Pour the boiling water over them and let them soak for 10 minutes.  Drain the dates and put them into a food processor with the rest of the filling ingredients; process for 4 minutes, to produce a very smooth puree.

To fill and shape:  Butter about a 10 inch (about 25 cm) round cake pan or skillet.  Take the dough (and filling, if made ahead of time) out of the fridge--you can proceed immediately if you like, or let the dough warm up for up to an hour or so.  If the dough has risen, punch down and knead a bit, then roll out to about a 12 inch (30 cm) square; if it's difficult to roll, let it sit for 10-20 minutes under a cotton towel to relax, then try rolling again.  You will probably need to flour the counter a bit, as it can be a sticky dough.  Spread the filling over the whole square, leaving about 1/2 inch (about 1 cm) border around the edges, and then roll it into a log--feel free to dampen the long edge with a little water if it would help it seal.  If you want the rolls really pretty, feel free to trim the unfilled edges at the ends (I just smoosh them up a little bit).  Cut into 9 rolls, place them in the pan (or skillet) and cover (use the lid of a skillet or a cotton towel) to let rise for 60-90 minutes; at the end of the rising time, they may not entirely fill the pan and that's OK, because they will loft and fill out a bit in the oven.

To bake:  Preheat oven to 350F (180 C).  Cover with a skillet lid or parchment and aluminum foil, and bake covered for 20 minutes, then uncover them and bake for an addition 20-25 minutes, or until just golden brown.  Remove from pan and cool enough to enjoy!

If you like them frosted or glazed, follow the link to the Bon Appetit recipe for the glaze they use--we prefer them unglazed.

English muffins

Baked 100% whole wheat English muffin

 
I've been making many batches of English muffins, trying to find a way to make them out of 100% whole wheat flour while fitting making them in around the workweek, housework-filled weekends, etc.  I think I've got it.  I started with the recipe in King Arthur Flour's Baker's Companion book, which doesn't seem to be currently posted on their website.  With extensive modification, here's the recipe I came up with.

We grind our own whole wheat flour from hard, red wheat berries in a Wolfgang Supreme wheat grinder.  We also bake a lot of bread, so tend to be able to use small amounts of yeast and still have breads rise well in our kitchen.

If I make the starter on Thursday evening, I have batter ready to bake on Saturday morning.

Whole wheat English muffin recipe

First evening, make starter:
Mix together:
1-1/2 c. (6.25 ounces) freshly ground whole wheat flour
1/8 tsp. yeast

Stir in:
3/4 c. water

Cover and let stand overnight (or as long as 24 hours or so).

The next evening, make the dough:

Put into a large mixing bowl:
All the starter
1-3/4 c. (7.25 ounces) 100% freshly ground whole wheat flour
2 tbsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tbsp. agave syrup (or honey)
2 tbsp. melted butter
3/4 c. whole milk

Mix thoroughly until a very soft, rather wet battery-dough is formed.  Cover and let stand overnight (or as long as 24 hours or so.)

The next day, bake the muffins:
Preheat oven to 350F.  Line a baking sheet with parchment paper; lightly grease English muffin rings; I use this recipe to make 8 muffins, but they're rather big--I think you could make 10 or more smaller ones.  Put the rings on the baking sheet, and fill with the batter.  Cover with another sheet of parchment paper and put another baking sheet on top.  Let stand at least 30 min., or until they're filling the rings in a bit.  If you use more rings and let them stand for longer, they should have larger holes in them.

Put in the oven (still with the parchment paper & top baking sheet on them) and bake for about 25 min.

Homemade Graham Crackers

Photo by Paul

Homemade graham crackers are faster to make than we had imagined and so very delicious!  We adapted the recipe from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book: we found that recipe too sweet, so omitted the sugar but kept in the syrup.  We also go ahead and melt the butter rather than mixing it in softened.  We use fresh ground whole wheat flour, so don't need to the flour the counter to roll out the crackers.

1/4 cup butter, melted
1 egg, well beaten
4 tablespoons honey or agave syrup
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons water
3/4 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 cups graham flour (or 6-1/2 ounces fresh ground whole wheat flour)
3/4 cup (3.5 ounces) white flour

Oven at 350F.

Combine the melted butter and honey or agave, and beat well with a whisk; add the egg, and beat well.  Dissolve the baking soda in the water and then add to the mixture.  Add the salt and flours to the mixture, and blend thoroughly.  If the dough is too tacky to handle, add a little more flour.

Roll the dough to a thickness of about 1/8 inch (flour the counter if necessary).  Cut into squares or rectangles, about 2 inches wide.  Place them on an ungreased cookie sheet, and prick with a fork.  Bake for 8 minutes on one side, then turn over and bake for 7 minutes more.  Remove from the oven and cool on racks.

Georgian dinner

We've long been fans of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's cookbook Seductions of Rice, but we just got their Flatbreads and Flavors--I'm so glad we did!  The first recipe we tried was fenugreek and corn bread, and it was delicious--we were having a busy weekend, and we followed the recipe almost exactly and they were fantastic.  The only thing we did different from the recipe was baking the breads on a stone in our oven rather than on an oiled baking sheet.

So last weekend, when we had more time, Paul closed his eyes and wiggled a finger into the cookbook to choose a recipe at random: potato and herb filled bread (khachapuri ossetinski) from Georgia.  We decided to make walnut and eggplant roll-ups (badrigiani, also from Georgia) to go with it.  It was an incredible meal--absolutely delicious:

It was our first time making these breads, and I've never seen any person, so we kind of winged it:

We also cooked these breads directly on our baking stone in the oven, rather than on oiled cookie sheets, and they were great!

We did have leftover potato and herb filling, which we had for breakfast the next day; we mixed it up with a beaten egg into a patty, fried it, and had it with egg on top--delicious!

Berber onion and kabocha squash pasties

We recently made the Berber Pizza from David Tanis' cookbook, A Platter of Figs--it's wonderful! Absolutely delicious, and we found it really easy to make.

If you're making it, be sure to cook up more of the onion mixture than you will need. We mixed up the extra onion mixture with baked kabocha squash, and used it for filling in pasties:

I made up some pie dough, divided it up into twelve or fifteen balls, and rolled them out pretty thin, filled them with this filling and sealed them up.  Then cut little holes in their tops, and baked them a little less than an hour at 425F--pretty standard pastie baking.  The combination of the squash and the Berber onion filling was fantastic!

I forgot to get photos of the pasties.  We were too distracted by the deliciousness.

We'll be making all these dishes again, though!

Feast day torte for a feast day

For dinner this past Christmas day, and then again for the New Year, we made a Feast Days Piñon Torte from Lois Ellen Frank's Food of the Southwest Indian Nations cookbook--it's fantastic!

This is the first one, inverted on a cutting board for serving, decorated with powdered sugar on half of it:

We found it was good with 8 ounces unsweetened chocolate (that's two bars of the kind we buy), 1 cup of agave syrup (instead of sugar), and 5 tablespoons of cornmeal.

Chapatis

I'm in love with chapatis. I used the recipe from India's 500 Best Recipes, which doesn't offer a lot of directions, so I would say that it's a recipe for people with some experience making stove top flat breads.

I've made them with home ground whole wheat flour (we grind the wheat berries with our KitchenAid's flour mill attachment), and they taste great. I haven't yet tried them with chapati flour (atta), but I will look for that next time we're at the Indian market.

They're very fast to make, and delicious!

Sierra Beauty Apple Pie

We've fallen in love with apple pie made from Sierra Beauty apples:



We get them at our local farmers' market, from Pomo Tierra Ranch, and they have so much more flavor than Granny Smiths. We've found that whether you eat them raw, or bake them into a pie, the first taste is sweet, but they have a tart finish, and are so aromatic--almost floral. We've been making pie after pie out of them, almost one a week, just like this one:



If you can, get some Sierra Beauties--enough for eating, and enough for pies!

Date custard pie

I wanted to try something completely new, and am so pleased with the results! It's not the prettiest pie, but is so delicious. The recipe is from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book, and I followed it as written. It's very simple, and I used the best ingredients I could find: free-range, organic eggs from Riverdog Farm, fresh dates that I bought at the farmers' market (I forgot to note the farm), plus milk (I used organic soy milk, since Paul can't handle cow milk), and a little salt--that's it. There's no added sweetener--all the sweetness comes from the dates.

The crust is the buckwheat crust from the same cookbook, and it's spectacular. Half wheat flour, half buckwheat flour--it's nutty and really flaky.

Whole wheat baguettes

These are the prettiest baguettes that I've made! I've really gotten the recipe down (King Arthur Flour's) so that I can whip these up even with a nasty head cold. And I still follow Julia Child's suggestion about the slashes (mentioned before), but now we have a French carbon steel knife that's incredibly sharp, which makes the slashes very easily.

I've also adapted the recipe to incorporate whole wheat flour: I grind 3/4 cup wheat berries, which gives somewhere around 1-1/4 cups of flour, and I substitute that for some of the white flour in the "dough" part of the recipe. The only challenge is the crust--they're not as crusty as the white flour version, so I'm working on that!

Refining the crackers

I've made the crackers dozens of times now, and found that they're even better if you roll them out twice as thin. That is, the recipe tells you to divide the dough in half and roll out two large squares--I've found that they're even better if you divide the dough in fourths, and roll out four large squares. You have to remember to pay attention to the ones in the oven--being so thin, they can brown too much very quickly, but they're so much better thinner. They brown evenly, and each and every inch is crisp.

I've also given up on the scoring and trying to get them square--we just crack them up into pieces. It's faster to the table that way!

Crackers

"White Crackers" recipe from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 13th ed., edited by Marion Cunningham.

These are amazingly delicious with red wine--just enough sweetness and saltiness to enhance the flavor. I substituted agave syrup for sugar (so I could eat them), margarine for butter (for vegan & husband friendliness), and rather than measuring the salt, just sprinkled the amount that I'd want over them, and they're incredibly delicious. They're also really easy to make--just a few minutes to throw them together and get them in the oven--they're as easy as pie.

Tomorrow we'll have them with soup. Can't wait.

Baguettes

These are my best looking baguettes yet. Granted, they're not gorgeous, but they're so much prettier than the previous ones!

I was never successful following the King Arthur Flour's recipe's instructions, "make three diagonal slashes in each baguette. Hold the sharp knife at a 45° angle to the bread, be quick, and use firm strokes." I couldn't get cuts that would open. The sharpness of the knives wasn't the problem, but I couldn't master this "45° angle" technique.

So I turned to Julia Child, From Julia Child's Kitchen, which had been of immense help with poached eggs: "Immediately make three lengthwise slashes in the top of the dough with a razor, cutting almost parallel to surface, as follows..."

That was the ticket. "Almost parallel." Worked like a charm.

Slightly wheat challah

My favorite recipe for challah (OK, the only recipe I know for challah!) is King Arthur Flour's Four-Strand-Braided Challah. It always turns out beautifully, and is delicious.

This time, we tried substituting some home-ground flour for white flour, almost two cups worth (from one cup of wheat berries).

It was fantastic. This is the way I'll be making challah from now on.

Round

The April Ravelry pie challenge is "round," and we're a bit in between fruit seasons, so the fresh fruit choices were apples and rhubarb--but although I love those together, I didn't love them enough to make another apple rhubarb pie so soon, so it was off to the frozen food aisle. We've been paying attention to the EWG's food news (about pesticide levels in some foods), so got the organic strawberries--and in the same section they had blueberries and raspberries:


They made a delicious pie. I used a cherry pie recipe, figuring that the berries matched the sweetness level of cherries, but omitted the lemon that I usually add to cherry pie, since the raspberries probably added some tartness. It was delicious! (I also made Slightly Wheat Water Rolls, and lasagna for dinner):

The theme was green

The Ravelry pie challenge group's March challenge was "green." I had been thinking of spinach pasties, or green peas in chicken pot pies, but the springtime fruit caught my eye--I started with these:



And ended up with an apple rhubarb pie:

Happy Pi Day

Happy Pi Day, or, 3-14.

We celebrated with apple turnovers.

(The little piece of paper says, "POINT"!)

Home ground flour

Fresh wheat berries, ready to be ground.

We just got the Kitchenaid grain mill attachment, and it's wonderful! A local market (Monterey Market) carries wheat berries, but if you're not near there, Whole Foods has them as well.

And this is the first loaf we made--we substituted 1-3/4 cups freshly ground whole wheat flour for white flour, and the bread has an almost buttery taste, in addition to the complex nuttiness of the freshly ground whole wheat. It's just amazingly delicious.

Chocolate. Pie.

The February pie challenge in the Ravelry Pie Challenge group (requires free login) is chocolate pie--but Paul can't eat chocolate, and although I want a whole chocolate pie to myself, that just didn't seem advisable. So what to do?

Make a favorite pie, such as pumpkin, and apply bites of pumpkin pie to squares of chocolate, such as this amazing chocolate that I'm so lucky to be sent every now and then by friends in Germany. Every bite is amazing.

Pita bread, first try

Today I attempted pita bread for the first time--although they came out absolutely delicious, the puffing was uneven. I used the King Arthur Flour recipe, and everything went well, except for the fact that the pitas puffed around the edges but not in the center. (This is not so useful for putting something inside them after you cut them in half!)

Our theory: I rolled them out with a french pin which made them flatter in the middle than on the edges. So next time, I'll try patting them out by hand, which usually results in a higher middle and lower edges (at least for me!)

We had them with the cannellini patties (we call them "bean burgers"), with a yogurt dressing and sliced cucumbers--putting it all on top of the unevenly puffed pitas like a pita pizza. Delicious!

Can't wait to try them again.