September 1, 2010
September 2010 Desktop Calendar
At the beginning of every month, I am offering C&Z; readers a new wallpaper to apply on the desktop of your computer, with a food-related picture and a calendar of the current month.
Our calendar for September is a picture of blackberries taken at the greenmarket in Split when we traveled to Croatia two years ago. The produce on display was gorgeous, and we bought enough fruit -- including some of those plump berry clusters, called kupina in Croatian -- to have ourselves a mini-feast on the seafront.
If I could just click my heels and be teleported there I would, but in the meantime I'll just re-read the highlights from our trip and dive back into my photoset. Care to hop along?
Instructions to get your calendar are below!
"September 2010 Desktop Calendar" continues »
August 31, 2010
Raw Buckwheat Granola
Two years ago, I met a young British woman named Poppy -- that alone made my day -- who introduced herself as a raw chocolatier.
I had a taste of her heart-shaped raw chocolates, assembled from raw Arriba cacao and a bunch of raw superfoods, and liked them so much I devoted one of my ELLE à table columns to them.
And when we met one day for her to demonstrate her chocolate-making prowess, she gave me a bag of her raw buckwheat granola, which was one of the items she served during the raw brunches she then hosted at Bob's Juice Bar in Paris.
If you've been scratching your head over the high incidence of the adjective raw in the above paragraphs, I'll quickly explain: raw foodists, or proponents of "living foods", consider that the nutritional benefits of plant-based ingredients are essentially lost when they are heated beyond a certain temperature -- the exact threshold varies depending on whom you ask, but it's around 40-46°C (100-115°F). So their (often vegan) diet focuses on unprocessed raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, as well as sprouted seeds, grains and legumes.
As I've mentioned before, I'm immensely curious about this kind of rebellious diet. I couldn't picture myself "going raw" -- I like bread and comté cheese too much -- but I do admire the necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention effect of such dietary limitations, and I love learning about, and tasting, the entirely new dishes they spur.
Especially when they're as fantastic as Poppy's raw granola. When I asked how she made it, I was a little deflated to learn it required a food dehydrator, which my arsenal didn't include, and certainly regretful that I had munched down the bag so fast.
Fast-forward two years, and I find myself with a food dehydrator on loan for a month. What was my first impulse? Yes, exactly.
I emailed Poppy again to get details, and although she didn't have an exact recipe to share, she was able to explain the straightforward process: soak* some buckwheat groats, soak some almonds and/or nuts and seeds of your choice, combine with honey, spices, and salt, and dehydrate.
I followed Poppy's directions for the most part, filling in the blanks when it came to the actual amounts of each ingredient, and adding a little coconut oil because I felt like it. I have also read that you can sprout the buckwheat in addition to soaking -- as demonstrated in these videos -- and I may try it next time, but I'm here to tell you it works splendidly without that extra step.
It is really quite amazing how the somewhat slimy mixture -- buckwheat groats become viscous little things when soaked -- transforms itself in such crunchy, nutty clusters. The buckwheat flavor is subtle, which I like, and blends beautifully with the nuts, honey and spices to form a delicate alliance.
Because I prefer bread for breakfast, I've been eating my raw buckwheat granola as an afternoon snack, with fresh fruit and homemade kefir.
I think I may like it even better than regular baked granola, of which I am terribly fond, and although I'm still hesitant to acquire a dehydrator of my own, this recipe alone might be all the convincing I need.
* The purpose of soaking grains, nuts and seeds is explained here.
"Raw Buckwheat Granola" continues »
August 24, 2010
Pain au levain
Last spring, we had a few friends over for dinner who were visiting from the US. One of them works for the excellent magazine The Art of Eating, and kindly thought to bring us the latest issue*.
It would have been a lovely hostess gift under any circumstances, but as I sat down to read it the next day, I was jump-on-the-couch ecstatic to discover that it contained no fewer than fourteen pages (fourteen! pages!) on the subject of pain au levain (a.k.a. sourdough bread), which has been my number-one kitchen obsession for the past year and a half -- probably the longest-standing ever, too. (See my initial post on natural starter bread and ensuing starter-based recipes.)
This fourteen-page (fourteen! pages!) article is written by James MacGuire, an esteemed American chef and baker who, as I learned from the contributors' section, acted as the technical editor in the English translation of Raymond Calvel's fundamental boulangerie book The Taste of Bread.
Following a discussion on the history and technique of pain au levain, MacGuire shares a recipe I eagerly tried a few days later. It was such a success it has become our go-to bread, and I've baked a weekly loaf of it ever since.
The originality of the process is that it requires no kneading (but not that kind of no-kneading). Instead, the dough is simply folded over itself as it ferments in the mixing bowl, a few times every hour over a period of four hours. This develops the gluten and the flavor, yielding a wonderfully tasty loaf with minimal effort.
To be clear, it's not that I mind the kneading, especially since I generally just use my stand mixer, but it is a noisy animal, and this method allows me to get a loaf started in the blissful silence of weekend mornings, without awaking the entire household. (And yes, I realize I could also knead the dough by hand, but I've never really gotten into the zen of kneading high-hydration doughs. I just get annoyed by the goo.)
Another departure from my previous routine is that MacGuire recommends keeping a 66%-hydration starter, i.e. a starter that's fed 2 parts water and 3 parts flour (in weight) at every feeding, as opposed to the half-and-half rule I'd been following up until now. I've made the transition without any problem and frankly my starter seems no less or more active than it was before, but I'm sticking to it out of habit now.
I make the recipe with French T80 flour (farine bise, a partially whole wheat flour), which is the type of flour MacGuire would use while baking in France, and often mix it with some T110 as well (farine intégrale, for which a little more of the grain husk is kept) for a greyer crumb. Because the recipe is written with American bakers in mind, MacGuire suggests emulating T80 or T110 flour by using some all-purpose flour and some whole wheat flour, which you'll sift first to remove part of the bran it contains.
I've scaled down the recipe -- almost halving it -- to make the amount of bread we'll eat within eight days or so, and I've rounded the gram amounts after the scaling, to make the recipe easier to memorize (though I admit I keep a cheat sheet on the fridge).
The overall timeline has you prepare the starter in two successive builds the day before baking (one in the afternoon, one before bed), then prepare the dough in the morning and bake it in the afternoon. This works out smoothly for those who work from home, naturally, but if you don't, you can perhaps fit this into your weekend schedule, building the starter on Saturday and baking the bread on Sunday. I've indicated specific times for clarity, but you can shift the whole process according to your needs.
I still feel I have room for improvement in my understanding and use of this recipe: the oven spring is not always consistent (I got less than usual when I took the photo above) and I'd like to try and get a thicker crust, but the flavor is excellent and the crumb well aerated, so I'm already very pleased with it.
I admit I am not very diligent about the temperature at which I keep my starter and proofing dough (nevertheless I've indicated MacGuire's recommendation below), nor about the temperature of the water I use in the dough, and those are factors I plan to work on.
I would like to note again that there is a lot more to the article that this recipe (did I mention the number of pages it spans?) and you'll get more insight into the recipe by reading about it in MacGuire's words, so I encourage you to get a copy of the magazine if you can. (And you don't need me telling you that this sort of independent, subscriber-funded, ad-free publication needs the support of people like you.)
* Issue #83 can be back-ordered on the Art of Eating website.
August 17, 2010
Apricot Blueberry Cobbler
I'd been living in California for a few months and thoroughly enjoying the dotcom vibe of my workplace when the big news was announced: we were going to have a company barbecue.
This, to me, was what working in the Silicon Valley at the turn of the century was all about: a lot of fun ideas to make employees happy (water guns! foosball table! free pizza on Fridays!) and therefore more inclined to put in the hours and brainjuice that would help the company grow (until it didn't, but that's another story).
And so, on barbecue day, everyone pitched in -- some set up the burger assembly station, others grilled the burger patties (and veggie substitutes, this was California after all), others yet plopped scoops of salad (potato or pasta salad, I mean) onto plates, or rounded up anyone still hiding out in his cube -- before sitting down on the sunny deck at the back of our offices to dig in.
A few people had volunteered to bring dessert, and among them, someone (Barbara from client operations, I think) had baked a peach cobbler.
While people oohed and aahed, I asked: what's a cobbler? A cobbler, someone explained, is someone who mends shoes (un cordonnier in French). This didn't make much sense to me, so I gently inquired: okay, but, um, why? My American-born coworkers conferred for a while, spoon in mid-air and brow furrowed, until they had to admit no one had a reasonable explanation.
No matter: we all know where the proof of the pudding is, and this one was very good indeed.
A cobbler is one of those all-American desserts with funny names -- together with the brown betty, the buckle, the grunt, the slump, and the pandowdy -- in which seasonal fruit is topped with some sort of dough, and then cooked or baked.
In the case of the cobbler, the topping is a sugar-dusted biscuit dough that is strewn across the fruit, either in rough hand-torn pieces, as I like to do, or in neat rounds, if you prefer (though I suspect it only looks that way if you use the ready-made biscuit dough sold in canisters at the grocery store).
The cobbler is a nice change of pace from the crumble or the crisp, in that it offers a wider range of textures: the dough becomes browned and crisp at the top, remains tender like the insides of a scone in the middle, and melds with the juicy fruit at the bottom.
Because I was first introduced to the cobbler by way of Barbara's, it remains iconically linked to peaches in my mind. But really, any ripe fruit can be used, and I particularly like the apricot and blueberry version I baked last week when friends came over for dinner.
I use ground almonds in my cobbler dough for a smoother mouthfeel, and when I make it for stone fruit, I like to flavor it with a prudent splash of orange blossom water. It is often recommended to serve the cobbler with vanilla ice cream, but I am French and I like it better with crème fraîche: I think it does a better job at underlining the natural sweetness of the fruit.
If you're still puzzled about the name, as I am, know that it may in fact be linked to the topping's resemblance to the shape of cobblestones, or of cobbles, which are either rounded hills or lumps of coals. But the truth is nobody really knows -- not even food history librarian Lynne Olver, who nonetheless offers quotes and references that speaks to the origins of the dish.
(And for more desserts in the cobbler family, see this rhubarb raspberry grunt and this brown butter spiced crisp.)
"Apricot Blueberry Cobbler" continues »
August 10, 2010
Gomadofu (Sesame "Tofu")
Because summers in Japan are hot and humid, Japanese cooks know a thing or two about the refreshing dishes such sultry days call for.
Gomadofu falls into that category: a concoction of sesame paste cooked with a thickening agent until set, it resembles tofu in color and texture, hence the name (goma = sesame), and is served chilled.
I first came across it when Maxence and I traveled to Japan last spring, and stayed overnight at a temple in Koya-san. There we were served a shojin ryori dinner, the vegan cuisine that is practiced by Zen Buddhist monks in Japan*, and one of the many little dishes brought to us was a shallow cup of gomadofu, silky on the tongue and richly flavorful.
I hadn't really thought to make it myself until I found this post on Maki's ever-helpful Japanese food blog. Her recipe seemed so easy, I couldn't not try it.
I already had sesame paste on hand -- mine is a Middle-Eastern-style tahini I buy at the organic store -- so all I needed to get was some kudzu powder, a starch drawn from a Japanese vine, which is not hard to find if you have access to a natural foods store or a Japanese market.
I made my first batch following Maki's recipe, to deliciously rewarding results. All you do, really, is combine the sesame paste with kudzu powder and water, heat it up to thicken, then chill to set.
On a later occasion, I used a couple of tips I got from another inspiring Japanese food blog I frequent, called Tess's Japanese Kitchen. I steeped some kombu (a type of seaweed) in the water first, and added a little sake for flavor, but both of these steps are optional.
All in all, very little exertion is required to create your very own sesame "tofu," which you'll then divide into cubes and serve cold, as an appetizer or as part of a light meal, typically pairing it with soy sauce, wasabi, and freshly grated ginger, or the homemade sauce Tess suggests.
I myself like it with yuzukosho (a yuzu and pepper condiment) and a little seaweed -- strips of torn nori or, as pictured above, a sprinkle of freshwater seaweed from Jugetsudo in Paris -- in addition to soy sauce.
Having made the original sesame version a few times now, I am planning to branch out and make amondodofu with almond butter and kashudofu with cashew butter**.
Don't forget to read Maki's post and Tess's post; they both offer interesting info on gomadofu.
* If you'd like to learn more about shojin ryori, Maki recommends a book called The Enlightened Kitchen, by Mari Fujii.
** Not official names; I've just made them up.
"Gomadofu (Sesame "Tofu")" continues »
August 6, 2010
[Edible Idiom] Ne pas manger de ce pain-là
This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.
This week's expression is, "Ne pas manger de ce pain-là."
Translated as, "not eating that kind of bread," it means refusing to act in a way that goes against your values, steering clear of a situation or behavior that you think is beneath you.
Example: "Il faudrait que je fasse des ronds de jambe à la directrice pour obtenir une place pour ma fille, mais je ne mange pas de ce pain-là." "I'd have to kowtow to the principal to get a spot for my daughter, but I don't eat that kind of bread."
Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:
"[Edible Idiom] Ne pas manger de ce pain-là" continues »
