recipes

Apple Cider Sour Rye

If you like assertively sour bread and a dark, flavorful crust, you will like this bread. If you don’t like one or both of those things, please skip it.

Although I started out thinking this bread would be an adaptation of the Normandy Rye from Nancy Silverton’s Breads from the La Brea Bakery, it turned out this bread didn’t want to be that. Instead it wanted to be more sour and more rye. Although at about 41% rye flour I suppose it qualifies as only a light rye, the flavor is not light at all.

The crust on this wants to get really really dark, and you should let it. The crust in the photo below looks like it is burned, but it isn’t. The sugars (which are in extra abundance here from the cider) have caramelized to give the crust a deep, sweet flavor that contrasts very nicely with the sour crumb.

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Sourdough Pancakes

Today is Pancake Day, so this might be a good time to post my favorite sourdough pancakes, the only pancakes I ever make any more. My photo does not do them justice; anyone who can enlighten me about how to get pancakes and syrup to sit still for the camera, please speak up.

Also, anyone who can offer a plausible explanation for why every pancake recipe under the sun makes exactly 14 pancakes will win a prominent place on my list of culinary geniuses.

For the lightest pancakes, fresh mature starter is the best, but I have used refrigerated, several-days-old starter for up to 50% of the total. Pure Vermont maple syrup makes everything good.

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Roasted Potato Bread, Two Ways

I made a lot of potato bread this weekend.

My intention was to make a simple sourdough bread with the addition of roasted potato nuggets that would stand up to the dough rather than receding into it, lending appreciable color, texture, and potato flavor.

The first time around, that wasn’t exactly how it played out, but I was still pleased with the bread. I roasted the potatoes at 350F so they were soft but not overly brown, with a few cloves of crushed garlic that I removed after roasting. Even having been left unpeeled, the potatoes did disintegrate almost completely into the dough. The result was a beautiful soft crumb with no discernible potato flavor, making it excellent for sandwiches (even PB&J) as well as accompaniment to the fantastic eggplant parmesan I had at the home of old East-coast friends who are now our neighbors (yes!).

As much as I liked the first loaves, I had not achieved what I set out to, so the following day it was more potato bread. This time I roasted the potatoes at a higher temperature (450F) so they developed more of a crust and a deeper flavor. The 3/4-inch pieces stayed semi-intact during mixing, giving the best of both worlds: a soft, mottled tan crumb studded with golden potato chunks and a definite potato flavor throughout. Definitely not a PB&J bread this time.

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Flaxseed Rye

My husband is a very patient person. He puts up with a lot in support of my baking hobby (even considering that he’s a happy beneficiary of it). A fine (or sometimes more than fine) dusting of flour over pretty much the whole house, equipment overflowing the cupboards and stacked on the floor and every available surface, books that leave no shelf space for so much as a phone directory — none of this elicits even the bat of an eye from this man.

So when he casually and calmly mentioned one day recently that my ingredients were overrunning the refrigerator, I paid attention. Time to spend down some of that baking capital: seeds, nuts, more seeds I bought because I forgot I had the first ones, grains, and special flours that have insidiously taken over way more than their fair share of fridge and freezer real estate.

Starting with the flax seeds. Flax seeds are delicious and nutritious and crunchy and beautiful, which clearly explains why I felt I had to buy about 2 or 3 pounds last time I stocked up. (This is maybe 7 cups of seeds — which is a pretty sizable helping of those healthy omega-3 fatty acids.

This flaxseed rye, adapted from Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes, was a really great way to use some of those seeds, as well as some of the high-gluten flour that is also in abundance at my house right now. Even though I used whole rye flour in place of the original recipe’s medium rye (I’m not allowed to buy more ingredients!), the texture was amazingly un-dense for a 60%-rye bread, and the flavor combination of flaxseeds and rye is just about unbeatable. I may even increase the flax seeds next time I make this (because I do still have plenty of those seeds left).

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Fennel and Pepper Taralli

I have seen taralli variously described as Italian bagels, Italian pretzels, and Italian oval bread sticks. So I guess we can at least safely say they’re Italian. Since I haven’t eaten these in Italy, I don’t know whether the ones I made are anything like the authentic ones, but they did taste good with a glass of red wine. And they’ll keep until your two-year-old is in college.

The recipe is inspired by Royal Crown’s Fennel Taralli from Artisan Baking by Maggie Glezer. I added some cracked pepper and made a few other adaptations for the ingredients I had on hand. I used a food processor but the dough can also be kneaded by hand if your upper body needs a good workout. The fennel seeds are worked in by hand at the end in either case.

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Mamie’s Oat Meal Bread

I have an accordion recipe file, the kind that has a pocket for each category, and when you want to find a recipe you have to dump everything in the pocket out — the index cards, the magazine clippings, the scraps of paper torn from whatever legal pad was handy at the time — and sift through them one by one for the one you want.

I’ve had it since 1982, and I don’t use it too much any more, but there are certain old recipes in there that I use regularly but that never made it onto the computer, like my mother-in-law’s pork tenderloin and Christmas cookies, and many more that I never used and never will but never got around to tossing. It’s a mess, really.

I can’t even tell you what I was looking for in “Cakes, Pies & Baked Goods” the other day — it won’t be cookie season for a while — but what I found was this:

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