Archive for the 'bread' Category
Remember that little basket of blackberries that came from Nanoose Bay? I managed to hold a few back to bake into scones this morning. Yes, I thought it was a good idea too.
Any fresh (or frozen – don’t thaw them) berry would work here – blackberries are probably the most fragile, coming apart into their individual drupelets as you stir them into thick batter – but I love them, and that they remind me of our years living in Vancouver, where blackberries were free for the picking everywhere. I looked forward to those late August days of blackberry hunting like almost no other, and would suit up in long sleeves (I’d have worn chain mail if I had access to some) and gardening gloves with their fingertips cut off, and drag Mike along with pails, although he was nowhere near as enthusiastic as I. So I don’t mind their frailty – swaths of purple are most welcome in my scones. I did try to add them gingerly, tipping them in, then stirring only once or twice with my spatula, then gathering up spoonfuls with the help of my fingers to drop onto the buttered baking sheets. They don’t have to be all the way inside – as long as they’re hanging on, the dough will bake around them a bit. They look good that way, too.
Lemon Blackberry Drop Scones
You don’t need lemon for these – they’d be as delicious without – we just happened to have a lemon sitting on the countertop that needed using before we leave tomorrow.
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/3 cup butter, cut into pieces
grated zest of a lemon (optional)
1 large egg
3/4 cup (ish) milk
a big handful of berries (blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, huckleberries…)
coarse sugar, for sprinkling (optional)
Preheat oven to 425F. In a bowl, stir together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the butter and blend it with a fork, whisk, pastry blender or your fingers (or do it all in the food processor, if you have one), leaving some lumps no bigger than a pea.
Crack the egg into a measuring cup and add milk to make it a cup. Stir it together with a fork and add to the flour mixture; stir with a spatula until just barely combined. Add the berries and stir a couple more times, then drop the sticky dough in large spoonfuls onto a buttered or parchment-lined baking sheet. Sprinkle the tops with coarse sugar, if you like.
Bake for about 20 minutes, or less if you made small scones, until golden. Makes 6 good-sized scones.
One Year Ago: Blueberry Galette
Over at Family Kitchen: Nanking Cherry Lemonade
August 02 2010 | bread and breakfast | 9 Comments »
I made a couple hundred biscuits today for the Slow Food Calgary booth at the Calgary Folk Festival this weekend (which I sadly won’t be attending, because I’ll, with any luck, be in Tofino). Yesterday Kris, Jenn, Maxwell and I made a few vats of chili (using beef from Tim Hoven), organic beans and other tasty stuff (including sweet marjoram and summer savoury from Kris’ farm) – but who wants a plain old bowl of chili with no carbs to dip in?
So today I holed up in the downstairs kitchen of the Cookbook Company and lost count at about 20 batches. That’s a lot of biscuits. I made an enormous mess. I took a picture. You don’t want to see it.
But – good news! Aviv is back. He came by to visit. He’s freshly back in Calgary after spending four months in Kathmandu-Tel Aviv-Paris-Montréal – he baked bread at Tangboche and at Everest base camp and worked with one of the best bread bakers in a city full of bakers and boulangeries. I sweated a little bit when he checked out the flour (from Kris and Highwood Crossing), then picked up a biscuit and bit into it. He liked them. Or at least he was being nice about it.
And lucky us-he’s going to stay right here in Calgary. He has decided to call his new bakery (for which he has plenty of cool ideas, but I’m not sure he’s ready to share them) -Sidewalk Citizen. How cool is that? So very cool. Just like his shoes.
Large-Batch Biscuits
Use any ratio of all-purpose to whole wheat flour you like, so long as you wind up with 3 cups. (Keeping some all-purpose flour in there will ensure you get some lightness and lift.) If you like, toss a handful of chopped fresh chives, parsley or green onion (or a bit of each) into the dry ingredients, or whiz them up in the food processor with the butter to finely chop and disperse them.
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
2/3-1 cup butter, cut into chunks (I used roughly a third to a half a pound of butter – it doesn’t have to be exact)
1 cup milk or half & half, plus a little extra for brushing on top
In the bowl of a food processor (or a large bowl), combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the butter and pulse or work with a pastry cutter, fork or your fingers until the mixture is well combined and crumbly, with bits of butter no bigger than a pea – you want to leave some larger bits, rather than blending it completely – the larger chunks are what will make them flaky.
If you used a food processor (this is my favourite way) – dump the mixture into a bowl. Add the milk and stir just until you have a soft dough (you may need to use your hands). Pat the dough out about 3/4″ thick and cut into small rounds with a biscuit cutter, glass or open can rim, or a knife, or if you really want to streamline things, pat it into a circle and cut into 8 wedges. Place on a baking sheet that has been sprayed with nonstick spray, spacing them a bit apart. If you like, brush the tops lightly with milk. (I do this to the whole circle of dough before cutting it.)
Bake for about 20 minutes, or until golden. Makes 8 large or 2 dozen small biscuits.
Wanna hear about dinner? Ironically the day before yesterday, in a state of panic, I made room in the freezer for all the stuff that will likely go stinky if left to its own devices in the fridge for the next couple weeks, which of course displaced much of the frozen stuff. I lobbed bags of cooked beans (white, red, black), six whole frozen tomatoes (which melt right into soups, stews, chilis and curries in the slow cooker), a bag of frozen cooked ground meat I couldn’t identify but turned out to contain zucchini, frozen diced tomatoes and peppers into the pot, plus a chunk of frozen chipotle pepper, and shook over some chili powder and cumin and let it go (on low) for 6 hours.
It was fab over new potatoes, cooked in a hot pan with a bit of canola oil, then topped with cheddar. W suggested we add a fried egg, so I obliged. It was actually pretty damn tasty.
Tomorrow: Tofino.
July 20 2010 | bread | 17 Comments »
Just thought I’d pop in for a quick hello, and offer you a muffin.
I’m still determined to plow through the ridiculous excess of food stacked three layers deep on my shelves. Did I know I had Red River cereal back there? I did not. Nor did I realize I never finished that box of All Bran that I purchased in an impulsive act of grown-up health-consciousness, then ate maybe three bowls of. And if you’ve been hanging around here a lot, you may know that I hate to waste stuff. Especially food.
And so I snooped around at a few cereal-based recipes, and looked up Sue’s not-a-crap-muffin recipe, and made these, and they turned out really well. I imagine they’d work out just fine using any grainy cereal-turned-mush. I added a peach, cut into chunks; you could add blueberries, or raspberries, or fresh apricots. They aren’t too hard-core, in comparison to others in the realm of bran muffins – not overly grainy in the sort of way that makes it seem like it might have come out of a horse.
Fresh Peach Bran Muffins
2 cups All Bran cereal
1 3/4 cups buttermilk or plain yogurt, thinned with milk
1/2 cup sugar (white or brown)
1/4 cup canola oil
1 large egg
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
pinch salt
1 peach, chopped
In a large bowl stir together the cereal and buttermilk; let stand for 10 minutes, until soft. Preheat the oven to 375F.
Stir the sugar, oil and egg into the bran mixture. Add the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt and stir until almost combined; add the peach and stir just until blended.
Divide the batter among 12 muffin cups that have been lined with paper liners or sprayed with nonstick spray. Bake for 25 minutes, until golden and springy to the touch. Makes a dozen muffins.
One Year Ago: Roasted Plum Ice Cream and Mascarpone Ice Cream with Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote
July 12 2010 | bread and breakfast | 10 Comments »
Sorry, I know this isn’t new nor earth-shattering, and I’ve offered up banana bread recipes before. But we spent this morning at the park eating warm banana bread studded with melting chocolate pieces, a great way to wrap up a bit of a nutso week. We decided, since our house looks like someone picked it up and shook it and I had absolutely no desire to rectify the situation, to have a potluck brunch at the park. It was great. There was cinnamon sticky biscuits, and cherries, and cheese, and devilled eggs. The kids ran and played, and none of us had to do dishes afterward. This may be a new Sunday morning tradition until the first snowfall starts cooling down our brunch.
Since I always have a glut of black bananas in my freezer, I threw a few into a bowl of hot water to quickly thaw, and made the standby two minute potato masher banana loaf that has become a near-daily ritual around here. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll have the batter mixed up before the oven is preheated. I toss all manner of ingredients into these loaves, since everything goes so well with banana – nuts and seeds, coconut, dried fruit, chocolate – I always add a glug of flax oil too boost omega 3s (a teaspoon has as much as a filet of salmon!) and let me tell you, banana bread is pretty spectacular toasted with peanut butter with coffee first thing in the morning.
Two-Minute Banana Bread
3 very ripe bananas
1/2-3/4 cup sugar
2-4 Tbsp. canola, olive or flax oil
2 large eggs
a big splash of vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour (I usually use half all-purpose, half whole wheat, oat or quinoa flour)
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
a handful of chopped walnuts, chocolate chips, raisins, coconut, fresh or frozen blueberries (optional)
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
In a large bowl, mash the bananas, sugar, oil, eggs and vanilla with a potato masher – don’t worry about getting all the lumps out. It will look sort of cottage-cheesy.
Add the flour, baking soda and salt and stir until almost combined; add any additions and stir just until blended. Spread into a buttered 8”x4” loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes, until golden and cracked on top and springy to the touch.
(GalleryCalorie was a spectacular success yesterday, by the way! A long day-almost 12 hours of sun and fun, between setup and teardown. It was so great to see some of you there. We ate and drank our way up and down 17th Avenue, and partied in the park afterward. I brought my camera, but left it on a bench and forgot to use it. You’ll just have to come see for yourself next year!)
June 13 2010 | bread and breakfast | 16 Comments »
For Mothers’ Day, Ali taught Emily how to make baking powder biscuits. We ate them for dessert, split and filled with strawberries, after a roast ham, beans baked in the slow cooker, and new potatoes. Sadly, the corner store was out of whipping cream, and E came home with a tub of Cool Whip. It was like putting Cheese Whiz on freshly baked bread.
They were pretty delicious biscuits. Made with butter (not shortening, as the recipe below suggests), they weren’t as tall as some, but had a tender crumb, split beautifully and were quite perfect looking, like something you might see in a store.
Ali is a good cook, and tends to hang on to a recipe for dear life if she finds one she likes. This is the sole recipe taped to her fridge, torn from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook:
And, as promised, the recipe for scones from the Fairmont Banff Springs. It’s a large recipe – but who knows? Someone out there may have occasion to make ten dozen scones? If you have a kitchen scale (and I really think everyone should, it makes baking so much easier and more accurate) it would be easy to cut it down to a more manageable quantity. I’ll do that another time – I promised myself I’d be in bed by 11 tonight (CBC tomorrow morning) and it’s 11:02.
Scones for Afternoon Tea at the Banff Springs
thanks to Executive Pastry Chef Stephen Garton
2 kg Bread Flour
2 kg Pastry Flour
40 g Salt
1.2 kg Unsalted Butter
800 g Granulated Sugar
150 g Baking Powder
12 large Eggs
1.6 L Buttermilk
500 g raisins (optional)
Mix butter, sugar, salt, baking powder and flours into a crumble mixture. Mix in milk and eggs until just incorporated. Roll out dough to about 18-20 mm thick. Cut desired size.
Bake at 170C (about 340F) for about 15 minutes, or until golden. Note *Our ovens are convection. Regular ovens can take longer.
Makes about 120 scones.
May 10 2010 | bread | 14 Comments »
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