STIR THE POTS

Olive oil biscotti, with a distinct nod to Sicily

The term "extra virgin" sounds good, especially for olive oil. So when a recipe for biscotti with pistachio and cranberry called for butter, I decided to give my extra virgin oil a chance serve as substitute.

After starting a batch, already having worked out the ratio to use oil instead of butter, I realized I didn't have either cranberries or pistachios. But I did have the other ingredients; walnuts, sultana's, saffron, crushed fennel seeds and lemon zest - a Sicilian inspired cookie

 

Here's what I learned about using extra virgin olive oil. Extra Virgin is good, but a standard olive oil is better. First, it's less expensive, and it will give the biscotti a subtle - rather than overly assertive - olive oil flavor. Beyond that, the olive oil worked fine. 

 

While the recipe called for "egg-washing" the cookies, I passed on that instruction, wanting something more rustic in looks and embellishment, sort of a workingman's cookie. More important so far as instructions, biscotti are twiced cooked. The first baking is to set the cookie. Once baked, let them cook even more, as you might find these are a bit fragile when slicing with a serrated knife to a thumb thick size.

 

Get out your vino santo or marsala, caffe macchiato.....

Walnut, sultana, fennel, olive oil and saffron biscotti

283g All Purpose flour

    7g    Baking powder

 1.4g    Salt

170g    Sugar ( I ran out of sugar, substituted half with agave, which I mixed with wet ingredients.)

80g     Olive oil

pinch saffron threads

 1        Zest of lemon or orange

113g    Nuts, pistachio, almond or walnut

56g     Fruit, cranberry or raisin, gogi?

100g   egg, (2 eggs)

squirt if vanilla (optional)

 

Sift dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients, eggs, oil, etc... Add to dry mix and finish with nuts and fruit. Split dough in half, roll out to about 7" cylinder, about half inch thick.

Bake at 350F for twenty to twenty five minutes. Remove and cool on rack, when cool enough to handle, cut into thumb thick slices, straight or biased. Re-cook at 300F for about twenty minutes, cool if you can keep from eating warm!

For my friend who say's, "why not!"

The Croissant

Croissant in France. Viennoiserie in Austria. Recently, I've seen a bunch of conversation about its history. Reading about the Ottoman empire, I became a fan of a 16th century-inspired myth of Viennese bakers creating it, their goal to shape crescent pastries to collectively warn their city's defenders of an Ottoman effort to mount a secret tunnel attack.Thus the infamous crescent was a delicious warning to defend against bitter defeat!

Regardless of who created them (or why), the eating experience can be sublime: delicate, lightly chewy inside - crisp flake outside, the meeting between the textures a buttery sweetness creating layers of sensory delight. Yet from the baking perspective, much can go wrong. And in its 500 years of history, this pastry has been in all sorts of recipes. From levain, straight dough, milk and cream in the dough, butter or even oil. In Switzerland, my sister offered a Swiss version call "the kipferl," a croissant topped with seeds. And eating at Eataly, I saw a variation with "farro and evoo," healthy but textured cousin to the crisp and flaky Parisian delicacy oozing with butter richness with which many of us are familiar. 

This week I decided to make a rendition of a formula for levain dough, including a small bit of extra virgin olive oil (about 10 percent) as a flavor enhancer. A third of the dough was spelt, whole grain, for a nod to health and taste, as spelt has a special quality of deep flavor when baked. 

 

The dough was mixed, without any descernible difficulty in acheiving a tight gluten structure, and maybe the spelt, allowed for extensibility I noticed when laminating and finally shaping the croissants. But with all things, not all was completely right either... Cool air, the wrong yeast, didn't give the necessary push to make a wobbly risen and perfect croissant....instead I get a sort of flaky and crunchy outside, but a bit doughy inside, but the nice flavor of spelt and butter made up for total disaster! Cover with almond paste and there a camouflaged almond croissant! Back to the drawing board!

 

 

Spring Fling, photo's

 

The demands of a loafer

Making dough takes dough. And so does baking it. Okay, puns aside, competent bread baking takes time, money, and other resources. It's an intricate art as well as a demanding craft, playing with ingredients that have a magic and a biology. Bread for me is constant, it's in the epicenter of my mind - commandng attention and generating questions and ideas. What bread today? What loaf? What shape? Which flour? And yes the green stuff is a necessity.

 

 

Looking back

Files and recipes fill my folders. Many come from classes taken years ago, notes and half ledgible percentages marked on fading papers. The other day deciding what to bake, I sorted through some of these scribblings, coming upon a print-out from an email correspondence with my former bread baking instructor, David Norman. In it, he gave me advice on how to convert  hydration in preferments, biga to levains.

His example was this:

10Kg. Flour as total

Biga would be 4kg flour

                2.6 liters water (65%)

Final Dough 4.4liters water,(total water is 7 liters or 70%, but the final dough water is 4.4 liters, meaning 7liters -2.6 liters in Biga.

Now to convert to another hydration preferment you would keep the total water and flour the same.

10 kg flour total

New biga: 4 kg flour

  5 liters water (125%)

Final dough: 6Kg flour

                   2liters water.

Anyway, if you're going to switch from a yeasted preferment like a biga or poolish to a sourdough, you will want less of the flour in the preferment. In the example above, 40% of the flour is in the preferment. This is normal for Italian style biga breads. However, 40% would be too much if it were a sourdough. The acid would make the dough harder to develop and the taste too sour. If you wanted a bread that was not sour, reduce the flour to 5-10%. Form more sourdough flavor, use 15-20%.

It was an easy lesson then, as it is now. But typically (for me) I decided to go against his lesson - don't students ever learn?

Wouldn't you know, I payed no attention and stuck with the 40%, and I used all sorts of different flours, spelt, rye, whole wheat, white wheat, in various proportions. So far the dough did'nt seem to have problems with development, so I wonder if different flours make the higher amount of sourdough react differently?

The test will be in the taste of the finished loaf I guess, without having retarded the loaf, it's got a wonderful wheaten smell, mild and no notes of acidity.

 

Sliced it tasted absolutely marvelous, a crisp dough without being overly tough, and some acidic tones but quite flavorful and nuances from the various flours make for a fairly airy crumb.

 

 

Video on Paulie Gee

This morning we received a note from video producer Alex Hopson. Apparently Alex shot a short film on Paulie Gee's, the pizzaria reviewed here recently. He wanted to know if we could share it here. After watching it, we said of course. 

It's a colorful, warm piece, worth a watch. Enjoy. 

 

Punching dough

While I love cooking, there is nothing more satisfying to me then baking bread. After 10 plus years of serious bread baking, I finally have a basic core understanding. At the same time, baking remains a mystery, a meaningful search for definitions and for exactness. We bread bakers are constantly searching for the perfect loaf. There's always room for tweaks, playing with the finite constraints that go into bread, namely it's limited ingredients; flour, water, salt and, of course, the levain.

Quite often I'm asked, "which formula did you use?" Often baking makes me think of algebra, a discipline which I never have and never will master. But because of baking,I have become comfortable in crunching numbers. Which translates into an ability to get the baker's percentage-parameters sorted out, the variables being temperature, mix,fermentation and shaping. 

 

 

For a long time, baking at work seemed a chore, but the challenge of expressing myself not only as chef, but as baker, started to feel okay. No, it felt better than, "okay." It felt great. Here's an example. At work last week, I had old pizza dough in the fridge, which was on its way to becoming an overly acid pre-ferment - commonly known as, "Satan's spawn," illustriously named by reknowned baker, John Downes. 

Borrowing an idea from my friend  David Aplin at Cliffside Hearth Bread Company, I decided to make a walnut and roasted red onion bread. Using basic levain proportions, I substituted levain with pre-ferment, and a touch of yeast, et voila, some decent tasting bread! 

 

Even lacking my levain, a nice slice smothered with honey and labne (a Lebanese yogurt) was a great foil for this moist loaf of bread. 

 

Being a big proponent of sourdough doesn't stop me from the use of commercial yeast, any bread if made well, is good bread, just if it's made by your own hands and with love.

 

Food photo's, busy....

 

Paulie Gee's

Pizza is as New York as it is Italian. Even within those geographies, it comes in all sizes, shapes, doughs, sauces. But there is one Big Apple pizzaria that struck me as particularly interesting... Paulie Gee's.

Since first hearing about it on SkeeterNYC's Vimeo on Food Curated, I've been hankering to try Paulie Gee's. It's located in Brooklyn's Greenpoint section, which is a short subway ride from Manhattan's Union Square. On a recent sunny Friday evening (luxurious with spring blossoms and soft warmth) I ended up venturing out that way. Greenpoint has been a Polish neighborhood for the last 100 years. Today the area breaths Kielbasa-plus-yeasty wafty old world air, and the emerging scent of new restaurants that sing bohemian chic.

 

 

Walking in to Paulie Gee's, the first thing I noticed was the deliciously dim-lit bar, wooden planked bar, tables and antique bar chairs. And it has a great array of shuffled music, played just at the right decibles, loud enough to hear but never blaring, great soundtracks for great pizza. 

The menu seems chock full of pun-intended pizza names, with a nod to salads and soup and even one pie giving hommage to an off-premise partner, Sea bean goods. My eyes made quick friends with something called "Red,White and Greenberg." 

 

Red, White and Greenberg, cheesy but really packed with flavor and the dough, that's the key. A pie with guanciale and pickled onions, meeting of all good old school with light crisp dough.

 

 

Paulie Gee's doesn't feature the classic Neopolitano pizza with puffy fat edges, but a thinner, less doughy creature characterized  by charred flatbreads, with a tender but still slighty thin, puffy crust. It lends itself to sharing the toppings. It's also less filling (in a good way). You'd almost think, wow, one more please!  So charmed, it begged to be savored and simultaneously demolished, washed down with a really satisfying crafted beer. And besides great beers, it offers wines and sodas, including Mexican Coca-Cola.

In the main dining area, you could see the wood burning stove with the distinct Napoli tiled oven and the pizzaiolas working each pie with care and precision.

 

 


What's nice too, I met Paulie as I snapped photos. He's a charmer, likes to chat pizza, and a real host. I'll definitely be back...

 

 

Pane Pugliese, with yeasted biga

Visiting Montreal recently, invited to a dinner for Sarah Jenkins and hosted by Michele Forgione (two heroes!) I volunteered to bake a loaf of bread using a "biga." Michele kindly obliged, letting me stick out my thick Gallic neck to show I wasn't a baking novice.

I decided to bake a Pugliese bread, as Michele's family is from that part of the world. He also had some first class finely ground Canadian semolina flour (known in Italy as "semola rimacinata") for me to use. Improvising on baker percentages and substituting yeast for leavening instead of my trusted sourdough, the biga had a trace of yeast, and a long overnight proof in a cool Montreal kitchen.

Also, I wrestled with using a full 100% semolina, deciding to compromise to make sure the dough would have oven spring, not turning into a pancake. The biga was all rimacinata, and the final dough was half semolina, half wheat, with a touch more yeast.

A distant relative of my pane eretici with kamut, perhaps this hybrid wheat version actually came close to the tradition of of Pane di Altamura, albeit using wheat flour. All to say, it became a compromise, touching the parameters of orthodoxy with a safety net of gluten strands, and structure, and aided by elements of Montreal's cool air, water and hospitality.

Machiatto while the dough rises and gets it's folds in!

Inscribed by D.O.C. Pane di Altamura is made and structured by these parameters: A few notes given me by my fellow baker and native of Bari, Angela Musci.

100% semola rimacinata di grano duro (finely ground durum wheat,but you already know that!)

60-70% 'good' water, 20º C approximately

20% semola rimacinata starter (I usually use it with 80% hydration)

2% salt

Simple is alway's better, straight up numbers, but it's not that simple, Pane Pugliese, or Pane di Altamura are a mosaic of style, shapes and different methods of fermentation, which I as an amateur would not be able to even explain, still trying to sort it all out myself!

Though it was made with commercial yeast, this 12 hour biga leavened dough with rimacinata semolina and just a standard commercial kitchen oven, I was amazed by the depth of flavor and different crumb characteristics from the same formula, just a different flour and leveaning agent.