I don’t think I know anyone who doesn‘t like cinnamon buns. And I know, I know, some people like Cinnabon or the twist-off-and-bake Pillsbury rolls…but to me, those are so ultra-loaded with sugar and artificial stuff that they’re not worth it. But homemade cinnamon buns…now those are a different creature entirely! Light, warm, sweet-but-not-cloyingly-so, mmm! Making them for last week’s BBA bread reminded me how much I love them (as you can probably tell from the frequency of italicized words in this paragraph), and that I really should make them more often. They’re not hard to make, and oh, the smell when they’re baking! Heavenly.

For this BBA bread, I decided to add raisins and walnuts into the cinnamon swirl of the buns. Cinnamon buns are great, but I love them even more with little bits of fruit and nuts swirled throughout.

The process for making the buns started with creaming together butter, sugar and salt, then adding an egg, lemon zest, bread flour, yeast, and buttermilk. I mixed these ingredients together in my electric stand mixer until they came together in a shaggy ball:

I decided to then knead the dough by hand, which was easy — because it was so supple — but it did take me a bit longer than usual to achieve the windowpane, closer to 15 minutes than the usual 8-10. But look at the lovely windowpane I did eventually coax out of the dough:

Next came the usual step of letting the kneaded dough rise until doubled in a lightly oiled bowl.

I then gently degassed the risen dough and rolled it out into a rectangle about 14 inches long by 12 inches wide. Reinhart says the thickness of the dough at this point should be 2/3 inch, but mine was not this thick…I might have too aggressively degassed it, but in any case, I pressed on, sprinkling a generous coating of cinnamon sugar over the dough.

I then scattered raisins and walnuts over the cinnamon sugar, and lightly pressed them into the dough.

Starting from the bottom edge, I then rolled up the dough into a log, trying to keep it fairly tight as I rolled. The individual buns were then easy to slice directly from this log.

I placed the buns on a sheet pan close to each other, but not touching – so that when they proof and bake, they’ll gently connect with each other (so you get those soft sides when you pull them apart. Yum.)

After they’d proofed at room temperature for about an hour, here’s how lovely and puffy they were:

After they proofed, I baked them for about 20 minutes, until they were golden brown.

Oh, hel-loooo, there.

We ate some of them warm, with a powdered sugar/milk icing drizzled over them (didn’t get shots of those – we scarfed them down too quickly!) I stored the remainder at room temperature in a sealed container overnight, and we had them over the weekend with guests that stayed with us for the 4th of July…it was such a fantastic breakfast treat! I’m going to make these over and over, I just know it.

You can find the BBA recipe for cinnamon buns here.

Previous BBA Bread: Ciabatta

Up next: Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Bread

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What did our CSA share for last week hold? Still shades of green, with some new treats. Golden swiss chard, hakurei (salad) turnips, garlic scapes, daikon, leaf lettuce, field greens, kale, and basil (nice to have the latter this early in the season, thanks to the farm’s greenhouse!)

Daikon is fairly new to me; it’s a large, white root in the radish family, used often in Japanese cuisine. It looks similar to a large carrot that’s been sucked dry of its orange pigment, which always reminds me of the book Bunnicula (the whole series of which I read when I was young, and then subsequently read to my younger brother, too. We loved those books.) Anyhow, daikon tastes fairly mild and crunchy raw, and mellows even further when cooked; it keeps really well in the fridge for weeks. It’s a great addition to a slaw or sliced into a salad for some crunch, and sometimes I stir-fry it briefly with other vegetables.

Our fruit share this week contained probably the last of the season’s strawberries — with all the rain we’ve been having, the season won’t last much longer. Good thing we got plenty in our Fruit Bowl share to enjoy!

Since freshly-picked strawberries are so fragile and perishable (and SO delicious!), after I’ve eaten some right from the container and made my requisite strawberry-rhubarb pie (yes, I made it again and no, sorry, I did not get a picture!), I’ve been pureeing the remainder with just a little sugar or honey, straining the puree to remove the tiny seeds, and using it as a strawberry coulis. We had the coulis last week over cheesecake squares that I topped with the last of the season’s rhubarb, which I had roasted with sugar.

sprinkle the strawberries with a little sugar; let them sit until juices develop

puree until smooth, then strain to remove any seeds

The strawberry coulis is also fantastic as a sauce for ice cream (particularly buttermilk ice cream!), or mixed with a little seltzer or sparkling water to create a homemade, natural strawberry soda. It’s so refreshing!

I recently saw Dorie Greenspan tweet about roasting rhubarb, and thought it sounded like a nice new way to prepare it. Sprinkled with sugar, mixed in a pan and covered with foil, the rhubarb tenderizes and caramelizes in no time.

I had seen these cheesecake squares on Epicurious recently, topped with a few fresh blueberries (also a great idea, now that blueberries will be coming into season!) The cheesecake itself is flavored with a little lemon zest, and it’s baked on a graham cracker crust.  The squares are super easy to make, easy to cut, and (topped with a fresh berry or two rather than the coulis) would make great transportable picnic food.  A nice base for many of the berries coming into season soon (yeah!!)

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Cheesecake Squares with Roasted Rhubarb & Strawberry Coulis

Adapted from Bon Appetit

view printable recipe

These would be terrific topped with any seasonal berry. They slice well and would transport well for a picnic!

Makes 9 squares.

Ingredients
For the cheesecake squares
9 whole graham crackers
5 tablespoons butter, melted
1 8-ounce package cream cheese, room temperature
1/3 cup sugar
1 large egg
3 tablespoons sour cream
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon peel
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the strawberry coulis
1 pint strawberries
1 tablespoon (or more to taste) sugar or honey

For the roasted rhubarb
1 pound rhubarb, trimmed and cut into 1 inch pieces
1/4-1/2 cup sugar (I used 1/4 cup because I had slightly under 1 pound of rhubarb)

Directions
To make the cheesecake squares:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Place a piece of foil into an 8×8 baking pan (use enough so that the foil overhangs the sides.) Butter the foil in the pan.

Place the graham crackers in a large ziptop bag and smash them with a rolling pin until they’re crushed to fine crumbs. Stir in the melted butter with a fork until the crumbs are moistened, then use your hands to press the crumbs into the bottom of the pan. Bake until deep golden, about 12 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside (you can start preparing the cheesecake filling while the crust is baking.)

With an electric mixer, cream together the cream cheese and sugar in a large bowl  until smooth. Beat in the egg and sour cream, then lemon zest and vanilla.  Spread the batter over the crust once it comes out of the oven.

Bake cheesecake for 30 minutes, or until set and slightly puffed. Let cool completely on a rack, then chill for at least 2 hours until slicing into squares.

To make the strawberry coulis:
Trim and half the strawberries; place them in a medium bowl. Sprinkle sugar over the strawberries (I use about 1 tablespoon sugar for 1 pint of strawberries, but feel free to adjust to your taste) and stir to coat. Let them sit at room temperature for about 15 minutes, until juices form. Puree the strawberries in a blender or food processor until very smooth, then use a fine mesh strainer to strain out the tiny seeds. Store covered, in the refrigerator.

To make the roasted rhubarb:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Spread the sliced rhubarb out in a single layer in an 11×7 glass baking dish. Sprinkle the sugar over the rhubarb and stir to coat. Set aside for about 5 minutes to let juices start to form, then cover the dish with foil and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, peek under the foil to see if the sugar has almost melted. If not, replace the foil and roast another 5 minutes or so. When the sugar has almost melted, take the foil off the pan and roast, uncovered, 5 minutes longer. The syrup should be bubbling.

Remove the pan from the oven and let the rhubarb cool. You can store this, covered, in the fridge for a week.

To serve:
Spoon a little roasted rhubarb on top of a cheesecake square; drizzle the strawberry coulis over the plate.

Ciabatta! Mmm, tasty. My favorite bread for dipping in olive oil, and it’s not too shabby as a sandwich bread, either. Ciabatta was the name of the game for me last weekend, as the latest bread in the BBA challenge. Let’s get right down to business as I’m already late to my self-imposed posting deadline (oh well) and my stomach is growling for dinner. Looking at these pictures won’t help much.

I was excited to make this bread because it seemed like it would be one of the more complicated ones we’ve done so far in the BBA Challenge. The main issue is hydration: ciabatta dough has a much higher hydration level than other bread doughs, and the hydration level is what produces (hopefully) the nice big open holes in the crumb. As you can see from my picture above, my holes weren’t as hole-y as they could have been, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The process for making this dough starts with a pre-ferment: either a poolish or a biga. I chose to make a biga, as the other BBA participants seemed to have good results using this method. To make the biga, I mixed AP flour, yeast and water together in a bowl, then kneaded it until it came together in a ball.

I then let the ball of dough rise until doubled in size, which took about 2 hours.

After degassing the risen biga, I then stored it in the fridge for a long, slow fermentation. I ended up storing it in the fridge for two days, which could only help in developing a good flavor with the bread. When I took the biga out to warm up to room temperature on the third day, here’s how nice and bubbly it looked:

When I was ready to make the ciabatta dough, I cut the biga up into 10 pieces. These were then added to my electric stand mixer along with more water, olive oil, and bread flour (I chose to mix AP and bread flours, between the biga and dough, as other BBA participants said using some portion of AP flour seemed to give better results as far as size of holes.)

I mixed this dough up until it came together in a sticky mass — this is much stickier than a traditional bread dough, due to the level of liquid.

I then gathered the mass and turned it out onto a bed of flour, patting it into an 8-inch long rectangle.

NOTE: you do NOT need to use this much flour. I was being cautious but, well, let’s just say I didn’t need my end result to be so floury.

Each side of the rectangle is then stretched out, lengthwise, and folded back over the dough, envelope style.

I let the dough rest for 30  minutes, then repeated the stretch-and-fold process. That dough then fermented at room temperature for about 2 hours, after which it had grown quite significantly in size.

Using my dough scraper, I carefully cut this mass of dough into two smaller rectangles, trying not to degas the dough as I cut it.

I then repeated the same stretch-and-fold process with each loaf. Reinhart then instructs readers to proof the dough in a couche, which is traditionally a sturdy canvas cloth that can be folded around the proofing dough to give it support on the sides. I do not own a couche, so I crafted a makeshift one with a dishtowel (just be sure not to use a terrycloth dishtowel – this one was a flat weave and as you can see, very well-floured – so it wouldn’t stick to the dough.)

Again, NOTE: you do NOT need to use this much flour. I was just being overly cautious.

After another hour or so, my ciabattas had swelled up nicely and it was time to transfer them to my pizza peel so that I could transfer them into the oven (which had been preheated to 500 degrees F.)

The next part of the process is lacking pictures, mainly because it was a little too tricky to perform and document simultaneously. To simulate a professional steam-injected baker’s oven, I placed a heavy metal sheet pan on the bottom rack of the oven. On the second rack of the oven, placed in the middle, I put my baking stone. When I transferred the dough to the baking stone (which gives it a nice crust), I poured hot water into the metal sheet pan on the bottom of the oven, creating a big burst of steam. I then sprayed the walls of the oven every 30 seconds, 3 times, to create periodic bursts of steam and moisture. After the third spray, I turned the oven down to 450 degrees and baked for about 15 minutes.

Here’s what emerged:

Not too bad, although as I’ve mentioned before, I think I could really have gotten away with using less flour. I had to tap off the loaves to get rid of some of the excess flour.

And here was the moment of truth: the crumb shot –

Hrm. Not nearly the holes I was looking for. It tasted great — believe me — we devoured a whole loaf on the spot with some olive oil and herbs from our garden. I’d like to make this bread again, though, and increase the amount of water in the dough formula. I’ve been reading through some of the other BBA bakers’ experiences with this dough, and the consensus seems to be that the recipe could use an even higher level of hydration. So, all in all, this was a good challenge and a challenge in the exact sense of the word: something to go back to and try again and work towards perfecting.

Because good ciabatta, dipped in nice olive oil, is a hard thing to beat.

You can find this ciabatta recipe online here.

Previous BBA bread: Challah

Up next: Cinnamon Rolls (growl, growl goes my stomach!)

CSA Week 3: 6.25.09

Our CSA is doing  a nice job this year of mixing things up a little from week to week. We still get the same general categories of vegetables this time of year: some greens, radishes, turnips — but the other items have been varying a little from week to week, which makes for nice surprises when I open our share box.

So here’s the rundown this week: a nice head of romaine, a head of red curly kale, spinach, arugula, radishes, spring onions, salad turnips, and garlic scapes. Yum!

And in our fruit share, strawberries and rhubarb:

Finger Lakes Fruit Bowl Share: 6.25.09

I used the spring onions and arugula to make a dish I saw recently in Bon Appetit magazine — halibut with white beans, wilted arugula, and a brown-butter-caper vinaigrette. The original recipe uses fresh-caught trout, which oh boy, would I have loved to have used — but seeing as I hadn’t planned any fishing excursions, the wild Alaskan halibut I had was a nice substitute.

But the dish I really want to tell you about today was the pizza we had on Friday night…it was a white pizza, topped with little nubs of sweet roasted garlic, sauteed red curly kale, and four cheeses: fontina, asiago, provolone, and mozzarella. It was a winner!

Every time I roast a whole head of garlic I wonder why I don’t do it more often. I slice the top off a head of garlic so the tops of the cloves are exposed, place the head in a square of aluminum foil, drizzle some olive oil over the head, fold up the foil to make a little purse-like package, and bake it for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees F. I love the perfume of sweet garlic that wafts out of the package as I open it, and squeezing the soft cloves out of their papery skins is fun, to boot.

Curly kale can be a bit on the tough side, so I sauteed two big handfuls of it down in some olive oil until tender, then chopped it into small bits. I then layered this onto the pizza dough, mixing it with bits of the roasted garlic and grated cheese.

And out from the oven emerged…voilà!

Oooh, so tasty. It was like garlic-sauteed kale in cheesy, crusty form. A new favorite in our house!

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Pizza with Kale, Roasted Garlic & Four Cheeses

an Eggs on Sunday original

view printable recipe

Ingredients
pizza dough – your favorite or mine!
2 big handfuls of kale, sauteed in some olive oil until tender, then chopped
cloves from about half a head of roasted garlic,  thickly sliced
3 cups of grated cheese, a mix of fontina, asiago, provolone and mozzarella

Directions
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F with a baking stone inside (I place my baking stone on a rack, and place the rack on the lowest slot in the oven.)

Generously dust a pizza peel (or the back of a sheet pan) with coarse cornmeal or flour. Roll or stretch your pizza dough out to a 12 to 14 inch circle directly on the peel (or pan.)

Top the crust with half the grated cheese, then half the sliced roasted garlic and half the sauteed kale. Repeat with another layer of cheese, garlic, and kale.

Bake in the oven for about 8 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly and just starting to brown, and the crust is golden brown.

A little late here on my BBA post for the week, and that’s mainly because I can’t think of much to say about this Challah other than (1) it’s delicious (challah is one of my favorite breads!), (2) it’s easy to make – probably the easiest of the BBA breads I’ve made so far – and (3) my braiding technique, while certainly not awful, could use a little refinement.

Oh, and one more thing: for a long time, I thought “challah” was pronounced with a hard “ch,” like “chair” or “cheese.” Lo and behold, I learned the c is silent, resulting in a pronounciation more like “hallah.” Which now, unfortunately, always makes me think “Holla!”, as “Holla if you want challah!” …and this, without fail, gives me the giggles.

What can I say; sometimes I crack myself up.

Challah is a traditional Jewish bread, rich with eggs, ever so slightly sweet, soft, and braided in any  number of shapes. I love to use it for French toast, bread pudding, or just toasted and spread with butter.

Anyway, this was the easiest of the breads to make so far, I thought. For one, it could be made all in one day, in about 5 hours from start to finish. I began by mixing together bread flour, eggs, egg yolks, salt, water, a little vegetable oil, sugar, and yeast in a large bowl.

After mixing those ingredients together, I kneaded the dough until it passed the windowpane test, which took me only about 6 minutes. Perhaps it was the weather — particularly amenable to kneading dough that day? — but it came together into a tacky, supple ball pretty quickly.

I then set the ball of kneaded dough aside for its first rise.

After it went through the first rise, I kneaded it briefly again to de-gas it, then set it back in the bowl for a second rise. Once it had then doubled in size, it was time to decide what kind of a braid I wanted to attempt. I decided to do Reinhart’s suggested “celebration challah,” which layers a small braid on top of a larger one. To do this, I started by dividing the dough into three equal pieces:

then combined two of the pieces to create one larger hunk of dough, and one smaller one.

Each of these two pieces were then cut into 3 equal portions…

…and formed into balls.

I rolled each ball into long ropes, starting with the three larger portions, and these ropes I then braided into a loaf.

I repeated the same process with the smaller portions to give me a smaller braid. As you can see these are…not bad, but not perfect. The asymmetry kind of bugged me. I think I need to work on maintaining a consistent tension when I’m rolling the ropes, so I get strands of even thickness.

I then laid the smaller braid on top of the larger one (and my mind briefly flitted to the petite brioche a tetes, where I had the detachment issue, and I wondered if the small braid would be secure on top of the large one. I just pressed it firmly down and crossed my fingers, and as you’ll see, everything did work out just fine.)

Brushed the braid with egg wash, and let it proof for about 90 minutes.

After it proofed, it was big and puffy and ready to bake!

Wow – look at that loaf. That’s enough bread for one lovely celebration!

The crumb was light, soft, and tender. I think this was a great challah recipe, rivaling the taste of ones I’ve bought in bakeries. I had a few slices warm with butter, and they were heavenly.

Previous BBA Bread: Casatiello

Up next: Ciabatta! I’m looking forward to this one.

CSA Share, Week 2

Our CSA share this week included some of the same things from last week, and some new pretty eye-catchers: kale, field greens, lettuce, golden swiss chard, French Breakfast radishes, salad turnips, and….greenhouse basil!

This also was the first week of our Finger Lakes Fruit Bowl share, in which we’ll be getting a sampling of seasonal fruit grown on farms in our region. We’re trying this share for the first time this year, and I’m super excited about it. Early June in upstate New York brings strawberries and rhubarb into season, and that’s exactly what we got in our Fruit Bowl share this week: a thick bunch of rosy rhubarb and a quart and pint of wonderfully sweet, ripe strawberries. Both of which I used in a strawberry rhubarb pie this weekend.

Finger Lakes Fruit Bowl Share, 6/18/09: Strawberries and Rhubarb

I wanted to pass along a tip I learned for storing herbs (learned a bit too late after many bags of herbs perished or rotted into oblivion in my fridge): I cut the stems fresh after bringing them home, stick them in a glass of cold water, place a plastic bag over the tops of the leaves — punch holes in the bag so air can circulate through — then secure the plastic bag onto the glass with a rubber band (sometimes you don’t have to do this if the bag fits pretty snugly). Stored in the fridge this way, the herbs will stay fresh for an unbelievably long time. I’ve had this fresh dill in the fridge for a few weeks and it’s looking as bright and fresh as the day I brought it home from the market. Since it’s cold, the water stays fairly clear of bacteria build-up (unlike when I used to keep herbs in a jar on the counter), though I do usually change it once a week or so. We’ll see how the basil fares, but so far, so good.

We’ve had a stretch of cool, rainy days here recently, which is great for the gardens and farms (as long as we get some sun and drier weather soon — don’t want things to start rotting!) but doesn’t exactly put me in a summery mood. In fact, last night it was in the 50’s, pouring rain, and as I pondered what to make for dinner I couldn’t help but think “I must have polenta.” (My relationship with polenta seems to have a direct correlation to the temperature and degree of precipitation outside, i.e. the colder and wetter it gets, the more I crave a bowl of the soft, comforting stuff.)

So I decided to make a recipe I came across on Epicurious the other day, when I was looking for a new way to use chard. I often like to make sautes of some type of bean, garlic, and chard together, sometimes served over pasta, sometimes over quinoa or brown rice, or even more often over soft polenta (or polenta triangles, if you make the polenta ahead, let it cool, and cut it into wedges.) The difference with this recipe is that the garbanzo beans are roasted in the oven with lots of garlic, shallots, fennel seed, bay leaves, and a generous amount of olive oil.

I used to despise garbanzo beans, having only ever really had them as the cold, mealy, hard nubbins served as part of lackluster salad bars. I really found a difference when I started buying organic canned garbanzos — they’re not mealy at all. This way of roasting them with spices, garlic, and oil rendered them velvety soft, almost melt-in-your-mouth, and unbelievably delicious! I had a hard time not eating most of them straight from the pan (I think I might also try roasting white beans this way…mmm, so delicious.)

Anyway, once the garbanzos are roasted, I started sauteing the chard with more garlic, shallots, and bay leaves, then braised the leaves in some chicken stock I’d made during the day (again, cool + rainy + time inside = Amy makes chicken stock.)

The resulting saute was earthy, garlicky, flavorful, and super, super delicious over a base of soft polenta (to which I’d mixed in a little fontina cheese.) So good! A great vegetarian main course, which we had with a side salad of our CSA field greens, salad turnips, radishes, and buttermilk dill dressing. You could also easily serve the garbanzos & chard over pasta, rice or another grain, or even lightly mashed as a topping for crostini. Yum!

(One last note: if you do serve it with polenta, the soft polenta sets up pretty quickly as it cools — so you can spread any leftovers on a sheet pan to let cool, then cut it into wedges to save for later.)

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Garlic-Roasted Garbanzo Beans & Swiss Chard over Polenta

Adapted from Bon Appetit

Instead of polenta, the garbanzo and chard saute would be equally delicious over pasta or any cooked grain.

view printable recipe

Ingredients
For the garbanzos:
2 15.5-ounce cans garbanzo beans (chickpeas), drained (about 3 cups)
10 garlic cloves, peeled
2 large shallots
3 small bay leaves
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

For the chard:
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
6 garlic cloves, peeled, chopped
3 small bay leaves
2 shallots, sliced
2 small or 1 large bunch Swiss chard, large ribs trimmed off, leaves coarsely torn
1 1/2 cups chicken stock (or storebought low-salt good quality chicken broth)

For the polenta:
4 cups water or milk, or a combination
1 cup polenta (coarse-ground cornmeal), not instant
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup grated cheese, such as parmigiano-reggiano or fontina

Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a Pyrex baking dish (8×8 or 11×7), combine the garbanzos, garlic, shallots, and bay leaves. Sprinkle with coarse salt and black pepper, then pour the olive oil over the pan. Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes, until the garlic cloves and shallots are soft. Set aside at room temperature until ready to add to the chard.

After you put the garbanzos in to roast, start your polenta. In a medium pot, bring 4 cups of water or milk and a teaspoon of salt to the boil. Stream in the polenta, whisking contantly, and continue whisking until the polenta thickens slightly and is suspended throughout the liquid, about 1 minute. Cover the pot, turn down the heat, and simmer for 1 hour. Stir the polenta occasionally; it should be cooking at a rate of a slow bubble.

About 15 minutes before your polenta is finished cooking, make the chard: Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy pot over medium heat. Add the garlic, bay leaves, and shallots, cover, and cook until the shallots are tender, about 10 minutes. Uncover and add the swiss chard, stirring to coat with the olive oil. Add the chicken stock, stir to combine, then cover the pot to braise the chard until it’s wilted and tender.

Uncover the pot and continue to cook until some of the broth has evaporated, then add the roasted garbanzo bean mixture. Stir to combine, cook over medium heat until heated through, a few more minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings with salt or pepper as needed.

At this point your polenta should be finished cooking. Turn off the heat and add the 3 tablespoons of butter and 1/2 cup of grated cheese. Stir until the cheese is melted, then divide among serving dishes (if you have any leftover, spread it on a sheet pan to cool.)

Spoon the chard & garbanzo mixture, with some of the juices, over the polenta.

Makes 4-6 main course servings.

When I was in my 20’s and living in the Boston area, one restaurant that my friends and I used to go to quite often was Pho Pasteur (which is now called Le’s Vietnamese Cuisine, I think, though I’m not sure why the name changed – I think it’s the same owners.) It was my first introduction to the light, fresh flavors of Vietnamese food, and I loved it. We always ordered the fresh summer rolls (goi cuon, literally “salad rolls”) to start, which were little rolls of pork or tofu, crispy fresh vegetables, bean sprouts, and lettuce wrapped in translucent rice paper (soft and fresh, not greasy and fried like some Chinese egg rolls), and served with the most delicious peanut sauce I’ve ever tasted. My friends and I used to joke that we could drink that peanut sauce all on it’s own. Actually, I think we were probably only half-joking.

Fresh summer rolls are without a doubt one of my favorite foods, and when warmer weather finally makes its appearance around here, I crave them. They’re fresh, light, so flavorful and so satisfying – a great warm-weather appetizer or even a light meal on their own (if you like them as much as I do.)

It’s been a bit cooler and rainer the past few days here, but last week, it was gloriously sunny, pleasantly warm (not hot) and I was in a summer roll mood. How lucky, then, that my craving coincided with our first CSA pick-up, which gave me so many great things to work with! I had beautiful lettuce, local pastured pork from The Piggery and Kingbird Farm, radishes and salad turnips, herbs like mint, Thai basil, and coriander growing in pots outside my front door, and some greenhouse cukes I’d picked up at the farmer’s market. In other words, a “perfect storm” for summer rolls.

The twist I put on these was to wrap them in the collard leaves that we received in our share, which I steamed just until they were tender and bright green. I saw this trick awhile back on The Victory Garden — B and I watch this PBS show every weekend while we eat lunch — where the chef used the large, flat, round collard leaves as wraps for a chicken, bulgur, and summer vegetable mixture (which looked delicious!) The collards are just about the size of tortillas, so they’re easy to manipulate around your filling, and I think they  make a really nice twist on a traditional grain-based wrap.

I found a killer summer roll recipe online, courtesy of Todd and Diane from White on Rice Couple, and let me tell you: they’re fantastic. The peanut sauce alone is worth making, but the marinade for the pork is equally delicious.

I made two versions of rolls: one with grilled pork tenderloin, cucumbers, thinly sliced radishes and salad turnips, lettuce, and fresh herbs. I also made a different pork filling, made with ground pork, tamarind paste, garlic, ginger, and peanuts that I found in Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet (a beautiful cookbook, if you haven’t seen it — it’s part travelogue and part cookbook, filled with recipes from Southeast Asia, and reminds me of a coffee table book in its size and wealth of gorgeous pictures.  I’ve been cooking from this a lot, lately, and it’s nice to rediscover it.)

Both were delicious — fresh, ultra-flavorful, and a nice twist on my traditional method of cooking greens (sauteed in garlic and olive oil.) And they satisfied that summer roll craving…at least for now.

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Amy’s CSA Version of Vietnamese Fresh Summer Rolls

view printable recipe

For both of these rolls, you’ll want to begin by steaming the leaves of collard greens in a large steamer basket or steamer insert. I trim off the stem, up to the point where the leaf starts, and steam them for about 5 minutes or until they’re bright green and tender (but not mushy.) The steamed greens can be set aside to cool and then refrigerated, covered, until you’re ready to assemble your wraps.

Any of the following are great to include in  your rolls:
radishes, thinly sliced
salad turnips, thinly sliced
cucumbers, sliced into matchstick strips
bean sprouts
fresh herbs, such as mint, basil, coriander/cilantro
scallions

Grilled Pork Filling

From White on Rice Couple via Rasa Malaysia

1 lb pork chops, loin, butt or shoulder, sliced thin.
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 shallots, minced
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste
1/4 cup peanut or vegetable oil

Place slices of pork in a shallow dish or ziptop bag. Whisk together all of the remaining ingredients, then add to the container with the pork. Mix so pork gets coated, then let marinate for at least 20 minutes. Grill for about 2-3 minutes per side, or until it’s cooked to the texture you desire.

Spicy Ground Pork Filling

From Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet

1/2 pound ground pork
1 tablespoon tamarind concentrate, dissolved in 1/4 cup warm water (I can find this in the Indian section of our grocery store)
3 tablespoons peanut oil
1/2 cup shallots, chopped
3 tablespoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 or 2 tablespoons Thai fish sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1 tablespoon minced ginger
2 tablespoons toasted unsalted (raw) peanuts, chopped

Whisk the tamarind concentrate into the warm water until dissolved; set aside.

Heat a wok over high heat, then add the oil. When hot, add the shallots and garlic and stir-fry until golden. Add the ground pork and cook until it’s all changed color. Add the sugar, tamarind juice, fish sauce, and salt and continue cooking until almost all of the liquid has evaporated, about 5 minutes. Add the ginger and chopped toasted peanuts and stir-fry one minute more. Taste and adjust seasoning to your taste.

Hoisin-Peanut Sauce

From White on Rice Couple via Rasa Malaysia

1 cup (8 oz) hoisin sauce (if sauce is thick, add about 1/4 cup warm water to reach desired consistency)
1/4 cup smooth peanut butter
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 minced thai chili, or more for desired spiciness

Combine all ingredients in a food processor, and blend until smooth. If the consistency is too thick, thin out to your desired consistency with a little warm water.

I thought brioche was pretty perfect on its own, but that was before I tasted this bread. Peter Reinhart describes Casatiello thusly: “This is a rich, dreamy Italian elaboration of brioche, loaded with flavor bursts in the form of cheese and bits of meat, preferably salami.” Cheese and cured meat, in bread! It’s wonderful. This was the next bread in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, and unlike the previous 4 breads that I’ve made in the challenge, this one could be made all in one day — so, this was my project yesterday while I caught up on some reading in the afternoon.

As with the other breads, this one started with a quick sponge (flour, yeast, and milk). Once the sponge has foamed and bubbled and fermented for a bit, it’s added to the mixing bowl with more flour, salt, sugar, and eggs.

Just as with the brioche, now I added some butter (though not as much as in the brioche.)

After the butter is incorporated, I let the mixer do the work, kneading it with the dough hook for about 8 minutes, until it passed the windowpane test. (I could have kneaded it by hand, but…well…sometimes a girl’s gotta take a load off and let her machines do the work for her.)

Now it was time to add the salami and grated cheese (already smelling good!)

After the salami and cheese were mixed in, I transferred the dough to an oiled bowl to let it rise. I keep forgetting to mention this: one of the best tools I have for bread making is this electric heating pad, which I picked up at CVS for about $10. We keep our place on the cool side, so the heating pad under the bowls where the dough is rising helps create a little microclimate where the yeast can stay warm and do it’s thing (in less than, say, 4 hours!)

Proofing followed the rise, and I decided to make this bread in a cake pan, which was one of the suggestions in the book. Look at that big beautiful proofed dough!

Out of the oven, it smelled heavenly – like cheese and sweet yeasty bread and salty salami. A thick wedge made a perfect afternoon snack.

I think this bread would make a perfect picnic takealong food, too; it’s kind of like a sandwich all wrapped up into a slice of bread. As it was, we brought it to dinner at a friend’s house last night, and I think everyone enjoyed it.

Previous BBA Bread: Brioche

Next up: Challah

We received our first CSA share of the season this week: ceeeee-le-brate good times, come on!

CSA Share, Week 1

In this week’s share: kale, collards, lettuce, baby salad greens, garlic scapes, arugula, fingerling potatoes, radishes, and salad turnips.

I’ve been waiting for this week with quite a bit of anticipation. It’s our 4th year belonging to a CSA, and for the past 2 years, we’ve had shares in the Full Plate Farm Collective. This CSA is unique in that it’s a collective of 3 farms:

• Remembrance Farm, which is certified organic and biodynamic, and specializes in salad greens, onions, and root crops
• Stick and Stone Farm, which is certified organic, and grows a wide range of vegetables, including lettuce, cooking greens, summer and winter squash, heirloom tomatoes, beets and spinach.They also have a lovely U-pick section of the farm for shareholders.
• Three Swallows Farm, which is certified organic and biodynamic, and specialized in hot weather crops like eggplant, hot peppers, tomatoes, and melons.

We love the fact that this CSA allows us to support three local farms at once. They do a great job of providing a variety of produce throughout the growing season, and offer a few different pick-up and delivery options to give people all around the Ithaca area a way to conveniently get their shares.

We’ve found in our CSA experience that June in the cooler climate of the Northeast usually brings greens, greens, and more greens! The first year we belonged to a CSA, I was exposed to a few kinds of greens I’d never cooked before — kale, mustard greens, collards — but one of the best things about being a CSA shareholder (in my opinion) is the learning process of figuring out how and what to cook with the vegetables you get each week (and kale, incidentally, is absolutely one of my favorite vegetables now.)

One of the other things I had to learn fairly quickly was how to best store the vegetables we received and how I could space the vegetables out over the week. Greens are pretty perishable, but there are certain ones that keep longer than others. Here are a few tips that have worked for me:

• Salad greens, particularly baby greens and arugula, are quite perishable and should be used in the first few days after you bring them home. They’re best stored in the front part of the fridge, where it’s not as cold as the rear.
• We receive our baby salad greens in plastic bags, misted with water. I tried keeping them in this bag during the week, but ended up sacrificing a few that rotted from the moisture. Now, when I bring them home, I spin them dry in a salad spinner and transfer them to a dry ziptop bag; they seem to keep well in the fridge for a few days, sealed, this way.
• Kale and collards are sturdier and can be stored in the fridge for most of the week. Kale, especially, doesn’t mind colder temperatures and can take being pushed towards the back of the fridge if you’re cramped for space.
• Radish greens and turnip greens are delicious and shouldn’t be discarded. Both are, however, fragile and I usually try to use them the same day that I receive the radishes and turnips. They both have a peppery flavor, with turnip greens having a taste reminiscent of mustard greens (but not quite as spicy.) Radish greens are terrific mixed into a salad or sauteed, and turnip greens are delicious given a light braise or saute with garlic and olive oil.

The reason I was so thrilled to see all of these crunchy greens in our share is that we have been gorging on salads with dinner lately, now that local lettuce is in season, and I am positively obsessed with this buttermilk dill dressing that I mixed up one day, after picking up a gorgeous bunch of feathery dill at the farmer’s market.

come to mama

We’ve been eating this kind of salad non-stop lately with whatever I bring back on the weekend from the farmer’s market; recently, it’s been tender baby greens with salad turnips (more delicate and mild than the fall storage turnips, I love them!), radishes, and a few chive blossoms thrown in from the chives I have growing in a pot outside.

salad turnips

Easter Egg radishes

beautiful (edible!) chive blossoms

The tang of the buttermilk and fresh dill is a perfect match for the crunchy, delicate greens and thinly sliced radishes and salad turnips. On the day we brought home the share, I blanched the fingerlings in salted water, let them cool slightly, sliced them and tossed them in with the salad — the dressing is a wonderful topping for potatoes, too (you could try it on a potato salad – yum!) We’ve also had it as a sauce for poached salmon (delicious), served with some sliced greenhouse cucumbers that I picked up at the farmer’s market a few weeks ago. I’ve even used it as a dip for raw vegetables (just use less, or leave out, the buttermilk so it’s a thicker consistency.)

I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you how much of this I’ve made already this spring…I can’t get enough of it!

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Buttermilk Dill Dressing

an Eggs on Sunday original
view printable recipe

You can make this into a dip, instead; just reduce the amount of buttermilk used (or leave it out entirely, relying just on the sour cream and mayonnaise for thickness.)

Makes 2 cups of dressing (enough for quite a few salads!)

Ingredients

1 cup sour cream
2 Tbsp mayonnaise
1 small shallot, minced
1 tsp dijon mustard
juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp coarse salt (plus any additional to taste)
freshly ground black pepper – at least 1/2 tsp
3 Tbsp chopped fresh dill
1 cup buttermilk

Preparation

In a medium bowl, whisk together the sour cream, mayonnaise, minced shallot, mustard, lemon juice, salt, and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Whisk in the chopped fresh dill. Slowly add the buttermilk in a stream, whisking constantly until it’s the consistency you like (I find the 1 cup makes a good consistency for a salad dressing.)

First of all, can I just say how sweet it is that some of you have contacted me to make sure everything is okay since I haven’t posted in over a week? Thank you! Everything is A.O.K., we’ve just had an unbelievably busy weekend and early week — family wedding shower, high school graduation, and big house-building event — which meant lots of preparation and packing and some cooking and go-go-go-ing and not having much time to stop to take a breath, much less blog. But now we’re home, settling back in, catching up on rest, and getting back into our more relaxed daily routine. Bear with me as I catch up on emails and comments; I have a few posts lined up to share as well, just need to…um…write them. But without further ado, I’m a few days late on posting my latest Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge bread, so let’s hop to it!

The next bread in the challenge was one I love, and one that I think is pretty much universally loved: brioche! Mmmmm. Buttery and rich and flaky, this is not one to make a practice of snacking idly on if you don’t plan on turning into a butter ball yourself, but it is absolutely delicious with some homemade jam alongside a cup of coffee, or in sandwiches, or french toast, or bread pudding. And for those of us who want to choose how much butter goes into our brioche, Peter Reinhart offered three different variations on the basic recipe: Rich Man’s, Middle Class, and Poor Man’s Brioche. I’m not one to shy away from butter, but having heard that the Rich Man’s version was a little extreme on the butter factor, I decided to go with the Middle Class brioche.

The dough was a breeze to make, even more so because I used the recommended method of mixing the dough in my electric stand mixer.

mise en place: butter, flour, eggs, salt, yeast, sugar and whole milk

As with many of the breads I’ve made for BBA so far, this one started with a sponge: flour, yeast and milk mixed together and left to ferment until bubbly, about 30-45 minutes.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble…

After the sponge had fermented, I mixed in the remaining flour,  yeast and salt, then added the butter in pieces until it was all incorporated into a sticky mass. Some BBA-ers mixed their dough by hand, to which I say, kudos to them — you’d get some pretty good arm muscles built up mixing all that butter in manually!

glad I’m doing this with my stand mixer!

Next went the eggs, one by one, mixing until each egg was incorporated. The resulting dough was satiny and slightly sticky.

At this point, I spread the dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet and covered it, then into the fridge it went for an overnight rest.

The next day, the dough had risen slightly — I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to rise more — and I began shaping it, working with it while it was cold. If you let the dough get too warm, the butter content can make it difficult to easily shape.

I decided to divide the dough in half and use one half to make a loaf, and the other half to make brioche à tête rolls, which are the little individual fluted rolls with a “hat” on top. These started out promisingly enough but…well…you’ll see what happened. I couldn’t find any brioche à tête molds at our local restaurant supply store, but I did have a set of small metal tartlet pans that I thought I’d try using as a substitution.

shaping a brioche à tête

loaf and brioche à têtes, ready to proof

After I shaped the brioche à têtes and placed them in the metal tartlet pans, I realized I might have made them a little too large. I had seen in the BBA discussions that other people experienced this bread having terrific oven-spring, so at this point I was figuring between the proofing and the oven-spring, we might have a bit of an overflow situation on our hands…but it being a busy week last week, and me being pressed for time anyway, I figured we’d just see what happened and even if they sprung out of their pans, they’d probably still be tasty.

They rose quite a bit during their proofing, and after an egg wash, it was time for the moment of truth: into the oven they went.

hmm…we can already see an overpuff situation brewing…

After baking in the oven, I opened the door to find — gasp! — mutant brioche à têtes!! Oh, the horror! Actually, I thought they were kind of cute, in a so-obvious-what-happened-to-the-”hats” kind of way.

I mean, look at this. You can see exactly what happened: oven spring occurred and the little têtes on top had nowhere to go but to tip over! So sad.

This one I thought was particularly funny. It’s so obvious the path that it took to droop down…

But anyway, I did get two decent looking brioche à têtes out of the batch.

And the rest still tasted delicious, even if they do remind me of a flock of hens, pecking on the ground for seeds.

Oh – and the loaf turned out beautifully!

It had a light, airy crumb and just the right amount of butteriness for me.

Check out the BBA Challenge page if you want to see more Brioche creations, and stay tuned for some other non-bread related posts (hopefully soon!) Our CSA starts today — can’t wait for that!

Previous BBA Bread: Bagels

Up Next: Casatiello (a brioche-like bread with salami and provolone – I’m thinking picnic food!)