Little Breads for Company #3: Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads

Epicurious Recipe: Crisp Rosemary Flatbread

• Advanced Prep: Can be made two days in advance (although it's super fast so not a big deal to whip up day-of).
• Method: Quick bread with a smidge of kneading.

Of all the recent little savory breads for company, the Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads from Epicurious were probably the easiest: no biscuit hand needed and very little kneading involved. Despite the ease, they were quite tasty and seemed to be successful with folks. Other than the fact that you bake them in batches, they are also very quick. Just mix up the ingredients, knead a few times, roll out and stick in oven.

The picture that accompanies the recipe on the Epicurious site makes these look like they will be lavosh-like in their crispiness.

In actuality, they have more of a saltine-type texture, a mixture of crispness and soft flakiness.

Two of the three big pieces I made were actually not particularly crispy at all, mainly because I didn’t roll them out thin enough. I brought the flatbreads over to Will and Carolyn’s, and Will noted he actually liked the almost biscuit-y texture of the thicker pieces. Personally, I liked the crisper ones, but they were both tasty and slightly addictive after a while.

If you think you would also like a crisper texture, I recommend rolling them out verreeee thin, even if it makes the dough larger than the 10-inch diameter the recipe notes. If you have a good pizza stone, you would probably want to use that instead of the baking sheet called for.

I think the addictive element to these was thanks to the large amount of rosemary, olive oil and sea salt in the recipe. I might have oversalted a bit...note to self: sea salt is nearly invisible when sprinkled onto a damp surface, so you don’t have to keep sprinkling until you can SEE it. It’s there.

Other than the fresh rosemary, the ingredients in this recipe are ones most folks usually have on hand, and with how quickly they can be thrown together, this could be a good choice for last-minute entertaining.

Tomorrow: Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti

Yesterday: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

Tuesday: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

Quickbread Bonanza

If you have a Joy of Cooking on the shelf and you're not using it, you might be missing out.  I've had one for several years and I return to it again and again.  Its binding is cracked and most of the baking-related pages are covered with a dried mist of dough from errant hand-mixer spray.

While I had some time off this past holiday week, I made a whole bunch of quickbreads: five sets of six mini-loaves. Only four are pictured cuz...well, I dunno.  The missing fifth pretty much looks exactly like the bottom right, just tastes savory instead.  The types I made were two savory (Smoked Cheddar and Chive and Chipotle Cheddar Northern-Style Cornbread) and three sweet (Orange-Cranberry Pecan, Pumpkin Walnut and Pear and Pecan).

 

(Clockwise from top: Smoked Cheddar and Chive, Pear and Pecan Bread,  Orange-Cranberry Pecan Bread and Pumpkin Walnut.)

That's a lot of carbs! Some went as a gift: the lady half of the couple who owns this house is eight month pregnant, so I figured they might need some food stuffs they could stick in the freezer for quick and easy snacking and breakfasting after the baby comes.

The rest went into my own freezer. I have houseguests coming on Monday, and while they will probably feel cheated if all of their breakfast carbs don't come from the Top Pot not too far from my place, I figured it would be nice to have these on hand too.

The Pumpkin-Walnut was my favorite.  Hands down.  Such a great moist texture and delicious flavor.  My landlord, however, noted that the Pear and Pecan was "delicious and addictive."  And if you like savory and spicy, the cornbread recipe is excellent, easy, and gives me great results almost every time.

Some tips I learned from this go-round...

• Only one recipe that I made didn't come from Joy was the smoked cheddar and chive.  However, I'm not in love with the results of the recipe I used, and Joy does have a Beer, Cheddar and Scallion recipe that I've made in the past that would have been a better bet.
• The super-awesome helpful cheese guy at the Wedgwood Laurelhurst View Ridge (I still don't understand what neighborhood I live in) PCC steered me to a Grafton Maple-Smoked Cheddar.  Okay, so it's a little pricey at the PCC but damn!  The smoky-sweet flavor is a knock-out and also, for you vegetarians and vegaquarians out there, it's reminiscent of some kind of meat-oriented breakfast flavor that you probably haven't experienced in a while.  I used it in both the Chive Bread and Chipotle Cornbread.
• The basic method used to make both the Orange-Cranberry and the Pumpkin-Walnut seems nearly foolproof for making a moist and beautifully textured bread.  If you are looking to experiment, I'd recommend working off those recipes as a starting point for a good shot at success.
• The recipes that called for an 8-cup loaf pan, when doubled, originally made nice-sized loaves in the pictured silicone six-loaf dealie.  The 6-cup recipes I should have done 2 1/3 times the volume, but I didn't really figure out the math until I'd already done the smaller recipes.  The loaves were still nice but a little thicker would be better.  If you need help translating pan sizes and cooking times, Baking911.com has a helpful article on it.
  

Link Round-Up: Homemade Food Gifts

Friends and relatives, plug your ears and avert your gaze.

Okay, are they gone?  Well, then, everybody else, here’s a link round-up for some homemade food gift ideas.  Don’t have time to cook?  Tune in tomorrow (eh, Wednesday) for some food-related gifts made by somebody else.

(So I missed the chance to do this in a timeframe that would be useful for Hanukkah-celebratin’ folks – sorry!  But maybe if you celebrate Hanukkah and are as behind as I generally am with gifts, this timing might still work out for you?)

I haven’t ever quite mastered the art of saving money via homemade gifts, but I sure do enjoy the process, right up until about 2:00 am when I’m smack in the middle of something I can’t stop doing and I’m dead tired and frustrated and cursing the fact that I started this ridiculous project.  I have said before that I am waiting for the day that Werner Herzog shows up to document my holiday baking and making projects because I think the combination of hubris, quixotic idealism, lack of foresight, masochism and eventual despair would be right up his alley.

BUT – let’s stay focus on the fun part, shall we?

Here are some gifts that are relatively easy to make and ship well...

Click to read more ...

The High-Risk, Low-Fat Way to Make Banana Bread

Dr. Weil’s recipe for Banana Bread would probably not win any County Fair dessert prizes.

It’s made with whole wheat (pastry) flour, uses honey as a sweetener, and only has a minimum of oil. (It’s technically not true "low-fat" by FDA definition, though, as it contains nuts, but it's low saturated fat and that's probably the more important thing.)

So it’s not a banana bread that is going to taste like a cake or super-sugary muffin.  It’s a little heavier, and significantly less sweet.

That said, it’s still pretty satisfying for relatively healthy treat.  The bread stays moist for days, and freezes well.  If you are a carbohydrate addict, it’s probably one of the least damaging ways to get your fix. 

And the ingredients are not just less-damaging, some are actually pretty good for you.  As the recipe notes, “[bananas] are rich in potassium…and offer a fair share of magnesium... In addition, bananas help to strengthen the stomach lining and are good for soothing indigestion.”  Walnuts have been found in at least one study to be “ rich in compounds that reduce hardening of the arteries, and keep them flexible,” even at a greater rate than olive oil.

So these are the things I tell myself in order to justify having banana bread for breakfast whenever I can.  I like to make a batch, slice it, and freeze, then take out a slice and put it in foil on top of my coffeemaker at night.  By the next morning, it’s usually thawed, and the heat from the coffeemaker finishes the job if not.

Dr Weil’s recipe, though, leaves out the most important part: banana preparation so that your recipe has maximum banana flavor to offset the virtuousness of its ingredients.  (This part is not for the squeamish or for anyone with any kind of OCD-type skeeved response to oogy food.) 

So here's how you do it: 

1. Go to grocery store and – if you even can nowadays – find the ripest banana you can.
2. Take it home and do nothing.
3. Continue to do nothing until the banana begins to look really skanky.
4. Continue to do nothing.
5. Look at the banana, think to yourself, “Oh my god, that’s so gross, there’s like FUZZ on the STEM!  This banana MUST have gone too far.  I should throw it out.”
6. Resist the urge to throw it out.
7. Wait as many more days as you can stand.
8. Finally, after you are positive there’s no way it can still be an edible banana, start to make the banana bread.  
9. If banana really has gone too far (although I’ve had success with ones that looked like the entire thing was just one giant bruise) discard, curse this blog, and subtract one day from the whole process next time.

It's like the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer tries to see how far he can drive with the gas gauge on E.  You just have to keep going past your point of comfort. 

As an alternative, you can roast the bananas.  That’s how Cook’s Country got the best flavor for their low-fat banana bread. (Must be member to access recipe.)  But where's the sense of danger in that?

Or, possibly give the banana to a semi-truck driver and ask them to haul it around for a while in the cab. I remember hearing something a gajillion years ago on the radio – maybe The Splendid Table again – where a long-haul truck driver was commenting on how the vibrations in his cab made the bananas he brought for his own personal meal go too ripe too quickly.  My imagination might have created that memory.  But my imagination is actually probably not that imaginative, so maybe it is true.