Homemade English Muffins

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by Lisa

english_muffin_2

I don’t bake nearly as frequently nor with as much passion as Caroline or finesse as my husband, but I do go on baking sprees, and this holiday vacation was no exception.  Inspired by discovering my family’s love of English Muffins, and a few great blog posts, I decided to bake my own.
For one thing, I buy English muffins about once a year. I think they’re delicious but expensive, and it just doesn’t make sense to me to keep them in the house with any regularity.  But the kids decided they loved them a week ago, so….

I rounded up several recipes, made two batches, by which process I landed on the one below.  Don’t be fooled. It is very, very, very simple. And fast.  And, to my very great surprise, forgiving. I had neither bread flour, nor a kitchen scale with which to weigh the dry ingredients, and the results were amazing.   I basically eyeballed the flour, and ended up adding enough to make a soft, slightly sticky dough. Other than that rather egregious digression, I followed the recipe from Winos and Foodies exactly (which I found linked on Becks & Posh).

You can mix the dough on a Friday or Saturday evening, let it rise on the counter overnight, and finish it in the morning.  It takes a short second rise (don’t leave out the part where you cover the muffins with another tray; it keeps them from overrising) and a slow cooking on a low griddle, so it’s probably not ideal for a weekday. But it’s very amenable to weekend morning and much less mess than pancakes or waffles….

The recipe produces a very soft, but dense, nook-and-cranny filled delight.   You can make a double batche on the weekend, fork split them, and keep them in your freezer (if they last that long).

english muffin

English Muffins

from Winos and Foodies

  • 2 teaspoons dried yeast granules (I used a full packet)
  • 1/2 teaspoon sugar
  • 250ml warm water
  • 125ml warm milk
  • 350g high grade flour (or bread flour)
  • 100g standard flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • fine cornmeal
  1. Put the yeast and sugar in a small bowl with half the warm water. Stir and set aside for a few minutes, then add the remaining water and the milk.
  2. Put the flour and salt in a large bowl and use your hand to mix in the yeast, water and milk mixture. Knead the mixture which will be sticky, thoroughly in the bowl (or use the dough hook of an electric mixer).
  3. Cover the bowl with a damp tea towel and set aside to rise until more than doubled in bulk. Although this may take only a couple of hours, the dough can be allowed to rise overnight.
  4. Deflate the dough by pulling it away from the sides of the bowl. Lift it out of the bowl and divide into 8 pieces.
  5. Drop each piece on to a tray liberally dusted with rice flour or fine cornmeal and roll them over until well coated.
  6. Form each piece into a thick disc.
  7. Place the disks on a baking tray and place another tray on top.
  8. Leave to rest and rise 20 minutes, then remove top tray.
  9. Place a  cast iron griddle or large frying pan over low heat.
  10. When only moderately hot place four of the muffins on it and cook for about ten minutes until light beige on the bottom.
  11. Turn the muffins over and cook the second side for a similar length of time.
  12. Wrap the cooked muffins in a dry tea towel while you cook the remaining four.
  13. Pull apart or fork split and eat while still warm.
  14. For toasting pull the muffins apart and toast on both sides.

Hickory Puffs

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all three

My dad and sons added a new cookie to their repertoire this year, one I grew up with thanks to the nut-gathering efforts of my dad: hickory puffs. Now, most Californians don’t know about hickory nuts; the trees grow in New England and Wisconsin, and the nut shells are so hard and the nutmeat so small that they aren’t cultivated. Further, as my dad writes,

“Hickory trees are individualists. Some produce nuts every year, some only when they feel like it. Some produce nuts the size of a small baseball, some produce nuts more the size of a large marble, some are round in shape, some are oblong, some come down from the tree with a thick green husk, some come down after shedding the husk. If you don’t happen to have a hickory tree on your property, keep an eye out as you drive. Often the edge of the road will be littered with husks and nuts and you can stop and scoop them up, keeping a careful eye out for traffic. This is best done on a dirt road or one with a low volume of traffic. You will not find hickory nuts in your local market so you will need strong hunter-gatherer instincts for this step in the process.”

Sometime I’ll get the boys back east in the fall to involve them in the nut gathering, but for now, they are very good at the nut cookie-baking, and I can’t complain about that. If you aren’t lucky enough to have someone gather and shell hundreds of hickory nuts for you, you can use pecans.

Hickory Puffs

Preheat oven to 300º

Beat until soft:
½ cup butter

Add & blend until creamy
2 Tbs sugar

Add
1 tsp vanilla

Measure, then grind in a nut grinder (or pulse in a food processor)
1 cup hickory meats (be sure to sort for stray shells!)

Sift before measuring
1 cup cake flour

Stir the hickory nuts and the flour into the butter mixture. Roll the dough into small balls. Place balls on parchment paper-lined baking sheet and bake for about 30 minutes.

Roll while hot in
Confectioners’ sugar

To glaze, put the sheet back into the oven for a minute. Cool and serve, or store in a tightly covered tin.

Chocolate Hazlenut Roulade

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By Lisa

My Christmas table wouldn’t be complete without a chocolate roulade, which my sister calls a giant ho ho, or giant yodel, and she’s right. But it’s  delicious, and deceptively easy to make. I’ve been making this recipe for about 8 years, though the recipe has morphed into its current incarnation.

I start with Jacques Pepin’s chocolate roulade, swap out the cognac for Frangelico, add finely ground, roasted hazlenuts for crunch, a chocolate glacage, and–this year–tempered chocolate leaves and merengue mushrooms. Ella added the fairies, which looked better in person than in the pictures I let my husband take.

This only seems like a lot of steps. The cake is really, really easy to make. It’s also flourless and has a rich, decadent texture. Try it on New Years Eve, or for your birthday, or your next potluck.  You don’t even need the extras (including the glacage) for a really stunning dessert.

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Chocolate Hazlenut Roulade

Serves 10 to 12

Roulade

  • 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, for pan
  • 2 cups heavy cream
  • 8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
  • 7 egg whites, room temperature
  • 3 1/2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 1 tablespoon cocoa powder, plus more for garnish
  • 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
  • 1 tablespoon Frangelico

Glacage

  • 6 oz heavy cream
  • 6 oz bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
  • 2 oz butter

Mushroom Merengues

  • 1/2 cup egg whites
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 tsp. vanilla

Extra chocolate for tempering leaves; edible leaves to use as “molds”

Confectioners’ sugar &/or cocoa powder, &/or woodland fairies & sprites from your daughter’s collection


Make the Roulade
  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees with rack in center. Butter an 11-by-17-inch jelly-roll pan or a 12-by-17 1/2-inch sheet pan, and line with parchment paper.
  2. In a small saucepan, heat 1 cup cream to a simmer. Add chocolate, reduce heat, and whisk until chocolate is melted. As soon as mixture is a uniform dark color, remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes.
  3. In a large bowl and using a hand mixer, whip egg whites and 2 tablespoons sugar to stiff, glossy peaks, about 1 1/2 minutes. Whisk one-quarter of the egg-white mixture into the chocolate mixture. Gently fold chocolate mixture back into the original egg-white mixture, and mix until smooth and well combined.
  4. Pour batter into the prepared pan, and spread it in an even layer with a rubber spatula. Bake until cake is set and puffy, 10 to 12 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack, and cool to room temperature. Lift parchment paper to remove cake from pan, and set it on work surface with long side facing edge of table. Using a fine-mesh sieve, lightly dust cake with cocoa powder.
  5. Make the creme chantilly: Whip the remaining 1 cup cream with the remaining 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar, the vanilla, and Frangelico.
  6. Sprinkle the roasted hazlenuts in a thin layer over the cooled cake.
  7. Spread the creme chantilly evenly over entire surface of cake.
  8. Roll the cake lengthwise, starting at a point 2 to 3 inches over the creme chantilly. Roll cake another few inches, pressing against parchment paper to make a tight spiral. Gently peel parchment paper off as cake layer rolls away. Complete the roll, stopping at the far edge of the parchment paper. Tuck the loose parchment paper around and underneath the cylinder so it is well wrapped and can be moved easily. Refrigerate.
  9. Remove parchment paper, gently rolling cake into center of cooling rack, with seam on bottom. (If roll has slumped or twisted, lay a piece of plastic over top and sides, and reshape with hands.) With a sharp knife, trim both ends of roll crosswise or on a diagonal.
  10. I set the rack over another baking sheet and set the whole thing in my very large sink in order to pur the glacage over it:

Make the Glacage

  1. Bring the cream to a simmer, then pour cream over the chocolate and stir until well blended.  Add butter and stir until blended. Pour the glacage slowly and evenly over the cake. Put in the refrigerator to set.

Make the Merengues

  1. Whip the egg whites until foamy.  Add the vanilla and then the sugar, slowly, a little at a time, until the egg whites are stiff and glossy.
  2. If you don’t have a pastry bag (mine is lost) spoon the mixture into a one gallon ziplock bag and snip a small hole in one corner. Pipe mushroom caps by holding the bag’s tip against the surface of a parchment lined baking sheet until you have a nice round dome. Pipe stems by piping a small, vertical stump. It takes practice but they don’t have to all be perfect or similar.
  3. Back in a 225 degree oven for one hour.
  4. When cool, make a small hole in the top of each mushroom and insert the tip of the stem. You can use a little tempered chocolate to glue them together.
  5. Sprinkle with a sifting of cocoa powder.

Tempered Chocolate Leaves

  1. Heat 8-10 oz finely chopped chocolate over a double boiler to 105 degrees.
  2. Take off heat and add 3-4 oz finely chopped chocolate
  3. Stir and blend until chocolate cools to about 88-90 degrees.
  4. With an offset spatula, spread chocolate in a thin layer on a slipat lined baking sheet.
  5. As chocolate begins to cool and set, firmly press edible leaves into chocolate and let set until hardened. I used orange leaves.
  6. When cool, score around edges of leaves with a paring knife. Carefully remove leaves from chocolate.

Use additional tempered chocolate to affix leaves and mushrooms to the roulade.

When you’re ready to serve, dust the serving platter and/or the top of the log with confectioners’ sugar and/or cocoa powder, and garnish with seasonal fruit. To serve, cut the roll into 1-inch-thick slices, and lay flat on dessert plates; top with additional creme chantilly, leaves and mushrooms.

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Cooking with Granddad

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generations


We don’t have quite as many holiday food traditions as Lisa’s family — the meals always vary depending on whether we stay in California or travel east to my parents’ home — but one tradition that reaches back generations is, as in many families, cookie baking. My grandmother and mother kept tallies of the cookie count in the back pages of increasingly-tattered copies of Joy of Cooking, and now I do, too. I don’t produce as many cookies as my mom did in her heyday (when she hosted Christmas open houses for the entire church congregation and choir), but I like the history in the lists: 1998 (childless, newly partnered with Tony, and — most tellingly — in the thick of dissertation writing), I produced 11 different types of cookies; Christmas 2001 (the first year in our house) I made 10. The list for Christmas 2003 reads, “pneumonia, strep throat, bronchitis, and truffles.” Thank goodness for truffles!

A new tradition, and one I very happily encourage, is for my dad to make a couple batches of cookies with the kids. I don’t know quite how this started — probably just my dad wanted bourbon balls one year and realized that, despite the main ingredient, they are a terrifically kid-friendly, craft-project kind of cookie: smash vanilla wafers, mix with flavorings, scoop out balls, done — but the kids love it, of course. It’s fun to smash and mush. It’s fun to cook with Granddad. And it’s exciting to use such a grown-up ingredient as bourbon, and one which is adored by one of their favorite characters — Captain Haddock — in their beloved Tintin books.

measuring

The recipe is straight out of Joy of Cooking, with my comments:

Bourbon Balls
Sift (or not, depending on how much mess you can tolerate):
1 c confectioner’s sugar
2 T cocoa

In another bowl, whisk together
1/4 c bourbon
2 T light corn syrup

Smash, using either the food processor or in a resealable bag, with a rolling pin
2 1/2 cups vanilla wafers

Stir in
1 c coarsely chopped nuts (we use hickory nuts; more on those in another post)

Combine all the ingredients and roll into small balls. Roll in confectioner’s sugar and store at room temperature. They improve as they age.

Tomato Confit

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by Lisa

For two years now, I’ve served my Christmas filet with tomato confit. It’s totally delicious, sweet, herbaceous, jammy concoction that is pretty and complex enough for your holiday table.

But every year I have way too much left over. This year, I halved the recipe and still had too much, and so when we were fatigued from eating meat (the very next day) I used the leftover confit to dress pan fried gnocchi, and on the next day it dressed the leftover (but not-yet cooked) shell pasta from the Christmas Eve Fish Soup.

The results were so good and so appreciated by the family, that I’ve resolved to periodicaly make big batches of this confit and use it for all sorts of things like:

  • quick pasta sauce
  • quick gnocchi sauce
  • to dress inexpensive cuts of beef (think skirt steak or strip steak or london broil, etc.)
  • to top hamburgers on or off the bun
  • to top meat loaf before cooking
  • I’m sure you can find other things to do with this….any firm-fleshed white fish like halibut could handle this as well…

The confit will freeze, so you can freeze smaller family-sized portions for another quick, fast, and a little-bit elegant weeknight meal. It might even remind you of something special, like Christmas.

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Tomato madeira confit

from Gourmet

  • 8 large garlic cloves
  • 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • 4 (14-ounce) cans diced tomatoes, drained
  • 1/2 teaspoon finely chopped thyme
  • 1/2 teaspoon finely chopped rosemary
  • 1/2 California or 1 Turkish bay leaf
  • 1/4 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 cup Madeira (preferably Verdelho), divided (you can also substitute a red or white wine; taste will vary, but it will still be good)
  • 1/4 cup water

Cook garlic in oil in a large heavy skillet over medium-low heat, turning occasionally, until golden, 10 to 15 minutes. Add tomatoes, thyme, rosemary, bay leaf, sugar, 1/4 teaspoon table salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper, and 1/2 cup Madeira and briskly simmer, stirring frequently and crushing tomatoes with a heatproof rubber spatula, until tomatoes start to break down and oil separates slightly, about 1 hour.

Mash garlic into tomatoes with spatula, then stir in 1/4 cup Madeira. Discard bay leaf.

If you’re roasting anything, be sure to deglaze the pan and add the drippings to the confit before serving.

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