Il Forno

What to do with those fridge rests? Hazelnut-chocolate balls!

As I mentioned In my previous post on Daniela's birthday cake I ended up having more dough than I needed (laying in the freezer) and had all that chocolate intended to make the failed chocolate cigars. They were just taking up space and would have landed into the "what that stuff there?" category very soon. So Sunday evening, while I was busy with a major stock making action (coming soon), I decided to use both to make some chocolate coated biscuits. I just divided the dough (look at the original post for the recipe) into 1 cm wide balls (1/2 in) and baked them for 20 minutes at a moderate 160C(320F), to avoid them loosing shape too much. Once done I let them cool and meanwhile melted the chocolate which I then used to coat them. Apart maybe missing a bit of sugar, they tasted great. I'm actually considering inserting them in next year's Christmas baking list.

Street food from Napoli: taralli

Looking again at the pictures I took in Italy I noticed I had "lost" a few somewhere on my HD. Even worst looking at them I noticed I completely forgot to post about taralli, one of my favourite street snacks. Taralli are little dough rings, fairly widespread in southern Italy in their many variations. Quite common are the so-called taralli bolliti (boiled taralli), that is taralli which, a bit like bagels, have been dipped in boiling water to make their outside shiny. These can be plain, sweet (sugar frosted), or flavoured (fennel seeds, pepper and so on). They're mostly dry and crunchy, great as a snack with a glass of wine. The taralli I'm talking about are a bit different. They are the typical Neapolitan ones: Taralli sugna e pepe (lard and pepper taralli).

These taralli are not boiled like most of those found in the rest of the south and are more flaky than crunchy. That's easily explained by looking at their name: the dough, apart from a good dose of ground pepper (and very often whole almonds) contains a noticeable amount of lard.
Although they're also eaten at home as snack or bread substitute their real place is as street food. No seaside stroll in Naples would be complete without a tarallo bought from one of the kiosks between Castel dell'ovo and the Mergellina harbour. That said I have to admit that the best taralli in Napes are to be found somewhere else: from one of the Leopoldo bakeries. Their taralli are still made by hand (except for the dough portioning) following a traditional recipe.
Taralli themselves are not too hard to make. Since we often get a little packet with taralli from my parents I never tried baking them myself. The recipe itself is actually quite easy.

500 g. (1.1 lb) bread flour
150 g. (5.3 oz) lard
150 g. (5.3 oz) whole almonds, slightly toasted
abundant ground pepper (enough to get a marked pepper taste in the dough without being too hot, 2-3 tsp.)
1 tsp salt
20 g. (0.7 oz) fresh yeast

First make a sponge with 100 g. flour, the yeast and some water (enough for a soft, moist dough). After 30 minutes mix it with the rest of the flour, lard, peer, salt and eventually enough water to get a soft but non-sticky dough which you will knead till shiny and smooth and which will rise till doubled, ca. 2-3 hours. The taralli are then shaped: for each ring two dough "sticks", 18-20 cm (7-8 in) long and as thick as your little finger, are rolled together to form a "rope" which is then closed into a ring shape. Each ring is then decorated by pressing 4-5 almonds in the dough at spaced intervals. Once all the rings are formed they should rise another hour and then be baked at 180C (350F) till golden brown. Some bakers add the almonds directly to the dough. It makes the dough a bit harder to knead and to shape but has the advantage that the almonds, as often happens, won't fall of the taralli once they're baked and cooled.
Now excuse me I've got to go munch that last piece of tarallo I hid in the cupboard...

Birthday cake... chocolate mousse pie.

At Daniela's request I baked a chocolate pie for her birthday: a chocolate mousse pie adapted from Patricia Lousada's Chocolate. I had done the pie a few years ago for the first birthday we spent together and decided to slightly modify it to make it "darker", which worked great, and tried to make chocolate cigars for the decoration, which did not work at all. This pie has a very intense chocolate flavour, enriched by alcoholic notes. It is fluffiest when just out of the oven, soon afterwards the filling tends to "sit" a bit. We waited a bit and let the pie cool slightly. I find it tastes better: the filling becomes more compact, almost truffle like :-9.

First of all the crust: I used the original proportions. This will probably give you quite a bit more pastry than you need but since you can't take a fraction of an egg (you could actually but it's all more complicated) I use the remaining dough to make small round cookies.

The crust dough:
60 g. (2 oz) hazelnuts (which I toasted, skinned and ground)
165 g. (5.8 oz) flour (all-purpose)
30 g. (1 oz) sugar
a pinch of salt
I mixed these together well and then incorporated 125 g. (4.4 oz) cold butter till the butter was absorbed by the flour and the mixture started to form crumbs. At this point I added one beaten egg and kneaded shortly till everything came together. If you need you might add some water (very little) but I find that's not called for. I wrapped the dough and let it rest about 30 minutes in the fridge. Once the time was over (the dough should have become a bit harder) I rolled the crust on a floured surface to the preferred thickness: I like something like 3-4 mm (1/6 in) not more. I lined my pie pan with the dough, cut the excess away and baked it blind at 200C (400F) for about 15 minutes.

For the filling one needs first of all... quite a bit of patience! I started melting 140 g. (5 oz) dark chocolate (used 70%) with 60 g. (2 oz) butter slowly in the microwave. Meanwhile I mixed together 2 eggs and 100 g. (3.5 oz) sugar, put them into a glass bowl and that into a bain-marie. From this point on the instructions in the recipe tell to whip for 10 minutes till the mixture becomes thicker and descends in "ribbons" from your whip. It always takes longer... usually 2-5 minutes more than it takes me to start believing the bloody thing will never thicken! Once it FINALLY became thicker I took it of the heat and mixed in, carefully, the chocolate-butter mix, 2 Tbs flour, 2 Tbs cognac and 5 Tbs whipping (or single) cream . I poured all into the crust and let the pie bake for another 15 minutes at 190C (375F). The filling puffed quite a bit, as expected (after a few minute panic because it did not puff immediately).

Just before serving I decorated the cake. As I mentioned I intended to use chocolate cigars, as in the book's picture. Those are theoretically easy to make. Melt some chocolate, spread it on a board (or other surface) and wait till cold; then, with a sharp knife held at 30-45 degrees move on the chocolate surface. This should give nice chocolate cigars. Should. If your chocolate is cold enough... maybe. Mine, although warm was still quite pliable and so just folded itself into a thick sheet :-(. My last second solution was to dust the cake with cocoa powder and place some "opened up" physalis spaced on the cake border. Not what I wanted but it looked quite cool anyway.

A sunny empanada fights those grey winter days away...

I like winter. OK, I like winter when it snows or when it's cold and sunny. What I can't stand is those rainy, grey, sad days when all I'd like to do is lay on my couch, reading a good book drinking hot chocolate (with amaretto for me, thanks). The last few days have been exactly like that here and since my boss doesn't approve of me doing the couch potato while I should be working I had to resort to other means to cheer me up. A happy vacation memory gave me a good hint. I was, for no reason at all as often happens, thinking about a trip me and Daniela made about 2 years ago to Andalucia. Apart from many other delicious things we ate there, we had a sort of staple snack/lunch to bring to the beach: empanadas de atun or tuna empanadas, bought from small but nice grocery store. And that's what I tried to make yesterday evening.

The stuffing for the empanadas was not too difficult to reproduce as I had a quite good idea of the ingredients. The dough was a bit more problematic: it turned out nice but was not like the original one.
First of all the stuffing: I knew (having carefully studied one of the mentioned empanadas in Spain) that it contained red and yellow peppers, some tomato, tuna (in oil probably), onion, green olives and a herb which I supposed to be oregano.

So for the stuffing I took:
2 cans tuna in oil (about 300 grams "meat", 9.6 oz)
2 peppers, one red and one yellow
2 big canned tomatoes
12 pitted green olives
1 red onion
some oregano, about 1 Tbs fresh

I first browned the thinly sliced onion in some oil and then added the peppers, also sliced in thin 1 cm long pieces). While the peppers cooked I took the tuna and crumbled it. I chopped the onions quite finely and added them, together with the oregano to the tuna. As soon as the pepper slices turned "soft" I added the chopped canned tomatoes, added salt and pepper , and let cook till the peppers were done and only a little liquid was left (that was probably a mistake as you'll see). I mixed the tuna and peppers together and went on to make the dough.
I was quite sure the original dough was not yeasted and that it contained some fat as it was nicely flakey, but had no clue about the proportions. So I just tried. At the end I used 400 g all purpose flour, half a glass of olive oil, one tsp salt and as much water as needed to have a dry-ish but soft dough. I divided it into 8 balls and proceeded with the assembly of the empanadas. Here I noticed that a lot of liquid was present in the stuffing so I gust dumped it into a sieve to get rid of most of it. I suspect that the chopped olives and the peppers were responsible for this. Anyway, without loosing too much time I started rolling out the dough. Since the empanadas we had in Spain were more longish than half circle-shaped I rolled the dough into an elongated oval. After adding 2-3 tsp of stuffing in the middle, I wetted one side of the oval and closed the empanadas using a fork to press down the seam. Before going into the oven I brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled some sesame seed on top. They took 15-20 minutes in a 180C oven (350F) to become a nice golden colour. After burning my tongue trying to taste one fresh from the oven I decided to wait... I never learn :-).
The empanadas were nice, the stuffing had the proper taste, lacking maybe a bit of acidity (probably do to me using canned instead of fresh summer tomatoes) and maybe a tad too rich on the tuna. Next time I'd probably reduce the tuna by 1/4 and add a pepper more. The dough was not it. It tasted nice and was even a bit flakey like the original but it wasn't as pliable, it was more sort of crunchy (but not cracker like!). I also suspect that the original fat was lard. Me and Daniela liked them anyway and I'll keep them in mind as something for picnics or parties. They're quite quick to make and great to eat with your hands.

A fine toothpick job

Final post about our New Year's eve dinner, and finally back to baking. To finish properly this Italian cuisine inspired dinner I decided to bake one of my favourite cakes torta caprese or chocolate almond cake from Capri. Capri is, gastronomically speaking, the home of some wonderful lemons: so what better than a strongly lemon flavoured custard to go with the cake? I tried some decoration on the custard, as you can see from the pic above, which was, as you'll see, easier than thought.

I first of all made the custard: a standard custard recipe, any cookbook has one and they're all pretty much similar. I varied the classical vanilla flavouring by substituting the peel of a lemon to the vanilla pod. Normally the peel of one lemon would be enough for a custard made with 500 ml milk but I used it for half the amount, to get a stronger flavour. I wanted to serve the sauce cold so I continued stirring while it cooled to avoid the formation of the infamous "skin". In the meanwhile I talked a bit with Juliane, a friend of ours and one of the dinner guests, drinking a freshly made mango milk shake. For Daniela: no reason to complain about the mango, that's what happens when some people cook and work and others sleep ;-p.
The cake itself is not hard at all. The most boring part is blanching and peeling the 250 grams (about 9 oz) almonds needed for the cake. Once done I put them in the oven to toast (I agree with what Deb said in one of her last posts, toasted almond rule!). Meanwhile I started the cake. First I whipped together 200 g. (7 oz) sugar with 150 g. (5.3 oz) butter till well mixed and fluffy and then added 4 eggs, adding each after the preceding one got incorporated in the batter. I took the almonds out of the oven and ground them to get pieces about as big as a peppercorn. I also melted 200 grams (7 oz) of chocolate in the microwave (great for melting choc) and added both chocolate and almonds to the batter. Last came 1 tsp baking powder and crumbled rusks. I used, following a tried recipe, 9 rusks (Zwieback in German, fette biscottate in Italian), crumbled very fine in the food processor. Only for some strange reason the cake was, at the end, a bit drier than I wished. I guess either my eggs were smaller than those I normally use or the rusks in Germany are bigger than the Italian ones. Either way I should have used one less probably. You could also used savoiardi biscuits crumbs, you know, those for tiramisu. In that case I would take 12 (as they're much spongier).
The cake baked 40-45 minutes in a 180C (350F) hot oven, till firm in the middle, but not completely dry. Once ready, I turned off the oven and left the cake another 10 minutes in it. don't really know why one should do this, and since I never tried avoiding this step I have no clue. I let the cake cool on a cake rack till ready to serve. Before cutting it it got dusted with icing sugar.
For the finishing touch I first covered the cake dishes with a few tablespoon of lemon custard. Then I drew, using a paper cornet, three concentric melted chocolate circles. To get the "abstract" effect I just ran a toothpick alternating upwards and downwards strokes. I had never tried this before and was surprised how easy and "stupid" this is. Still no need to spread the secret too much especially when it impresses the guests so much! :-)
The cake tasted nice (apart being slightly too dry), chocolate and almonds both there as taste and the lemon sauce was a good match... although... if I think about it... next time I'll try orange (and cointreau!).

Dough stretching

This post is the first of four on the dishes I prepared for our New Year's Eve dinner. I decided to have a bit of fun and, for the occasion, try to put together a nice menu for us and our friends. So I took the chance to try a few recipes that were waiting in my "to try when you feel fit for them" list and also to try and develop my plating a bit inspired by Blue's tips. Following the order in which the dishes were served I will start with our appetiser: grissini stirati con prosciutto e tuiles di Parmigiano Reggiano, i.e. "stretched" bread sticks with dry cured ham and Parmesan chips.

Grissini are quite easy to make. The very important thing is to get a quite dry but very stretchy dough in the kneading phase. For the dough I took:

500 g. Flour (3 and 3/4 cup)
1 1/2 tsp. Salt
2 tsp. Malt syrup
2 Tbs. Olive oil
Enough water to get a firm non-sticky dough (slightly less than a cup)
1 tsp. Active dried yeast

Once the dough was kneaded properly I left it to rise covered till about doubled (ca. 1 1/2 hours). At this point I patted it gently to form a rectangle about 20x30 cm (8x12 in). I cut the rectangle into four pieces (10x15 cm) and each piece in 5 or 6 stripes. Each strip was stretched to become as wide as my oven sheets. Some strips resisted a bit so I moved on to the next ones before continuing to stretch them. Others stretched much more than needed so I had to cut them to size. Unfortunately these bits and pieces can't be kneaded and stretched again so I used them to make a little roll I ate as a snack... baking makes me hungry :-)!!!
I stretched the strips and placed them with about 1 cm distance from each other till my oven sheets (sprinkled with cornmeal) were full and covered the remaining dough to prevent it from drying out. The stretched grissini were brushed with oil and dusted with poppy seeds: next time I'll use some other topping as poppy seeds don't seem to be very "sticky" even when pressed into the dough. I baked the grissini for 20 minutes at about 200C (400F).

I made the grissini the day before the dinner which was maybe not a too good idea as they lost part of their crunch after one day. Therefore I had to "toast" them briefly in the oven before serving. Not a problem as such but the thinnest sections of the grissini became quite crunchy. Well I always learn something new.
The Parmesan tuiles are very easy and quick to make. I took the recipe from a book I got for Christmas, La cucina di Nadia e Antonio Santini, a recipe book from a quite famous restaurant in Italy, "dal Pescatore". You just need some grated Parmesan and a slightly buttered non-stick pan. Take about a tablespoon Parmesan per chip and spread it in the pan. Quickly the parmesan will melt and start to "bubble". Take the pan from the fire, wait just a few seconds and then pick up the chip. I found a toothpick works very well. Put the Parmesan chip on a rolling pin, wooden spoon handle, or similar to give it a curved shape (actually one could play quite a bit with shapes) and to cool it down.
To serve I wrapped some dry cured ham (Spanish Serrano as I could not find Parma ham) on the tips of two grissini and placed them across the plate. On the lower part of the plate I put three Parmesan tuiles and dropped some real 18 year old Balsamico around them.
Apart the few "crunchy" spots in the grissini the dish was well received, at least judging from the speed at which it disappeared :-). I was also quite pleased as afterwards I had to recognise that the dish is a good re-interpretation of a classical Italian style appetiser: the grissini and ham in a classical paring and the Parmesan chips a modern touch. Plus Parmesan and Balsamico are just great together... mmhh.... :-)

Sweet snail

Sometimes I wonder if I'm sane, at least when it comes to cooking and baking. How many would start a 6-7 hours baking project at 7 PM after a long day at work and a dentist visit? Or maybe I just don't know the right people... apart maybe a few of you fellow food bloggers. Why did I take up this project anyway? Well, since we were celebrating a little Christmas party at work I decided to bake something. I had seen the recipe for gubana, an Easter bread from Friuli (NE Italy), on Carol Field's The Italian Baker. OK it ain't a Christmas cake but I like it much better than the more famous panettone, pandoro or pandolce (from Genova). I fell in love with this twice rolled up cake and its nutty, alcoholic filling the first time I tasted so once I had the recipe I HAD to try it.

I didn't really need to bake anything for the party to be honest. I mean, everyone else was just bringing Pfefferkuchen and similar stuff bought at Christmas markets, wine (for mulled wine) and so on. But I had to show them.... I'm bake and I'm proud... no sorry I meant, I bake and I'm proud. After all I take a slight snobbish pleasure from showing my "do you have to let bread rise?" colleagues (only some of my co-workers are like that, to be fair) what I can come up with... after all, be honest, don't you too?

Before starting I checked a few other gubana recipes on the net and on one of my Italian baking books. The dough is always quite similar, the stuffing, as I'll discuss below has some constant points but can be played around a bit to fit your tastes. I took Carol Field's recipe, for 2 gubanas, as a guide and slightly modified it. So to start, for the dough I proceeded as follows:

I took 1 Tbs active dried yeast (half or even less than what indicated by other recipes), and dissolved it in 3/4 cups of milk and 150 grams (ca. 1 cup) flour mixed together. I waited till the first bubbles appeared (10 minutes) and added the remaining ingredients: 2 eggs and 2 yolks, 150 grams sugar (1/2 cup plus ca. 3 Tbs), 500 grams all-purpose flour (slightly more than 1 lb.), one heaped tsp salt, the zest of two lemons, the flesh of one vanilla pod and enough milk to make a soft dough (about 3 Tbs). In the dough also went 110 grams unsalted butter (about a stick): one could add then straight away but this would slow the rise of the dough so many advise to add it at the end of the first rise. The dough rested and rose for the next 2 hours. Now, I either have a super active yeast or most recipes in baking books simply exaggerate how much yeast one needs. I expected my dough to need more than 2 hours, since I halved the yeast and since my kitchen was quite cool, but no, after the given 2 hours the dough had doubled nicely.

While I waited I prepared the stuffing. Now, this stuff smelled so nice I was actually tempted to eat it on it's own. The stuffing consist of many ingredients falling into five categories: dried fruits, nuts, alcohol, "binding agents" and spices. Every recipe I found had variations in the stuffing so I'm writing what I used, possible additions/variations and what I would have used if I had had all ingredients at hand.

Nuts: I used 200 grams (7 oz) hazelnuts (tasted, skinned and chopped), 150 grams (5.3 oz) walnuts (toasted and chopped), 40 grams (1.4 oz) pinoli and 30 grams (1 oz) almonds (blanched, skinned and chopped). While a bit of almonds and pinoli pop up in every recipe hazelnuts and walnuts vary much in proportion: some recipes use one or the other, some a 8:1 ratio of hazelnuts:walnuts. I was quite happy with my choice.

Dried fruit: 180 grams raisins (1 cup) which I let stand in the alcohol mix (see below), 70 grams (1/2 cup) candied orange peel and the zest of a lemon. While raisins and orange peel are always present in al recipes their quantities can be slightly reduced to include some dried figs or/and dried plums, both shredded. I would have added some figs, reduced the candied peel and maybe added the zest of an orange, but I had no figs.

Spices: I followed Carol field and added 1 Tbs cinnamon. This is often left out in other recipes with one exception where I also found 1 tsp of nutmeg and cloves each in the mixture.

Binding agents: in this case I was also quite conservative and used the book's recipe. I added 4 Tbs apricot jam, 2 Tbs cocoa powder and 160 grams (1 1/2 cups) crumbs which I had obtained from stale brioche bread. The crumbs can be made from plain biscuits, home-made bread or, in the worst scenario, plain commercial bread crumbs. The cacao can be substituted with shaved chocolate (I would have, but no chocolate). The jam appears seldom and is in a few cases substituted by honey, but I love apricot jam so in it went.

Alcohol: now here comes the fun :-)). I was intrigued by Field's mix so I used it almost as is. Here it is: 3 Tbs Malaga (or Marsala, sweet Sherry), 2 Tbs grappa (or aquavit, schnaps, etc), 2 Tbs rum, 1 Tbs amaretto liqueur and 1 Tbs kirsch (or better maraschino). Most Italian recipes use only 2 or 3 alcoholic ingredients, usually grappa, marsala and verduzzo, a sweet wine from Friuli. The mix IMO gave a great aroma to the stuffing.

So, stuffing ready and dough risen I first of all mixed the butter in the dough (those 110 grams I mentioned before). Once the dough was smooth again I divided it into two parts, each for one gubana. To roll the gubana I first rolled the dough into a 50x30 cm (20x12 inches) rectangle. From my experience I learned that the dough should be thin but not too thin, otherwise it will tear while rolling (you'll still be able to patch any tears with the dough from the ends). I spread half the stuffing on the dough leaving about 2 cm free round it, which I brushed with warm water, and rolled the dough like a jelly roll, ending with a long "cigar". I then rolled this around itself into a spiral to resemble a snail. I covered the gubanas and let them rise 2 hours (they should not double). Now if you have a small cake or charlotte mould you might be able to let the gubana rise so that it keeps a more "vertical" shape. I don't so mine spread and got wider more than tall.

After the two hours I brushed them with egg white and poked some holes with a skewer at regular intervals to let steam/alcohol escape. I baked them in a preheated oven, first 20 minutes at 190C/375F and then 25 minutes at 160C/325F. They rested another 5 minutes in the hot oven and then went onto cooling racks. At the end it was 2 AM so I decided to go to bed and taste the cooled cake in the morning, but not before Saami woke up for some mid-night milk. At breakfast I cut into the cake revealing the nice (and delicious) swirl pattern. At work gubana no.2 got a very warm welcome. I was happy if maybe sleepy :-).

Odds and ends tart

One of the "games" i like to play sometimes when I cook is the let's see what odds and ends are left in the fridge and come up with something edible, possibly even good. I started playing this game when I used to be a daily reader of the it.hobby.cucina newsgroup, I still had time to read 200 messages a day back then. One of the first threads I ran across then was titled "pasta allo scovazzume di frigo" i.e. fridge garbage pasta. Each person posting was looking in their fridge and coming up with a pasta sauce recipe. It was fun! As a PhD student I had a chance to improve my skills in this game :-), there was always plenty of junk in my fridge.
Sunday after the cookie baking I noticed I had 5 egg yolks left. How to use them? I had 4 heavily bruised apples too (fell from my shopping bag) so I thought of an apple and custard tart. I had no vanilla, pure or extract, left to flavour the custard. What could I use? I suddenly remembered something a friend of mine at school used to eat as a mid-afternoon snack: baked apples with crumbled amaretti biscuits and a dollop of apricot jam. And so the final idea was there: apple and amaretto liqueur flavoured custard tart with apricot glaze.

I made a classic shortcut pastry first, using 300 g (10 1/2 oz) flour, 100 g (3 1/2 oz) butter, 1 egg yolk and a little cold water and let it rest in the fridge. I then made the custard. I used a recipe for confectioners custard that works very well which I "stole" from one of my aunts. The ingredients:
500 ml (2 cups) milk
3 egg yolks
75 g (3 oz) superfine sugar
40 g. (1 1/2 oz) cornstarch
First bring the milk to boil. If you want to flavour the custard with vanilla or lemon rind (or other similar stuff) put it in the cold milk and remove it once it boils. Meanwhile I whipped yolks and sugar till the mass changed colour, going from a bright orange to a more whitish beige, and then whipped in the cornstarch. Once the milk has boiled add it slowly to the egg mixture whisking constantly. Put the custard in a pot and bring it to boil on a low flame. I actually stopped just before the mixture boiled since I did not want the custard to be too firm.
The custard seemed a bit too much so I poured about a third in a mug and used the rest for the tart. I mixed in about 3 1/2 tablespoons of amaretto liqueur and a tablespoon Schmand (a cream product between sour cream and double cream) which was laying in the fridge.
I rolled the dough and used it to line a tart mould. I originally intended to dust the bottom of the pastry shell with crushed amaretti but I forgot that the ones left had been "visited" by our unwanted kitchen guests, moths, and therefore thrown away. So I decided to brush a thin layer of apricot glaze on the shell bottom and sides, poured the custard in and topped with sliced apples. The tart took about 40 minutes at 180C/350F to bake. After it cooled it got a brushing of apricot glaze.
We had it for coffee with Daniela's family and it disappeared very quickly. Always a good sign :-).

A little Christmas baking

Last Sunday was a cold wet day, one of those when you would just like to stay in bed with a good book and maybe a hot chocolate. Those things are a mere utopia when one has a small child around so we took the chance to do some Christmas cookie baking. While we baked Saami happily played with dough rests. We made Vanillekipferl (a horseshoe-shaped almond-vanilla cookie), Zimtsterne (cinnamon stars) and Baci di dama again, since those from last time were already finished.

Vanillekipferl are one of the cookies Daniela always makes for Christmas. They're fairly easy. The dough is a modified and enriched version of shortcut pastry. One needs:
180 g. (6.3 oz) flour
70 g. (2.5 oz) finely crushed almonds
125 g. (4.4 oz) butter
1 egg
50 g (1.8 oz) sugar
a pinch of salt
vanilla flavoured icing sugar for dusting
The dry ingredients are mixed together, the butter is rubbed in and then the egg (beaten) is added to form a quite firm dough that should rest about 30 minutes in the fridge. When the dough is ready, roll it to obtain a cylinder and cut the cylinder in 5 mm (1/5 in) slices. These will be then rolled first into a ball and then, using the pressure of the fingers and rolling the balls on the working surface, into stubby cylinders. These will be bent to resemble horseshoes and baked at 180C/350F till golden. Once cool dust with vanilla icing sugar.
The Vanillekipferl were easy. What was really a pain was the Zimtsterne. I have to admit it is partly my fault. I should have followed my instinct instead of blindly believing in the recipe I found in an otherwise good German baking book. The recipe calls for 3 egg whites and 250g. (8.8 oz) icing sugar to be beaten together till firm. I had to start twice: the second egg I tried to separate had two yolks and one fell and broke into the egg whites. Egg whites don't get firm if even traces of yolks are there so I had to start again. After the second try I got a mess I could have used as glue but not terribly firm. A little part of my brain was trying to tell me that I should have beaten the whites first and then added the sugar, which is what all other recipes I found (the day afterwards) said too. Still I went on, stupid and stubborn, adding the required 250g. (8.8 oz) ground almonds and 1 tablespoon cinnamon to the mixture. The recipe said to roll the mixture to get a 1 cm thick layer. There was no way I could roll my "dough"! It was runny, sticky... a nightmare. So I added 3 tablespoon flour to the "mess" and got a dough I could work with, which I rolled and cut into stars with a star-shaped cutter. They baked for about 15-20 minutes (till light brown) at 180C/350F. The cookies turned out OK but not as chewy as I expected.
Afterwards I looked for the same recipe in other books and on the web and came up with an acceptable version which works. First beat 3 egg whites till really firm. Add tablespoon-wise the 250g. icing sugar. At this point remove 6-8 spoons of the mixture to be used as icing at the end. Add 300g. ground almonds or 250g. almonds and 50 g. maizena. Roll on a surface dusted with sugar and cut out with a star-shaped cutter. Bake as described above and once cool glaze with the reserved icing mixture. For next year :-).

Snack scones

At work we have twice a month a Friday "discussion round". Usually one of us explains his work/results while someone else brings something to eat, snacks and similar. In a certain sense one supplies food for the brain while another food for the body and that was me last week. I decided to prepare, among a couple of other things, some tiny spicy cheese and onion scones I had been wanting to try for ages. The recipe comes from The Ballymaloe Bread Book. This is a great reference book for Irish bakery. Soda bread, scones and sweet buns recipes are especially good. I'm not really happy with the recipes I've tried from the ethnic and flavoured breads sections, but those were not the chapters that pushed me to buy the book anyway.

Before I go on to describe the recipe I wanted to spend a couple of words on Ballymaloe House. This country residence is probably the most important high end B&B/restaurant in Ireland, setting the standard for other similar establishments. They also run a cookery school which is highly renowned in Ireland, having produced many of the country's top chefs. BTW if someone extremely rich who really likes my blog would like to give me a gift voucher for their 12-weeks course I'd be happy to accept... well I can try can't I? :-))). If you happen to be in Ireland this is a place that deserves to be tried. Even if you're on a tight budget, like us last summer, you could consider eating there for lunch, which has a fixed price of 30 or 35 Euro. The sweets trolley is almost worth the price on its own.

Back to the scones. I slightly changed the recipe to include a bit more cheese than the original. I used:
2 small onions, finely chopped and cooked with a bit of oil till just starting to caramelise
450g (1 lb.) flour
1 large egg
1 teaspoon each: mustard powder, chilli powder, salt and crushed black pepper
3 tsp baking powder
50 g (1.8 oz) butter
50 g (1.8 oz) each grated Parmesan and grated Cheddar
225 ml (7.8 fl oz) milk
some egg yolk and grated parmesan as topping.

I sifted the flour, added the dry ingredients and mixed well. I rubbed in the butter, cut into small pieces, then added cheese and onions. Finally I beat the egg with the milk, added them to the dough and kneaded only as needed to get the dough together in a ball. To form the scones I just patted/rolled the dough into a rectangle, 2 cm high, brushed it with egg and sprinkled with the remaining parmesan. I then used my dough cutter to divide the rectangle into 2 cm square scones. These went into my oven, preheated at 180C/350F, for about 12 minutes.RIt was all really quick, scones take very little time.
The scones tasted good (especially with wine) but I had a few ideas for other "snack" scones with cheese that could be even better:
-blue cheese and walnut
-fresh goat cheese and herbs
-Tuscan pecorino (or Spanish sheep cheese) glazed with honey
To be continued.....

Old fashioned tastes

As promised I'm posting about some traditional Neapolitan cooking, baking actually. The first recipe I made from Jeanne C. Francesconi's book is Pizza di Scarole, or escarole pizza. The name pizza is in this case confusing as this is more a savoury cake. Still the term pizza is used in Naples both for the flat classic pizza and for several savoury cakes. The "modern" version of the recipe calls for escarole flavoured with olives, capers and anchovies as stuffing. I opted for a more old fashioned filling using a mix of pinoli (pine nuts), capers, raisins, black olives (all in the same amount, about a fistful) and a 1 clove of garlic, one anchovy and some hot pepper to flavour the greens. This is an old (probably XVII century or older) and traditional mixture used for a few vegetables (great on pan fried peppers) and for linguini di scammaro, the traditional lent pasta in Naples, in which case green olives and bred crumbs are also added, with or without tomato sauce (in which case no bread crumbs). This mixture probably came from Sicily. It might have arrived there with the Arabs, but since I'm not really strong in middle eastern cooking I could not say.

To start I chopped the garlic and anchovies and pitted and halved the olives. I was lucky enough to have some Gaeta olives, delicious small purple olives with a slight bitter taste, used in Neapolitan cooking whenever black olives are needed. Meanwhile I washed and chopped the escarole. In Naples this is sold as small baby plants, as big as an extended hand. Here in Germany I only found some as big as a salad, meaning that the leaves would be inevitably tougher. In a pan I dissolved the anchovies in some hot olive oil, added hot pepper and garlic, waited till the garlic turned golden in colour and then toasted the pinoli in the mixture for one or two minutes. Before I go on with the recipe let me digress for a second. I would like, one day, to find out why pinoli are called pignoli in the States. I guess it probably comes from north-eastern Italian dialects as in Italian pignoli means stubborn people! Going back to the recipe; once the pinoli looked slightly darker in colour I added the cut escarole and let it cook/braise (I would say stufare in Italian) covered. At first the amount of greens in the pan looks enormous but soon it reduces in volume to a more "normal" size as the leaves become soft. At this point I added olives, capers and raisins (softened in warm water) and salt and uncovered to let the little liquid present evaporate. If too much liquid is there one could simply pour it off the pan, important is that the stuffing is not wet or it will soak the bread dough casing. I really love the colour the escarole has at this point, a beautiful green (hope you can see it in the pic below). Together with the olives, etc. it almost looks like an abstract painting.

Beforehand I prepared some simple bread dough, enriched with a bit of olive oil. I rolled (gently) 2/3 for bottom and sides filled it with the braised escarole and used the remaining dough to make a lid, which i brushed with olive oil. The pizza di scarole baked at 180C/360F for 25-30 minutes. After it cooled a bit it was ready to eat. It tastes good still warm but it is even better if left to cool so that the flavours can blend together.

If you try this and REALLY hate raisins you can leave them out, otherwise, even if the combination sounds weird, try it. It might positively surprise you.

Stuffing but no turkey

I recently managed to buy a book I wanted to have for a quite long time, "la cucina Napoletana" (Neapolitan cuisine) written by Jeanne Carola Francesconi. This is sort of a "bible" in regards to classical Neapolitan cooking, full of classic, curiosities and information. This means you'll probably find a bit more Neapolitan cooking on this pages in the future :-). Francesconi, as her first name hints, comes from a family with French roots. This should not surprise there is a strong connection between Naples and France since (maybe even before) the Anjou dynasty ruled in southern Italy. Neapolitan cuisine was also dramatically influenced. Famous chefs were called Monzu (from Monsieur) and many French classics were adapted to the Neapolitan taste. I took inspiration from the book to prepare one of these "French" dishes, stuffed brioches, also called Danubio in Naples (Danube, as the river, no clue why). There are a few stuffed brioche recipes in the book (salami and cheese, vegetables, financiere). They might look like modern inventions: all are actually adapted from an early XIX century book, "Cucina Teorico Pratica", written by Ippolito Cavalcanti. It would be interesting to know if something similar is also baked in France. I went for the salami and cheese ones, because I like them and because I didn't have the ingredients for the other recipes.

To make these stuffed brioches I first made a normal brioche dough. I started with 400 g. bread flour (12.8 oz.), 4 eggs, 1 1/2 tsp dried yeast, 2 tsp sugar and salt (to taste). I let the dough rise 1 hour then mixed in 200 g. butter (6.4 oz) and let the dough rise 2 hours. Meanwhile I cut some salami and some smoked scamorza into small cubes. You can actually use ham or salt cured ham instead of salami in the stuffing, and well drained mozzarella or even emmenthaler as cheese. When the dough had finally doubled I started shaping the brioches. One could shape individual ones or, as I did, let them all bake together in a big cake mould. You take some dough, flatten it out in a circle, put the stuffing in the middle and then close the dough all around the stuffing. You can decide how big the brioches will be varying the amount of dough and stuffing. For a party I would make many small ones. Here I was making something to eat at work for lunch, therefore I went for a quite bigger size. Once the brioches are all shaped brush some diluted egg yolk on all of them and let rise for at least an hour. One of the reasons why I love making this kind of recipes is the quite childish pleasure I get from the "before/after" effect in the last rise. When the brioche had risen enough I brushed them again with the egg yolk and baked them for 20-30 minutes in the pre-heated oven (180C, 360F), till golden brown on top.

Once cool the finished brioches have a tasty filling made of the salami and melted cheese in their middle as you can see in the pic above. In my case the dough should have been a bit more salty as I forgot to taste if the salt was enough. The recipe is a bit time consuming but mainly because of the long waits in-between rises. Ideal for a rainy weekend afternoon.

Squeeze it through!

So here's the continuation of my post on cookie baking from yesterday. As I mentioned the other cookies/biscuits I baked on the week end were Crumiri. These are typical biscuits of Piedmont (like Baci di Dama): actually a quite simple butter cookie dough pepped up by including some maize flour in the dough. They have a characteristic horseshoe shape and are piped through a star tipped pastry bag (that sounds much easier than it is!).

The Crumiri have a simple but very pleasant taste, the maize/corn giving a very nice "rustic" feel. Maize is one of those ingredients (tomatoes, beans, many fishes and so on) that worked its way in Italian cuisine from the bottom. First it was considered food for animals and poor people... nobles would not touch the stuff... spoiled brats! Then once the nobles and bourgeois noticed how much success the stuff had they tried it themselves. Today maize is present in quite a few Italian dishes: apart from the famous polenta there are many sweets and breads made with maize.
I tried making these cookies the first time a few weeks ago using Carol Field's recipe. They tasted great, especially since she uses only cornmeal (no corn flour) which gives a great crunch but did not keep the shape they got from being piped through the pastry bag. I searched on the net and found quite a few recipes (mostly in Italian) all pretty identical. From those I got the impression that Carol Field's dough is way too soft to keep those nice ridges Crumiri should have. Or maybe I just screwed up badly somewhere. From what I found on the net and my first experiment I got to the following recipe:

100 g (3.2 oz) corn flour
40 g (1.3 oz) fine cornmeal
110 g (3.5 oz) flour, all purpose
140 g (4.5 oz) butter
2 egg yolks
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
a pinch of salt

I first mixed all the dry ingredients well then rubbed in the cold butter cut into small pieces. Once i started getting "crumbs" of dough I added the yolks and mixed just long enough to get a compact dough, which went for 30 minutes in the fridge.
Now came the funny (very ironic) part. You're supposed to pipe the mass with a pastry bag into 10 cm (4 in.) long strips which are then shaped into horseshoes. As much as I tried the dough did not want to come anywhere near the pastry bag tip. I considered using brute force but the experience from two burst pastry bags advised against it. So I armed myself with patience and squeezed the cookies through the pastry bag tip using my fingers. It took a LOT of time. I know that some food processors/pasta machines have special attachments for making such cookies. There are even meat grinders with this sort of attachment just for the purpose here in Germany (because of the industrial scale of cookie baking in some families). Next time I'll probably try and get one of those! If you have some melted chocolate at hand you could dip the tips of the cookies in it, not traditional but..yum! I couldn't since I had used all for the Baci di Dama.
Was it worth it? Yep, after all. I'm actually considering doing a double batch soon... with chocolate!

Sweet kisses

While some people prepare for thanksgiving or celebrate the end of Ramadan here in Germany preparations are starting for Advent, the four weeks before Christmas. Traditionally on the first weekend of December (or like this year last of November) Christmas market start, selling Gluhwein, mulled wine, sweets (Lebkuchen and others), food and possible gift items (pottery, candles and so on). On each of the four weekends families sit at the table eating cake and sweets, especially many sort of cookies baked for the occasion. I decided to give my little contribution this year by baking two Italian cookies: crumiri (more about them in the next post) and baci di dama (Ladies kisses). Baci di dama are probably my favourite cookies: not the "I could eat them every day" kind maybe, but more special "treats". The cookies themselves, two butter-nut biscuits united by a thin dark chocolate layer are quite easy to make.

The basic dough is equal amounts of flour, butter, sugar and fine ground nuts. Usually they're made with almonds but some use hazelnuts. I use the following mix: 1/3 hazelnuts, 2/3 almonds. I find that the delicate almond flavour and the more nutty hazelnuts complement each other nicely. The almond/hazelnut ratio is ideal for my taste: the almond aroma is there without being covered by the hazelnuts.
To make the cookies first I had to grind the almonds and hazelnuts. If you're lucky enough to find ground almonds and hazelnuts you can use those, it will not be as fragrant as with freshly ground ones but saves a lot of work. I was not that lucky, or better forgot to look for these ingredients at my local shop, so had to blanch the almonds (100 grams, 3.5 ounces), toast the hazelnuts(50 grams, 1.7 ounces), peel both and then grind them in my food processor with some sugar to absorb the oils from the nuts. I started beating 150 grams (5.3 ounces) butter till fluffy and then added the ground nuts, a pinch of salt and 130 grams (4.6 oz.) sugar. I reduced the sugar a bit because i prefer cookies (actually sweets in general) no too sweet. Once well mixed I added 150 g. flour, all purpose, and mixed gently till the dough came together. The dough went for 2 hours in the fridge.
Short before shaping the cookies I pre-heated the oven at 160C/320F. The cookies should be shaped into little balls the size of cherries. I wanted to try a bigger size this time, more like a walnut, but that only meant that the cookies needed more time in the oven and expanded more then wanted. As you can see from the pic the finished cookies are not very round, more dome shaped. With a smaller size that happens to a lesser extent. I baked them till the firs ones started to get slightly brown and let them cool. Once cool I just melted some dark chocolate, used it to paste the cookies pair-wise together and let the chocolate harden till the next morning.
All I can say is that after three days there's not a cookie left.... ;-)))

Pizza!

Last Saturday I started preparing a new sourdough batch. It is almost becoming a tradition. But then all of a sudden I found myself thinking about pizza. After all don't some of the best pizzerias in Naples still use sourdough? Then why not give it a try?
I've been trying quite a few pizza crust recipes in the last year or so and I'm still not completely satisfied. Maybe I should first explain what I'm looking for. Having lived quite a few years in Naples I have become partial to the kind of crust that's typical of the city pizzerias; thin, bubbly and soft. You could easily take a pizza and fold two times, actually the traditional way to eat pizza on the go. I don't like what I would call Roman style crust, i.e. thin and cracker crisp. I'm OK with pan pizza although my Italian pride still has to come to terms with calling that pizza :-))). Baking Neapolitan crust at home is actually impossible if you don't have a wood burning brick oven. You need the high temperatures for proper baking and the wood for the wonderful smoky flavour. Still a pale copy would be enough for me.

So to make the dough I proceeded as for sourdough till before shaping and final rise. I took the dough from the first rise and cut it into 150 grams pieces (enough for a small 20 cm pizza), rolled them into balls, oiled them slightly to prevent drying out and put them in the fridge to slowly rise over night.
On Sunday evening I baked the pizzas. I heated the oven up as hot as it goes, around 240C, not that high after all and started to bake. There are many methods to shape pizza, I find the one described by Peter Reinhart the easiest: pat the dough balls into rounds and then holding the border flick them away from you. Move around the border and continue flicking the dough till it has the right diameter/thickness. Once you try it a couple of times it works great.
I made a few different pizzas. Two "classics": marinara (tomato, garlic and oregano), no pic there, it was the first pizza, too hungry :-), and margherita (tomato, mozzarella and basil) the pizza in the pic at the start of the post. I also tried to use the dough to make a sort of pizza-focaccia, spreading olive oil on one dough circle and then covering with rosemary, sage and salt. It tasted good but it wasn't a real focaccia, it was way too thin. I also made a pizza I really like topped with a very thin layer of cream and then mushrooms (sauteed beforehand), sausage and mozzarella. Not traditional but oh so tastebud-satisfying. Probably would cause the protest of the verace pizza napoletana association ;-), but what the heck! For the pizzas I used decent cow-milk mozzarella, not the DOC one I wrote about. It would be a waste to bake great buffalo milk mozzarella, it just loses its fine aromas. As tomato sauce plain tomato sauce, just salted. I think it keeps a cleaner flavour that way.
The pizzas were quite good, crust between crispy and soft, nice taste and very appreciated by the little one (he kept asking for one more bite) but not exactly my pizza ideal... still a bit too crunchy and not "bubbly" enough. Since I always screw up something I also used the chance to learn that if you try to slide a pizza of a too little floured peel (in my case just a wooden board) your pizza will fold in amusing shapes :-)).
The search for great home baked pizza goes on....

Sourdough 2.0: the exploding bread

This week-end I tried baking sourdough bread again. This time the results were much better (see my first try) but still not perfect. Instead of having a flat bread I had a slight exploding bread problem. By that I mean that my bread expanded a bit too much in the oven, so much actually that the crust popped open in one place. I found out that probably my first bread was way over-proofed and for that reason so flat. I also changed the method this time and used the one explained by jackal10 in the eGullet culinary institute.

This method requires a "runny" starter: therefore I took my starter and diluted it with equal quantities of water and flour (resulting in a thick batter), refreshing it at the same time. It started to bubble quite quickly, maybe a bit quicker than I thought. After one night I made a second refreshment of the starter waited about 6 hours and mixed the dough together. In the mixer went 3 cups of bread flour, 1 cup of starter and 1 cup of water and kneaded it a few minutes. The dough was really wet, a bit more flour went in there, and super stretchy. Ever played with that green stuff, slime? Almost like it. Not exactly appetising but at the same time a good sign of gluten development. After 30 minutes rest, which serves a specific purpose which I did not get too well (something to do with amylases) I added 2 tsp salt and kneaded again. The dough was left to rise for about 3 hours. It hardly increased in size but I could already see small bubbles in the dough, the product of my wild yeast working. Yay! At this point I shaped the dough: I poured the sticky gooey mess (The Blob!) on a floured board, patted it very gently round (I will not have any of that squeezing air out of the dough here!) and simply folded the left and right sides towards the middle. To give it a round form I turned it around and stretched the dough while turning it. And then up it went in a floured banneton and into the fridge for the night.
I woke up the next day and started baking, just could not wait. I flipped the dough onto some baking paper and slashed it. Then straight in the pre-heated oven (around 230C). In the first 5 minutes the dough expanded very little than I left the kitchen for five minutes and BAM! (am I turning into Emeril?) the bread had expanded so much one corner had exploded letting dough out. I believe I probably did not slash the dough deep enough, not giving the dough enough room to expand. Or maybe my starter is too active? If you have any other idea pleas tell me, your help is welcomed and wanted! The bread was done after 40 minutes. Apart form the explosion I was not really happy with the crust, a bit too thin this time. Still the crumb had a great irregular open structure and, most important of all, tasted really good. A bit mellower than the first bread but with still a nice sour note.
Now I have found a method. Next goal: perfect it.

Hoax chocolate chip cookies

Sometimes urban myths can be delicious. I've tried baking one with great results yesterday. The urban myth I'm referring to is the one about the Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe. In case you don't know the story, a few years ago an (hoax) e-mail started circulating claiming someone had been charged (more or less unknowingly) 250 dollars for this recipe and decide, as a sort of revenge, to send it through the web. As a result Neiman Marcus was bombarded by e-mails, they denied (and still do) the story. Still to stop the rumours they published their recipe openly on their own web page. Another version of the story claims that the chocolate chip cookie recipe was developed after the whole e-mail hoax case exploded.

Whichever is true (I like the second story better) one can't help noticing that the two recipes are quite different (for examples the e-mail one has oats which don't appear in the official one). I had received the famous mail and I think I still have the recipe saved somewhere on my old iMac. What brought the story back to mind was a page about it in Leite's Culinaria and since the comments to the recipe where so enthusiastic I decided to try it out.
I'm not going to give the recipe as you can find it clicking here. The whole preparation is very easy and quick and the cookies... oh boy, the best I've had. The cookies are full of chocolate chips (yes!), sweet but not too sweet, chewy and the addition of the small amount of coffee gives a great aroma. My only problem with them is that German chocolate chips don't seem to be that temperature resistant, they melt a bit. On the other hand that means that if you press the cookies before they completely "expand" you can get cool psychedelic chocolate patterns on your cookies.... groovy!