Russian bread

I've been putting this off a bit too long, haven't I?

It has been said by some that the one thing the Soviet government made sure never suffered in quality, no matter how many shortages they had of anything else, was bread. Now classic Russian bread is a rye bread, and it's available in a few different variants (Anya von Bremzen's "Riga Rye", from Latvia but eaten throughout Russia, is one of the more famous), but none of them have the coffee/caramel/cocoa coloring agents like American pumpernickel. In fact, real Russian black bread is not black at all, but medium to dark brown (depending on how it's baked) and is somewhat midway between the grainy German rye vollkornbrot and an American Jewish rye in texture. In fact, I've only found two authentic recipes for standard Russian bread; one came from the Usenet group rec.food.cooking (and you can probably find it on Google Groups), and the other came from Andrew Whitley's somewhat lackluster Bread Matters (why I thought it lackluster is a long story that I covered in an Amazon review, but the recipes are quite good). This recipe is more or less Whitley's, adapted to how I made it.

I'll leave the exact details to other books (particularly the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book and the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion), but the short form is that rye needs acid to lift properly in the oven, or the overactive amylases in rye flour will eat up all the starch and other complex carbohydrates and cause it to collapse before they can be cooked to death. That said, 100% rye bread still doesn't rise to anything like the same degree as wheat bread, which is why American rye breads are usually a mix of wheat and rye flours; in fact, to someone not used to 100% rye, this will come out rather brick-like. Slice it thin, and toast it if you want.

• 450g active rye flour sourdough starter (you can start with the one from carlsfriends.org and culture with rye flour instead of wheat)
• 350g whole rye flour
• 1.5 tsp kosher salt
• 200mL tepid water

Combine the starter with the flour, salt, and water and mix until fully combined. Let sit to hydrate for about 20 minutes, then place some parchment paper on the bottom of a loaf pan, bring the dough together into a single mass, and press into the loaf pan. Let rise, covered, for 2-5 hours. Preheat the oven to 475F/245C, then put the loaf pan in the oven. Bake for 15-20 minutes, then drop the temperature to 400F/205C and continue baking for 40 minutes or until the internal temperature is between 200-210F/95-100C. Remove from the oven and cool on a standard cooling rack. When cool, wrap in plastic wrap or waxed paper, sealed tightly, and let sit for a day or so to reach its final texture (it will be sticky inside fresh out of the oven). Slice thin and serve with butter or some Russian zakuski.

A couple of websites on genetic engineering

As you may or may not know, I am a supporter of both sustainable agriculture and genetically engineered food plants. I actually don't see any real contradiction in this; I am firmly against the anticompetitive practices of companies like Monsanto and the patenting of genes (it's like software patents, except instead of patenting math they're patenting DNA). But the Green Revolution was only a start to solving the world's food problems and we need every tool we can to keep people fed in the future.

That in mind, I'd like to link to a couple of blogs worth checking out:

Tomorrow's Table at ScienceBlogs.com, written by Pamela Ronald
Biofortified.org, a group blog the winner of a recent contest to discuss GMO plants with food/agriculture writer Michael Pollan (Dr. Ronald is one of its contributors)

It's long past time for sustainability supporters to reevaluate our approach to genetically modified plants. While such plants may never be certified organic, they can certainly be used to try to find ways to move past the current paradigm of industrial farming into something less dependent on oil and noxious chemicals like anhydrous ammonia or glyphosate.

Return of the Coffeehouse Dictionary

Eleven years ago, after leaving college, I went to work at Starbucks.

The Coffeehouse Dictionary was one of the results.

It's now one of the first things I've moved over from the old site other than the recipes I've been posting here. Enjoy and feel free to offer any updates or new slang I haven't heard.

In which I eat American history

Depending on who you talk to, the oldest apple variety bred in the United States is either the Roxbury Russet or the Rhode Island Greening. I've not tried a Greening, but I first read about the Roxbury Russet in the book The Art of Cidermaking by Paul Correnty years ago when I was learning to make beer; Correnty seemed to be a huge fan of the Roxbury as a cider apple. The problem is that russeted apples are, to put it bluntly, ugly -- they have thick, scruffy brown skin that vaguely resembled a bald kiwifruit, and therefore are almost impossible to find as fruit or trees (Seeds of Change sold the trees a few years ago but no longer carries them). I'd never had a chance until last week to taste one.

My old hometown of Belmont, MA has a farmer's market on Thursdays, which also happens to be the one day of the week when I'm always off Cape and in the area. One of the regular vendors, an organic farm from Pepperell, always has very large selections of both apples and tomatoes (well, in season, of course), and last week they had Roxbury Russets, so naturally I had to try some. Although my parents weren't overly impressed with it, I did enjoy it and bought more this week (sadly, the last week of the Belmont market for the season).

For people who are used to prettier apples, either red streaked with green or green/gold, the Roxbury will come as a shock. The rough skin holds in what little aroma it has, which means that it isn't as sensual as, say, a Gala or Braeburn, and gives it a distinct tannic flavor that you simply don't expect from an eating apple. The flavor is also unusual, with a low-acid profile that reminds me very much of a slightly underripe pear. The fruit itself ranges from small to smaller, with the late-season apples I bought yesterday being little larger than crab apples. I could see how they'd make good cider apples, provided they were balanced with something with a bit more acid punch to it like a Granny Smith; I don't know that they'd make good pie apples, though, if for no other reason than the thick skin must be a pain to peel.

These will never be popular, sadly; I really don't think they have much commercial appeal, and it's probably a minor miracle that they're even still grown. But I think the heirloom aficionados will keep it alive for a long time to come.

On buying British cookbooks

You've seen them if you go to big independent bookstores with large remainder sections -- familiar titles with odd cover art and sometimes unusual fonts. Perhaps an unfamiliar publisher, definitely unusual editing and punctuation, and the cover price denominated in pounds (or, occasionally, euros). These are the British (and occasionally Irish or even Australian) editions. In the bigger bookstores like Barnes and Noble or Borders, they're usually shovelware "bargain books" with hit-or-miss quality, but if you go to a place like the Harvard Bookstore or New England Mobile Book Fair (to take two examples of places with good remainder selections), you can find some popular titles for even cheaper than you'd pay for paperbacks.

This comes up in the context of an Amazon review I wrote recently on one of Peter Mayle's food-related books, Confessions of a French Baker (co-written with Gerard Auzet, a baker friend who had gained a fair amount of tourist business from being mentioned in one of Mayle's travelogue books). The book itself is slight, and of a genre I think of as "little cookbooks" -- small cookbooks, 125 pages or less, that make their point in a relatively small number of representative recipes -- usually well under a hundred, often 25-50, but in the case of Mayle and Auzet's book, a mere 16. (Mind, the little cookbook is an art form of itself and probably deserves another, entirely different column.) The interesting thing was that this was the UK edition, published by the UK subsidiary of TimeWarner Books (the US publisher is Knopf). The recipes all give metric measurements first (likely quite a bit closer to Auzet's original intent), which is nice, but above all, the book was only $7, compared to the US cover price of almost $17. Great deal, right?

Mostly. There's an important thing to remember with any kind of how-to literature from another country, and that's that the differences in vocabulary require extra diligence. Ingredients will be different -- a Maris Piper potato may be a good baking potato, but it's going to be different in appearance from a Russet -- and even where there's a close correspondence, it won't always be obvious that caster sugar in the UK is the same kind of superfine sugar that bartenders use for mixed drinks in the US. Being the foodie that I am, I can usually convert these things in my head, but it's critically important to make sure you have the necessary resources to back up what you think you know.

In the case of Confessions, you run into a few problems with flour, something that among others Peter Reinhart and Shirley Corriher have dealt with in some of their books. Many of the recipes demand French type 55 flour, and failing that "strong white bread flour". The problem, however, is that what passes for "strong" flour (i.e. high-protein flour) in the UK is more like what we in the US call all-purpose flour; if you use a US-style bread flour in these recipes but follow Auzet's notes to the letter, you will get an overly fine crumb and quite possibly a warped baguette. If you can get French flour (or French-style -- King Arthur sells a very expensive clone of Type 55 on their website) use that; otherwise, you have to be very careful to know the protein content of your flour. The same applies to any other ingredient -- what the average British cook can pick up in ten minutes at Tesco might take a week or an Internet order to find in the US if you don't have a good source for British or Irish groceries in your neighborhood.

None of this is to say that buying British cookbooks (or, for that matter, any other country's cookbooks) is a bad idea. A little extra care and research will be very helpful (especially for a beginner cook), but in an era where you might have to do that anyway to make some obscure recipe that you found on a website halfway across the world, it certainly can't hurt. And hey, you might even wind up with something unfamiliar but awesome, like, I don't know, this. (No, that was not a plug for another review. Not intentionally, anyway.)

Resources worth checking out:

• The rec.food.cooking FAQ from the Usenet group of the same name is the closest thing to a culinary rosetta stone you'll find out there. It's been continuously maintained for damn close to 20 years now, and if you can't find the answer in there, it'll tell you where you can find it.
• The BBC's Food website includes a huge recipe database from their extensive library of cooking shows, and is a good place to start with getting comfortable with converting British recipes. (Unfortunately, their random recipe shuffler is gone, and you can't watch any of the TV programming without some wacky proxy hijinks, but their recipe database is stellar.)
  
• The Australian Broadcasting Company also has a food site, especially helpful if you're a little confused over those 20mL Australian tablespoons.
• Not to leave anyone out, here's RTE's website on Irish food programs. (Anyone know the equivalent in New Zealand? India? The Philippines?)
  
• The Metric Kitchen (which I've linked to in the past) gives you a few recipes to get comfortable with the measurements.
  

Bagels on the border

There is a right way and a wrong way to make a proper bagel, and if you're really picky about such things, this is most definitely the wrong way -- the flour is wrong, the finished product is best described as "rustic", and the texture is not as chewy as you'd think and strangely moist, like bread machine Italian bread. The technique cuts corners here and there (the standard overnight retarding was ignored in the desire for immediate bagelage) and violates every damn thing the experts tell you about bagel making. But they came out really good, so I'm not inclined to care.

I call them "bagels on the border" because they're sort of a hybrid -- the stark simplicity of a New York bagel combined with the artisanal raggediness and faint sweetness of a Montreal bagel. The ones in this recipe were baked with no toppings at all, but don't let that stop you; all of the usual toppings (poppy, sesame, garlic, salt, onion flakes, rosemary, whatever you like) work just fine. Serve them however you wish and don't apologize to anyone; they may not be quite authentic, but you'll like them anyway. (For baking geeks, the baker's percentage here is approximately 55%; the dough is very rubbery and may actually bounce if you ball it up.)

• 500g unbleached bread flour
• 275mL tepid water
• 1 tbsp honey
• 2 tsp kosher salt
• 2 tsp (7g) instant yeast
• 1/4-1/3c (50-100mL) honey for the water bath
  

1. Mix the water, honey, and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer until the salt and honey dissolve. Add the flour and yeast and stir with the dough hook until a very stiff dough forms; add a little bit of extra water if the dough doesn't come together. Let sit for 10 minutes.
2. Knead the dough with the dough hook for 3-5 minutes (don't bother to hand-knead -- you have to be a glutton for punishment to pull it off). Cover and let rise for two hours; the dough may not quite double.
3. Divide the dough into eight equal pieces and shape into bagels. My preferred way is to shape into balls similar to a boule loaf, stretching the gluten envelope and sealing at the bottom, then punching a hole in the middle and carefully stretching the dough into a ring about four inches across; you can, however, also follow the old-school stretch-and-loop method. Cover the bagels on a piece of parchment or a Silpat and let rise for 1.5-2 hours.
4. Preheat a large pizza stone in your oven at 500F/260C. Fill an electric frying pan or deep saute pan with water about halfway up and add the water bath honey then bring to a boil. Poach the bagels about a minute per side, dip in toppings if you're using them, then transfer back to the parchment on a peel or cookie sheet.
   
5. Bake the bagels (still on the parchment, either on a cookie sheet or directly on the stone) for 10-15 minutes or until generously browned (the bagels will be somewhat mottled and maybe a bit soft on the edges; that's fine). Peel them off the parchment and put them on a cooling rack. Please try to let them cool at least a little bit before attacking with cream cheese.
   

Quick and dirty scallion pancakes

Find me someone who doesn't like scallion pancakes and I'll show you someone who's never tried them. However, the whole rolling-and-folding thing you need to do for proper scallion pancakes is kind of a pain in the butt; this is a simple recipe based on Martin Yan's batter recipe from Chinese Cooking for Dummies, embellished with a bit of baking powder for lift. (If you want a more traditional recipe, try this one from Ming Tsai's Food Network days.)

• 1 egg
• 1.5c water
• 2 tbsp cooking oil
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp Chinese 5-spice powder
• 2c all-purpose flour
• 1/2c sliced scallions
• 1 tsp baking powder

1. Combine the wet ingredients, then mix in the flour gradually. Fold in the scallions and let stand for 30 min to an hour.
2. Heat a nonstick frying pan over high heat and just cover the bottom with oil. Pour in enough batter to cover and spread out.
3. Cook until brown and crispy on one side (2-3 min) then flip and cook on the other side for the same amount of time; flatten with a spatula if necessary. Serve in wedges.