Category: Baking

A bite of the past, in present tense

Monday, Aug. 14, 2023

When I was a kid in New York about 60 years ago my grandmother in the Bronx bought crescent-shaped cookies that were gently crisp and had a licorice-y taste. They were Stella D’oro anisette toasts, made in the Bronx then, probably not far from where my grandparents lived. They were heavily advertised on the radio.

I didn’t know from cantucci, which is what Italians call the crescent, twice-baked cookie we call biscotti; I just liked them. My grandparents had them with coffee, I with milk and even though they weren’t particularly exotic or expensive, I only had them in the mornings at my grandparents’ apartment, usually while my grandmother listened to “Rambling with Gambling” on WOR.

Stella D’oro anisette toasts are still made, although no longer in New York and three owners later. A couple of years ago I thought about them again when my wife, Janet, was served an anisette cantucci with her coffee at a restaurant in Cape May, N.J.

“I can make that,” I said when she declared how much she liked it. Here’s a link to my favorite recipe, from Sally’s Baking Addiction, probably my favorite resource for sweet things: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/chocolate-dipped-almond-biscotti/

It’s a vcry easy recipe and has the additional advantage of being quite low-fat for a cookie, using only a half-stick of butter and a tablespoon of oil for 18 cookies. Sally doesn’t like anise, but I do, so I find that adding a tablespoon of anise extract or a couple of tablespoons of Sambucca will give the licorice-y flavor I like.

When made correctly they’re very crisp — hard, even, asking to be dunked in coffee — and not overly sweet. Follow the recipe and you’ll do fine. Two instructions I sometimes ignore, and am always sorry when I do:

  • Wait 10 minutes after the first bake before slicing the logs into the cookies before the second bake. If you don’t wait long enough the cut sides will crumble under your knife.
  • Don’t slice the cookies more than one inch thick. If you do, the sides of the cookies will be brown before the insides are completely cooked and they won’t be crisp.

The website recipe calls for a chocolate dipping with additional finely chopped almonds. Chocolate doesn’t do much for me and I’d rather avoid the extra 50 calories, so I usually skip that.

Even my first attempt came out very well, the sign of an easy and well-written recipe!

We freeze them, taking them out for company or liberating one when the spirit moves. They take well to experimentation — some folks like to put raisins, dried cherries or chocolate chips in them and I’m sure there are recipes for chocolate biscotti, which I’ve seen in bakeries.

I’ll take mine this way, or plain vanilla, even omitting the almonds if I feel too lazy to toast and chop them. Either way it’s a great cookie, easily made and even though it’s only reminiscent of the Stella D’Oro Anisette Toast I loved then, it’s still a sure-fire way for me to get back to my grandmother’s table where I sat so many years ago.

In Which Our Novice Baker Finally Achieves The Bagel Of His Dreams

For the last three months or so I’ve been trying to make bagels that taste good, replicate the texture and chew of those of my long-lost youth, and look pretty much like a bagel should. Go back a few posts and you’ll see one that looks like it came from the croissant factory. Not good.

But now, I think I’ve got it:

Today’s batch, onion on top, plain on the bottom. I’m happy with them, and I’ll be very satisfied if I can do as well from now on.

These are sourdough bagels, no yeast at all. They have just a little bit of tang that balances the malt in the recipe, and best of all, they are as chewy as the bagels I teethed on as an infant during the first Eisenhower administration. Really chewy.

In fact, it’s said that when teething I gnawed on a single bagel for a month, which would say as much about parenting in the ’50s as it does about the bagels, but my family is known to exaggerate.

These bagels came not from the excellent yeast recipe at Sally’s Baking Addiction I used earlier, but from baked-theblog.com, and you can find it here: https://www.baked-theblog.com/new-york-style-sourdough-bagels-with-roasted-garlic-labneh/. If you’re not a sourdough person by all means use Sally’s recipe.

Because I can’t stand not tinkering with stuff, I do have a couple of tweaks to the baked-theblog recipe:

  • The only tricky part with your sourdough starter is making sure it’s quite active when you’re ready to use it. For me, that would be four to six hours after feeding it. But it can work well if you feed it the day before, let it sit out until it perks up, then refrigerate it until the next day. At worst, you’ll have to let the shaped bagels proof for a longer time, up to four hours after shaping them.
  • The recipe also calls for all-purpose flour. I think the bagels are better with bread flour, which is higher in protein but these days may not be so easy to come by. I used Heckers all-purpose flour, which is 11.5 percent protein, and replaced 40 grams of flour with 40 grams of vital wheat gluten, which is available online and in some groceries. This brought the protein content up to nearly 15 percent, and made the bagels teething-worthy.
  • Finally, the recipe equates 750 grams of flour to five cups. A cup of flour weighs 120-125 grams, so if you use cup measure instead of weight, by the spoon-and-sweep method you’ll probably get closer to six cups before you hit 750 grams. I say that when it comes to flour, it’s best to have a kitchen scale and measure by weight.

Still, I think that even if you use the recipe exactly as written you’ll come out with very satisfying bagels. Do remember that it’s a two-day process but I found that it works on whatever schedule I have.

This recipe makes the heaviest, stiffest dough I’ve ever seen. Your stand mixer will struggle, and might give up entirely. Kneading by hand will make today’s trip to the gym unnecessary.

In the end, there are a few steps but not all that much effort. And even though one can buy a pretty good bagel where we live, I can now say that mine taste better and look just about as good.

They are, at last, the bagels of my dreams.

I Don’t Care If My Flour Tortillas Look Like Amoebas. I Am Never Buying Them At The Store Again.

I like flour tortillas. I’ve been eating them all my life. I’d buy them at the grocery and use them for Latin dishes, rolled sandwiches, whatever.

We’ve even used them cut with cookie cutters as a base for hors d’oeuvres. They can be a little expensive, maybe 30 or 40 cents apiece, but I never considered an alternative.

If I wanted a tortilla, I bought tortillas.

Not anymore, not after last night. Last night I made my own tortillas. The difference astounded me, and they were so easy that I wondered why I’d never made them before.

Last night’s batch, my first, were oblong and misshapen. And they did not fall flat on the pan when I cooked them, so they were wrinkled and lumpy in spots. On the plate they looked like a Mexican grandmother’s nightmare.

But they were so delicious that I didn’t care. They were nicely chewy, soft even after they cooled, and they held together well under last night’s fajitas.

I’m going to keep working at them and I know eventually they’ll look better, but I don’t know how I could ever make them taste better. They taste fantastic, in a completely different world than store-bought.

The recipe is here: https://www.mexicoinmykitchen.com/flour-tortillas-de-harina/ and there’s even a video to go with it. In that video you will see Mely Martinez’s expert hands turn out nearly perfect circles of dough that puff up, blowfish-like, when they hit the hot pan.

Mine did that, too, but they looked more like amoebas with intestinal problems than blowfish. In any event, I’ll bet they tasted just as good as hers, and so there’s no reason for you not to make them.

Her ingredients are flour, shortening, baking powder, water and salt, and she says not to worry if you don’t have the baking powder. You do want to take seriously her admonition to go easy on the hot water. I used about seven-eighths of a cup and I should have used a little less. The extra made the tortillas a bit harder to roll, but didn’t bother me otherwise.

I looked around and found several recipes that used less shortening — one used only an eighth of a cup rather than the one-third in Martinez’s recipe — but I’m going to stick with the larger amount.

And I’m going to stick with homemade flour tortillas. They don’t take long to make and I discovered last night that they are worth every minute, no matter what they look like.

Let The Bagel Be Unbroken

Like everyone else I know I’m sitting at home, except for masked-and-gloved expeditions to the supermarket every couple of weeks. From the looks of things, everyone in the world has decided to take up baking when they are not washing their hands or going to the bathroom. Our markets have vast empty spaces where flour, paper towels and toilet paper used to sit.

I’ve been thinking if a guy wants to see immediate and sincere gratitude, the hot birthday present this spring could be a jumbo pack of toilet paper. But that’s neither here nor there.

I’m a meat guy and baking, like vegetables, has been off my beat. But we wanted bagels a couple of weeks ago, to replicate the deli experience we can’t have right now. I had some flour and yeast so I gave it a try. The bagels were OK, but far from ideal.

I wanted ideal.

2020-03-21-18.12.25
My first attempt. Using the finger-poke method to shape them, the tops turned out OK but the bottoms were wrinkled as a Shar-Pei’s face, and a lot less cute.

On my third effort I hit on a really good recipe at Sally’s Baking Addiction, here: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/homemade-bagels/. I used her instruction for overnight proofing in the refrigerator, and they were delicious.

This is a great recipe and easy. I boiled the bagels for 90 seconds on each side, gave them their egg-white wash before baking and they came out perfectly chewy, with a slightly crisp crust. They taste just a little sweet like a perfect plain bagel should, and I think they taste better than any I can buy.

Shaping them, however, is killing me.

Bagel shapers seem be either pokers or snakers. Pokers make a ball out of each piece of dough then send a floured index finger through the middle and wiggle it until they have what they want. Snakers make a 10-inch-long rope of the dough, then fold it around their open hand and roll to seal.

My tops look fine when I poke the hole, but as I cannot get a perfectly shaped ball in the first place the bottom bakes up looking like a construction zone.

Snaking gives me good-looking circles before I boil them but once in the water they decide to turn into bagel croissants.

A croissant bagel is not what I'm after.

This is not what I want.

On this specimen from a couple of weeks ago, the ends came apart when I boiled it, and once the bagel is in the water there’s no going back. It tasted good, but I needed to do better.

Today I tried the method you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTdbDxfYydo.

The technique in this video has you tie a little knot at the end of your rope, then press to roll everything together. I can see that I didn’t go quite far enough with my knot, and maybe not vigorous enough with my roll to seal, so I had a little unwinding in the water.

Bagel snakes. Looks like the two in the back are attacking each other. Gotta tighten my knot.

Still, I am encouraged and having fun. The bagels taste great and I think I’m closing in on the shaping. I think I’ll have it right next time.

As it is, I’ve learned something fun, useful and delicious.

And that absolute perfection might be overrated.