Baking

Wineberry Flaugnarde

Chuck GrimmettLeave a comment

Wineberries are ripe here in the Hudson Valley this week, so I picked about two cups of them and Amanda baked them into a flaugnarde. This might become a yearly tradition.

Wineberries are an invasive cousin to raspberries, brought to the US from Japan and other parts of Asia to cross-breed with the local raspberry stock. The plants are hearty, full of nasty thorns, and difficult to get rid of, but they produce pretty berries the color of red wine. They have fewer seeds than raspberries and the fruit falls apart easier.

You can identify wineberries by the color of the berries (red wine), the leaves (a cluster of three whose pattern and shape is pretty distinct), and how fuzzy the protective wrapper is on unripe berries.

Some foraging etiquette:

  • Leave berries low to the ground for small creatures like turtles, chipmunks, and rabbits to eat.
  • If it is in public woods and you are able to go off the path and into the brambles to pick the berries, do so. Not everyone can, and you should leave some berries accessible for other people to enjoy. Never pick all the berries unless it is on your own property.

A flaugnarde is a fruit tart with a consistency halfway between flan and custard. A custardy cobbler, if you will. Up until about an hour ago I had been calling it clafoutis, since we made one of those with black cherries on Monday. When I mentioned yesterday that the wineberries were ripe, Amanda thought they would go great with the clafoutis batter, so we made one. Then I started doing some research for this post and found that the French, who are quite particular with naming, only consider the dish a clafoutis if it contains cherries. If it has some other fruit, it is a flaugnarde. C’est les Français. A flan by any other name…

It is good warm, but even better cold. Let it cool after you make it, eat a small slice, then stick it in the fridge overnight.

It isn’t overly sweet, so it goes great with coffee in the middle of the afternoon. This is the year of the snacking cake, after all. (See Yossy Arefi or Bill Clark.)

We like the Smitten Kitchen recipe for the base. We used vanilla instead of almond extract with the wineberries, which was a good choice. Almond complements cherries, but would be too much for the wineberries.

cherry clafoutis

In case you were wondering:

  • Clafoutis is pronounced “clahhh-foo-tee”
  • Flaugnarde is pronounced “floon-yard”

…or so I think. I once got mocked in the Charles de Gaulle airport for my pronunciation, so I might not be the most reliable source here.

Simple breads to make at home

Chuck Grimmett1 Comment

Want to get into bread baking during this quarantine but don’t know where to start? Here are two ideas:

  1. Navajo Flatbread: Simple and fast, minimum ingredients, no yeast needed. Most cultures have something like this. Think naan, pita, frybread, etc. H/t to Ilya Radchenko for sharing this link!
  2. No-knead bread – Simplest regular loaf-style bread I know about. From Jim Lahey at Sullivan Street Bakery. Needs yeast and a dutch oven to bake. I use this same recipe but sub in sourdough starter for the yeast and give it a long fermentation in the fridge before baking. H/t to Tyler Machovina for sharing this recipe with me 4 years ago, and for sharing the sourdough starter with me!

Cooking the Books: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Sister Pie, and The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie

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This is a guest post from KatieRose McEneely, a fellow culinary experimenting friend from college. She is a fantastic artist who created the paper cuts of a cow, sheep, and pig that currently hang above our couch. Thanks for joining in the challenge, KatieRose! 

If you want to join the Cooking the Books challenge, see the details at the bottom of this post.

1. How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman 

Recipe: Caramelized Squash with vinegar

  • Butternut squash, cubed
  • sugar
  • balsamic vinegar
  • onion, minced
  • garlic (omitted)
  • salt and pepper
  • rosemary, fresh and minced

I made the balsamic and rosemary variation–the original recipe uses sherry vinegar and chili powder. I didn’t take a photo, but it looks like cubed squash in a dark sauce, so.

Why I tried it: I had all of the ingredients and the cooking method was unfamiliar to me (it’s Vietnamese in origin). Plus, I thought I’d have a fighting chance of more than one member of the household giving it a taste.

It is technically not a one-pot meal, so I served it with a green salad and risotto, per Bittman’s recommendation.

Result: Real talk: would never make this again. The first step consists of making caramel, then adding vinegar and water to dissolve the caramel (and perfume your kitchen with the scent of hot vinegar, which was met with protests from other members of the household). Then, add the onion and cook until softened; add cubed squash, cover and steam for three minutes, then cook uncovered until squash is tender. Finish with the spices and cook a bit longer, until the sauce thickens.

I really liked the texture of the squash–I usually default to roasting it–but the flavor was much too sweet, and the rosemary was not discernable, despite adding a full tablespoon. Also, I question the nutritional value of a vegetable dish that contains more sugar than the following recipe, which is a dessert.

 

2.  Sister Pie: The Recipes & Stories of a Big-hearted Bakery in Detroit, Lisa Ludwinski

Recipe: Coconut Sweet Potato Pie

Why I tried it: I love pie (and I’m a huge fan of the Sister Pie cookbook), but I generally don’t enjoy custard or squash pies, possibly because I am lactose intolerant. This recipe has a very small amount of dairy, and uses full-fat coconut milk for the bulk of the liquid.

The recipe is available in full in many places, but here’s a link to it on Wisconsin Public Radio.

Result: Well, I’m converted. The pie is delicious; a faint coconut flavor, a smooth texture accented by the toasted unsweetened coconut garnish, and it’s not milky at all. It also baked in the time given in the recipe, but I attribute that less to the recipe and more to the fact that I finally bought an oven thermometer.

 

3. The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie, Paula Haney

I’ll note that I did make an additional new-to-me recipe on Jan. 30; it was Hoosier Mama’s apple pie, from the eponymous cookbook, which I also own. (If you like pecan pie, her recipe is superlative.)

Look, I’ve made a lot of apple pies in my time, and this was the taskiest of them all (and the first to omit cinnamon!). Never have I pre-cooked the drained liquid from the apples, let it cool, chilled it further, and then incorporated it to the rest of the pie filling. I’ve eaten this recipe before, because it’s delicious, and the result was great.

I’m of two minds: I make pie because I have things lying around that can go into a crust, and most of the time I’m winging it. But the final product here is very consistent, and my dad really likes it. It might be a game-time decision (and on the plus side, it baked more quickly than my usual method, which involves piling apples into a shell and baking until the filling reaches the set temperature for jam).

All told: this was fun! My sister and I have an agreement to try at least two new recipes per month, so it was a good jump-start. I’m fortunate in that my cookbook selection is small and I’m pretty good about using them, but I’m a librarian, so I have a lot of access to new titles without committing to a purchase.

Thanks for the invite!

Cheers,

KatieRose

Join us!

If you want to join us in the Cooking the Books challenge, send your posts to cagrimmett@gmail.com! I’ll guest post them here on Cook Like Chuck. Here are some guidelines:

  • Send me a decent photo of the book to use as the featured image
  • Send me photos of the meal you cooked
  • Write a little bit about the book, why you chose it, and how the meal turned out
  • Send me a photo of the recipe

Let’s dust off those cookbooks and put them to use this year.

Cooking the Books: Baking with Steel

Chuck Grimmett1 Comment

Below is the first guest post in the Cooking the Books Challenge series. It is from my Dad, also named Chuck Grimmett. It is from a cookbook I got for him last year, Baking with Steel. If you want to join the challenge and post, see the details at the bottom of this post.

Due to the cold rainy weather last weekend, I decided to dig my Pizza Steel out and bake some bread! This marks the first time I tried making bread from the Baking with Steel cookbook.

The recipe calls for the dough to be made at least 24 hours prior to baking, so you need to plan ahead. I started with good bread flour, I chose “King Arthur Flour” and Platinum Superior Baking Yeast by Red Star. I figured if I start with quality ingredients, I cannot blame failure on the materials! 

Ingredients: Bread flour, salt, dry active yeast, warm water. (CAG’s note: I don’t publish the entire recipe unless the author has posted it somewhere else online. I don’t want to rip off their work. I’d prefer you buy their books.)

Following the recipe, I measured the flour by weight.

I used my stand mixer equipped with a dough hook. 3 to 4 minutes did the job, just needed to get all the dry clumps out.

My dough was sticky and bubbly, I needed plenty of flour on my board. The recipe says to place the ball seam side up in a floured breadbasket to rest for 2 more hours.. I don’t own one so I placed it on a floured plate.

I coated my pizza peel with semolina and scored the top of the loaf with a razor, launched onto my Dough Joe, then baked for 25 minutes.

It turned out great! It was delicious and lasted in a plastic bag for about a week. I’d definitely make it again.

Join me!

If you want to join me in the Cooking the Books challenge, send your posts to cagrimmett@gmail.com! I’ll guest post them here on Cook Like Chuck. Here are some guidelines:

  • Send me a decent photo of the book to use as the featured image
  • Send me photos of the meal you cooked
  • Write a little bit about the book, why you chose it, and how the meal turned out
  • Send me a photo of the recipe

Let’s dust off those cookbooks and put them to use this year.