Garlic Fontina Flatbread

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Chelsea

I have a thing about garlic bread. Achingly soft butter, a scattering of herbs, pungent, sharp garlic paste, spread thickly on sourdough baguette and broiled until the butter bubbles and browns and the garlic takes on a toasty depth; what’s not to love? I make it in the oven, I make it on the grill, I’ve even tried turning it into a sandwich. But all too often, the process of toasting leaves the edges of the bread blackened and the crust just too crunchy for my taste. I want crisp toastiness, but I don’t want mouth-scraping shards of bread shrapnel.

Enter flatbread. I don’t mean the dry, cracker-like stuff carelessly sprinkled with toppings and served up as an appetizer. I mean something a little puffier, a little richer, a little cheesier. A few months ago, I dabbled with a Food Network recipe for Spinach and Cheese Flatbread, and was delighted by the elastic dough that bubbled up into a soft-but-crisp rectangle. It is chewy and golden, but not quite as sturdy as a pizza dough. The bottom, slapped against a well-oiled sheet pan, gets just crisp enough to support all but the most ridiculously sized slices (don’t ask me how I know this. Thank you), so you aren’t left with a square that wilts as you hold it.

As soon as I ate the FN version, I realized this was the answer to my garlic bread dreams. The dough would be smeared with a loving, excessive layer of garlic-butter-herb-are-you-drooling-yet?-paste, sprinkled with fontina, which melts beautifully and has a mild funk I really enjoy, and baked until crispy toasty nirvana resulted.

My results approached sublimity, and the shortcomings were entirely human error, which seems fitting. The paste didn’t spread very evenly because this is a soft dough: it threatened to tear when I applied a spatula, so I ended up smearing and dolloping my mixture with my fingers. You could easily solve this by melting your butter instead of just softening it, and then pouring the mixture evenly over the dough. Then, because I was afraid the butter and garlic would burn at pizza-cooking temperatures, I was pretty liberal with my cheese application, which meant that the toasty roasty golden color I was expecting didn’t quite happen. Another minute or two in the oven might have helped, but we were hungry. A little less cheese might have helped too, but seriously, less cheese? Totally unreasonable.

In any case, the bread itself was puffy and buttery and decadent. The garlic loses some of its pungency during baking, but retains that addictive sharpness and bright tingly aroma that makes it so good. The dollops of butter became dimples of puddly richness that, upon reflection, reminded me a little bit of the center of a really good bialy. The bottom of the crust is like an old-style pan pizza: golden with burst air bubbles and just oiled enough to leave your fingertips in need of a napkin.

This is a great happy hour snack. Since it heats up the house, it gives you a great excuse to sit out on your patio, or deck, or picnic blanket, or camp chair. It pairs well with a crisp, summery wine, and equally well with a frosty pint of beer (or maybe, since, you know, Cinco de Mayo, a classic Corona with lime, or a salt-and-cayenne-rimmed margarita). You can use any combination of herbs you like. I chose what was happening right outside my back door:

Oregano – I love the fuzzy leaves on this little guy.

Basil – back in late fall, I relocated a few stalks of basil from the supermarket clamshell container to a vase of water, and instead of wilting, they grew roots! I shook my head, still in Oregon mindset, while planting them – they would never make it through the winter – but this is Southern California, so of course they did, and are now flourishing. I’ve read that plucking the blossoms off encourages them to keep producing leaves, so every day or so I faithfully scatter the delicate white blooms.

Parsley – my parsley plant is looking a bit wild these days; it has bolted thanks to the heat.

But if you peer down inside, amidst the sunburned jungle, you can see there are still some stems worth serving!

As for additional toppings, you could add sundried tomatoes or thin rings of bell pepper or even jalapeno to the butter paste if you want to get fancy about it, and it would certainly fare well dipped into a bubbly saucer of marinara, if that’s your thing. Either way, I think you should make this.

Maybe today!

Are you making it yet?

Garlic Fontina Flatbread

adapted from Food Network’s Spinach and Cheese Flatbread

For the dough:

2 tsp sugar

2 tsp active dry yeast

1 cup warm water (it should feel just slightly warmer than body temperature when you dip your finger in to test it)

2 ¼ – 2 ½ cups bread flour

1 tsp salt (I like coarse sea salt)

1-2 TB olive oil

For the toppings:

8-10 cloves garlic, minced (about ¼ cup in all)

1 stick very soft butter (1/2 cup)

2 TB each chopped fresh parsley and basil

1 tsp chopped fresh oregano

¼ tsp crushed red pepper flakes

1-2 cups grated fontina cheese

Sprinkle the sugar and yeast over the warm water, stir gently to combine, and set aside to proof for 5 minutes or so. The yeast will begin to bubble and smell like warm bread.
In a large bowl (I use the bowl of my electric stand mixer), combine 2 ¼ cups of flour, the salt, and the olive oil, and whisk together briefly. The olive oil will create little streaks of moistness, like barely dampened sand.
Once the yeast mixture is bubbly, pour it into the flour and mix with the paddle attachment or a wooden spoon just until a sticky dough comes together. Then, if you are using a stand mixer, switch to the dough hook and knead on medium speed for about ten minutes. If the dough is still relentlessly sticky by minute six, smearing tackily across the sides of the bowl and schlopping stubbornly on the bottom, add an additional ¼ cup flour to make it more manageable. If you don’t have a stand mixer, plop your dough out onto a floured board and knead by hand.
After about ten minutes, the dough should be smooth and elastic, though still fairly sticky. That’s okay. That stickiness will keep it moist and supple and lovely.
Place the dough – more or less sticky as it is – into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Set it aside in a warm place until doubled. This may take about an hour and a half, but my kitchen was about 80 degrees on the day I made this, so it only took mine an hour to puff triumphantly.
Gently deflate the dough and let it rest for ten minutes. Then, stretch and spread it carefully on a well-oiled baking sheet. If it stubbornly snaps back against itself and refuses to form a nice rectangle, let it rest another ten minutes and try again. The gluten needs to relax a bit after all that rising work it has done.
When you have the shape you want, cover the dough with a clean kitchen towel and leave it to rise again for half an hour, until it has doubled yet again.
While the dough rises, preheat your oven to 450F and prep your toppings.
In a medium bowl, combine the butter, garlic, herbs, and red pepper flakes into a chunky paste. I haven’t added any salt here, because the cheese is salty, but if you are a sodium fiend sprinkle in some salt to taste.
Approach your risen dough with caution: you may be able to smear on the garlic butter paste with a spatula, but you may have to carefully coat the surface with just your hands. It will depend on the texture and elasticity of your dough. If it won’t spread the way you want and you get frustrated with it, microwave the paste for a few seconds until the butter is melty, then pour the mixture on instead of smearing.
Top your buttered dough with an even sprinkle of cheese, keeping in mind that where the cheese completely covers the buttery garlic paste, not much toasting will occur. I’ll leave determining quantities and coverage up to you and your preferences.
Place your topped flatbread into the oven and bake for 15-18 minutes, until the edges of the dough are puffed and nicely browned, and the cheese has turned golden and sizzles. Let it cool on a countertop for 5-10 minutes, just to let the cheese cool from molten temperatures a bit, then slice and serve.

Dried Fruit and Ginger Scones

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Chelsea

This month’s archive makes it look like I’m harboring a bit of a sweet tooth. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but I should tell you this week’s entry is actually at N.’s (indirect) request. A month or two ago, my beloved aunt sent me some specialty King Arthur flour, and along with the packages of semolina and European style AP blend came a catalog. Naturally, this has become my bedtime reading (what, you don’t read cookbooks and kitchen magazines in bed?), and on Monday night as I dawdled longingly over a blurb about Double Devon Cream, N. surfaced from internet-land and glanced at the facing page. “That,” he said, and pointed at a photograph of some cranberry orange scones. “You want scones?” A silly question, apparently. “That.” So here they are.

I did some research (i.e. food blogs and recipe comparisons from the other cookbooks stacked on my nightstand) and found, as usual, that Deb has all the answers. Seriously, is there anything the woman hasn’t made? I adore you, Deb, but really – a person can only repress the green-eyed monster for so long… This adapts her recipe for “Creamy, Dreamy Scones,” which she got from the America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook. I’ve used a combination of cake flour and all purpose flour for a lighter texture, allowed turbinado sugar to stand in for the regular sugar, and replaced some (okay, most) of the cream with whole milk, because I lost my mind this week and, forgetting the intended use of that little container, dumped most of it into an unholy-but-oh-so-heavenly conglomeration of chard, bacon, and bourbon.

These scones take advantage of the bags and bags of dried fruit that inevitably collect in my pantry. You could probably add other flavors as well, but I thought apples and cranberries, and the candied ginger I’ve been obsessed with for at least a year now, would play well together. Apricots would probably be beautiful too (unless you are, like one of my family members who shall remain nameless to protect familial harmony, freaked out by dried apricots because they apparently bear an uncomfortable resemblance to mouse ears).

Scones come together much like biscuits: whisk the dry ingredients, cut in the butter, stir the milk/cream/buttermilk and flavor additions in with a fork. But then, and this is where things can go awry, you have to pat it into a circle and either punch out rounds with a biscuit cutter, or slice the whole thing into triangles. I chose the latter.

This dough is, if we’re honest with each other, an almost unmanageably sticky mess. Resist the temptation to mix more flour into the dough, because the more flour you add, the less tender the finished scones will be. But do be prepared to sprinkle flour over everything it will come in contact with. I used a floured pizza cutter to slice it into eight pieces, which tore up edges and corners even while the dough clung fiercely to the board below.

A bench scraper tool is really helpful for transferring your scones to their cooking vessel – a parchment lined baking sheet would be fine, but I used my brand new enameled pizza stone because I’m so jazzed about it. This, because I preheated it along with the oven, made the scones sizzle as I levered each one onto its surface, and rather than sticking (which I was dreading, since I realized only after they’d been in the oven for five minutes that I hadn’t greased or floured the cooking surface AT ALL), produced a crisp bottom crust.

I left my offering on the pizza stone to cool while I took the dog for a walk, and returned to find it had been accepted.

An hour or so later, it had been accepted again.

These are best on the first day, but will keep acceptably for two or three days if they are well wrapped in aluminum foil and stored at room temperature. Chances are – if your family is anything like mine – this short storage period won’t be an issue. Still warm, these make perfect hand-held afternoon pick-me-ups (the ginger really zings you out of the 3 o’clock slump), but if you want to go the extra mile, I recommend slicing them in half so you have two triangles, stuffing them with Greek yogurt and a decadent ooze of local honey, and attacking with a fork for breakfast.

Apple Cranberry Ginger Scones

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who used America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook.

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup cake flour

1 TB baking powder

4 TB coarse sugar, divided (I used turbinado because that’s what was in my baking cupboard)

½ tsp salt

5 TB butter, cut into cubes

¼ each chopped dried apples, chopped dried cranberries, and chopped candied ginger

¼ cup heavy cream

¾ cup whole milk

Position a rack in the middle of your oven and preheat to 425F. If you will be baking on a pizza stone, put it in the oven to preheat as well. If you will be using a cookie sheet, line it with parchment paper and set it aside.
Whisk together the flours, baking powder, 3 TB of the sugar, and salt in a medium bowl.
Cut in the butter using a pastry blender, two knives, or your fingers, until the largest chunks of butter are the size of small peas (sidenote: “peas” seems the universal size for butter chunks – why is that? Is there no other pea-sized object so regular and recognizable in size that we could call upon? Ball-bearings? Corn kernels? Canine teeth?).
Pour in the cream and milk (or just use all cream, if you have it) and mix it around with a fork until an evenly hydrated, extremely sticky dough forms.
Add the fruits and mix again until evenly distributed (you may have to work a bit to break up the ginger pieces).
Dump the sticky mass out onto a well-floured board. Sprinkle a little flour on top as well, then pat the dough out into a circle about 1-inch thick. Try not to add too much flour, lest they become dense and tough.
Dip a pizza cutter or other thin, sharp knife into flour, then cut the circle into 8 equal sized pieces. You may need to scrape off and re-flour your slicing instrument between slices.
Using a bench scraper, a thin spatula, or (if you are brave) your hands, relocate your 8 scones to your prepared baking vessel, spacing them a half inch or so apart (they will puff and rise a little bit, but not tremendously). Sprinkle the tops with the remaining 1 TB of sugar.
Bake for 13-15 minutes, or until lightly golden on top and cooked through.
Cool at least 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack. Eat warm or cool.

Blackberry Bourbon Bread (#Twelve Loaves April)

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Chelsea

I’m a sucker for alliteration. Call it having been an English major for so many years. So when I read on April’s Twelve Loaves challenge that the objective was berry bread, I may have freaked out a little. And when the idea of blackberries and bourbon zinged into my brain – dark, sultry, tartly perfumed – I may have freaked out a little more.

Blackberries, bourbon, yogurt, and crumbly pebbly streusel all done up in a quickbread that we’ll pretend isn’t really an excuse for cake. How could you want anything more? Well, maybe a warming breath of cinnamon. Granted. And maybe some browned butter.

Just as this is barely a bread, it’s also barely a dough. It only fits into my dough challenge by virtue of its attachment to the idea of bread, which, as I’ve noted, isn’t a very strong attachment at all. Aren’t “quickbreads” really just desserts that we like to eat at non-dessert hours of the day? But it is delicious, and warm, and comforting, and I think we could all do with a bit of that after this week.

Yogurt, browned butter, blackberries, bourbon, streusel, and cinnamon all in the same bread sounds a bit overwhelming, but really, all of the components played very well together. Blackberries and yogurt scream breakfast, and mixed in a thick batter with plenty of melted butter they produce a moist, slightly dense loaf splotched with purple pockets of jammy tartness. But the addition of bourbon makes this a naughty thing to consider having a slice of too early in the morning (unless you are still up from the night before, I suppose). When I tasted the batter, I was concerned about how assertively the alcohol came through, but after baking what lingers is a lovely floral aroma – all the peaty, throat-searing headiness fades (and honestly, it left me wondering whether another tablespoon or two of bourbon might be welcome in the recipe). Really, this is a loaf perfect for that most wonderful of British institutions we are sadly lacking in the U.S: afternoon tea. And if you slathered a thick slice with clotted cream, I don’t think anyone would complain.

Blackberry Bourbon Bread

Makes 1 large 9×5 loaf

For the bread:

1 ½ sticks butter (12 TB, or ¾ of a cup)

2 eggs

1 ½ cups sugar

1 tsp vanilla

¼ cup bourbon (I like Knob Creek)

½ cup Greek yogurt, though likely any plain, unsweetened yogurt would do

2 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

12 oz. blackberries, rinsed and air-dried (I realize this is an odd quantity, but that’s how much was in the container I found. The advantage here is that it means you can start with two pints [16 oz.], and the inevitable handful you end up eating by sneaking “just one more” at a time will leave you with just the right amount!)

For the streusel:

½ cup flour

½ cup powdered sugar

½ tsp cinnamon

4 TB (½ a stick) cold butter

First, you’ll need to brown the butter for the bread. In a small saucepan, preferably not black (it’s harder to see the browning against a dark background), melt the butter over medium heat. Continue cooking, occasionally swirling gently, as it foams up. That’s the water separating and steaming away. After a few minutes, the solids will start to collect on the bottom of the pot, and begin to darken to gold and then coppery brown. When that happens, turn off the heat. It’s amazing how quickly those cooking solids go from perfectly brown to burned. Set the pot aside to cool while you work with the other ingredients (I stuck mine in the freezer on top of a pot holder to chill down quickly).
While your butter cools, preheat the oven to 350F and prepare a 9×5” loaf pan by rubbing the bottom and sides with butter or spraying with a non-stick spray.
In a large bowl (or the bowl of your stand mixer), beat the eggs until slightly foamy. With the mixer running (you could do this by hand with a whisk, I suppose, but an electric mixer of any kind will make it much easier), add the sugar ½ a cup at a time, integrating it completely before the next addition. When all of the sugar is added, continue mixing for another 2 minutes, or until the mixture has become quite pale in color and increased in volume.
Add the vanilla, bourbon, yogurt, and cooled butter, and mix until well combined. The yogurt may break up a bit and make things look curdled, but don’t worry. Once you add the dry ingredients everything will be fine.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Add 1/3 of the dry mix to the wet ingredients, mixing on low speed just until the flour is integrated. Add another 1/3 of the dry mix and combine again.
When you have just 1/3 of the dry mixture left, toss the blackberries in it gently. This will help keep them evenly distributed in the batter as it bakes, rather than all sinking to the bottom. Add this final portion of flour, with the berries, to the batter and fold it in gently with a spatula. This is harder to do evenly, but will keep the berries intact better than using a mixer blade. The resulting batter will be quite thick.
Scrape-pour the batter into your prepared loaf pan. Mine got tremendously full, and to prevent any chance of overflow during baking, I relocated some of the batter to a 6-inch cake pan instead. If you are concerned about overflow, I suggest filling the loaf pan only about 2/3 full, and make muffins or tiny cakes out of the rest of the batter.
For the streusel, which I insist you use because it adds such a nice textural contrast, combine the flour, sugar, and cinnamon in a small bowl. Using a fork to whisk them together works nicely.
Rub in the butter with your fingers or a pastry blender until it is very well integrated. Ordinarily I use a pastry blender for this sort of thing, but here I think your fingers really do work best, since you can squash and smoosh the butter more efficiently. You want tiny pebbles – the biggest should be smaller than peas and the smallest like grains of couscous.
Sprinkle the streusel over the surface of your bread in an even, thick layer. You will probably have a bit extra, but I think that’s hardly a bad thing.
Deposit your loaf in the oven and bake for 80 minutes, or until a toothpick or cake tester inserted in the middle comes out with only a few moist crumbs clinging to it. Since ovens are all different, I recommend you first test for doneness at 60 minutes, just to be safe.
Remove and cool in the pan on a wire rack until you can’t stand it any longer. Then slice and enjoy with tea, with cream, with a dollop of yogurt, or just all on its own.

Goat Cheese and Bacon Biscuits

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Chelsea

I’m not one of those people who is crazy for bacon in everything. The idea of pairing it with chocolate still weirds me out a little, and I’ve never tried it in brownies or ice cream. That being said, bacon is probably the top reason I would have trouble being a vegetarian. Crisp, sandwiched with some dripping heirloom tomato slices and lettuce on toasted sourdough, and I’m dreamy happy. Salty fatty fried chunks studding my bowl of baked beans, and my evening is made.

What I am generally crazy for is breakfast. But not at breakfast time. I can’t handle a big savory meal early in the morning. A fried egg sandwich, okay (and with a little sriracha in the mayonnaise? Be still my heart!). A pancake or three, maybe on occasion. The big, multi-course breakfast is, for me, wasted on the morning. I’m a breakfast-for-dinner kind of girl.

This week, in need of comfort as spring break drew to a close and allergy season burst wide open, we decided breakfast sandwiches were just what we needed. Eggs, bacon, fluffy buttery biscuit, and why not, a little goat cheese?! But layering these components together would not suffice. Thick slices of bacon smashed against a cloud of scrambled egg and crumbles of goat cheese seemed like a mess waiting to happen. I’ve incorporated cheese into biscuits before with great success, why not do the same with the bacon?

The result: goat cheese bacon biscuits. A simple revelation, but let me tell you, a spectacular base for a scrambled egg sandwich. Crisp squares of bacon, cold cubes of butter, crumbles of chevre, and a healthy glug of buttermilk.

These are pretty cinchy to make, though thanks to the addition of the goat cheese your biscuit dough will be a little stickier than usual. Try not to add too much flour – you don’t want them to get dense. They bake up into lovely little puffs, and the bacon stays crisp against the soft dough. The goat cheese wasn’t as strong a flavor as we were expecting, though after the biscuits cooled a bit we did pick up a pleasant tang from the larger crumbles. Loaded up with a simple layer of scrambled egg, and you have a perfect, three-bite sandwich with all the right trimmings. And because it’s only three little bites, you can have two or three without any guilt to speak of. Or four… or…

The funny, blackened stakes lying in a pile in the background of this photo are roasted rainbow carrots. They were incredible. And don’t just take my word for it – I knew they were the real deal when N. carefully sampled one, turned to me, and said “wow.” If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you will know that N. is not intentionally grudging when it comes to food praise; he’s just not particularly effusive about it. A “wow” is like fireworks.

Breakfast-for-dinner slam dunk, then. What’s your favorite?

Goat Cheese Bacon Biscuit Sandwiches

2 cups flour (All-Purpose is fine)