Cream cheese and onion dip

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Chelsea

I am a list writer. I love lists. I live my life by them. I am addicted to my day-planner, where I write in even the most menial of tasks (eat lunch! unload the dishwasher!) just so I can have the satisfaction of crossing them off. I have a three page document on my laptop of “blog post ideas” – names and concepts of dishes I’ve never even tried that I’d like to develop and perfect to share with you.

Thus it should come as no surprise that I can’t go grocery shopping without a list. Every week I make one, and every weekend before the big trip, I hand the list over to N. so he can add his requests. He writes funny little notes on random lines all out of order (doesn’t he know the list is arranged by where in the store the product is found?!) and tries whenever possible to convey his desires in puns or wordplay or goofy spelling. A few weeks ago, he wrote “chip-snack” near the bottom of the list. I knew this meant we’d be trying something new – a change-up from the standard yellow corn tortilla chips we usually have lurking about in our pantry.

We came home with thick ridge-cut sweet potato chips. And they were… okay. N. noted astutely that they were tasty, but after a few you felt like you’d eaten, well, a sweet potato. And I guess that’s a sign that they are what they advertise, but maybe they aren’t our ideal snack.

As I was munching my way through a second helping one afternoon, trying to pinpoint what it was about these chips that I wasn’t crazy about (I know, I know, why would I eat more of them if I didn’t really love them?), I realized they just needed a little help. Without as much sodium as a standard potato or tortilla chip, I was missing some of the savory oomph that you really want from a chip. This meant they were going to need a friend to play with: a salty, creamy swirl of dip to plunge into.

What came together, as I played, was the best possible version of a sour cream and onion dip. Whipped cream cheese with a dollop of sour cream for consistency and tang. A pile of well-caramelized onions, sweet and soft and deeply bronze, produced through considerable patience. Salt and pepper, of course, and I didn’t want to complicate things, but it needed something else to break up the richness. That something else turned out to be the earthy herby punch of finely chopped rosemary.

You want this for your next chip and dip party (do people have those? We should). You also want, I quickly determined, at least four people at the table when you serve this, because it will disappear, and you want to prevent any guilt that would result from eating the whole cupful, along with the whole bag of chips, all by yourself.

Other suggestions: double or triple this recipe, spread it evenly into a casserole dish, and bake at 400F for 20 minutes or so, until the whole thing is luscious and bubbly and mouth-searingly hot, then serve with crostini or pita chips. And call me. Because I want in on that action. Or you could roast thick slices of sweet potato with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and pipe this on top with a piping bag in pretty little swirls. Arranged on a big square platter, that would make gorgeous passed appetizers.

Or you can just jam crackers or bits of toast into the dregs of the mixing bowl to get every last creamy bit. It is, after all, your party.

Cream cheese onion dip

Yield: ¾ – 1 cup

½ cup sweet onion, finely diced

1 TB butter

½ tsp salt or to taste

¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper or to taste

1 tsp finely chopped fresh rosemary

4 oz. whipped cream cheese, at room temperature (if you can’t find whipped cream cheese, use regular, but take an electric mixer to it for a minute or two on medium speed before you start combining things – it will mix more willingly and produce a nicer texture in the final product)

2 TB sour cream (I use full fat because I think the flavor and texture is better. It’s such a little bit. Treat yourself.)

Melt the butter over low heat in a small skillet. When it has liquified, add the onions, salt, and pepper.
Caramelize the onions by cooking them over low to medium-low heat for 15-20 minutes. If they sizzle aggressively or seem to be burning, turn the heat down and agitate the pan. You want the onions to get tender and golden slowly. This will enhance their sweetness.
When the onions are evenly caramel in color and sweet to taste, turn off the heat, add the chopped rosemary, and let the mixture cool to room temperature.
With a spatula, combine the cream cheese, sour cream, and cooled onion mixture in a small serving bowl. Refrigerate for 30 minutes, if you can stand it, to let the flavors meld.
Serve cold or at room temperature with sweet potato chips, pita chips, crudités, or crostini.

Jalapeño Cheese Bagels

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Chelsea

Seeing as it’s now been more than half a year since I started this dough resolution, I think it’s high time for a check-in. When I began this project, I was afraid of pie crust. I found baking bread an intimidating procedure: proofing yeast was a touchy business; sticky dough made me wring my hands in despair. My first few loaves came out with black bottoms, and I didn’t have a real sense of the difference between bread flour and all-purpose.

Fast forward. This past weekend, I made bagels. Real, crisp crusted, chewy, bagel-y bagels, studded with jalapeño slices and dripping with sharp cheddar cheese. I’d been thinking of making them anyway, but when this month’s Twelve Loaves challenge came along with a demand for savory breads, it sealed the deal. I know, I’ve used this flavor combination before. In fact, I used it for another Twelve Loaves challenge. You could say I’m rather fond of it. Maybe I need a bit of an intervention. But… jalapeño and cheese! How can you resist? See, the cheese transforms into a delicate crackling lace encasing the top of the bagel, and the pepper slices roast and shrivel in the oven’s high heat, and the whole thing becomes just so savory and interesting, that I want to put it on everything.

Bagels are an odd-ball bread. The additional protein of plain old bread flour is not enough for them – they require the even heavier duty high gluten flour, and sweetener in the form of barley malt syrup, both products I’d never heard of (see note on ingredients below). After a lengthy turn with a dough hook that I thought would break my stand mixer (the heaving strain of the machine was almost too much to take), the stiff, dense dough gets portioned out, rolled into wormy logs, curled and pressed and sealed into rings, and then refrigerated overnight to allow for a long, slow rise that enhances the flavor and texture of the finished product. Upon retrieval from the chill-chest, the rings are plunged into a vat of boiling water before being sprinkled with toppings and levered into a hot, hot oven to bake up shiny and crisp and chewy.

(Obligatory apology for the weird lighting in the pre-topped, pre-baked photos. That’s what happens when you bake at night…)

These are not the easiest baked good I’ve tried. They involve odd ingredients, special equipment (I can’t imagine kneading this dough by hand. Baking Illustrated, my guide for this recipe, says you shouldn’t even try), and considerable time. They require not one, but two methods of cooking, and they make a lot of dishes for a willing but sometimes reluctant ~~dishwasher~~ ~~sous chef~~ helper to wash up.

Yet I think, if you are up for the challenge, that you should take it on. Watching them transform from a scrappy, tough dough into firm rings, and then seeing the crust take on that glossy shine and texture surrounding a chewy, densely-spongy interior, is not far short of amazing. Several times during the process, astounded by how bagel-like they actually were, I said to N., “I can’t believe I’m making bagels! Actual real bagels!” The finished product is a far cry from the soft, fluffy offerings you’d find on a grocery store shelf. The extra labor and the strain they put on my stand mixer (seriously, guys, you should have heard the motor. I thought it was going to die on me right there) make these only a truly special occasion project, but one that was certainly worth doing.

Note on ingredients: I couldn’t find high gluten flour, but Baking Illustrated told me it could be readily ordered from King Arthur flour, if you have that kind of time, and the sweet, helpful woman who swept in to help me navigate the rows of flour in our Whole Foods market said it was sometimes at “crunchy granola” sorts of markets. I used, at her recommendation, a combination of bread flour and a few tablespoons of vital wheat gluten instead.

Barley malt syrup is a sweetener made from sprouted barley with an intriguing, earthy taste, less saccharine than white sugar or honey, not nearly as intense as molasses. I found it at my Whole Foods, but again, if you can’t find it, you might try a natural foods store or the internet.

Jalapeño Cheese Bagels

Adapted from Baking Illustrated

Makes 8 bagels

4 cups high-gluten flour OR 3 ¾ cups bread flour and ¼ cup vital wheat gluten (22 oz)

2 tsp salt

1 TB barley malt syrup

1 ½ tsp yeast (I used active dry yeast; you could also use instant)

1 ¼ cups water (at 80 degrees – it should feel just barely cool to the touch)

3 TB cornmeal, for dusting the baking sheet

1 cup shredded extra sharp cheddar cheese

1 green jalapeño, sliced wafer thin

Day 1:

If you are using active dry yeast, sprinkle it over the water and leave it to burble for a few minutes while you collect the rest of your ingredients.

Combine the flour, salt, and barley malt syrup in the bowl of your stand mixer with the paddle attachment. Add the yeast and water (if you are using instant yeast, skip the proofing step and measure it straight into the bowl) and mix on the lowest setting with the paddle attachment for about 4 minutes, until the dough is in dry tangles. Baking Illustrated says until it “looks scrappy, like shreds just beginning to come together,” which is a perfect description (124).

Exchange the paddle attachment for the dough hook, and continue to knead on medium-low speed until the dough comes together into a stiff but slightly elastic ball, about 8 to 10 minutes more.

Turn the ball of dough onto a work surface. It won’t be very sticky, so you probably won’t need to flour your board at all. Divide the dough into 8 even portions, roll each one into a smooth ball and cover them all with a towel or plastic wrap for 5 minutes.

Once the dough balls have rested, form each one into an 11 inch rope of even thickness by firmly rolling from the bottom joints of your fingers down to the heel of your hands. I found I had the best luck angling my hands slightly away from each other and pushing down and forward, which helped lengthen both sides of the rope simultaneously.

Shape each 11 inch rope into a circle, allowing for a 1-2 inch overlap. Dampen the dough surface where it will overlap, and press together, squeezing and pinching tightly to seal the edges. To secure the seal, put your fingers through the dough ring, resting it at the base joint where your fingers meet your palm, and roll the dough circle over the board a few times with the overlapped portion against your palm.

Dust a baking sheet with the cornmeal, evenly space the dough rings on it, and cover securely with plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 12-18 hours.

Day 2:

20-30 minutes before baking, remove the baking sheet from the refrigerator to let the dough rings warm up just a bit and get the yeast ready for quick action. With the rack in the middle position, preheat your oven to 450F. Pour water into a large stockpot or a wok to a depth of about 3 inches and bring it to a boil.

With the water boiling, drop the dough rings 4 at a time into the water; stir and submerge them with tongs, a slotted spoon, or a little skimmer for about 30 seconds. They will puff very slightly as the yeast expands and then is extinguished by the heat.

Remove the dough rings from the boiling water and drain them on a wire rack, bottom-side down.

While the rings are still wet, sprinkle them with the cheese and stud them with jalapeño slices, then transfer each to a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake 14 minutes, or until they are crisp and golden, and the cheese has transformed from drippy and melted to lacy and crunchy, and the jalapeños are just toasty and shriveled. Transfer to a wire rack to cool before serving.

Warm lentil and kale salad

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Chelsea

I don’t know about you, but when I get home from vacation I feel at once heavier and lighter. Lighter, because the toil of dragging overnight bags jammed with clothes, a laptop, a camera bag, two backpacks, a cooler, a sun hat, hiking boots, a satchel bristling with electronics, a grocery sack full of road snacks, a suit bag of dress clothes for a wedding, another satchel, this one loaded with supplies spanning the randomness quotient from shampoo to a day-planner (seriously, how can we have this much stuff???), and the leash of a dog intent on smelling every single thing she’s never smelled before from parking lot to hotel room to parking lot every other night is finally over.

Heavier, because even though I didn’t cook much, I sure ate a lot. Plus, there’s that whole emotional withdrawal from the glory of vacation, but mostly I’m just shallow enough to be talking about my waistline.

In any case, upon our return from a trip we typically plan out a few particularly virtuous meals to combat the quantity of food we consumed, and the dubious quality of some of those choices – road food is always, alas, simultaneously necessary and a bit specious (take, for example, the Milky Way I bought at a gas station in Coos Bay to help myself stay away for the remainder of the drive to Brookings, which turned out to be open on one side. I threw it away. And then I almost cried). Simple rice and steamed broccoli is one of our go-to homecoming meals. Whatever can be scraped together from the garden and eaten with a light dressing and curls of Parmesan cheese is another.

But now we have a third, which might also become a side for roast chicken, a working lunch, or a base for seared tuna or poached salmon: a warm salad of lentils, tossed with lightly blanched kale, briny kalamata olives, and the tang of feta cheese.

A few days after our return, with pantry and fridge freshly stocked, I considered my starch choices. We eat a good bit of pasta and a fair amount of rice, but our consumption of legumes and pulses is way below par. This had to change. I picked out a bag of green lentils that had slowly been pushed to the back of the shelf as new and more exciting boxes were set in front of it.

Lentils are great for us. They are packed with fiber and protein and folate, which all make them filling as well as nutritious. But like most dried beans, on their own they just aren’t very exciting. They call for additional flavors and textures: chilies or acid or salt, crunch or freshness. Herby sharpness. Crumbly cheese. A dance of textures. You see where this is going.

To give them as much of a fighting chance at flavor as possible, I sautéed some onions and garlic before tumbling in lentils, water, a lone bay leaf, and a bracing hit of red wine vinegar. “And salt,” you’re surely crying, but no! Salt should be added to lentils only near the end of cooking. It can toughen them if you add it right away. I’ve also read that acidic ingredients – like the red wine vinegar I used – can contribute to this toughness, but I didn’t notice any particularly virulent refusal to soften, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

You want your lentils to be fully cooked – that is, not crunchy – but to still retain a bit of texture. They should soften but not fall apart into mush – taste a few to be sure they have achieved the level of tenderness you like, but be sure to do a good sampling – five or six – as isolated beans can cook at different rates.

Once done, add salt to taste, let them cool a bit, and then the magic happens, and it’s such easy magic, it’s worth doing any night of the week. Torn pieces of blanched kale, cubes of feta, and halved kalamata olives. A drizzle of olive oil if you think it’s on the dry side. Faced with this combination – salty, chewy, crisp and fresh and soft – we scooped spoonful after spoonful, and ended up eating most of the pot. So much for virtue.

Warm lentil and kale salad with olives and feta

Serves 4-6 as a side, 2-4 as a main lunch dish

½ cup diced onion

2-4 cloves garlic, minced fine

1 TB olive oil

1 cup small green lentils, picked through and rinsed

2 ¼ cups water, vegetable, or chicken broth

2 TB red wine vinegar

1 bay leaf

1 tsp salt (or to taste)

4 packed cups chopped kale, tough stems removed

½ cup kalamata olives, halved (or to taste)

½ cup crumbled feta (or to taste)

Additional splash of olive oil (optional)

Heat the 1 TB olive oil in a medium pot over medium heat. Add the onions and garlic and sweat them gently for 3-5 minutes, until the onion pieces are translucent but not vigorously browned.
Add the lentils, water or broth, red wine vinegar, and bay leaf, but not the salt. Salt added at the beginning of cooking can toughen the lentils. We’ll wait to season them until they have cooked.
Turn up the heat and bring the pot to a boil, then reduce the heat to simmer the mixture for 35-40 minutes.
After 35-40 minutes, the lentils will have sucked up most of the liquid in the pot and they will be tender but not mushy. You want a slight bite of resistance to remain. Add the salt, stir well, and then pour out the pot into a colander or strainer to drain off any remaining liquid. Pick out the bay leaf so there aren’t any unwelcome surprises later. Set the colander of lentils aside to cool.
Meanwhile (if you are proactive, or in the same pot you just used, if you are lazy like me), bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add the 4 cups of kale and cook for 1-2 minutes, until the leaves are intensely green and barely tender. Drain the kale into the same colander as the lentils. Cool until just warm, or completely to room temperature as desired.
While kale and lentils are cooling, halve your olives and crumble your feta.
When the lentils and kale have reached your desired temperature, add the olives and feta and toss to combine. If the salad seems dry, add a splash of olive oil to moisten things up a bit.
Serve slightly warm or at room temperature.

Espresso Molasses Spice Cookies

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Chelsea

As Molly said a few weeks ago, sometimes recipes are so good they need no long-winded, story-laced introduction. These cookies are like that. You should just go and make them right now. But for the sake of propriety, or normalcy, or expectations, I’ll just explain how these – perhaps the best cookies I’ve ever made – certainly the best cookies I’ve tinkered with my own recipe for – came about.

Perhaps months ago, a friend mentioned molasses spice cookies on Facebook (incidentally, and perhaps obnoxiously, have you acquainted yourself with the blackberry eating Facebook page? Come on by, if you’d like), and suddenly I had to have them. So I poked around, checking one recipe and another, and finally, as I often do, turned to Smitten Kitchen to see what Deb’s take on the issue looked like.

I mixed up a batch of Deb’s recipe, subbing out white sugar for all brown, adding some espresso powder for a bit of kick and rolling the cookies in coarse, crunchy turbinado sugar rather than standard granulated. And then in between bouts of shoving them into our faces, I sent a stack to a few friends, who proclaimed them some of the best cookies they’d eaten.

For normal people, I’d wager this assessment of “best ever” would be enough to declare the recipe finished. But I’ve never been entirely normal. Yes, these cookies were good. They were soft and spicy and warm, and the crunchy sugar on the outside was a perfect contrast. They crinkled into little cracks on top and would have made ideal “bread” for a sandwich of ginger ice cream. But I wasn’t done. I upped the quantity of espresso powder so you could really taste a hint of it against the molasses. I added orange zest for perfumed freshness and black pepper for an additional and different kind of zing.

And then I thought about texture. For years, my dad has been searching for the perfect chewy chocolate chip cookie (more on this achievement in the future, I suspect…), and remains unsatisfied with recipes that churn out cakey or fluffy domes of dough. The first batch of these molasses wunderkind were like that – lovely spice and flavor, but a bit on the soft side for me. Some of this softness was my choice of sweetener; using all brown sugar is always going to leave you with a softer product than white sugar. So will honey. Both are hydrophilic, which simply means they attract moisture and thus stay flexible and soft, even after a few days (case in point: my friends who received theirs via post had no complaints about stale cookies!). But some of this textural challenge is also related to flour.

Let’s talk about flour for a moment, if you’ll permit me. “All-purpose flour” is one of the most misleading claims in the baking universe. Flour – at least wheat flour – does what it does thanks to gluten, which are the little strands of protein that form snaky, chewy chains that result in the stretchy but still pillowy texture of bread. The higher protein content your flour has, the more gluten it has and the more developed those chains will be. The issue is, all-purpose flour is going to have a different protein content depending on the company whose flour you buy, the particular type of wheat used, and, to some extent, the year’s harvest itself. So if you’ve ever made a batch of cookies that turned out perfectly the first time and then somehow, subtly different in texture the next time, you might have used a different batch of flour with a higher or lower protein content.

So how does this relate to the chewiness I was after? Here, as should surprise no one (at least no one who knows me), I turned to Alton Brown. If higher protein flour results in chewier cookies, why not sub in the flour made specifically for gluten development? Bread flour. And that was it. Replacing just a ¼ cup of the all-purpose flour from the original recipe with bread flour produced a cookie that still crackled on top and felt appealing between our teeth, but held up with a bit more resistance, demanding an extra chew or two. The perfect chewy cookie. We planned to bring a batch of these to my family when we went to visit them last week, but as we each took yet another from the bag mid-drive, we realized there were only three left from the whole endeavor – enough for my family to each taste just one.

Espresso Molasses Spice Cookies

adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who got them from the Cooks Illustrated Best Recipe Cookbook

makes 18-20 large cookies

2 cups all-purpose flour

¼ cup bread flour (this makes the cookies a bit chewier. If you don’t care or you don’t have bread flour, use 2 ¼ cups all-purpose. The cookies will be a touch softer, but still amazing)

2 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 ½ tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ginger

¾ tsp cloves

1 TB instant espresso powder

¼ tsp black pepper

12 TB room temperature butter (1 ½ sticks)

2 tsp orange zest

1 cup brown sugar, packed (I used golden brown; I’m sure dark would be delicious as well)

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1/3 cup unsulphured molasses

1/3 turbinado or other coarse sugar, for rolling

Position your oven racks in the top third of the oven, preheat to 375F, and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
In a medium bowl, whisk flours, baking soda, salt, and spices through the black pepper. This will leave you with a beautifully flecked mixture.
In a large bowl (I used the bowl of my stand mixer), cream the butter with the orange zest and the brown sugar for about 2 minutes, or until light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.
Slosh in the vanilla, the egg, and the molasses, and mix well. Scrape down the sides of the bowl again so everyone is included.
Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture and beat until all signs of flour are evenly mixed into a thick,sludgy dough. Again, scrape down the sides of the bowl to ensure full incorporation.
Pour the 1/3 cup coarse sugar onto a plate or a shallow bowl.
Scoop 2 TB (1/8 cup) portions of cookie dough, roll them in your hands briefly to make a ball, and coat the ball in the coarse sugar on all sides by pushing it lightly around the plate or shallow bowl.
When each ball of dough is coated in coarse sugar, set it on your prepared cookie sheets. Cookies should be spaced an inch or two apart; I wouldn’t do more than 6 per sheet, as they are large and do spread a bit.
Bake each sheet 11-13 minutes, or until cookies are puffed and set at the edges. The middles will still be soft, but don’t despair. They will continue to cook as they cool.
Cool cookies on their sheet for 2-3 minutes, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely before consuming, if possible.
You’ll hardly need to know this, I suspect, once you put one in your mouth, but enclosed in a zip-top bag these will stay fresh for up to a week.

Plum Upside Down Irish Soda Bread Cake #TwelveLoaves

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Chelsea

As you can perhaps intuit from the title of this post, this month’s Twelve Loaves challenge was just that for me: a challenge. Called upon to incorporate stone fruit into a bread item, my mind went in a thousand directions at once and came up blank. For me, stone fruits belong in pies and cakes. The idea of combining cherries, or peaches, or apricots, or nectarines with the slow, yeasted rising of a bread was an odd one (although now that I’ve considered it, chocolate and cherry bread sounds fantastic. Inspiration, if anyone still needs an idea for this month?). So I struggled. I wrote down ideas that sounded like madness:

Caramelized apricot yeasted mini loaves, baked in muffin tins too weird.

Plum cobbler not really a bread.

Peach upside down cake not a bread at all!

Irish soda bread with… stone fruit… somehow…

And that was where I landed, nibbling at the edges of this idea. It would be, I decided, a skillet bread: fruit caramelized in the bottom of a cast iron skillet, soda bread dough mounded atop it and then baked and flipped, like the weirdest version of a pineapple upside down cake bread you’ve ever heard of.

Once this weirdness was determined, I settled immediately on plums as my fruit choice. I always forget how much I love plums as a cooked component. None of the insistent fuzziness of peaches to deal with, but bursting with juice, brightly veined, and hiding just the right hit of tartness in that secret microscopically thin layer between skin and flesh. I love that part.

I envisioned bubbling slices of that sweet tartness in a slick of butter and brown sugar, mounding on heaps of gussied up Irish soda bread dough and baking the whole thing into a puffed, flippable cake/bread to have for breakfast, afternoon “tea” (N. and I rarely drink hot tea in the 3pm hour, but love the idea of stopping for a bit of a snack), or maybe even wedges wrapped up in wax paper to take on the road as we head into vacation.

Food Blog July 2013-1932 What I got was a stunner-in-progress. I’m going to give you the recipe for exactly what I made, but I know this is not the final iteration of this dish for me. The plums were perfect: juicy, melting into the caramel and the bottom of the bread, sticky and jammy and reminiscent of a triumphant batch of plum butter my mom made one summer with pounds and pound of plums delivered to our door in a brown paper bag straight from a neighbor’s tree. The bread itself was good: solid Irish soda bread, a little richer and a little sweeter from the addition of brown sugar, extra butter, and an egg, perfect for the breakfasts and snacks I envisioned, and better the second day than the first. But as I dug in, I found myself wanting the bread part to be more like cake: more egg, less flour, a hint of vanilla or nutmeg or maybe cardamom. The plums were so good, so gloriously gooey and tooth-sticking-ly caramelized, that they deserve a proper dessert – something you can watch a scoop of ice cream melt over.

Make this. It’s solid and scrumptious: the perfectly not-too-sweet energy boosting slice. But consider yourself warned: this won’t be the last time you see upside down plum something here…

Plum Upside Down Irish Soda Bread Cake

Serves 8-10

2-3 plums, thinly sliced

2 TB butter

¼ cup brown sugar

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups cake flour (this adds some lightness – if you don’t have cake flour, you can use all AP flour instead with slightly denser results)

¼ cup brown sugar (again)

1 ½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

¼ cup melted butter

1 ½ cups buttermilk

1 egg

Preheat the oven to 400F.
In a cast iron skillet (or other oven-safe skillet), melt the 2 TB butter and toss in the first ¼ cup brown sugar. Stir around until butter and sugar melt together into a sticky, bubbly mass.
Pull the skillet off the heat and add the plums in an even, single layer right on top of the caramel you’ve created. You can place them in concentric rings if you want, for aesthetics, but so long as you have a complete single layer, you’re in good shape. Set the skillet aside.
In a medium bowl, whisk the flours, the remaining ¼ cup brown sugar, the baking soda, and the salt until well blended.
In a small bowl or a 2-cup glass measuring cup (I like it easy), combine the melted butter, buttermilk, and egg. Beat thoroughly with a fork. Some of the melted butter will solidify again when the colder buttermilk hits it, but that’s okay. It will all work out.
Pour the liquid mixture into your whisked dry ingredients. You can make a well in the center first if you want, but the important thing is just to get them in there. Combine with a fork, as you would with the liquid in biscuits, just until everything is incorporated into a rough, lumpy heap of dough.
Plop the dough onto the layer of plums and use a spatula or your hands to press it down a bit into an even layer that covers the fruit below.
Bake in a 400F oven for 30-40 minutes, until the bread is puffed, golden, and reaches an internal temperature of about 180F.
When the bread is done, let it cool for 5-10 minutes. You can use this time to gather your courage, because the step that comes next is a little bit scary.
Place a large plate over the top of your cast iron skillet. Being very careful, and using pot holders because that sucker is still smokin’ hot, invert the plate-skillet contraption so that the skillet is resting on the plate, bottom side up. What we’re after is for the bread to give up its hold on the skillet and drop gently onto the plate with the plum layer on top. This may take another 5-10 minutes.
Once the loaf has unstuck itself from the skillet and landed on the plate, remove the skillet and scrape out any remaining plum slices to add to the top of the cake itself.
Serve warm, room temperature, or cold, but I think this bread tastes better on day two, when the flavors have had time to meld and deepen a bit.

Fig and Walnut Swirl Bread

Posted on July 15, 2013 by Chelsea

As I continue to write this blog, I think a lot about the kind of person I am, and the kind of person I seem to be becoming. I don’t mean this necessarily in a deep, philosophical or metaphysical way (although sometimes those things collide in the expanding corner of brain-space I use to think about food), but in a “what sort of food person am I?” kind of way.

Example: probably about five years ago, I wanted to make fried rice but didn’t have one of those seasoning packets, not even when I dug all the way to the back of my pantry (I can hear you gasping in horror that I ever had one in the first place. What can I say? We all have guilty secrets about one thing or another), so I tossed a few things together and ended up with a sauce we really liked. I haven’t bought one of those seasoning packets since. From there, I added different spices, different quantities, different ratios of garlic and ginger… and suddenly the bags of frozen stir-fry vegetables we were tossing in weren’t good enough anymore. Fresh vegetables were now a mandate. Fried rice used to be a quick and easy dinner! Now it’s a totally from scratch undertaking. And that’s the kind of (food) person I am becoming.

Example two: I used to subscribe to a number of cooking magazines. Though I let my subscriptions run out (their cost made them an unjustifiable luxury during graduate school), I continued to use the collection I’d amassed, restricting myself to cooking recipes only from the current month’s issue: no August recipes in April. This was an attempt to keep myself seasonal and inspired. Well, this year it stopped working. As each new month began, I’d eagerly flip through the appropriate month’s issue looking for something to excite me and drive me into the kitchen. I’d close each issue with a sigh and toss it to the side. There were many, many recipes I hadn’t tried before, but there just wasn’t anything in there that felt inspiring anymore. Well, almost. Once in a while, I’d find a recipe that I’d consider for a moment and then turn to N. and say something like, “this might be good, if you made it into a pasta dish instead of a sandwich and added some sundried tomatoes and herbed goat cheese.” And I’d do it, and we’d be pleased with the result.

After a few months of this sort of thing, interspersed with a probably indecent amount of complaining about how I was bored by these recipes, N. finally turned back and said, “I think you’ve leveled up.” Translation: your imagination has moved beyond what these magazines offer and you are now on to bigger and (we hope, for the sake of our taste buds) even better dishes. And that’s the kind of (food) person I am becoming.

Example three: since I’ve started baking bread, I’ve been trying to plan meals around a yeasty undertaking once a week or so, to keep myself in practice and find “the best” versions of each type of baked good I undertake. This has resulted in a development I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with: though I have continued to buy a weekly loaf of bread (I really like, oddly enough, the plain old sourdough loaf the bakery department at my grocery store produces) when I go shopping, I haven’t bought hamburger buns, or pie dough, or pizza dough, since beginning this little dough experiment. Am I really the kind of person who no longer considers store-bought burger buns acceptable? I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of commitment, but that seems to be the kind of (food) person I am becoming.

Does that make me a snob? Maybe. It certainly makes me one of those “oh, I just made it by hand” kind of people you sometimes feel inclined to secretly snarl at. But no one in the direct friendly fire of these developments is complaining, so maybe it’s not entirely a bad thing.

But it does make things more complicated, and more difficult to achieve, sometimes. Like when I decided I really wanted cinnamon-raisin bread for breakfast, but instead of picking up a pre-packaged loaf as we shopped, I was determined to make it myself.

And then I forgot to buy raisins.

What’s a girl to do, with the plan in her head and the taste already in her brain and the soft chew of homemade bread aching in her teeth?

Well, she chops up some figs, and some well-toasted walnuts, and some hazelnuts for good measure, because she was almost out of walnuts. She whirls together a soft, supple dough laced with brown sugar, cinnamon, and sour cream. Nutmeg and lemon zest find their way in. And she rolls up a crunchy crumbly sweet layer of fruit and nuts inside the dough, twists it to dispense the swirl, and lets it rise into a triumphant bulging loaf.

And what results, after it’s been rubbed with butter and cinnamon sugar for good measure and baked until golden and puffy, is something that drives standard cinnamon-raisin bread straight out of her mind.

The sour cream adds a beguiling richness to this loaf, making it almost unnecessary to add a slick of butter or cream cheese to a breakfast slice. The figs and walnuts are a pleasingly earthy combination, and though I wasn’t crazy about the lemon zest I added at the spur of the moment, you might like the brightness it brings to the filling.

So. Food snob? Maybe. But really, when you’re sitting down to breakfast with a loaf of homemade, fig-filled bread, your mouth is probably too full to complain.

Fig and Walnut Swirl Bread

makes 1 large loaf

For dough:

2 tsp yeast

½ cup warm milk

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

¼ cup butter, very soft, or melted and cooled

¼ cup sour cream (go on and use the full-fat stuff; don’t deny yourself on such a little bit)

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp nutmeg

2 – 2 ½ cups bread flour (see instructions below)

For filling:

½ cup toasted walnuts, chopped, or a mixture of walnuts and hazelnuts

(zest of 1 lemon – optional because I didn’t love it, but you might!)

¼ cup melted butter

¼ cup brown sugar

1 cup chopped dried figs (I like black mission figs, myself)

For topping:

1-2 TB butter, melted or very soft

2 TB brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

Stir the yeast into the warm milk and let it sit for 5 minutes or so to allow the yeast to wake up. It will begin to get bubbly and smell warm and bready.
While you wait for the yeast, plonk the ¼ cup softened butter, the sour cream, the egg, and the vanilla into the bowl of a standing mixer (or into a large mixing bowl).
Add the yeast and milk mixture to the combined wet ingredients and mix them together briefly using the paddle attachment, just enough to combine things and break up the egg (if you are not using a stand mixer, an electric handheld or some elbow grease and a whisk will do nicely here).
Add the brown sugar, spices, salt, and 2 cups of flour. Using the paddle attachment (or a sturdy wooden spoon if you aren’t a stand mixer sort of person), mix just until the flour is moistened and you have created a lumpy dough.
Switch to the dough hook (or turn your dough out onto a well floured board) and knead for 5-7 minutes. The dough will be very sticky – we’ve added a lot of fat and a lot of moisture. Don’t despair. Add more flour a tablespoon or two at a time just until the dough cooperates (up to 2 ½ cups of flour, though depending on the relative humidity of the day, you might not need that much). It will still be a bit sticky, but it will become more elastic and supple and much easier to work with.
Once your dough is smooth and stretchy and a bit springy, plop it into a greased or oiled bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and set it aside in a warm place to rise for 90 minutes, or until doubled.
Meanwhile, prepare the filling: in a small bowl, combine toasted nuts, figs, brown sugar, and lemon zest, if using. Melt the ¼ cup butter to prepare for glossing the dough.
Once doubled, punch down the dough to release trapped gas by gently deflating it with your fist. Turn it out onto a floured board and roll it into a rectangle the width of the long edge of your loaf pan and about twice as long.
Now it’s time gloss the dough and add the filling. Dribble the melted butter over your rectangle of dough and rub it all over the surface, right out to the edges. I’m calling this “glossing” the dough because it leaves everything shiny and glossy and gleaming. You might have a little extra butter; save it for the topping.
Sprinkle the dough with the fig and walnut mixture, leaving an inch or so border on all sides to prevent overflow. You will likely have extra. That is a most excellent thing because it goes so well with oatmeal or with Greek yogurt. Instant snack.
Starting on the shorter side of your rectangle (the side that is the same length as your loaf pan), begin to roll up the dough as you would for a jelly-roll, starting with the middle and moving out to the sides. Continue rolling until all the filling is enclosed, and then fold up the remaining, bare edge and pinch it firmly against the roll to create a seam.
Twist your log of dough a few times to ensure that a pretty swirl of filling is formed as it bakes, then settle it into a buttered or greased loaf pan.
Rub the top of the dough with soft or melted butter, then sprinkle it all over with the brown sugar and cinnamon. Cover it lightly with greased plastic wrap and set it aside to rise again for 30 minutes.
During this second rise, preheat your oven to 375F. When the dough has had half an hour to collect itself, remove the plastic wrap and bake it for 35 minutes, or until the bottom sounds hollow when thumped or the internal temperature is between 180-200F (the thump test is the standard way of checking for doneness on bread, but it seems sort of impossible when you are baking a big loaf in a loaf pan. I prefer to take its temperature).
When it tests done, using whatever is your favorite method, remove it from the oven and let it cool for at least twenty minutes in the pan. This will allow the structure to firm up so it slices nicely, rather than collapsing and squashing into itself when you so much as approach it with a serrated knife.
Slice and consume. The filling can be a bit crumbly, so we ate it with forks like a slice of yeasted coffeecake. Enjoy!