Apple Cheddar Waffles

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Chelsea

Although I object to the idea of swapping all of your usual décor with pumpkins and corncobs the moment calendars proclaim it’s the first day of fall, by the time mid-October rolls around I’m both cool with the harvest theme and starting to crave richer, belly-warming food. I have such ideas about bread, and stews, and short-ribs, and roasted everything…

Los Angeles is making this hard lately. With temperatures in the 90s during two of the past three weekends, it’s difficult to convince myself to cook anything, much less wax poetic about its warming spices and satisfying heartiness. My bedroom feels like the inside of a dryer. I might have fleeting dreams about fluffy, toasty, steaming biscuits mounded with chili, but all I can truly imagine consuming is a series of popsicles and frozen grapes.

But I will say, if it’s cool enough where you are that the thought of using heating implements in your kitchen doesn’t throw you into depression, you should make these waffles immediately. I first made them a month or so ago when it didn’t feel like Dante might mistake our kitchen for one of the circles of Hell. They were so good – fluffy and light from their yeasted batter, crisp and burnished with crackling edges of melted cheese – that it was only a week or two before we had to make them again. Like the grilled cheese sandwiches I pushed on you last year, they pull from the classic combination of cheddar cheese and apple pie. A wedge of salivation-inducing cheese against the sweet tartness of apple desserts is a worthy experiment in many cases, and here, soft, tender apple bits and pockets of melted cheese folded into a crisp waffle drowning in maple syrup is a combination you’re going to want to make all season, if the seasons would ever straighten themselves out. And if you simply aren’t enthused by a recipe that advertises itself with a pile of apples and sharp-as-you-can-get cheddar cheese, I’m not sure we can stay friends.

These start from my basic yeasted beer batter waffles recipe, which is adapted from King Arthur Flour. You can use milk instead of beer if you must, but between the yeast and the heat most of the alcohol is processed out, and the slightly bitter flavor of dark beer is such a welcome addition, balancing the rich cheese and tart apples. The first time I made these I was concerned about the apple pieces cooking all the way through in the short time they are enfolded in the waffle iron, but I needn’t have worried. They are in small enough pieces that they will cook. I like to leave the skins on for extra tartness, but you can peel them first if you prefer. Apples and cheese play well in both sweet and savory directions, so while I think a glug of maple syrup – we like to warm it up with a pinch of red pepper flakes for a little kick – makes these a complete meal, I could also see them providing a perfect raft for a moist thigh of roasted or fried chicken, or even piled with a fresh kale salad studded with walnuts and dried cherries.

Apple Cheddar Waffles

Loosely adapted from King Arthur Flour

Makes about six 7-inch waffles

2-2½ hours (45 minutes active time)

1½ cups (12 ounces) lukewarm dark beer, such as a stout or a porter

1½ teaspoons active dry yeast

3 tablespoons maple syrup

6 tablespoons (3 ounces) melted butter, cooled

1 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 green apple, diced into ¼ inch-½ inch chunks (1⅓ – 1½ cups, approximately)

1 generous cup grated sharp or extra sharp cheddar cheese

In a 2-cup glass measuring cup, or a small microwave safe bowl, heat the beer until just warm to the touch. Add yeast and let them mingle for 5-10 minutes. The yeast will foam up considerably, thanks to the extra sugars and yeast already in the beer.
While the yeast proofs, whisk together the cooled melted butter, the maple syrup, the salt, and the eggs in a large bowl. Be sure there’s room for the batter to expand.
Add the beer and yeast mixture and whisk to combine, then add the flour 1 cup at a time, whisking to combine thoroughly. Switch to a rubber spatula and fold in the apple chunks and the cheese. Stir well, as the cheese may want to stick together; we want it evenly incorporated.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set it on the counter for 1½-2 hours (how fast it rises and bubbles will depend on how warm your kitchen is, but longer rise = deeper flavor). The mixture will develop lethargic and then more energetic bubbles, and begin to smell quite bready.
Once it has had a chance to rise and is covered with a near-consistent layer of bubbles, either stow in the refrigerator overnight, or preheat your waffle iron!
Drop the batter in generous ⅔ cup batches onto a preheated, greased waffle iron (or whatever capacity your iron can handle). Close the lid and cook for the recommended amount of time, or until the waffle is crisp on the outside and deeply golden, with dark crisp cheese lace protruding. Ours took about 7 minutes per waffle. (If you refrigerated your batter for a few hours or overnight, be sure to bring it back up to room temperature before cooking)
Serve hot with your choice of sweet pourable topping. We like maple syrup warmed with a pinch of red chili flakes in it, for a little kick. If you need to keep the waffles warm, stow them on a wire rack over a baking sheet in a 250F oven until you are ready to eat.

Cheddar Dill Twists

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Chelsea

It seems fitting that I should do my first post along with the Twelve Loaves bakers during a month that celebrates cheese. On any given day, you can find between three and six different kinds of cheese in the tiny drawer in my refrigerator. My last two posts have featured it as a key ingredient, and in both I’ve waxed eloquent about using not just some, but MOAR. I seriously love cheese. It’s the primary reason I could never go completely vegan. I could give up meat with very little trouble (though I would miss bacon, I must admit). I could wave a cheerful goodbye to fish, to beef, to chicken, and stock my cupboards with vegetable broth and my freezer with coconut based ice cream. I already use soy rather than regular milk on my cereal and in my weekend chai. But I would have serious problems bidding farewell to cheese.

Even though I know this isn’t true – they had their ingredient chosen long before I came into the picture – it feels almost like the Twelve Loaves baking group planned this month’s post just for me. Bake with cheese. Yes. I. Will. Cooking with cheese is exciting because the ingredient offers such variety. Do you want something mild, or so sharp it makes your mouth water? Do you want a familiar flavor, or something tart or funky or stinky like last month’s socks? And then there’s texture. Cheese already runs the gamut from so soft it seems already melted to the firmness of parmesan that requires a knife point to dismantle. Add to that the different reactions it has to heat: some cheeses sigh into liquid. Some pull into foot-long strings. Some – and this is one of my favorite results – some flatten and solidify and transform into crunchy little cheese crisps suitable for nothing fancier than jamming into your mouth as quickly as you can.

With all of these options to work with, I was surprised by how quickly I landed on a choice. I’ve been playing around with a pairing of dill and cheddar, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to showcase it. Dill goes really well with yogurt, so for a different source of fat and moisture, I decided to use some thick, tangy Greek yogurt instead of butter in my dough. The tartness of the yogurt would be nice with the rich sharpness of the cheddar. And since I like to be fancy, I decided to make little twists, rather than a standard loaf.

Guys, these are definitely the right thing to do. The dill-cheddar-yogurt trio is a chamber group on a good night. They bounce off each other in such a lovely way. But it can’t be denied that the star here is the cheese. It melts into little orange pockets while the dough turns into bread, and the smell of it while cooking makes a better homecoming than much else I can think of. I made one tray of twists with cheese sprinkled on top and one without, just to see which was better. As you might expect, more cheese won the day. It drips over the edges into crisp little crackered pieces you can snap off and crunch through before you dive into the main event.

I had the idea that these would make fantastic extra-large tea sandwiches: halve them into long pieces, toast lightly, slather with cream cheese, then layer with long strips of cucumber. Cheese on cheese is rarely a bad thing, and the cucumber would nod to the dill and provide a crisp freshness and a lightness for the perfect spring lunch. Alas, when I reached into the fridge drawer jammed with vegetables, not cheese, my cucumbers were past their prime. So I had to settle for cream cheese alone, with a side of Caesar salad. I can’t say I ended up disappointed.

Serving suggestion: these are perfect all on their own straight out of the oven. But they do make a nice, roll-sized vehicle for anything sausage shaped, and I can’t see many people objecting to using this as the base for a good solid cheesesteak sandwich. If you really wanted to get decadent, the twists could be split lengthwise, spread with a garlic butter, and broiled into a dreamy take on garlic bread.

To capitalize on the tea sandwiches idea, you could make them even smaller, dividing into 16 or even 24 pieces, and creating miniature twists to serve as part of an appetizer spread with the requisite cream cheese and cucumber filling. I haven’t tested this smaller size so I can’t be sure how much to reduce the baking time – start with 12 minutes and go from there.

Cheddar Dill Twists

Makes 8 sandwich sized twists

2 teaspoons yeast

1 tablespoon brown sugar

½ cup lukewarm milk

½ cup plain, unsweetened Greek yogurt (you could use regular yogurt too, but you might need additional flour)

1 large egg

2 – 2½ cups bread flour

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons finely minced fresh dill

1 cup grated cheddar cheese, if not topping the twists. 1-½ cups grated cheddar, divided, if topping the twists

In a bowl or a 2-cup glass measuring cup, combine the yeast, brown sugar, and lukewarm milk. Stir, then set aside for 5-10 minutes until bubbly and smelling of bread.
In the bowl of your stand mixer, or another large bowl, stir together the egg and the yogurt (use the paddle attachment, if you are working with a stand mixer). Add in the milk and yeast mixture, stirring well, then add 2 cups of the flour, the salt, the dill, and 1 cup of the cheddar cheese. Mix until the dough comes together into a rough ball.
Switch from the paddle attachment to the dough hook and set to medium, if you are using a stand mixer. If you are mixing by hand or with a wooden spoon, turn the dough out onto a floured board. In either case, knead into a smooth, slightly sticky ball with some elasticity. If it seems too sticky to work with, add more flour 2 tablespoons at a time. This unfortunate stickiness may increase as the cheese softens; don’t despair.
Plop the kneaded dough in an oiled bowl (I just spray down the sides of my stand mixer bowl and flip the dough ball over a few times), cover tightly with plastic wrap, and leave it to rise for 60-90 minutes, until doubled. Punch it down by gently pressing your knuckles into the center, then let it rest for 5 minutes.
Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured board and divide into 8 equal pieces. Using the palms of your hands, roll into 18-inch long ropes. As you roll, the middle will get thin and the ends will plump up. Prevent this by pushing outwards toward the ends of the rope (so your hands are moving slightly away from each other) as you roll.
Fold the rope over into a long horseshoe shape, then twist or “braid” it by lifting one side over the other in 3 or 4 tight twists, as in the photos above. When you reach the ends, crimp them together and tuck them under for neatness.
Transfer each twist to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, settling them at least 2 inches apart, and let rise again for 45-60 minutes, until noticeably plumped but not quite doubled.
At least 30 minutes before cooking, preheat the oven to 350F.
When you are ready to bake, if you want to top the twists with cheese, sprinkle the remaining ½ cup of cheddar in equal amounts over each – this will be about a tablespoon per twist.
Bake at 350F for 18 minutes, until the twists are golden and the top layer of cheese is melted and slightly crisp.
Cool for 5-10 minutes, if you can, before removing to a rack or directly to your mouth.

#TwelveLoaves is a monthly bread baking party created by Lora from Cake Duchess and runs smoothly with the help of Heather of girlichef, and the rest of our fabulous bakers.

Our host this month is Robin from A Shaggy Dough Story, and our theme is CHEESE. For more bread recipes, visit the #TwelveLoaves Pinterest board, or check out last month’s mouthwatering selection of #TwelveLoaves enter last month’s Italian Breads!

Buttermilk Goat Cheese Biscuits from That Skinny Chick Can Bake
Casatiello from Cake Duchess
Cheddar Chive Bread from Karen’s Kitchen Stories
Cheddar Dill Twists from blackberry eating in late september
Cheese Babka from Hostess At Heart
Cheese Soda bread from Ma che ti sei mangiato
Cream Cheese and Cherry Buns from girlichef
Feta & Olive Swirls from The Bread She Bakes
Khachapuri (Georgian Cheese Bread) from A Shaggy Dough Story
Pimento Cheese Straws from Kudos Kitchen By Renee

If you’d like to bake along with us this month, share your CHEESE bread using hashtag #TwelveLoaves!

Spinach and Goat Cheese Orchiette with Hazelnuts

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Chelsea

One of the great things about the last house we lived in during our tenure in Eugene – the best house – the party house – was its location. Just over a mile from campus, it was also within walking distance of downtown (for the incredible produce and local craft market each weekend) and the fairgrounds.

The Lane County Fairgrounds played host to … well, let’s call it an interesting line-up of events. Among others, a gem and mineral show, a bridal show and wedding expo, a model train exhibit, and (I am not kidding) a wool festival. In the summers during the County Fair, we could smell the fried food and hear the cover bands from our backyard as the sun fell. Sometimes they were fun. But sometimes it was someone covering Huey Lewis and the News again. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer in the power of love. After all, it don’t take credit cards to ride that train, and far be it from me to critique the theme song from Back to the Future! But several nights in a row, even if it’s only once a year, is pushing it.

Despite its foibles, the fairgrounds also hosted an annual event that N. and I went to every single year. The Friends of the Library Book Sale happened in the spring, and with most books priced at 50 cents or $1, the season was important, because we ended up having to establish rules. A household with two English literature PhD students may lack many things, but what it does not lack are books. By our third year in the program, we already had at least four bookshelves jammed so full we were piling books atop each other and committing the shelving equivalent of double parking with some of the smaller paperbacks. Every shelf sagged in the middle from the weight. Cheap books were a danger zone.

We ended up instituting a rule that we had to walk to the book sale. This required us to get some exercise and celebrate the season, but more importantly, it meant we were limited in what we could add to the collection by our own biceps. If you can’t carry it home, you can’t have it. It helped. A little.

Facing a room full of tables full of books, with more books in boxes underneath, is a daunting task. After I’d perused the “literature and fiction” area and the “classics” table, I would routinely wander to the cookbooks section. Selections here were usually hardback, which meant I’d be able to carry fewer of them, and (surprise, surprise) usually a bit pricier than the twelve ratty copies of Heart of Darkness with torn covers gracing the literature area. But for people with limited willpower, these kinds of hard and fast prohibitions are a good thing. They mean you have to really want what you’re getting, and that leads to better purchases.

I acquired several good cookbooks via this method, including one containing the first yeast bread I ever made (and it was a success!). But by far, the star has been an old annual collection of Food and Wine Magazine recipes, and within that collection itself, the single page that receives the most attention contains a pasta dish by Mario Batali. It features goat cheese, hazelnuts, and red pepper flakes coaxed into a sauce to coat a pile of orchiette, those little domes of pasta named for their apparent resemblance to little ears (though to be honest they have always reminded me more of a lady’s cloche hat).

Batali’s recipe is delicious but basic. He blends the aforementioned ingredients with a smattering of chopped parsley, a glug or two of olive oil, and a healthy pour of starchy, steamy pasta water into a creamy sauce. After tossing the pasta in all this tangy, spicy, nutty glory, Batali adds a dusting of toasted bread crumbs for some needed crunch.

My version, though it maintains the procedure, plays to my own tendency for gluttony. Unsatisfied with just goat cheese, I add some shredded white cheddar for extra savory tang. N. is a fiend for bread crumbs, so I nearly triple the quantity called for in the original recipe. In an attempt to atone for these culinary sins, I also add a tremendous half pound of fresh baby spinach leaves, lightly wilted in the pasta water during the last minute of cooking. Further, it’s gluttonous in its allowances for laziness: the sauce, such as it is, is constructed in the serving bowl, the spinach cooks with the pasta, and though you do have to dirty up your food processor, you can process the bread crumbs and the hazelnuts in it one after the other with no need to do more than tamp it out a bit in between.

The finished dish is a mountain of pasta, caressed with sauce and threaded through with enough wilted spinach to eliminate the need for a side salad (though if you still want one, be my guest!). It’s a study in textures, with the orchiette themselves retaining a lovely chew, the spinach soft, the sauce silky but rumbling with pebbles of hazelnut resistance, and topped off with the perfect golden crunch of the toasty bread crumbs. Behind all this is the steady heat of the red pepper flakes, which I alternate quantities of – sometimes just enough to add a suggestion of spice, sometimes enough to clear the sinuses of the persistent fall allergies the LA basin is kind enough to grant me. Either way, it’s a dish that I forget about in between instances, but once I’ve tasted a fresh, steaming forkful, it becomes the only thing I want to eat ever again. Again.

Spinach and Goat Cheese Orchiette with Hazelnuts

adapted from Mario Batali

Serves 8

1-1/2 cups fresh bread crumbs (whir 4-5 slices of sourdough in a food processor)
1/2 cup hazelnuts
6 ounces goat cheese, at room temperature
6 ounces extra sharp white cheddar, grated, at room temperature
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup minced fresh parsley
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (or to your taste; this quantity produces a moderately spicy flavor)
1 pound orchiette, preferable, or another vaguely shell-shaped pasta
8 ounces fresh baby spinach
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 350F. Once you’ve processed your bread into 1-1/2 cups of fine crumbs, spread them out on a cookie sheet and toast them in the oven until golden, tossing and fluffing occasionally. Depending on the density and size of your crumbs, this will take 10-15 minutes. Once golden and crisp, remove from the oven and set aside.
Use the same food processor, shaken free of bread crumbs, to grind the hazelnuts into a gravel with individual pieces about the size of coriander or mustard seeds (i.e. we want them small, but not quite ground into a paste).
Heat well-salted water to boiling in a large pot and cook orchiette according to package directions.
Meanwhile, put the goat cheese, shredded cheddar cheese, crushed red pepper flakes, olive oil, parsley, and ground hazelnuts into a large serving bowl. Mash it about with a rubber spatula to combine into a thick, lovely, cheesy paste.
In the last minute of the pasta’s cooking time, add the 8 ounces of baby spinach leaves and push them down into the boiling water with a wooden spoon.
When the spinach is wilted but still bright green and the pasta is tender but still pleasantly chewy, drain both, reserving about 1 cup of the pasta water.
Add pasta and spinach to the serving bowl with the cheese and nut mixture. Begin to add the pasta water, 1/4 cup at a time, stirring, until a thick, sauce forms that coats the pasta evenly. This may not take the entire cup of water; thin the sauce just to your desired consistency.
Season to taste with salt and pepper, then scatter on the breadcrumbs immediately before serving.

Apple Cheddar Monte Cristo Sandwiches

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Chelsea

When you tell people you live in Los Angeles, one of the first things they often say is something in the realm of “well you can’t beat the weather!” Well, okay, but you can get sick of it. As I drove home from work the day we had these sandwiches for dinner, one of the local radio DJs said something akin to “is it still summer? I won’t let it be fall yet.” Cue snarling and angry words from me. How could she?! I mean, I like the sun. I love summer. But here’s the thing: I miss my jeans. When I get home from work and evict myself from my teacher clothes, I miss sliding into the worn embrace of my soft, familiar denim. Not to mention spending a day without the hair plastered to the back of my neck. Appetizing, I know.

So maybe out of resentment at the season (or lack thereof, since it just slid from mid- to late September and we spent the last two weeks ping-ponging between mid-80s and near 100 degree temperatures), I came up with a dish that screams fall at the top of its lovely, melty little lungs. Apples. Cheddar cheese, as sharp as possible. Dense, moist sourdough. Sage, that most autumnal of herbs. Maple syrup. It’s a bit of a breakfast sandwich, but since when have I ever been opposed to that sort of thing as an evening meal?

In its preparation, this sandwich takes the Monte Cristo as its font of inspiration. Though I’m using cheddar instead of swiss, and replacing ham with apples that have been gently sautéed in brown butter with a liberal dosing of maple syrup (are you hungry yet?), the whole assembled sandwich gets dunked in an egg batter and then fried until delicately crisp on the outside and limp with melted goo on the inside.

In an effort to be responsible diners, we ate this with a wilted kale salad-ish concoction, but it honestly didn’t need any accompaniment. In fact, the second time I made it in as many weeks, I didn’t prepare any side dish at all, and that and the relatively petite slices of bread I used made me feel completely justified in demolishing two sandwiches all by my lonesome. Well, minus the apple slice or two that I shared with Miss Lucy. It’s tough to refuse those velvet brown eyes.

Your fingertips will get greasy as you eat this. But despite the richness of the cheese and the eggy coating and the caramelized, syrupy apples, the sage keeps the whole thing from being overwhelming. Its sharp, herbaceous note cuts through the cheese, and it somehow miraculously maintains a bit of crunch even buried between the layers of filling. For me, it’s sandwich nirvana.

Apple Cheddar Monte Cristo sandwiches

Quantities for 2 sandwiches

1 tart apple, quartered, cored, and cut into thin slices – I like granny smith

6 tablespoons butter, divided

3-4 tablespoons maple syrup

¼ teaspoon salt

8 whole sage leaves

4 slices sourdough sandwich bread

⅔ cups extra sharp cheddar cheese

1 egg, lightly beaten

½ cup milk

2 tablespoons flour

Heat 4 tablespoons of the butter, the maple syrup, and the salt over medium heat in a 10-12 inch skillet. When the butter has melted and is bubbling with the syrup, add the apple slices in a single layer, and scatter the sage leaves on top.
Cook on medium heat until the underside of the apples is brown, about 5 minutes. Flip the slices over, and cook again to brown the other side, about 2-3 minutes more. Try to keep the sage leaves on top of the apples so they get crisp from the heat but don’t burn. The apples will show that they are almost ready by puffing up and looking swollen just before they begin to get golden, and the butter and maple syrup mixture will get deep, deep toffee colored and become a thick caramel.
Remove the pan from the heat and cool while you ready the other ingredients.
Shred the cheddar cheese and set it aside.
In a shallow bowl, combine the egg, milk, and flour, mixing well to eradicate flour lumps. The addition of the flour will help the exterior of the sandwiches stay crisp – I use the same trick with French toast.
To assemble the sandwiches, layer cheese, then half the apples and half the sage, then a bit more cheese onto one slice of bread. You should aim to use ⅓ cup of cheese per sandwich, but we want to have some on both sides of the apple slices to hold the whole thing together better. Top with the second slice of bread, and repeat for the second sandwich.
In a skillet, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons butter over medium-low heat. While it melts, set the first sandwich into the egg and milk mixture and leave it for 30 seconds or so to allow some of the batter to penetrate the bread. Then flip it over and let it sit another 30 seconds or so. Repeat with the second sandwich.
To cook, raise the heat on the skillet to medium and carefully add the sandwich (or sandwiches, if your skillet is large enough to accommodate both). Cook over medium heat, flipping halfway through, until both sides are golden and crisp and the cheese is melted. This should take about 5 minutes per side.
Slice as desired, and consume hot.

Loaded Baked Potato Biscuits

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Chelsea

I’m not going to say that my mom was a hippie or a health nut. She didn’t stock her pantry with wheat germ or homemade granola, and she didn’t feed us sprouted grains or tempeh (in fact, she probably didn’t know what tempeh was). But she did make a definite effort to keep food choices healthy when my sister and I were kids. Her rule for me when picking out breakfast cereal was that sugar had to be third or lower on the list of ingredients tapped out in tiny letters on the side of the box. I think the first time I tasted Lucky Charms was when I was in high school, where I was quietly surprised that anyone could think of eating this candy for breakfast rather than dessert. The first time I saw someone put sugar into a bowl of Corn Flakes, I was stunned. The only kind of cereal I’d ever put sweetener onto, besides oatmeal, was Shredded Wheat.

Despite the commercials I drooled over for Sunny Delight (back when it wasn’t just a D) and Capri Sun, nothing but 100% juice (and the occasional lemonade concentrate) entered our fridge for a very long time. Brand name Fruit Roll-ups didn’t fly, but the occasional real pressed fruit leather was okay. My sister, seven years my junior, somehow managed to get Mom to buy Squeeze-its, but not until they had a “real juice” component. She also ended up with Lunchables to take to school (I didn’t find out about this until a visit home from college. I was shocked and felt a weird kind of betrayed jealousy – I didn’t want to eat Lunchables now; they looked disgusting! But I wanted to have been allowed to have them when I might have thought they tasted good. Is there even a word for that feeling?).

Given all this, as you might imagine, white bread was not something that appeared in our (paper, please) grocery bags. But my sister and I were not sold on the breads my parents wanted us to eat. Whole wheat was pushing it a little, especially if it had cracked wheat spattered across the top crust. Oatnut and any kind of seven or nine or even five grain compilations were out. And then Mom found Country Potato bread. Do you remember it? It’s golden and mild, slightly sweet but still savory enough to taste good with ham and cheese. The top was often lightly dusted with some residual flour, which was somehow not offensive in the way the cracked wheat pieces were on the bread we refused. We ate potato bread for years. It was soft enough that, once you ate the crust off, you could roll the rest of it up into a mushy little ball, or tear the slice in pieces and make a whole pile of little dough-balls, and then eat those. They squished against our teeth.

In the years since sourdough replaced potato as my bread flavor of choice, I’ve thought again about that bread my sister and I ate. How did they (whoever “they” were) get potato into bread? In what form? Was it mashed? Was it baked? Was it a flurry of potato flakes? Was it potato flour? At the farmers’ market in Eugene, OR my husband and I discovered potato donuts: dark brown, dense, sugar-crusted rings that were mercifully only available once a week, and I wondered about these too. Two beloved starches, baked together, could only be greater than the sum of their parts.

This is all an extremely long way to introduce the idea of putting potatoes in a biscuit. If they can produce bread and donuts, and of course pasta – gnocchi is not, when it comes right down to it, really so tremendously different from a row of fluffy little miniature biscuits that you boil instead of baking – why not a tall, leavened biscuit?

A little internet research showed me numerous methods of incorporating potato flavor into my biscuits. I decided early on that I wanted to use a fresh potato, rather than the instant potato flakes some recipes recommend, which meant I had to be careful about moisture. The potato needed to be cooked and mashed or pureed before adding it to the flour, so that it mixed in easily. However, boiling potato chunks to mash them does add water, and I wanted to keep my potatoes dry so that the moisture could come from something with additional flavor – I was thinking buttermilk. Here, gnocchi was the answer. To avoid adding too much water, here or in those pillowy little nuggets, the potato is baked and then grated into crumbly, starchy strands, which are then easily smashed into smoothness.

I’m rarely contented with a plain old buttermilk biscuit, so I decided some add-ins were in order. Since I was already playing with the potato idea, I started thinking about loaded baked potatoes: cheese, broccoli, bacon bits, sour cream, green onions… I had a roommate once who liked to top hers with salsa and cubes of fried tofu. In the end, though, I decided to keep the excess to a (relative) minimum: crisp shards of prosciutto, sharp cheddar, and a pile of roughly chopped roasted broccoli florets.

This produced a dough that clung together reluctantly, given how jammed with additions it was. But I was patient, after I’d finished throwing flour everywhere, and gentle, and managed to punch out 12 biscuit rounds jammed with bits of green and pink poking out every which way.

This is a dense biscuit, so it doesn’t rise a tremendous amount when it is baked, but it will still puff a bit as the chunks of butter struggle to support the spudsy weight. It emerges speckled with bits of broccoli and browned cheese, and it’s totally worth it in every way. Guys, you have to try these. It’s rare that I run out of food words to describe something, but this is one of those times. If I jammed all the superlatives I was thinking of using into this post, you probably wouldn’t believe me. I’ll keep it at this: the cheese and the broccoli and the prosciutto all lend a crazy-good saltiness (the prosciutto could easily be taken out to make this vegetarian). The flavors are perfect together, and though the potato doesn’t have a lot of flavor on its own, it does make this biscuit fairly substantial. Paired with a salad (as we had), or a nice bowl of soup, it’s basically a complete meal.

As with all biscuits I’ve ever tasted, these are best on the first day, as hot out of the oven as you can stand to touch them. They are perfect on their own, though if you wanted to split one open and add a pat of butter, I’d completely understand. They are, after all, related to baked potatoes. And if you wanted to top them with a roasted garlic or a white pepper gravy, well, I don’t think I’d be in any position to stop you.

Loaded Baked Potato Biscuits

(for flour and potato quantities, I started with Deb’s sweet potato biscuits, and improvised from there. This seems like a lot of steps, but trust me…)

For the potato:

Bake a medium to large russet or other fluffy, starchy potato at 400F for about an hour, or until a fork sinks easily through the middle. When it is cooked through, let it cool completely. Splitting it in half will hasten this process.
Using the largest holes on a box grater, grate the potato flesh away from the skin. In a large bowl, smash or crush the crumbly bits of potato into a smooth mash.

For the broccoli and prosciutto:

1-2 medium heads broccoli, cut into small florets

6 slices prosciutto

Preheat the oven to 425F. On a baking sheet, toss the broccoli with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast for 30-45 minutes, flipping the broccoli pieces over halfway through the cooking process. When done, they should be well browned on the outside and tender in the middle. The flowery bits will be crisp, like broccoli popcorn.
Remove the broccoli to a plate or cutting board to cool. When cool enough to handle, chop into ½ inch pieces.
Place prosciutto strips onto the now-empty baking tray (yes, there will be some broccoli bits and residual oil there. Don’t worry about it – they are all going into the biscuits together!). Bake for 10-15 minutes, or until prosciutto is crisp. Watch it carefully: it burns easily.
When crisp and dry, set aside on paper towels or a wire rack to cool and drain a bit. Once cool, cut or crumble into bits.

For the biscuits:

2 cups flour

2 TB baking powder

½ tsp salt (this doesn’t seem like much, but remember, the broccoli, prosciutto, and cheese are all salty already. If you’re a salt fiend, go ahead and use a full teaspoon, but otherwise, start small)

1 cup grated baked potato, mashed smooth

5 TB unsalted butter, cut into cubes

½ cup buttermilk

1 – 1½ cups chopped roasted broccoli florets

Crumbled prosciutto from 6 strips (you could easily substitute an equal quantity of bacon)

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese, as sharp as you can find

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, mashed potato, baking powder, and salt. You want a homogenous mixture: no big potato chunks.
Using a fork, two knives, or (my favorite) a pastry blender, cut in the butter until it is the size of large peas. This will also help break up any remaining hunks of potato.
Add the cheese, prosciutto, and broccoli, and incorporate until they are distributed evenly.
Add buttermilk and stir with a fork. You are looking for everything to combine into a rough, shaggy-looking dough.
Turn your dough out onto a well-floured board and knead it a few times with the heels of your hands until it is more willing to cling together. Press it out into a rectangle or circle about 1 inch thick.
Using a biscuit cutter or the floured rim of a drinking glass, punch out biscuits by pressing straight down, NOT twisting. This will help the biscuits rise better by not disrupting their layers.
Once you have punched as many as you can from the dough rectangle, gather the scraps, knead them together once or twice, and press the dough out again. Continue until no more dough remains (making one or two funky-looking biscuit bits is totally acceptable: you can call those the cook’s tax and gobble them while no one is looking).
As you punch out biscuits, place them on a greased or parchment lined baking tray.
Bake in a preheated 425F oven for 15-18 minutes.
Eat while hot, warm, or room temperature, if you can wait that long.