Bread/Pizza Archives

Brioche for Beginners

I’m currently listening to Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France, on Audible. I’m embarrassed it to say that it took me this long; I suppose I thought I already knew the story because I’ve watched both Julie & Julia (multiple times) and Julia (which I really loved; I interviewed the showrunner, Daniel Goldfarb, on my podcast). But there’s something undeniable about hearing Julia tell her story in her own words. The wonderment that she felt upon arriving in France and experiencing not just the famous sole meunière but the cheeses and the sauces and the breads totally reignited my own Francophilia. And that’s why I found myself, on a Saturday afternoon, whipping up brioche from scratch like a real boulanger.

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Holy Sheet Pan Pizza

Some people see the light and get religion. Other people see the light and get sheet pan pizza. That’s what happened to me this past Friday night when I cooked up the best sheet pan pizza of my life here in my own apartment, setting off a smoke detector and freaking out the dog in the process, but oh was it worth it. (Sorry, Winston.) Now that I know how to make a killer sheet pan pizza, I plan to make sheet pan pizza on the regular.

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Makoviy Rulet with Apples and Poppyseed Paste

Baking a recipe at home is hardly a political act and yet, as a show of solidarity, you can’t really argue against it. With all of the horror going on in Ukraine right now, it feels important to honor and celebrate Ukranian culture, especially its recipes. If that sounds like homework, let me put it another way: Ukranian food is delicious and if you decide to give it a go, do what I did and start with Olia Hercules’ Makoviy Rulet, an elaborate Ukrainian braided apple poppyseed bread.

This recipe comes to us by way of London-based journalist Felicity Spector, my second guest on You’ve Got to Taste This. Not only is Felicity a scholar of the region, having won a Fulbright to Harvard where she did her masters, she’s a wonderful cook as evidenced by her popular Instagram page. Our talk today covers everything from the rise of British cuisine to her heroic act helping to gather and deliver baking supplies to ravaged bakeries in Kyiv.

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Got Persimmons? Make Persimmon Bread

And so it was that I found myself at an AirBnb in Santa Barbara with persimmon trees. The trees were so beautiful — I’m mad at myself for not taking a picture of them (sorry!) — it felt like a crime to actually pull persimmons off of them. But pull persimmons off of them, I did, and when I got home with them, they were so very squishy, they almost seemed rotten. But I knew better.

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How To Make Really Great Pizza at Home

As a person who’s devoted most of my life to food, I have certain beliefs that I fervently hold on to. One: never grill chicken breasts for a dinner party. That’s depressing. Two: When baking with chocolate, it’s important to eat a quarter cup of the chocolate in its raw state. Quality control. And three: there’s absolutely no reason to make pizza at home. Order in, it’ll be better.

Pause on that last one. Recently, I felt inspired to try my hand at homemade pizza again after many unimpressive efforts from the past, earning comments like this one:

Nicholas Bergus had a point. I never quite got the dough thin enough, giving up on stretching it while it still looked rather puffy. The resulting pizza was, as Nicholas Bergus says, “more like focaccia than pizza.” When the internet trolls are right, you know you’re doing something wrong.

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I’d Like To Propose A Toast For Dinner (Creamed Mushroom Toast with Little Gem Salad + Baba Ganoush Toast with Scarlett Runner Beans)

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, we had toast for dinner. Now when I say “toast for dinner,” you may be imagining a stale piece of bread, smeared with a little butter and jam. That wouldn’t be a very filling dinner, now, would it?

No, the toasts that I made for dinner were hearty affairs; so filling, in fact, we almost couldn’t finish them. Consider them close cousins of bruschetta; they’re the kinds of toasts that you see sometimes at trendy restaurants, like ABC Kitchen in New York which serves a famous butternut squash toast. The premise is simple: a very thick slice of bread, toasted until very dark around the edges, and then topped with something rich and decadent.

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I’d Like To Propose A Toast For Dinner (Creamed Mushroom Toast with Little Gem Salad + Baba Ganoush Toast with Scarlett Runner Beans)Read More »

How To Add Flair To Your Banana Bread

My dad has a joke he makes whenever someone his age has a birthday: “Don’t buy any green bananas.”

I buy green bananas every week, but I’m only 41. The thing about buying green bananas is that eventually they become yellow bananas, perfect for snacking or slicing on to your yogurt and granola. And then those yellow bananas become speckled bananas, perfect for making banana bread.

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Homemade Sourdough

Hello from quarantine, my long-lost blog readers. I know I’ve neglected you for a while — I’ve shifted all of my energies to Instagram and my podcast — but something has happened during this strange time that calls for me to dust off the ol’ food blog and tell you about it. And that something is that I’ve become one of those sourdough people.

I know, I know: there’s a lot of uproar about making sourdough right now. For starters (haha: sourdough humor), you need a LOT of flour to make it. Not just to make a loaf, but to feed the starter that’ll give your loaf rise. I bought some red fife whole wheat flour on Anson Mills website a few weeks ago that’s been sustaining me, along with their bread flour; but when that ran out, I went to Central Milling and bought three fifty pound bags of flour. At the time, I didn’t really visualize in my head what that looked like (it seemed like a good deal); now I have three enormous bags of flour in my kitchen that I can barely lift, let alone open. (If that sounds selfish to hoard all of this flour, don’t worry, I’m giving lots of it away; and baking loaves of sourdough for friends which I put in my trunk, so I can stay six feet away upon delivery.)

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