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New Years Breakfast — buckwheat blini

Posted in Breakfast, ingredients on January 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Happy New Year!

We didn’t celebrate late into the night (still recovering from a long flight and a very late arrival home the night before), but before we went to bed we did manage to pull together the batter for a wonderful New Year’s tradition (well, it should be a tradition, anyway), what the Joy of Cooking calls Raised Buckwheat Blini.

Blini are little pancakes, traditionally associated with Lent in Russia and the Ukraine, served with caviar or, in my house, smoked salmon, and creme fraiche. Raised refers to the fact that they are made with yeast and need to rise for at least an hour before making (I refrigerated the batter overnight after it’s initial rise). The yeast makes them light and airy, the buckwheat gives them a nutty flavor and a lovely brown color.

They can be made on an ordinary griddle, like any other pancakes, but they are even better when made on a “platar” or “plett” pan.

Here’s the recipe, straight from the pages of the Joy of Cooking (1997 edition).

Raised buckwheat blini

1 ½ cups milk

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 teaspoons active dry yeast

2/3 cup all-purpose flour

2/3 cup buckwheat flour

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

3 large eggs, lightly beaten

Combine the milk and butter in a saucepan and heat gently until the butter has melted. Remove from the heat and let cook until it is between 105 and 115 degrees F. Sprinkle with the yeast and let stand until the yeast is dissolved (about 5 minutes).

Whisk together flours, sugar and salt in a medium bowl and pour the wet ingredients over them, whisking until just combined. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until the batter has doubled in volume, about one hour.

Once the batter has risen you can make the pancakes right away, or refrigerate the covered bowl for up to 24 hours; let stand at room temperature for about 20 minutes before proceeding.

Stir to deflate the batter and whisk in the lightly beaten eggs.

Prepare and preheat your platar or griddle. For the platar, spoon or pour about 2 tablespoons batter into each depression. Cook until the top of each blini is speckled with bubbles and some of the bubbles have popped, then turn and cook until the underside is lightly browned. (The easiest way to turn blini is to spear them with a thin skewer, nail or knitting needle; you can also slip a narrow icing spatula under the cakes.) If you are using a griddle, spoon a scant ¼ cup of batter for each pancake, leaving space between cakes for some expansion. Serve immediately or keep warm in a 200 degree oven while you finish cooking the rest.

They are also good with a little jam on top (Marionberry in this case).

Fresh grapefruit as a side,

and everyone is sure to clean their plate.

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Quick and easy homemade jam

Posted in Breakfast, cooking, food on June 21, 2010| 6 Comments »

Now that berries are finally here I find myself coming home from the farmer’s market loaded down with more fruit than even I can eat. The solution? Make jam, and make it right away, before those berries get overripe.

How do I find the time to make jam? I use my handy dandy bread machine! Yes, my bread machine (an older version of this one) has a jam setting that makes jam-making easy and fun.

So far I’ve made two batches — strawberry (with amazing Hood strawberries, a particularly flavorful small berry that is only around for a few short weeks in the early part of the strawberry season) and raspberry. Both were amazing, though if I had to choose, I’d give the raspberry a slight (very slight) edge.

The recipe is really easy and quick (one note — this only works in bread machines with a “jam” cycle).

Bread Machine Berry Jam
(adapted from The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook by Beth Hensberger)

3 cups fresh strawberries or raspberries
1 cup sugar
¾ package of Sure-Jell (or other powdered pectin)
2-3 tablespoons lemon juice (use more or less to taste)

If using strawberries, crush the berries roughly before adding them to the bread machine. This step can be skipped with raspberries.

Put all of the ingredients into the pan of the bread machine and let them sit for about 15 minutes or until the the sugar begins to dissolve.

Set the Bread Machine on the JAM setting, push start, and let the machine do the work.

When the jam is ready, spoon it into canning jars, cover and refrigerate. Your jam may be a bit runny at first; it will thicken as it cools.

These jams will keep in the refrigerator for up to 2 months. You can also spoon jam into plastic bags and freeze if you want to keep it longer.

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Baking David Lebovitz’s Chocolate Bread

Posted in baking, Breakfast on May 14, 2010| 9 Comments »

The minute I saw this post on David Lebovitz’s wonderful blog, I knew I had to make Chocolate Bread. I mean, how could I resist? Chocolate bread? What a great idea. Not a new one, even to me, but this recipe was both relatively straight-forward and annotated with lots of notes about each ingredient choice. I was hooked.

Of course, I had some questions to answer first. DL recommends using a Dutch process cocoa powder and I wanted to use my current favorite, Green and Black’s Organic Cocoa. Was it “Dutched” (aka alkalized)?” Yes.

DL also calls for bread flour (though he says all-purpose will do in a pinch) so I replenished my supply of King Arthur bread flour (it turned out I had some sitting around, but since I wasn’t sure how old it was, getting fresh flour was a good idea).

DL’s recipe cites toasted nuts as an optional ingredient. Being a resident of Portland, where I can get freshly roasted hazelnuts at the Farmer’s Market most of the year, I chose to add those incredibly tasty nuts to this batch.

Finally I bought and chopped some Scharffen Berger 70% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate.

Ingredients assembled, I waded in. The dough came together easily in my mixer, looking (as DL mentions) almost like brownie batter when fully mixed — very soft and not at all like most bread dough.

After a couple of rises (2 hours in the bowl, just over an hour in a loaf pan) I slid the bread into the oven.

And, oh! the smell. Better than bread alone, better even than brownies baking, my whole kitchen was filled with the warm scent of chocolate and the yeasty smell of bread — a combination almost impossible to describe. The scent alone makes baking this bread worth it.

Of course it tastes pretty darn good, too!