Bagels

I started to make more bread yesterday. After the dough had risen once, I punched it down and was about to make a loaf, when I had a crazy idea. I haven't had a bagel since I last was in the US.

So, I rolled some dough into small balls instead, and then made a one-inch hole in each. I smoothed them and set them aside. Then I put an inch of water with a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of sugar in a frying pan, and boiled it. I dropped the bagels in the boiling water for 3-4 minutes, and then put them in the oven for another 25 minutes.

Here they are, my own bagels, fresh and hot out of the oven. These are with whole wheat, rye, and multi-grain flour (with various nuts and sesame). No yeast, just my sourdough starter, but they weren't sour at all. Next time I'll try white wheat flour with cinnamon and raisins, or maybe rye with poppy seeds. I'm definitely going to repeat this experiment.

Tiramisu

I like the combination of coffee and alcohol in this dessert. It's very light, creamy and uplifting.

• Ladyfingers (enough to layer the bottom of your containers)
  
• 4 egg yolks
• 3 egg whites
• 2-to-3 tablespoons granulated sugar, depending on sweetness of liquor
  
• 1 teaspoon confectioner's sugar
• 250gr of mascarpone cheese
  
• 1 cup Madeira wine. That's what I had available, but you can also use Porto, Vin Santo, Marsala, or any liqueur-sweet wine you can find. Coffee liqueur is also good, and brandy works, too.
• 1/2 cup espresso coffee
• 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
• cocoa powder for dusting
  

Preparation:

1. Separate the eggs.
   
2. Beat the egg yolks with one or two tablespoons of sugar (depending on how sweet is your liquor) until it has a light ivory-yellow color.
3. Move the bowl to a double boiler over simmering water, add 1/3 cup wine (or other liquor) and whisk until it thickens. Set it aside.
4. Using a rubber spatula, press and mix the mascarpone cheese until it's a thick cream.
5. Stir a spoon of the sugar in the espresso, add to the mascarpone and mix until it's smooth.
6. Whip the cream with a drop of vanilla, and a teaspoon of confectioner's sugar until it forms peaks, and put it in the fridge.
7. Make a meringue of the egg whites (I used 3 egg whites, not all 4) and fold it into the now cold zabaglione.
8. Pour the liquor left in a dish and dip the ladyfingers in there for 5-10 seconds, sugar side down. Layer the bottom of a container (a tarte-pan) or individual cups, wine-glasses, etc. I used 5 large teacups.
9. With a spatula, cover the ladyfingers with mascarpone, then zabaglione, and then cream. You can make 3 or 6 layers on top of the ladyfingers by repeating with mascarpone, zabaglione and ending with cream. I guess you can even fold everything together and fill the cups up. I used 6 layers, this way it looks cooler, and probably you keep more of the meringue air bubbles, which give it a very light texture.
10. Put in the fridge to set, for at least a couple of hours
11. Dust with cocoa powder before serving

It looks better in transparent cups or wine glasses, but the teacups were all I had. It tasted quite good, not too sweet, and very light and airy.

Sourdough bread

I made a sourdough starter recently, and I use it to make bread, instead of yeast. The process is extremely easy: just mix a couple of tablespoons of flour with a couple of tablespoons of water, leave it in an un-capped glass jar (or plastic container), and every day add another spoon of flour and water. After a few days, it'll start to froth and grow, and smell sour. There, that's a starter, you can use half of it to make bread, and add flour and water to the rest for next time. After it starts growing, keep it in the fridge, then it doesn't need feeding every day.

I read somewhere that you get different strains of yeast and bacteria depending on where you live, the yeast living in the flour you use, etc. My non-statistically significant experience hints that's true. When I made a starter in the US, it doubled in size in about 2 hours after feeding it, and the bread wasn't very sour, if I wanted more sourness, I added more flour after the first rise, and had the bread rise twice before making a loaf. Here, I got a completely different behavior. After I feed the starter (or knead it into dough), nothing happens for 3 to 4 hours, and then, within an hour, it doubles in size. It's also more sour.

I made two loafs, one with white wheat flour, and a multi-grain with rye flour and whole grains.
This is the wheat flour bread, not very sour, but more sour than the simple supermarket-yeast bread I made before. This is good to escort food, or dip into stuff.

The whole-wheat, rye and multi-grain bread had a much stronger flavor, as expected. It was a meal on its own, best eaten with just a bit of butter, or with cheese.

Dinner menu

A few friends came over for dinner on Saturday. I made a salad, one main course with two sides, bread, and dessert. I was planning to make an appetizer too, but I ran out of time. So, here's the menu for five.

Green salad
This was easy. I got three kinds of lettuce-like salad greens, chopped them coarsely, added finely chopped green onion, chives and parsley, salted and dressed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

Main course: slow-roasted pork, with a caramel coating
Get two smallish rolls of pork with no fat chunks. Luckily, they sell them rolled and tied. Stab the meat and plant thin slices of garlic in the holes, total about one clove of garlic for each roll. Then mix:

• a pinch of chili powder
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon

Add a bit of olive oil and make a paste of these, then rub it around the meat. Put a slice of bacon on each piece of meat, the goal is the bacon fat to drip on the (otherwise lean) meat as it melts. I put the rolls in two small oven pans and in the oven, on low heat (setting 3 of a scale to 8). Slow roast for about 2h to 2h30.
Then mix:

• 3-4 tablespoons of brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon mustard
  

Make a paste of these, spoon it over the meat, and cook in the oven for an additional 30 minutes, increasing the heat a bit. The sugar caramelizes a bit, making a nice coating around the meat.

When serving, take out of the oven, move the meat to a dish and slice. Then move the oven pan over a stove on low heat. There should be bits of burnt seasoning, bits of caramel, oil and fat and maybe a bit of meat juice left. Sprinkle a teaspoon of flour in that, and stir it in. Then, deglaze by adding some beef stock, and stir until all the burnt bits are dissolved, and you have a nice thick gravy. I poured the gravy over the meat, and served.

It helped to have two oven pans with the two rolls of meat, because the second one was in the oven while we were eating the first, and I took it out just when the last slice of the first roll was gone. Deglazing to make the gravy takes 2-3 minutes, so it's easily done "online" at the latest possible moment.


Side dish: Mashed potatoes
Mashed potatoes is a very standard dish to serve with roast and gravy, and easy to make. Usually you boil and peel the potatoes, mash them, add salt, milk and butter, and serve. Well, I had a small constraint, I couldn't use milk in the food. So, I substituted that with vegetable broth. I make vegetable and beef stock and store it in the freezer, it's easy and much better than the "cube" things, or the broth sold in paper boxes. I'd made this broth from leeks, onions, carrots, celery, garlic, parsley, fennel, and probably other stuff that I forget now. So I used the broth to make the mashed potatoes instead of milk, and a bit of olive oil. I should have used less broth than I would milk, the mashed potatoes tasted more "light" and less filling than normal but also a bit more aromatic. I think it was good enough for a side dish.

Side dish: mushroom risotto
This one is easy too, except it takes a bit of stirring. In a sauce pan over low heat add a tablespoon of olive oil and a finely chopped shallot. After 2-3 minutes add a tablespoon of butter, and chopped mushrooms. If you have many kinds of mushroom add them in the right order so that they are all cooked to the same consistency at the end. The softer ones are easier to cook, add them last. Then, add two cups of risotto rice, and stir for a minute to coat it with the fat. Have some hot beef stock ready, and with a ladle add a cup of broth, salt and stir. Stir often, and add more cups of hot stock when the previous cup is absorbed. You have to stir often, so that the rice on top (that is not covered by the liquid) is also cooked. Keep doing that adding one cup at a time for about 25 minutes. It took 4 cups of beef stock, if I remember correctly, maybe 5. After it's done, turn off the heat and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley and chives.

Dessert: chocolate and strawberry cake
I might have gone a bit far with how chocolaty this one was. Isn't that great?

For the cake:

• 2 eggs
• 100g butter
• 1 2/3 cup flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 2/3 cup cocoa powder
• vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder (or 1 teaspoon baking soda)
• pinch of salt
  

Butter and flour a cake pan, and set the oven to 180C (350F). Beat the butter and sugar, add the eggs, and beat for 5 minutes. Then add the milk, sift the solids through a sieve, and add them while mixing, little by little. Pour the mix in the cake pan, and bake for 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean from the center. Set aside for a while to cool down.

While it cools down, make the strawberry filling.

• 1 packet of strawberries
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup white dessert wine: Vinsanto would be nice here, but I didn't have any, so I used one I found on the local grocery store.
  

Wash and chop the strawberries in half-inch cubes, sprinkle with the sugar and set aside for 5 minutes.

Then put a frying pan on low heat, and melt the butter. Add the strawberries with any liquid that they've sweated, and the wine. Simmer until it thickens a bit. Let it cool.

Then, make a ganache. Warm up some heavy cream, and pour it over chopped chocolate, stir until smooth and shiny. Set aside to cool. I didn't measure the quantities, it was a big bar of chocolate (minus the bits I ate), and about a cup of cream.

When everything has cooled down, cut the cake into layers. I cut it in three layers. You can use a long serrated knife and try to make the layers have the same width everywhere. Or, you can use a knife to draw a shallow "guide" around the cake, wrap it with a piece of thread that goes in the guide, and pull the thread to cut it evenly. I wanted it to be moist, so I made a quick syrup by mixing another cup of the sweet wine with a bit from the liquid in the strawberries, and I spooned it in the three layers. Using liqueur instead of the wine would have been better, maybe dark rum, or Grand Marnier, or kirsch, or a mix of brandy and fruit syrup, or something like that. Well, I didn't have any, I only had the sweet wine.

Assemble the cake carefully, starting with the layer that was on top of the cake as it was baked, so that you'll end up with the nicely round-shaped bottom part on top. Spread half the cooked strawberries on it, and then pour some of the ganache on them, not much, you want to be left with half the ganache at the end. Add the second layer and repeat. Add the third layer so that the round bottom-part of the cake is on top. Unfortunately, I managed to break my top layer in two, when transferring it, but managed to hide it at the end. After it's assembled, spoon some of the ganache left on top, and carefully spread it so that you barely push it to drip on the sides. Add more ganache on top and keep doing that, until the ganache has dripped all around the cake. Smooth carefully around the sides if necessary to cover all of it. Try to avoid pouring all the ganache at once, and then pushing lots of it over the same side, because you'll end up with a partly iced cake, in a pool of ganache, not good. Then wipe the plate all around the cake with a napkin to make it look better, and put it in the fridge for the ganache to set.

After a couple of hours, it's ready to decorate. I melted some white chocolate and poured it on the cake with a spoon to make random shapes, then chopped two strawberries and sprinkled it. Here's how it looked.

This is the inside view, it was quite moist, very chocolaty, and the sourness of the strawberries broke the heaviness of too-much-chocolate, balancing it out.

I was left with a cup of sweet wine, not enough to serve to my guests, and I don't like sweet drinks too much, so I decided to make a zabaglione sauce with it. Usually people make that with champagne, but sweet wine will do. In a metal bowl put two egg yolks and two tablespoons of sugar. Mix immediately, otherwise the sugar will dehydrate the egg-yolks and "cook" them, and you'll have bits in your sauce. Put the metal bowl over (but not touching) almost-simmering water, and mix. After a minute add the wine, and whisk until it's foamy and thick. You can serve it like that, warm, over fruit. Alternatively, whisk some more to make it like a mousse, and then you can serve it cold too. I added a spoon around every piece of cake.

Here's a piece of cake, served with a couple of spoons of zabaglione sauce around it. The sauce could have been served to look better, but I didn't care for appearance much at that point.

Panna cotta

Here's an easy dessert, the only drawback being you have to do it a few hours ahead. I made some one night, and had one for breakfast the next day. Put some milk over medium heat, add sugar and some vanilla, stir every now and then so that it doesn't stick, until it is close to a boil but not boiling. In the mean time, dissolve some gelatin in cold milk. When the milk is almost boiling, take it off the heat, add the dissolved gelatin. Pour the liquid in the ramekins and put in the fridge overnight. I made some caramel syrup and poured on top in the morning, it would have been better with marmelade or fruit syrup, but I didn't have any. A light, refreshing dessert.

UPDATE: I just thought you might want to know that gelatin is not vegetarian food, it's a meat product.