Toast

A Gratuitous Advertisement and Some Vegetarian Party Food

I have probably mentioned this before, but Trader Joe's all-butter frozen puff pastry is the answer to a prayer. Sure, anyone can make their own delicious puff pastry, as a certain anapestic frequently reminds us. But a person is not always motivated sufficiently to cover herself and her kitchen in flour. If I only had puff pastry as often as I made it myself, I would be a thinner, but perhaps not so happy woman. And the thing is- I really can't stand the standard Pepperidge Farm frozen stuff from the freezer case at the Iggle.

I actually used to think it was fine. It was the first approximation of puff pastry I'd ever had. And puff pastry is an amazing, brilliant invention, which naturally knocks one's socks off, even in its least lovely form. After a several experiences of the good stuff, from pastry shops and restaurants, that particular ready-made kind of frozen stuff began to taste of oil and chemicals to me. Wishful thinking kept me going with it for a while. But either it's gotten worse, or I'm just pickier. And until the Trader Joe's thing, the only all butter stuff on offer in my part of the USA was incredibly expensive- out of my league- at Williams-Sonoma.

So if you live near a good bakery willing to sell you some of theirs, more power to you. I don't, and I'm therefore especially grateful to the Trader Joe group for bringing this buttery goodness my way. End of uncompensated commercial message.

With this stuff in the freezer, you can make all kinds of yummy special stuff at a moments notice, including one of my very favorite snacks- Shammi's egg puffs. What you see above is a rough approximation of a recipe I saw in an English cooking magazine called "Delicious". With a salad, it would make a nice vegetarian dinner party menu, I think. I actually just made one for me, and have been taking leftovers for lunch, cold. Very french picnic-y, I feel.

To make it you need:

one package (about 450 grams if you are making your own, and shaming me) of all butter puff pastry
a package of prepared hummous (or, you could shame me thoroughly, and make your own)
various cut up veggies for roasting- your choice (I used some very dense cremini mushrooms, eggplant, zucchini, red peppers, shallots, fennel, parboiled, peeled fingerling potatoes, and whole garlic cloves. Sliced onions are a bad idea- they made it hard to cut the pie-too bad, as the red ones taste great roasted)
an egg yolk, beaten with a little milk
chopped fresh cilantro
cumin seed or rosemary
olive oil spray or olive oil

Preheat oven to 425F. Cut the veggies into bit sized pieces- neither too tiny nor too large. You want them fairly chunky, but you also want to be able to cut the pie. Set them on a foil lined baking sheet. Coat thinly with olive oil, and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and the cumin or rosemary. Meanwhile, if using frozen pastry, take it out to defrost. It should be in two equal sized parts.

Bake the veg until browned and a little crusty, and remove from the oven. (This will take varying amounts of time, depending on the vegs you chose, and your oven. You have to check. I did my whole thing in the convection toaster oven, which is very fast. It is a good idea, when using vegs of varying cooking times, to make the longer cooking kind into smaller pieces- the quicker cooking, chunkier.)

Remove foil and veg, and line the baking sheet with parchment. Set one piece of the pastry down on the parchment, and brush about 1" of the outside edge with the egg mixture. Spread the remainder of the surface with a layer of hummous. If you have some left, mix it in with the roasted vegs. Pile the roasted veg over the hummous, leaving the eggy border bare. Sprinkle chopped cilantro over the veg.

With a rolling pin, roll out the second sheet of pastry so that it is just a little bigger and thinner than the covered piece. Carefully set it on top of the veg, and press to seal the pastry edges together. Use your fingers to mold it over the veg, so there are no air pockets. If the top pastry edge overlaps the bottom one , trim the borders to make the top and bottom even. Press all around with a fork, to further seal, and cut 3 diagonal slits on top, using a very sharp knife. Brush top with remainder of egg mixture. This takes about 35 minutes to bake, but watch it. Mine (above) got a little too brown.

You can actually freeze this before baking, defrost and bake when needed. Not bad, but it's better all fresh.

Raised Cabbage Pie

If you are just going to have a quick supper, before or after you go out, it is nice to have something simple you can serve at room temperature, with a beer or a glass of wine and a salad. This is a pretty elegant alternative, I think, and not too fussy to make. It would make quite a classy picnic in better weather, and I intend to take wedges to work for lunch. It could easily be the major part of a party-ish lunch for guests, including vegetarians.

From Moscow, via Massachusetts, and adapted from Nick Malgieri's Baker's Tour, Pirog Kapustoi was fun to make, and I think it looks damn cute, too. NM notes that it can also be made with a flaky pastry, if you prefer, rather than the raised dough. I really like the raised dough with a savory pie, though. I've got my eye on another recipe from the same cookbook, which has a brioche-like dough, and a cheese/ham/pea filling. It's a little more of an undertaking, but I think I'll give it a try, too. If you would like to make this freeform cabbage pie, you will need:

Raised Crust

warm water one cup
dry yeast 2 1/2 tsp
unbleached APflour 3 cups
salt 1 tsp
unsalted butter, melted and cooled 3 tbsp

Filling
finely shredded cabbage-pref savoy 1 1/2 lbs
salt 1/2 tsp
unsalted butter 2 tbsps
1 clove garlic, minced
sugar 2 tsps
hard cooked eggs, chopped 2
tarragon, to taste

Cover a cookie sheet with parchment, and make the dough:

Pour the water into the bowl of an electric mixer, and whisk in the yeast. Add flour, salt and butter, and stir with a rubber spatula. Mix, with dough hook, on lowest speed for 2 minutes. Cover and let it rest 10 minutes. Then, mix on medium speed for 3 to 4 minutes, til smooth. Plop into a buttered bowl, and flip it to butter all sides. Cover and let it rise til doubled, about an hour.

Toss the cabbage with salt, and wring it out to get as much moisture out as possble. Melt butter, add cabbage, tarragon, garlic and sugar, and cook down, stirring until cabbage is wilted and reduced, and fairly soft. Cool. Fold in chopped eggs. Preheat oven to 400F.

Divide the dough in half. On a floured surface, roll the dough to a 10" disk, handling as little as possible. If it is resistant, let it rest a bit before trying to extend it further. Transfer dough to parchment covered pan. Spread filling on dough, leaving an outside border of one inch. Grate fresh black pepper over all.

Now, roll out the 2nd half of the dough as you did the first. Brush the outer rim of the bottom crust with water. Fold the top crust in quarters. Set it over the filled bottom crust, with the point in the center of the filling, and unfold neatly. Press around the edges firmly, and roll both crusts in toward the center 1/2". Squash the edges together with a fork, to seal. Cut several vent holes in top crust. Brush all over with water, and bake about 30 minutes, until it is a nice golden color. Cool on a rack, and serve at room temperature.

I added the garlic and tarragon, which I love with cabbage, thinking that the seasoning in the original was a bit subtle for my taste. Even with these additions, this pie benefits from being served with a sharpish sauce, or something pickled. I served it with a sourcream/horseradish mixture; something mustardy would also be good.

Rosemary Potato Pizza

I have spent quite a bit of time lately trying new recipes -including puff pastry and English muffins. This has been a lot of fun, and I intend to make both again, possibly often. Trying new things can be very entertaining. But it is also good to make certain things over and over , sometimes with slight variations. I like to do this until I have more or less decided on a favored version of a dish and absorbed it. Some things, of course, I abandon, when they prove less interesting than they first seemed. It is a pleasure to make food that bears repeating.

Blog writing, of course, is not necessarily suited to this repetitive or cyclic side of cooking. "Yep, I made a roast chicken again tonight" is not what I feel like writing, anyhow. But different aspects of familiar ingredients sometimes appear suddenly highlighted to me. Right now, probably due to the astonishing behavior of puff pastry and the delightful crannies of the english muffin, I have wheat flour and it's clever tricks on my mind. It is astounding what flour will do, under peculiar circumstances. A particular favorite recipe involving strange morphing dough behaviour is the Potato Pizza from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking, which she got from the Sullivan Street Bakery, a place I have never been.

Whoever created this pizza dough was not only inventive, but also very persistent, for it is quite ornery. If no one had told me that it would work, I'd have given up on it, myself. Yet if you keep on, it always comes out right in the end. It makes a wonderful chewy/crispy crust, a marvelous combo with the creamy/crispy potatoes- very greed inducing stuff. And it is perfectly delicious made in an ordinary home stove-though no doubt it would be even better in a woodfired oven. It is a standby of mine. It can, of course, be a supper by itself, with a salad. But I have also served it to friends as a side dish at dinner, cut into rectangles that you can pick up and munch. Please note that the ingredients are so cheap as to be practically free.

In addition to persisting with the dough, it is very important to oil the pan thoroughly, and to dry the potatoes well in a kitchen towel. Failure to do either can result in extreme, irreparable stickiness. (Being more usually a cook than a baker, I always have to remind myself, when baking, that I cannot simply follow my taste and instincts changing things, and expect them to work, as in ordinary cooking. This is not to say, obviously , that I never vary baked things . It seems best, though, to make a recipe as is at first when baking, so I can see what it is supposed to be like, and how it works.) By the way, this recipe needs a stand mixer, for sure.

Anyway, after all that preliminay yakking, here's how it's done.

You need:
1 3/4 cups King Arthur's unbleached all purpose flour (or half ordinary unbleached AP flour and half bread flour)
1/4 tsp instant yeast
1 1/4 cups lukewarm water
1/2 tsp sugar 1/2 tsp salt
7 big yellow fleshed potatoes
sea salt
a large yellow onion, peeled, cut in half and sliced thinly
fresh rosemary
lots of extra virgin olive oil

This is what you do:
Put the flour and yeast in the mixer bowl. Using the paddle attachment, mix on low, while slowly pouring in the water. Increase speed to medium and mix for 20 minutes-really! You will see it change from a sloppy batter into a surprising shiny, coherent but wet mass, clinging to the paddle. When it is cleaning the sides of the pan this way, add the salt and sugar, and mix a couple of minutes more, to combine it thoroughly. Detach it from the paddle if necessary. Cover and let rise about 4 hours, until it becomes quite light.

This will make a whole half sheet pan of pizza. Or, you can make a combination of smaller pans. Oil your pans very generously with olive oil. Also oil your hands. Spread the dough into a very thin layer in the pan, from the middle, as far as you can without ripping it. When you think you can't get it to go any further, let it rest for 10 minutes, and have another go. Voila! It will stretch a bit more. It can take as many as three or four approaches to get it all the way to the edges. Persist.

Once the dough is covering the pan, cover the whole thing loosely (try not to let the covering touch the dough, it will stick) and let it proof for an hour, until it has begun to be a little puffy. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 425F, and prepare the topping. Slice the potatoes very thinly, with a mandoline if you have one. Lay them on a big clean kitchen towel, and sprinkle them with salt. Let them sit for 10 minutes, exuding liquid. Then twist the towel up and wring out as much liquid as you can, over the sink. Open the towel, turn them into a fresh towel, and pat them dry. Toss them with the onions and the fresh rosemary to taste.

Spread the topping over the pizza. Brush or spray with olive oil, and sprinkle with more sea salt. Bake about 40 minutes, until the potatoes are nice and crusty and soft enough to pierce with a knife. You can cut this stuff with scissors if you like. I love it.

By the way, I cheat a tiny bit sometimes, using a large flat round pizza pan, which has slightly less surface area than the half sheet. When I do this I try to compensate by making a pinched edge, so it won't lose the ultra thin wonderfulness. At any point in the proceedings, if bubbles appear, try to puncture as few as possible. They are a highly desirable feature, if you are lucky enough to have some make it to the finished product. I adore this pizza.

The Egg Puff Derby: Rough Puff to the Test

With a lot of advice and some great photos from anapestic, I made "rough"puff pastry for the first time this weekend. I now have 2 lbs of it in the freezer,as well as 6 onion egg puffs, and a mini apple tart. It worked out well, and it was fun to do.

With a significant taste differential, I think I'm ready to give up the store stuff, at least until it's possible to buy all-butter puff pastry for a reasonable price in Pittsburgh. I don't really bake with it that often. Thus, 2 lbs in the freezer is a pretty good hoard, and I think by the time I need more, I'll probably be up for doing it again.

So I decided to evaluate my product, as compared to the stuff from the shop. My first ever, "rough" all-butter puff pastry, made into Shammi's Egg Puffs, took on the store bought frozen misc. ingredients puff version in two, highly simplified categories:

I. Appearance: You can see the others here, where you can also find the link to Shammi's delightful and simple recipe for this supper/lunch/treat item. I think the all-butter homemade pastry ones are prettier, better browned and pouffier, although they are also less tidy, due to their greater lift pulling things apart a bit. I can remedy this next time, by using a larger slice of pastry for each puff. As you can see, if you follow the chain of links to Shammi's original post, hers are nicely browned and tidy looking. She didn't say what sort of puff pastry she used, except that it was "frozen." She lives in England, and probably has more market choices for readymade puff.

2. Taste: No contest, the homemade pastry is delicious and buttery and sets the filling off beautifully. The store-bought misc. ingredients one tasted dubious at best, as I noted at the time I first made them.

I've got a clear winner here, and for a bonus, a nice little tart for dessert. Not bad for an evening's work. I can't recommend the above-linked photos too highly, and it was really easy to follow the connected "rough puff" recipe. (I did experience a slight glitch due to the limited capacity of my stand mixer-there was a brief flour storm, soon controlled. It was a little preview of what I'll look like when all my hair goes white-unless I dye it. Which I will.) I also commend to you, if you do not have one, the pastry marble. It's so cool. Literally. Please excuse me, I'm a bit giddy with success.

Sort of Samosas

So I bought a package of frozen puff pastry thinking to make my favorite lemon tart with the Meyer lemons which appeared unexpectedly in the Giant Eagle this week. I thought I would have the lemon tart for a dessert when my friend came to dinner , and write about the little Meyer Lemon tree on my windowsill at work, and this would be very nice. But a person who does not make sure she has sugar in the house cannot expect to make a lemon tart. That will have to wait.

Still, I will only need one of sheet of puff pastry to make the tart, and there are two in the box. So I decided to make some puff pastry samosas for my supper, and here they are. They are based on the ones in the excellent Indian Home Cooking by Suvir Saran. I did not have all the things for the recipe- especially I did not have the chutneys, or make them, so I made a spiced up mix of potatos and peas to fill them with instead. I have no doubt that the original would be superior, but this snack food supper was very satisfying, and I am going to take the leftover ones to work with me for lunch.

2 tbsp vegetable oil
cumin seeds
fennel seeds
mustard seeds
nigella
tumeric
garam masala
some boiled fingerling potatoes which are purple, in small cubes
some boiled potatoes which are white or gold, also in small cubes
frozen peas (potatos and peas together should total 9 heaping tbsps- vary as desired)
chopped fresh cilantro
lime juice or lemon juice
plenty of salt and pepper

1 sheet of frozen puff pastry- defrosted at room temp for 1/2 hour

an egg beaten with a little milk

Preheat oven to 400. Heat oil in a wok or heavy skillet. Toast the spices over a fairly high flame until they smell nice, then add potatoes, stirring them around. Just as you sense the potatoes are going to start browning, add the peas and stir, cooking them until they aren't frozen. Turn off heat. Toss with cilantro and citrus juice. Add salt and pepper. Be generous, as these are a tasty snack and shouldn't be too bland.

Cut the pastry sheet into 3 strips, along the fold lines. On a lightly floured surface roll each rectangle proportionally bigger, and thinner. Savir Saran rolls them to 6"X12", but I can't get mine that big. Cut each strip in 3 smaller rectangles. Brush the edges with the egg wash. Put about 1 tbsp of your filling more or less in the midddle of each, and fold each into an isoceles triangles. This which will leave you with a border on 2 sides. Fold the little borders up over the triangular packages and seal gently.

If you have trouble with your samosas sticking to your surface, you can noodge them up (also gently) with the kind of thin spatula that you use on hot cookies. Put your 9 bundles on a cookie sheet, brush with more egg wash, and bake for 20 minutes or so.

I ate three with some napa cabbage and chive coleslaw, dressed with rice vinegar and light olive oil. I think the purple potatoes look interesting with the peas, though this is accidental. I may have to eat another one or two later.