High Heels & Frijoles

I was flipping channels once upon a Saturday morning and landed on a “Baking with Julia” marathon. A gentleman with a Lloyd Christmas-meets-medieval pageboy haircut was making pita bread, and I thought, why not? I’ve never made pita bread.

PITA BREAD
Adapted from an episode of “Baking with Julia” with guests Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.
Bread baking is time consuming, so clear your calendar before you start.

2 ½ cups warm (about 110˚F) water
1 teaspoon dry yeast
2 ½ cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon olive oil, plus additional for greasing bowl
About 6 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

- Preheat oven to 200˚F. As soon as it reaches temperature, shut the oven off. Dough likes to rise in warm places, and this guarantees a cozy resting place.

- Place warm water in large bowl. Sprinkle yeast over water and wait for it to dissolve, about 1 minute. Stir in the whole-wheat flour with a wooden spoon. “Stir 100 times in the same direction,” Alford recommended—this will prevent the gluten strands that begin to form from breaking.

- Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let rest in oven, 30 minutes and up to 8 hours.

- Remove bowl from oven and remove plastic. Stir in salt and oil.  One cup at a time, start stirring in the all-purpose flour. The dough will absorb different amounts of flour, depending on the day (dough is affected by numerous factors, including humidity – I added about 2 ½ cups flour when I made it). The dough will be sticky and shaggy, but will have some body (see photo 1).

- Turn the dough out onto a clean, dry, and well-floured surface. If you’ve never kneaded dough, here are some pointers: With the heel of your hand, push the dough away from you, firmly, as if you were scrubbing clothes the old-fashioned way, on a wooden plank. Fold the far end of the dough towards you, then turn it counter-clockwise, and repeat action.

- Now you’re ready: Begin kneading, adding more flour as necessary, until the dough has “a certain tension,” about 10 minutes (see photo 2). Normally, I would say the finished dough will have a smooth, satiny texture, but the whole wheat flour makes this dough a bit more like coarse leather. It will be tight, like a firm muscle.

- Place dough in a large, well oiled bowl. Lightly coat the dough with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic and place oven. Allow the dough to rise 2 to 3 hours, until it is doubled in size. An old tip: when the dough is ready, you can poke the dough and your finger’s indentation will remain.

- Preheat oven to 400˚F.  If you have a pizza stone, set it on the bottom third the oven. Otherwise, place an inverted rimmed baking sheet in the oven.

- Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface. With a bench scraper, cut the dough in half. Cut each half into 8 pieces (see photos 3 and 4).

- Roll each piece into a ball.  Flatten each ball to about 4 inches in diameter.  Then, with a rolling pin, roll it out to about 7 inches in diameter (see photos 5 through 8).

- Carefully transfer 4 to 6 rounds to the pizza stone or baking sheet.  The pitas will puff after about 3 minutes.  Allow 30 seconds more and remove from oven. Stack pitas together and wrap in a towel to keep warm.

- If you don’t want to use all the dough, save half and refrigerate. Use the next day. Alternatively, use it all, cool the pitas, and store them in plastic Ziploc bags in the freezer. Pop in the toaster or oven when you’re ready to eat them.

I wish I could say I’d been off summering somewhere fabulous and glitzy, but the reason behind my long absence is much more plebeian and pedestrian: I started working and have been acclimating to my new situation. That being done, I am now back and ready to start feeding the blog – it’s looking a bit gaunt at the moment.

To ease into things, a simple recipe of French toast – quick and comforting for those Sunday mornings when the promise of Monday starts looming ominously in the distance:

For 4 (or 2 with roomy stomachs)

1 C. milk
3 whole eggs
½ C. plus 1 TBSP. granulated sugar
¼ tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract
3 TBSP. butter
8 tsp. cinnamon
8 slices hearty bread
¼ C. toasted pecans or walnuts, toasted
2 bananas, sliced into ¼”-thick rounds

-In a pie plate or shallow bowl, whisk together milk, eggs, 1 TBSP. sugar, salt, and vanilla.

-Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat and add 1 ½ TBSP. butter. When the butter begins to foam, sprinkle the skillet with 2 TBSP. sugar and 1 tsp. cinnamon.

-One at a time (or two, if they fit) dip 4 bread slices in the egg mixture, turning to coat (don’t let the bread just sit there unless you want mush for breakfast). Arrange the dipped slices on the sugared’n’cinnamoned skillet and cook till nicely browned, 2 to 3 minutes.

-While that first side is cooking, sprinkle the soggy side facing you with 2 TBSP. sugar and 2 tsp. cinnamon. Flip bread and cook opposite side. You should have a lovely crunchy crust on your toast.
Repeat dipping, buttering, sugaring’n’cinnamoning, and cooking with remaining bread slices.

-Arrange French toast on plates and top with pecans and sliced banana. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve with maple syrup, if desired.

NOTES: Under no circumstances should you use flimsy sliced white bread for French toast. It’ll soak up all the liquid and be a hopeless wet mop of a thing. Stick to heartier stuff like challah or those so-called Italian loaves… I like a croissant now and then (but then I top it with whipped cream and berries), but only if it’s a sub-par one – no sense in using a perfect specimen for this.

Bread is the perfect food. There’s no arguing that – it’s even in the Lord’s Prayer: “give us today our daily bread.” I know I’m interpreting that very literally, but there it is, in black and white.

I used to get my bread at Fairway on the Upper West Side and was pretty happy with it. No additives, no less-than-2%-of-the-following-impossible-to-pronounce ingredients. When I moved away from the UWS it was, for the most part, back to the bread aisle at the supermarket. There I would walk past Wonder and Sunbeam, Arnold and Nature’s Own. It got to a point where it didn’t really matter what I bought. All of these breads were wimpy and forgettable.

Tired of blah bread, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I’d been to the library recently in search of a Boston cream pie recipe (coming soon!) and along the way found a recipe for honey whole wheat bread in Greg Patent’s Baking in America. Mr. Patent failed to inform this dimwitted reader that perhaps her standard-sized Kitchen Aid (aka Kiki) would be no match for seven cups of flour. I should’ve known it wasn’t, but if there’s a recipe in a cookbook meant for home cooks, I expect it to work with standard kitchen appliances. My little Kiki started bucking like a bronco, and rather than risk breaking her neck, I turned her off and plunked the dough onto the counter. Now I would truly have to take matters into my own hands – I would have to knead.

Kneading was not easy. I’m too short to really bear down on the dough, so I strapped on some heels, but they didn’t help my situation – the heels provided height but not much in the way of support. Back in sneakers, I stood on my tip-toes and tried my best to work the dough, pretending all the time I was Lady Macbeth, outing the damned spot. Sweat started beading my brow and the bile starting bubbling. “I hate Greg Patent!” I muttered. But I kept going. I was scared because the dough was dry and crumbly and for the first few minutes, my labors did nothing to bring it together. It wasn’t smooth or elastic, just an ill-formed, uncooperative lump. To make matters worse, I kept remembering what my old boss W. told me about dough: “It’s alive.” Surely, I was killing it.

What a lump.

I continued to fret while the bread was rising. It wasn’t smooth and beautiful, but heavyset and squat. Into the oven went two loaves anyway and without waiting for it to cool I cut a slice and buttered it. It was dense and a little chewy, bland in flavor, and OK at best.

Squat, toad-like loaves.

I’d decided to make bread despite the fact that I had a date the very next day to meet a real baker at a bakery a friend described as “THE BEST BREAD EVER:” Clear Flour Bakery (www.clearflourbread.com). Clear Flour specializes in the production of French and Italian breads that are real: no additives, no preservatives. My new baker friend D. gave me a tour, which was awesome: Brobdingnagian mixers, about 50 times bigger and more powerful than my dinky little Kiki, imposing deck ovens, buckets of dough, stacks of beautiful frielings and bannetons (round and rectangular molds for shaping and proofing bread), and the main event: bread. There were baguettes, ficelles, olive rolls made with green olives, focaccia smothered with onions, hearty rolls with studded with nuts and plump raisins bearing the very poetic name of Paris night.

Bannetons.

Big mama mixers.

There is but a small area in front of the counter at it was packed solid at all times. Everyone, staff and visitors alike, were very kind, though, letting me be all interrupt-y with my camera.

I bought an assortment and Señor O and I promptly went about the business of eating it. The ficelle was perfectly crunchy and French, as was its larger friend, baguette. I didn’t get to the baguette till this morning and, swoon, it was so perfect in its simplicity and straightforwardness that I was completely swept away. I spread some good European butter on it and ate away. I also treated myself to a Paris night roll with some apricot preserves I brought back from a recent trip to Rome. I haven’t enjoyed breakfast this thoroughly since I can’t remember when. Thank you, Clear Flour for keeping it real.

A dream of Paris.