Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [7]
Makes one 20-ounce loaf
MILK CHOCOLATE–CHERRY BREAD
Omit the ginger and apricots and replace with ⅓ cup dried tart cherries and ½ cup milk chocolate, chopped in nuggets the size of the cherries. The bread should rise to cover most of the fruit and chocolate, but if chunks are sticking out aggressively after the first rise, try to poke them back into the dough. Cut a piece of parchment paper to neatly fit the bottom of the Dutch oven, because the sugars in the chocolate and cherries can leak during baking. You won’t enjoy scrubbing the pot. You will, however, enjoy eating this bread.
ALMOND BUTTER
Almond butter might have been invented to go with apricot-ginger bread.
You can make almond butter with toasted almonds, which I love, or raw almonds, which I don’t love as much. Toasted almonds won’t require any additional oil, but raw almonds might need a few tablespoons of neutral vegetable oil to form a spreadable butter.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Easy
Cost comparison: Per cup, homemade almond butter costs about $3.75. Supermarket almond butter such as MaraNatha (which contains both sugar and palm oil): $6.40.
2 cups almonds, skin on, about 10 ounces
Neutral vegetable oil (optional)
Pinch of salt (optional)
1. If you want toasted almond butter, preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. If you’re making raw almond butter, skip to step 3.
2. Spread the almonds on a baking sheet. Toast for 10 minutes, until just fragrant. Cool to room temperature.
3. Put the almonds in a food processor and grind for about 5 minutes, until the nuts release their oils and become almost runny. If you’re using raw almonds, you might need to add a spoonful of oil. Add a pinch of salt, if you like. Store in a jar in the refrigerator.
Makes 1 cup
BAGELS
It’s untraditional to bake bagels at home. Dating back to at least the sixteenth-century in Poland, when village bakers sold them strung from ropes and piled in baskets on market days, bagels have always been a commercial product. Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century brought the bagel to New York City, where, according to bagel historian Maria Balinska, they were produced in fetid and vermin-infested basements (often using spoiled ingredients) and sold by street vendors. There’s no sense romanticizing the New York sweatshop bagels of yore, but when you bite into a hygienic and vacuous supermarket bagel today you might wonder why anyone bothered carrying the tradition across the Atlantic.
To understand, you might just have to bake your own. I’ve baked just about every bagel recipe I’ve come across, from honey-sweetened Montreal bagels and puffy egg bagels to the two-day bagel recipe from Peter Reinhart’s epic The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, and they’ve all been good, but the quickest and easiest recipe I found turned out to be the best. It comes from The New Complete Book of Breads by Bernard Clayton, who in turn took it from Jo Goldenberg’s, a legendary Jewish restaurant in Paris that closed in 2006. These bagels are delicious when baked with ingredients you probably have in the cupboard right now, but if you want to raise your game, order high-gluten flour (see Appendix), save the whey from making yogurt, and track down a jar of barley malt, which you can find in specialty groceries, health food shops, and some Whole Foods stores. The high-gluten flour makes for a superdense, chewy body, the whey provides tang, and the malt syrup gives both the bagels and your kitchen a toasty fragrance.
The crust on these bagels is hard and shiny, as if the bagel has been shrink-wrapped then shellacked, and the interior is dense and yeasty. Even without cream cheese, a homemade bagel is a meal. My sister, Justine, a former New Yorker, says, “Homemade bagels are better than 99 percent of the bagels I’ve ever eaten, including H&H and Murray’s, but not as good as Columbia Bagels on 110th Street in Manhattan.” Last time she went back