Rugelach

This week's recipe for the all-new Tuesdays With Dorie (Baking With Julia edition) is Rugelach.  I have baked rugelach once: Dorie Greenspan's recipe in the original TWD group, which I posted here.  Rugelach is a traditional Jewish cookie, and consists of a cream cheese dough filled with a jam or jam-like spread, and sprinkled with nuts and dried fruit then rolled and baked.


n.o.e.'s notes:

- The host blogs for the rugelach are Jessica of My Baking Heart and Margaret of The Urban Hiker; you can find the recipe if you visit their posts (here and here).

-  The rugelach recipe in Baking With Julia contains several different components.  One is prune or apricot lekvar - a sort of a spread or paste made from dried fruit.  I had some nice soft prunes that I had used for a different recipe and wanted to use them up while they were still fresh.  I made 1/2 recipe of the prune lekvar.  It was easy enough to prepare and I froze the leftover lekvar for a future baking projects.

- For the dough, I had 2 ounces of cream cheese in the fridge to use up so I decided to make 1/6 recipe of the dough and the other components.  I know that I mixed up the dough without incident, but got a little tricky when I moved onto the "filling and topping" component(s)  I was cruising along with my mental calculations and then suddenly I got totally confused by my math in the sugar and nuts measurements.  I know that I reduced the sugar by a little bit, and reduced the cinnamon by a good bit (I wanted the fruit and nuts, not to mention the prune lekvar, to shine)

-  Roll-and-sliced was the recipe's preferred method of shaping the cookies, but it also allowed for the traditional crescent shaping - where you form long thin triangles of dough and rolling those around the fillings.  I decided to go for the crescent shape even though I suspected it would be hard to fit all of the filling inside the cookies.  I rolled my dough into a rough semicircle, spread it with the prune lekvar, scattered the fillings, and cut triangular wedges.  The recipe cautions against rolling the dough too thin, because it has a lot of filling to hold.  As it turned out, filling was spilling out, even before my cookies made it to the baking sheet.

halfway through the process of coating with egg wash and sugar/spices/nuts before baking

-  Once filled and formed, the cookies were treated to an egg wash and rolled in a mixture of  cinnamon, sugar, and nuts.  It turned out that the egg wash glued all of the elements of the cookies together.

-  These cookies, in my hands, were an unholy, glorious mess. They melted all over the baking sheet (thank goodness for silicone mats!) and stopped this side of charring before the pastry was finished baking, but they ended up perfectly baked inside.

the verdict:

Matching their untidy appearance, my rugelach were a riot of fruit and nut flavors, with a hint of sweetness + cinnamon.  My husband and I had no trouble polishing off the half dozen or cookies and wishing for more.  They were especially good with a cup of hot coffee or tea.

Chocolate Truffle Tarts

refrigeration dulled the appearance of the filling but not the chocolate flavors!

Fat Tuesday is often celebrated with King cakes, but on this blog post and the posts of a couple of hundred other Tuesdays With Dorie bakers today, Fat Tuesday is chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate.  And really, that is quite appropriate for the day of excesses before the austerity of Lenten fasting begins on Ash Wednesday.  In years past, the faithful would want to clear the pantry of eggs, cream, and other rich ingredients before the beginning of Lent, because these ingredients did not have a place in the strict Lenten diet during the 6 weeks before Easter.  The effort to use up the rich ingredients led to creations such as the King cakes.

Although the fasting rules are significantly more relaxed these days, I used the occasion presented by this recipe to clean out my chocolate drawer of all manner of white, milk, semisweet and bittersweet odds and ends.  And the finished product more than qualified as a rich indulgence.

n.o.e.'s notes:

- There are four host blogs for the tarts this week, and you can find the recipe at any of their sites, along with some pretty spectacular tarts: Steph, Spike, Jaime and Jessica.  Of course you can also find the recipe in the book Baking With Julia!

-  The recipe is David Ogonowski’s Chocolate Truffle Tartlets.

-  I made 1/2 recipe of the chocolate crust in the book.  Some of my fellow bakers have pointed out that the chocolate crust is very close to Dorie's recipe in Baking: From My Home to Yours.  The crust dough comes together beautifully (I used the food processor) with 5oz/cup for the flour weight, as it says in the front of the book.

-  I find that tarts are one of the easiest desserts to adapt to gluten-free baking (the fillings often have no gluten, and with a few good gluten-free crust recipes in the baking arsenal, whipping up a gluten-free dessert is simple.  So I made 1/2 recipe of gluten-free (and grain free, actually) crust from the blog Deliciously Organic.

- From each dough I made two 4" tarts (my tart molds are quite deep) and two 3" shallow tarts in my silicone mold (using 4 of the 6 wells in the mold).

-  The recipe clearly directs us to remove the bottoms of the tart pans before baking the crust, I suppose so that the crust would bake on the bottom without too much insulation from the tart pan bottoms and the baking sheet they were on.  Rule-follower that I am, I did take out the bototms of my little 4″ tarts but if I were making a full size tart I’d definitely leave the bottom in.  In fact, I would leave the bottoms in any tart pan because it was very difficult to unmold the tarts with no bottom to push against, and my crusts crumbled on the edges.

-  I made a full recipe of the filling.  The recipe calls for 8 egg yolks.  One thing learned from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc cookbook is that egg yolks vary – those on the West Coast (of the US) are smaller than on the East. So when you are using a large quantity, the differences can really multiply!  Ad Hoc suggests a weight of 15g per egg yolk, so I measured a total of 120g for the 8 yolks, using a mixture of duck eggs and chicken eggs from my farm box.

-  This was a great recipe for cleaning out the chocolate drawer - I used 4 or 5 different kinds of bittersweet - ranging from 62% to 75% - in the egg mixture for the filling.  When it came to the chocolate cubes that were stirred into the filling I used two kinds of white chocolate, two kind of milk chocolate, and two kinds of semisweet.  I don't like white chocolate but I have some hanging around so I added just a bit - 1/2 ounce of white chocolate.  The rest of my cubes were 1 oz of semisweet chocolate and 2.5 oz of milk chocolate

-  The recipe calls for biscotti or amaretti biscuits to be crumbled into the filling for crunch.  I used 5 amaretti (they seemed small, and I would use a few more next time).

the verdict:

The tarts were quite good and quite, quite rich.  Just one of the 3" tarts (which were really small) bordered on being too big of a serving!  The texture of the amaretti got lost in the heavy richness of the filling.  The gluten-free crust turned out very well, and I'll be making it again.

If you want to see a lot of chocolate tarts, go to the link post on the TWD site, and start clicking on posts of the different bakers.  Happy Fat Tuesday!!

Basic White Bread

It's been a while since I posted a sandwich bread on this blog, as usually all the yeasted goodies are posted on my bread blog.  But White Bread is the first choice in the all new Tuesdays With Dorie baking group, wherein we begin our journey through Dorie Greenspan's book Baking With Julia.

That's right, there will be more Dorie on Tuesdays!  I thought long and hard about whether to join the new group. I hemmed and hawed. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I waffled.  And then, I decided to give it a try; we'll see how it goes.

The recipes in the new book tend to be more complex than Dorie's recipes in the previous TWD book, Baking From My Home to Yours, were so the group is only going to bake 2 recipes per month.  I am aiming to bake at least one of the selections each month, posting on the appropriate Tuesday.  For the next several months I'll also be catching up on all of the recipes that I missed from the early days of the first TWD, posting on close to the date when they were originally assigned for the TWD group four years ago.

The book for this round of TWD, Baking With Julia is based on the Master Chefs television series that aired back in the 1990s.  Julia Child was the host of the series, and 26 bakers were guests on the show, baking with Julia Child in her kitchen.   Dorie Greenspan made it all into this book.  Of course the book's recipes are not Dorie's, or even Julia's, and it's going to be fun to try recipes from many different bakers in the course of this new version of TWD.

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  The bread recipe is a contribution by baker Craig Kominiak.  If you want to bake this bread, you can find the recipe on Jules' blog, here, as she is one of our hosts this week, along with Laurie of Slush.  Or you could buy the book and bake along with the group; the last I heard there are 300+ blogs from almost every state and from countries around the globe.

-  I like a sturdy crumb on my bread, so I used bread flour.

-  I never use with active dry yeast when baking, but instead use instant yeast, which doesn't need to be 'proofed' or activated.  To convert, use about 3/4 the amount that you would use of active dry yeast.  The instant yeast is added along with the flour.

-  My stand mixer has been ailing for a couple of years (I'm hoping that 2012 will be the year of Operation Repair Kitchen Aid.)  I've learned to avoid kneading dough with a mixer but to knead by hand, which I enjoy, or use my food processor instead.  I learned the food processor method from Rose Levy Beranbaum and I like it so much that even when my stand mixer is fixed I won't go back to making bread dough with it.  When using a food processor, the ingredients are mixed in a slightly different order but the dough turns out much more quickly and I think just as beautifully.  So, using this method, I first put dry ingredients together in my food processor, including the instant yeast and pulsed several times to mix the ingredients together.  Than I added the water and finally the salt, pulsing until the dough pulled together and the gluten began to develop.  Then I turned the dough onto the counter and kneaded it by hand, adding softened butter as I kneaded, although I could have done this step in the food processor also.

-  My dough was very slow on both rises: it took 2 hours for first rise and 1.5 hours for the loaves to rise after they were formed.  I just told myself that the dough was developing more flavor!

-  I made half recipe of the bread dough, which I split and baked in two medium-ish metal pans of slightly different sizes.  Did you know that if you save the papers from sticks of butter they are great for greasing baking pans?  This time I also used the papers to line the bottoms of the pans to make sure the loaves would release.

the verdict:

We enjoyed the bread toasted with butter - it has a sturdy crumb and the browned crust was a bit chewy in a good artisan-white-bread way.  While this bread doesn't unseat our very favorite white bread, it is one that we savored down to the very last crumb.

If you want to see a passel of other white bread posts, head over here and start clicking on links to the other bakers in the all-new Tuesdays With Dorie!