sarah in nyc

 When I was growing up occasionally the Jewish bakeries would have a few slabs of tzibbile pletzle, onion board   out on top of the counter. My father would always sigh a big sentimental sigh and but a chunk which we would share . I don't think that I remember tzibbile pletzle ever even making to the car. It was always consumed standing, often while still in the bakery. The bakeries used to make the pletzele out of challah dough and top it with chopped onions and poppy seeds. My husband despises onions but loves onion rolls and  tzibbile pletzle. No, I don't understand that either but that is one of the big mysteries of life. I didn't have extra challah dough hanging around but I did have a bunch of bread dough in the fridge. About a third of it got turned into stove top  baked naan. I was in the mood for  tzibbile pletzle so I stretched put the dough. I chopped an onion and cooked it in the microwave with some fresh thyme olive oil and honey and spread it ov...

In these days of lock-down the days seem to run into one another. My husband was surprised this morning that it was Sunday rather than Monday. There are days when you wish you could just sleep the days away.Yesterday, I mostly slept. Today thought I decided to be productive. I wrote to some friends.  I made seven masks, This brings my total to about 80. All of the hand-washing we have to do means that we are low on hand cream. I made a batch. Due to the yeast shortage my older son and I have been experimenting with various methods of making sour dough. He has been nursing a classic sour dough. I have been doing our usual method of using bits of old bread and old dough  mixed with flour and water and letting the slurry hang out in the fridge. As I formed today's loaf of bread, I pinched off a bit, a K'zayit, about the size of an olive to add to our bread starter in the fridge. The movement of pinching off the bit of dough was so familiar from taking challah when I bake our chal...

A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal had an article in the weekend section about an old German bread making method where you use cut up stale bread as the starter for new bread. I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. Amazon.com Widgets Actually, I have done this a few times, with differing results. That is, sometimes the yeast in the bread blooms and is enough to make a dough rise with no additional yeast and sometimes you need to cheat and add a bit of yeast. Today I needed to cheat. Basically, this is what you do. Find a few lumps of state bread in your fridge. Cut the bread up. Put in a bowl and cover with water.  Add a tablespoon of brown sugar to the bowl as well and a tablespoon of flour and then go away for a while.  The last time I had done this it was pretty clear that the yeast in the bread had become reactivated. This time, I wasn't that sure so I added about a 1/4 tsp of yeast, a tablespoon of salt, a glugg of olive oil and then bega...

Today I baked bread for the first time since Passover. I felt like there ought to a a b'racha to recite for that first bread baking. There isn't one as far as I know, but i felt grateful to get back to that familiar task. Amazon.com Widgets Perhaps it was the pickled beets I had made to accompany last night's dinner but I thought it would be nice to make pumpernickel bagels. As per my usual way of doing these things, I didn't consult with a cookbook.  I know from extensive cook book  reading that the color in pumpernickel bread comes from chocolate. I added two hefty tablespoons of cocoa to the dough and some caraway seeds. The cocoa changed the texture of the bread dough to sort of resemble Play-do. it wasn't unpleasant, it was just different. Next time I might add a bit less cocoa to the dough. This is definitely something I would do again. I went back to work on Eliana's tallit. her mother had sent along some fabrics to be used in the tall...

Sandy had asked me to put together a recipe for the sour dough corn bread. So, here it is more or less. This gloppy stuff is my starter. It began life as a loose  bread dough yesterday. I didn’t measure, but I think I may have started with about two cups of water, a teaspoon of yeast, a table spoon of salt and one of brown sugar. Most of it got turned into yesterday’s excellent fennel loaf.   The remainder has been sitting in a small plastic bowl covered by a plastic shower cap in my fridge.You can see that I have added an assortment of grains to this starter. I can’t remember for sure but I think there is wheat germ and bran in there. I then took out a lump of the starter to begin my next loaf. Most of the rest of the starter went back into the fridge after I added a bit more flour and water to the bowl. I then got to work on the new loaf of bread.  I added another tablespoon of brown sugar to starter in the bowl. And then I added a tablespoon of salt. ...

  There aren’t too many weeks that go by without my baking bread at least once, and usually more often. I am a strong believer in bread baking fitting comfortably into your day. Laurie Colwin in her beautiful book Home Cooking writes a fabulous essay on baking bread that pretty much sums up my attitude about bread baking. ( Parenthetically, my copy of the book was a stupendous house gift from my friend Anne.) At this point challah, and pita and bagels and peasant breads and pizza are all comfortable parts of my bread baking repertoire. I adore sour dough bread. But each time I read a recipe for how to set up a sour dough starter my head starts to ache. According to most of the books I have read setting up sour dough sounds like it is almost as much work as taking care of an infant. Awhile back I took a book out of the library that promised a method for making home baked bread with a time expenditure of only twenty minutes per day. The method in the book described setting...

This blog post reflects the state of my mind at the moment. Between my anxiety about my mother’s condition ( How much better will she get in rehab? Will she be able to live on her own after they let kick her out of rehab?) And my anxiety about getting ready for Passover after having missed a week of work time, my mind jumps from  topic to topic. If you find the concept of a jumble of ideas disconnected from one another in one blog to distressing, come back another day. I won’t take it personally. My husband often finds the workings of my brain slightly disconcerting, and I know that he loves me. I need to use up the flour and grans before Passover, so I made a batch of bagels. I ground up kamut and soft wheat into the dough as well as some oats. as I mixed the dough I realized the close affinity between porridge and bread dough. This did make excellent bagels. Anxiety is also a good time to guild the lily. I often find it difficult to actually creative when my head is fill...

 Apron illistrations from Smart Sewing- 1949  My own take on the domestic goddess uniform-My apron is knee length on me. Sometimes it seems as if you can’t have a sewing blog without featuring aprons.  My mother never, ever wore an apron. My father though, used to wear a big denim, butcher’s apron when he baked bread. For lots of the women about half a generation younger than I am who are sewing and blogging about it, aprons seem to evoke a sort of “days of yore domesticity”. lots of these blogging young women have taken on apron wearing in a tongue in cheek sort of a way. A few years back I had made myself a butcher’s apron that didn’t quite work. but I wore it when I baked bread. One of my sisters had given me the 1949 edition of “Smart Sewing” an annual magazine with nifty sewing projects. I fell in love with the darted aprons made out of a bias square of fabric and finished off with a big ruffle. I wanted an apron that would provide more coverage for bread ...

There has been a discussion on Pattern Review, http://www.patternreview.com/ about bread machines and making peasant type bread. I do lots of bread baking. Given that we live in an apartment, I don't like owning a whole lot of equipment. It just takes up too much room. This bread is basically idiot proof. My kids can, and do make it without very much intervention from me. This is a vatiation on the no - knead Mark Bittman bread what has been creating a buzz on the internet. I have two problems with the Mark Bittman formula. The first is that when I followed his directions to the letter( Yes, I actually can follow directions to the letter, I just often improve things as I move along.) The results were often fermented tasting. Not pleasantly soured like sour dough but fermented and kind of yukky. My other issue is that the dough is just plain repulsive to touch when the time comes to form the loaf. Not to get too graphic but when i followed his recipie, the dough was the consistancy...