Sunday Dinner Series Bonus: Challah!

I've got one of these in the oven right now, so what better time to post?

There are times I'm glad I don't do a vlog/audio component to these entries.  One of the docs I work with keeps criticizing my pronunciation of 'challah.'  I guess I just can't make that Hebrew/Yiddish 'ch' sound properly...

Deb once told me about a wonderful bakery in Winnipeg that closed many years ago.  According to her, they made the best challah.  I've always thought it was a beautiful loaf of bread, and so versatile... good for dinner, breakfast, French toast, etc.  I've also heard that it can be challenging to braid.  What's that?  A food challenge?  Accepted!

When we had Deb over for a roast beef dinner, I decided to surprise her with my first-ever challah efforts.  She was definitely surprised!!  I felt like a whole slew of Babas were rolling over in their graves at the thought of two goyim (me and Hubs) working in the kitchen- he with the laptop+YouTube, me with the six strands of bread dough- trying to make this thing work.  And work it did!  After the first bite, our guest exclaimed, "Y'know what this reminds me of?  Did I ever tell you about that bakery that closed..."  YES!

It's somehow fitting that I got the recipe for this loaf from another Deb, over at Smitten Kitchen.  Her blog is something that all other food blogs aspire to, I'm sure (I know I do).  I cut her recipe in half (I don't usually have a use for two loaves at once), and use black sesame seeds instead of poppy seeds (I prefer them, myself).  In terms of braiding, this is why Hubs was holding the laptop for me in the kitchen...

Very, very helpful.

Best Challah (Egg Bread)
Adapted from Joan Nathan by Deb @ Smitten Kitchen

Makes 1 loaf

• 3/4 tablespoon active dry yeast
• 1/2 tablespoon plus 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup olive or vegetable oil, plus more for greasing the bowl
• 3 large eggs
• 1/2 tablespoon salt
• 4 to 4 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• Sesame seeds for sprinkling

1. In a large bowl, dissolve yeast and 1/2 tablespoon sugar in 7/8 cups lukewarm water.
2. Whisk oil into yeast, then beat in 2 eggs, one at a time, with remaining sugar and salt. Gradually add flour. When dough holds together, it is ready for kneading. (You can also use a mixer with a dough hook for both mixing and kneading, but be careful if using a standard size KitchenAid - it’s a bit much for it, though it can be done)
3. Turn dough onto a floured surface and knead until smooth. Clean out bowl and grease it, then return dough to bowl. Cover with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place for 1 hour, until almost doubled in size. Dough may also rise in an oven that has been warmed to 150 degrees then turned off. Punch down dough, cover and let rise again in a warm place for another half-hour.
4. To make a 6-braid challah, either straight or circular, form the dough into 6 balls. With your hands, roll each ball into a strand about 12 inches long and 1 1/2 inches wide. Place the 6 in a row, parallel to one another. Pinch the tops of the strands together.  Watch the YouTube video I posted :P Then place braided loaf on a greased cookie sheet.
5. Beat remaining egg and brush it on loaf. Either freeze breads or let rise another hour.
6. If baking immediately, preheat oven to 375 degrees and brush loaves again. Sprinkle bread with seeds, if using. If freezing, remove from freezer 5 hours before baking.
7.  Bake in middle of oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until golden. (If you have an instant read thermometer, you can take it out when it hits an internal temperature of 190 degrees.) Cool loaves on a rack.

Note: Any of the three risings can be done in the fridge for a few hours, for more deeply-developed flavor. When you’re ready to work with it again, bring it back to room temperature before moving onto the next step.

I also made this for Christmas/Chanukkah this year, for my aunt, uncle and cousins.  The whole family gobbled it up!!

Off to enjoy a traditional brisket dinner at Deb's tonight and celebrate the Oscars,

-Honeybee

Sunday Dinner Series

Ahh, the adjustment to married life continues.  Not that it's a big adjustment, mind you, but it does give me an excuse to cook up some dinners that take a little extra time, thought, and love.  This was a rare occurrence when I was living alone, but now that Hubs is here, it seems appropriate to lay the groundwork for a well-loved tradition: Sunday dinner.

Sundays were very important days in my house growing up.  Of course, the day would start bright and early with a Roman Catholic service.  Once we were old enough to not throw hissy fits in the store, this would be immediately followed by grocery shopping, since the large grocery store was across the street from our church.  I have some great memories of food shopping with the family, which eventually turned into waving hello from behind the deli counter as I rushed to work at the store immediately following mass.

Just had to include a shout-out to St. Paul's, even though my old elementary school next door is now a pharmacy...

It was a rare Sunday where we didn't make a special dinner (or "lupper", as my dad usually calls it, since we typically ate around 2-3 pm).  Nonna would often be invited over to dine with us as well.  Things like pot roasts with root vegetables, homemade egg-based pasta or gnocchi with meatballs and long-simmered sauce, beef stew, oven-roasted chicken pieces in some sort of delicious sauce, or barbecued ribs or pork loin in the summer would be the typical fare.  It wasn't just the food that was important, though... it was the sense of togetherness and family.

So, now that I've officially started our own little family, I'm finding that I'm gravitating towards a similar tradition in our one-bedroom apartment.  Our dear friend/neighbor Deb often fills the role of Nonna, coming over to share with us and visit.  The past few weeks, I've really enjoyed my Sunday creations... enter the Sunday Dinner Series on A Weekend, In Food!

Part I: Can't Beet This!

Blame my father for my terrible puns.  I'm just a product of my environment.

Manitoba.  Beets.  They're kind of a "thing" here.  I've seen them on all sorts of upscale restaurant menus: in hummus, on burgers, etc.  I honestly didn't really grow up eating them.  I do remember trying the pickled variety at one point, but they weren't a staple.  I saw some lovely local bunches at the market, and couldn't resist trying them.  I'd heard that they became very sweet when roasted, so I followed this recipe from Allrecipes.com to give it a shot. 

"Breadmaker bread", on the other hand, WAS a staple for Sunday dinners.  I can distinctly remember filling up the machine's "pail" with all the necessary ingredients and lugging it downstairs.  Magically, some hours later, bread emerged.  To a 12-year-old, this is pretty amazing.  My grandmother always marveled at how much we loved it, hot from the appliance, commenting, "you seem to like it so much that you don't even put butter on it!"  True enough.  The fresh flavour was all we needed.  I bought a breadmaker from a yard sale for a bank-breaking five dollars... and produced this lovely half-white, half-whole-wheat loaf to accompany our dinner.  I think the recipe produced a bit too much dough for my machine, though, as you can see by the "mushroom top" loaf that resulted.  I didn't have any bread flour, so I used 2 cups of all-purpose and 1 cup of whole wheat flour in this (again, Allrecipes.com) recipe.  Good results overall, and very simple to pull off.

Now what to do for the main?  Pork tenderloin has become a pretty frequent Sunday dinner star.  Now, I love my father to the very depths of my heart.  Really.  But his PTs are frequently seasoned with his special "rub"... which I'm convinced consists of a generous dumping of every spice and herb in the rack.  Even those that might not...err... "play nicely" together on the palate.  I will admit, though, that it forms a good, functional crust on the meat when he grills it on the barbecue.  Being 'cue-less, and preferring time-honoured combinations like oregano, garlic, and olive oil on my pork, I followed this recipe to make both roasted potatoes and a Mediterranean-inspired oven roasted pork tenderloin, with delicious results.  Three-for-three for Allrecipes.com!  It's becoming a good friend for hearty, down-home flavour ideas.

Mmm, pork.  A little bit pink in the middle, just the way I like it... which is PERFECTLY SAFE by today's swine-rearing standards.

Wondering what I did with the roasted beets?  I tossed them with mixed greens and feta, then drizzled with an olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt & pepper vinaigrette.  Hello salad course!!

A delicious plate overall.

I'm really hoping that nice Sunday dinners become a tradition in our family, especially as it expands (NOT YET!) with children.  Even though our lives aren't super-hectic at the moment, it's still nice to set aside time to sit down and really enjoy a nice, well-prepared meal that takes a bit more effort than our standard weeknight stir-frys and pastas.  Stay tuned for further installations of the Sunday Dinner Series, and let me know how I'm doing!!

Part professional, part aspiring household/gastronomic goddess, I remain,
-Honeybee

Baker's Dozen

I, quite simply, love bread.  I can't begin to fathom how the combination of flour, water, salt and yeast can yield so many fantastically delicious variations (have I said that before?)  At a maternal-family (read: Italian) dinner, Hubs once commented that he NEVER would have guessed that so many people could wax philosophical on the topic of bread for an entire meal.  It's true.  We're carb junkies, and proud of it.  Last weekend, I experienced bread in three glorious forms: artisan bakery, homemade, and prepared in a café.  Let the yeast-leavened worship begin!

How could you NOT talk forever about this?!  Silly Hubs.

Making my own bread has had its ups and downs.  I can remember making a recipe for simple dinner rolls when I was about ten years old.  This particular variety was made from a soupy, batter-like dough poured into muffin tins.  The recipe yielded 18, but not wanting to do two batches, I distributed the dough among one twelve-cup standard muffin pan.  Mistake.  Disaster.  Dough everywhere, mushrooming out of the cups, dripping into the oven.  I recall that my dearest, kind, and patient mother was none to pleased.  That's when I learned to put a cookie sheet under precariously full baking vessels.

These buns were more successful, if slightly more complicated.

Above you'll see today's experiment: paposecos, or Portuguese bread rolls.  I was introduced to these a few years ago while working in a government lab, trying to engineer the perfect human race (not really, that's just what most people feel that someone with a genetics degree would be doing).  Anyway, the social committee, designed to lure the reclusive scientists out of their labs, put on a chili cook-off.  The advertising flyers also boasted the presence of "Fresh Portuguese BUNZZZZ!!!!!!".  Hmm.  What was it about these "bunz" that warranted the all-caps and multiple exclamation points?  I soon found out.  Oh, my.  Still warm from the bakery, these reminded me of what Italian panini rolls SHOULD be.  Slightly chewy crust, with a soft, open-crumb interior that was miles away from the dry flakiness of the Ciociaro Club's traditional bread-basket fillers.  DELICIOUS, and well-deserving of capitalization.  I must have eaten about six of these, no word of a lie.

My "little soldiers", as Gina Neely would say, shaped and ready to rise.

Even though I had just had some of these tasty treats at Ni and Aron's wedding picnic, I attempted these on my own, following this recipe.  My only substitution was actual lard instead of shortening; I didn't think that Crisco would be frequently used traditionally.  They didn't turn out exactly like the paposecos I'd had in London, but they were still a delicious bun.  I think the error of my ways came in shaping them; I tried to follow the directions closely, but I imagine it takes a well-practiced vovó (Portuguese version of nonna) to get it right.

The bottom-middle bun looks the most like what I was aiming for, shape-wise.

As for my bakery adventures: earlier in the day, I stopped by a bakery/café that I'd been eyeing for a couple of months: Bread & Circus.  I wasn't looking for a sit-down meal, just a unique loaf of bread.  I spotted the "sun bread": round golden-brown loaves displayed on wooden racks in the window.  As soon as the girl behind the counter told me that sun bread = hazelnut maple bread, I was in love.  The staff packaged a loaf and brought it down to the register... where the hipster-esque male cashier proceeded to swap it for a different, slightly larger, "less pathetic" loaf of the same for me.  He was very chatty and extremely pleasant... and it wasn't until I was back in my car that I realized he MIGHT have been flirting with me.  Maybe.  I'm so oblivious to these things now, having been with Hubs for almost a decade, that I'm sort of slow on the uptake.  Ah well, nice to be noticed.

Sun bread, basking in the sun.  I hate that this falls into the category of "things that would kill Ni and Tori", since it was super-delicious

Cross-sectional view.  The bread was actually quite dense, and almost a little doughy still in the middle.  I'm not complaining, though... it was a prime candidate for toasting.

Ready for toasting (see the slices in my $10 Walmart appliance??).  The only thing that made this bread better?  A generous slathering of Nutella.  Not for the faint of heart.

Last but certainly not least on my weekend of dough-based goodness: the in-house baked bread at The Tallest Poppy.  Went for brunch there with my friends/coworkers on Saturday morning... definitely a treat.  It may be on a stretch of Main Street that's juuuuuust starting to get into the sketchy zone, but still worth a visit!

My café breakfast: delicious local eggs, over-easy, hashbrowns made with red-skinned potatoes, thick-sliced peppercorn bacon, homemade mixed berry compote, and (drumroll please...) slices of their in-house loaf, a dense, slightly sweet, flat-ish bread brushed with butter and dotted with poppyseeds.  This was fantastic with the berry spread, which I suspect may have contained Saskatoons.  Mmm.

Jess' French toast, made with the same in-house bread.  The density really helped it soak up the egg mixture; this went great with their locally-roasted Black Pearl coffee.  Also of note: the little index card in the background contained a little story about how a king had once built a castle using breadsticks stolen, over time, from restaurants.  It encouraged others to do so.  With the price of real estate in the city, I might just.

Please forgive the quality of the café pics... I accidentally left home without my Canon PowerShot A430 and had to rely on my cell phone camera (which has a crack in the lens, boo).  I really enjoyed The Tallest Poppy's bread; I'll have to see if I'm up for a bit of DIY recreation.  We'll see... I'm running out of yeast packages rapidly now!

Thus concludes my bread weekend.  If I haven't inspired you to either go out and buy a loaf of interestingly-flavoured bread, or to attempt to make your own, then I've failed myself here.


Feeling incredible sympathy for those on gluten-free diets,
-Honeybee


P.S.- It's not bread-related, but check out this pic from the décor at The Tallest Poppy:

This café is eclectic.  How eclectic?  In addition to mismatched chairs and wood paneling, it has a statue of a very angry-looking bear wearing a sombrero in its front window.  Hmm.  But is it art?  It didn't really speak to me, personally.  Or literally.  Yeesh.  He does look rather upset... maybe he's waiting for coffee?  That's my only complaint about this café; service was a tad slow.