Recipe for failure

I get a lot of food emails. Many are spammy. Usually I ignore them, but a recent one from the National Honey Board caught my eye. It included a recipe for King Cake, which has been "a Mardi Gras focal point since the eighteenth century." I've never been to Mardi Gras; heck I've never even been to New Orleans. But I can't resist any recipe for eggy sweet bread, and that's what it seemed the good people of the Honey Board were encouraging me to bake.

The first attempt came out fine:

The second did not. I made a number of moronic errors while being swept out to sea on a wave of haphazard technique and bad decision-making masquerading as Creativity.

Here's a short list of things you should NOT do if you want your baked goods to come out properly:

1. Substitute key ingredients
I didn't have the proper type of yeast, but I plunged ahead anyway. The recipe asked for rapid rise; I only had the normal glacial pace variety. I didn't bother to look up the difference this would make in rising times.

2. Make inaccurate adjustments
I played fast and loose with yeast quantities while doubling the recipe. Big mistake.

3. Combine unrelated recipes
Since I'd never made King Cake before, I started poking around the internet, investigating other recipes for an idea of what this thing was supposed to look like. I found another recipe that included a pecan brown sugar filling. That seemed delicious. I wanted it. In addition to sweet-yeasty-bread weakness, I also suffer from anything-containing-brown-sugar weakness. For the second cake, I rolled in a bunch of brown sugar filling to form a sort of mutant cinnamon roll, which led to tragic leakage once it melted in the oven.

4. When in doubt, add flour
The recipe created batter. But I wanted dough, so I could roll the thing up and slap the brown sugar in it. I kept adding flour until it became kneadable. This was just plain silly. I knew it, but I could not stop. Could. Not. Stop.

When it came out, it looked like a gargantuan bagel oozing brown goo:

And guess what? It didn't taste too good either. [Slapping hand. Tying string around finger.]

I don't like coloring inside the lines. But I don't like baking monstrosities either.

Cinnamon Buns and Burnout (Oh yeah, and French Laundry)

You know a food blogger is burned out when she doesn't even write a real post about her recent trip to the French Laundry. What to say? It was enormously expensive. Almost all of the food was quite good, except for a hunk o' beef that had too much of the sous-vide thing going on (flabby, no crust). Dessert was forgettable (I can say this because I've forgotten it), and the winter squash soup was so good that I will never look at a squash dish again without feeling short-changed. I grappled with pangs of guilt for spending that much money on food. They shoved us out of there in 2.5 hours, which stank, and did not even offer us any coffee after dinner. Can you believe that? Can you believe that? Me either. Anyway, I would still go back, if someone else was paying. I guess this indicates that my sense of self-respect defers to my sense of gluttony.

Now, on to more interesting topics--to me, anyway. Cinnamon buns. Every single time I walk past a Cinnabon anywhere in the world, I feel compelled to stop. But I never do. I suspect they taste like chemicals and contain 1000 grams of fat and frankly, the chain reminds me uncomfortably of the '80s.

You know what else reminds me of the '80s? Palm Springs. Which is where we went last weekend, and which is where I encountered a roach the size of my fist in the bathroom of our adorably hipster modernist hotel. I also encountered a cinnamon bun the size of my skull at Rick's. Here it is, with a knife stuck in it right where one might stick a knife into a skull, if one was so inclined:

Our waitress asked if we wanted it warmed and slathered with butter. You already know the answer to that one. Additionally, my breakfast came with these:

Am I bad food person if I confess that the sight of the cinnamon bun and its knife and the biscuits with Knott's Berry Farms jam and the plop of whipped butter made me at least as happy as many of the beautiful items on the menu at French Laundry?

It's been so long since I posted that I will throw in an extra bonus cinnamon bun photo for you; these are made from Molly's recipe in Bon Appetit, which was truly a gem. Give them a shot.

An Irish bakery in the neighborhood?

Yesterday I was walking down Geary, laden with Russian groceries, when I noticed a hand-written placard placed on the sidewalk.

"Irish Bakery," it said.

[Insert sound of me, screeching to a halt.]

An IRISH bakery? In the Richmond?? I went in directly and had a look around. Turns out they had opened for the first time just a few hours before. The walls are painted light green, the counter is stained wood, and the selection is naturally limited, but holds great promise. The guys working there are convivial.

So far they're offering soda bread, scones, shortbread, baps, pasties, and a few types of bread (I noticed white and bran). The only thing I can vouch for are the scones--they are superb. If you don't believe me, take a look:

And a close-up:

I was in and out of there so fast, I didn't really catch the name or location. Maybe it's called John Barnes Irish Bakery? Maybe it's at 24th and Geary? Stay tuned for more reliable info.

UPDATE! It's called John Campbell's, and it's at 20th and Geary.

No need for no-knead

The recent no-knead bread phenomenon caught me off-guard. Obviously there's something about baking bread that really appeals to a lot of people, but there also seems to be this collective fear of the process that inhibits folks from taking the plunge. Perhaps breadmaking, like skiing and Spanish, is better to learn when one is young and fearless. When that recipe was published in the NY Times--trumpeting foolproof steps and delicious results--the word spread like wildfire and suddenly people that had never put hand to dough before were convinced to give it a shot. Of course, with the no-knead recipe, they didn't even have to put hand to dough!

Am I sounding a little snarky? I don't mean to. I'd like to think I support just about anything that gets people in the kitchen cooking. I tried the no-knead recipe, and I thought the crust it produced was lovely. But it wasn't any easier than any other bread recipe I've tried, and I'm suspicious that its rampant popularity is due in large part to the savvy wordsmithing at work in the article (a "truly minimalist" recipe that "will blow your mind," etc.) rather than actual convenience. The thing still takes 24 hours to make, after all. Not exactly a 30-minute meal.

May I gripe just a bit more? I wish people were more excited about embracing culinary challenges, instead of backing away in fear unless a recipe purports to be so easy that a child can do it. What's wrong with a challenge? After all, it's just bread. What annoys me about no-knead bread is that it's not foolproof, not particularly easy, speedy or tidy, and yet people are willing to try it because it is presented as being all of those things. What's so scary about kneading, anyway? And why won't people give David Lebovitz a break already? Since when did no-knead bread become a sacred cow?

Ok, rant over. I suppose this is what I want to say: bread baking can be hard, and time-consuming, and frustrating. You should still try it anyway. Do not be paralyzed by the prospect of failing. Like I said, it's just bread.

Yes, baking bread is a demanding exercise. Dough is not unlike an irksome friend: asking for too much of your time, your space, plus comfort and warmth and affirmation. They both also benefit from the occasional beat-down. When you make your own bread, there is a small but real chance that you'll invest a lot of time into the process to produce a stunted, hard, dried-out piece of rusk that only the most desperate and diseased pigeons will consent to peck after you toss it out your window. But doesn't that risk always exist in cooking? I've messed up pretty much everything at one time or another. I burned microwave Cream of Wheat just last week, for the love of God. So what? The next time will be better.

Baking bread - with kneading, without it, whatever - is one of the most deeply rewarding culinary maneuvers. The process lets you bear witness to an amazing transformation: a shaggy mass of dough becomes a smooth, soft oval that feels like an earlobe, which then becomes that proud, golden loaf that magnetically attracts swarms of people with its heavenly scent as it emerges from the oven.

I had a breadmaker for a while, but it didn't float my boat. The sensual process of mixing and kneading disappeared and in its place the machine just spat out alien, cuboid loaves of bread with no discernible top or bottom. Like the breadmaker, the no-knead recipe produced a fine result (with a nice crackly crust to boot), but I quickly realized that this newfangled process wasn't going to be my cup of tea. It felt weird and sterile and sad to have such little contact with the dough throughout the rising.

One of my all-time favorite breads to make is challah. Now that I've spent this entry complaining about everybody wanting everything to be TOO DARN EASY, I will tell you that challah does fall on the quicker and easier end of the breadmaking spectrum, if you are quivering and frightened at the prospect of heaping bread-based failures upon yourself. The result is fabulous: a loaf that's moist, eggy, yeasty, richly hued, and slightly sweet. It's not such a great companion to garlicky salami or smelly cheeses (believe me, I've tried), and it won't keep more than a couple of days, but my goodness, challah toast is spectacular. And you won't suffer from any stress worrying whether the crust will come out crispy crunchy, because it ain't never gonna happen, sister.