B is for Brioche

There is a sentiment/comment/reprimand that I hear on occasion...okay, well, maybe a little more frequently than "on occasion."  It has something to do with crossing the line, a phrase I dislike and a behavior for which I am rarely sorry.  Let's say, for example, that maybe a few friends are talking about music, and then maybe the topic shifts to, oh, say...country music, and then maybe The Judds are mentioned (well, why wouldn't they, the color of Wynonna's hair demands attention), and then maybe Nik says something about how it seemed like the Judds Farewell Tour lasted for about 3 years...chuckle chuckle chuckle, end of conversation.  Um, no, I don't think so, I cannot just let that one slip by...so, just maybe I suggest a possible (graphic) regretful comment that Mrs. Judd may have made when finding out she had Hepatitis C.  Which undoubtedly is followed by a laugh/a groan/then another laugh/and a final groan, and then I hear it...You had to, didn't you...you had to cross the line. 

Or, for example, when a longtime local TV news anchorwoman appears on our television in high definition with bangs (at her age?) and more than her daily allotment of make-up, so I casually mention that she looks like a tribeswoman from one of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon who went to the big city to become a prostitute.  Sure, he's laughing AND he agrees, but he also implies that I crossed the line.

But it isn't limited to verbage or spontaneous commentary.  F'rinstance, there's the annual Halloween battle.  Halloween...an international holiday that exists, as far as I'm concerned, for crossing the line, for pete's sake, and yet, I get shot down year after year.  Why?  Because instead of appearing at J and T's party as the overdone and predictable "Diana Ross and The Supremes" (yawn), apparently I cross the line when I want to dress as "Diana Ross And The White Supremacists."  Come on, it's Halloween!!!

I could go on, and apparently that's the point, sometimes I do go on...a bit much, some might suggest.  Perhaps it's really just a matter of editing.  There are those who edit prior to speaking.  I, on the other hand, sometimes, allow my listeners to make the choice for themselves, and thus provide them with the unedited/unfiltered version of my thoughts, from which they can choose to respond/react/revolt/retreat. 

But, to be honest, really...it's almost always just for laughs.  I have always said that I will gladly sacrifice a meaningful conversation for a really good one-liner.  Personality flaw?  Avoidance behavior?  Politically incorrect? Sophomoric?  Sure, maybe, probably.  But, say what he wants, Nik still laughs...when I am the one crossing the line. 

Brioche is a rich, heavenly, wonderful medium with which to cross culinary lines, because it crosses lines by its very existence.  Pastry chefs consider brioche a cake, while for bakers it is certainly a bread.  Rich with eggs and butter, legend has it that (the tragically out of touch) M. Antoinette actually said "Let them eat brioche" in reponse to the peasants' lack of bread.  Crossing the line, when referring to food, might also be called gilding the lily, because what brioche does not need is an additional layer of richness.  But one bite of a soft buttery brioche filled with a vanilla pastry cream, and the concept of need is irrelevant/out the window, and we can be glad for those who cross lines.  

Brioche

Yield:  Approx 20 small brioche

AP Flour.......................................500 grams
Water...........................................50 grams
Sugar............................................70 grams
Eggs............................................250 grams
Salt..............................................12 grams
Yeast............................................30 grams
Butter (softened).............................250 grams
Egg Wash
Turbinado Sugar
1.  Combine yeast and water in mixer bowl, let set about 5 minutes until rehydrated.
2.  Combine dry ingredients.  Add dry ingredients and eggs to yeast mixture and mix with paddle attachment for 12 minutes.  (This builds the strength of the dough).
3.  Add the butter to the dough, bit by bit, with the paddle attachment incorporating the dough slightly as you go.  Don't dawdle -- get that butter into the dough.
4.  Beat for approx 6 minutes on medium speed, until the butter is fully incorporated into the dough.  (It may take a few minutes more or less)  The dough will be soft and silky.
5.  Scrape dough into a bowl, cover and let chill at least 2 hours, preferably overnight.

When ready to bake...
1.  Prehat oven to 350.
2.  Butter 20 muffin cups (or small brioche molds, if you have them)
3.  Divide dough into 2 ounce pieces.

4.  Roll the dough into a ball, then into a bowling pin laying on its side (using the side of your little finger), then into a sombrero, then place in the buttered muffin cups - folding the rim of the sombrero up and a little around the peak of the sombrero (see picture).
5.  Cover with plastic and let rise about an hour, until they are puffy and almost rise above the rim of the muffin tin. 
6.  Brush gently with an egg wash, sprinkle with Turbinado sugar, and bake for approx 20 minutes (until golden).

7.  Remove from muffin tins carefully (you may have to loosen the sides with a small, thin spatula).
If you are crossing the line/gilding the lily:
1.  Slice off the cap of the brioche. 
2.  Gently remove the interior crumb from the base of the brioche.

3.  Fill with a spoonful or two of pastry cream (see recipe).  (Add a few sliced strawberries in the base of the brioche and atop the pastry cream if you have them.)
4.  Replace the cap of the brioche, serve and enjoy.

Pastry Cream
Yield:  2 1/2 cups

Whole Milk...............................2 cups
Sugar......................................1/2 cup, divided
Salt........................................1/4 tsp
Cornstarch................................3 1/2 Tbl
Eggs........................................1 whole
Egg Yolks..................................2
Butter......................................2 Tbl
Vanilla Extract............................3/4 tsp

1.  In medium saucepan, bring milk and half the sugar to a simmer.
2.  Combine the salt, cornstarch, and remaining sugar in medium bowl.  Mix in egg and egg yolks.
3.  Slowly add the warmed milk to the egg mixture, whisking continually.
4.  Return the mixture to the saucepan and heat until it begins to bubble, stirring/whisking continually.  Let it bubble for 30 seconds.  Remove from heat and add the butter and the vanilla, stirring until it is combined.
3.  Scrape pastry cream out of saucepan, into medium bowl.  Plac ein ice bath, and place platic wrap directly on the top of the pastry cream.  Let cool then refrigerate.

A is for Apple Tart

Every October, for at least the past decade, we have been making the trip to Willcox to pick apples, and tomatoes, and chilies, and whatever else looks tasty and ripe at the U-Pick farms.  We usually pack a lunch and eat at picnic tables that are between the rows of trees in the peach orchard. 

 It's a hot and dusty and wonderful day.  We carry buckets through the apple orchards and fill them to the top with Granny Smiths and Fujis.  Using some weird sort of intuition not to pick from this tree, but then go two rows over to pick from that tree.  Then we head over to the vegetable farm and make a beeline for the rows and rows of tomato plants.  The plants aren't staked up nicely like in a home garden, but rather are draped over themselves, hugging the ground, hiding their fruit.  I can't even tell you how thrilling it is for me, everytime, to lift up the branch of a tomato plant and find 2 or 3 or 4 large, juicy, perfectly ripe tomatoes.  Beautiful, truly vine-ripened tomatoes.  I can honestly say that it is one of my favorite annual moments.  And the smell of a tomato plant, when you rub your fingers on the leaves or brush your arm against them as you are picking the tomatoes...that tart, tangy fragrance....mmmmm, love that.  Nik doesn't agree...but what does he know, he has cologne that smells like Play-Doh.

But we didn't get to Willcox this year.  And I'm not really sure why.  True, we did become The House Of Limping Men in the past several weeks...but that shouldn't have stopped us.  And I did make a trip out of town one weekend...but there were several other weekends in September and October when we both were home, so that shouldn't have stopped us.  And none of the other real-life barriers (illness, money, work) were an issue, so they didn't stop us.  I hate to say it, but it was inertia that did it.  The dreaded black-cloud/quicksand/empty tank/myopic/impotent fact of inertia.  We just didn't get it together to do one of our favorite events of the year.  We allowed life to stall for a period of time. 

So we don't have a freezer full of green chiles, tomato sauce, peeled/sliced apples, or okra.  Too bad but not a big deal, not really...we can always buy those things at the grocery store.  But Willcox isn't really about the produce.  It's about the fun, and the sunshine and dirt, and the tradition, and the familiar, and the "remember that one year when..."  And we let that slip by this year.  Too bad, sure, but we won't next year.  And in a few years, when we are drinking our Starbucks and heading east on I-10, lunch in the cooler in the back of the car, maybe a couple of friends in the back seat who (can you believe it?) have never before been to Willcox to pick apples, we will remember when we didn't get to Willcox that one year and we won't remember why.  And we'll just keep talking and laughing and driving east.

French Apple Tart

Makes a 9-inch round tart

(filling based on recipe from Baking with Julia)

Crust

AP Flour........................1 1/4 cups

Whole Wheat Flour...........1/4 cup

Salt..............................3/4 tsp

Unsalted Butter, cold.........5 oz

Shortening, frozen............2 1/2 Tbl

Ice Water.......................approx 1/4 cup

1.  Pulse the dry ingredients in the food processer a few times to combine.

2.  Cut the butter and shortening into Tablespoon-sized pieces and add to flour.  Pulse until the butter is broken into pea-sized pieces. 

3.  Drizzle in some of the water, pulse, some more of the water, pulse, etc...until the dough begins to come together.  Don't overmix it. 

4.  Turn the dough onto a worksurface or into a large bowl and knead it briefly (just a few turns) to get it to form a ball.  Wrap it in plastic and flatten it into a disc.  Let chill at least an hour.

5.  When ready to make the tart, roll the dough on a lightly floured surface to 10-inch round, and fit into the tart pan.   Poke holes in the bottom of the crust with a fork and let chill for at least 30 minutes (while you prepare the apple compote).

6.  Fit a piece of foil into the chilled crust and fill with pie weights or dry beans.  Bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes.  Remove the foil/weights and bake for another 4 minutes.  Let cool slightly before filling.

Apple Compote

Granny Smith Apples...................6

White Sugar. ...........................1/2 cup

Brown Sugar.............................1/4 cup

AP Flour..................................1 Tbl

Cinnamon................................Largeish pinch

Fresh Bread Crumbs....................1/2 cup

Lemon Juice.............................2 tsp

1.  Preheat oven to 375.

2.  Peel, core, and chop the apples (each apple should yield about 24 pieces).  Toss the apple pieces with the remaining ingredients, and turn out into a large roasting pan.  Cook for 25-30 minutes, until the apples have released some of their juice and are easily pierced with a fork.

3.  Mash with a potato masher, but leave a few small lumps of apple for texture.  Let cool while the crust bakes.

4.  Fill the crust with a layer of the apple compote, bring it just below the rim of the crust.  Smooth the top.

Apple Topping

Grany Smith Apples......................3

Lemon Juice..............................approx 1 Tbl

Butter, melted...........................2 Tbl

White Sugar..............................1 1/2 tsp

1.  Peel, quarter, and thinly slice apples.  Toss in lemon juice.

2.  Arrange apple slices atop the apple compote in an tightly overlapping pattern.  When the outside circle is completed, arrange an inner circle, overlapping the outside row slightly.  (You can lay some of the odd shaped apple pieces underneath the inner row to make it level with the outer row.)  Cut a small circle of apple and place in the middle of the inner circle. 

3.  Gently brush the apple slices with the melted butter and sprinkle with the granulated sugar.

4.  Bake at 375 for 30-35 minutes.  Let the apple slices get a little dark along the edges.

A Is For Anadama

Motivation is a strange  and elusive state of mind.  When it hits, fo-gittaboutit, nothing can stop me, and all else is deprioritized and of little import.  Cleaning the house, reading a book, working on a play, perfecting a recipe, it is all fair game for tunnel vision and a mad whirl of activity.  (Usually accompanied by statements like, "This is gonna be great!...I love this!...I gotta get this done!...This is the best idea!...Now!  And, or course, lots of exclamation points!).  Productive, stimulating, imaginative, and a tad bit manic.  Yes, suffice it to say that the line between motivation and obsession is quite thin.
On the flip side, because life is filled with big buts, there are times when motivation is hard to muster.  When sitting on the porch and flipping through a magazine is about as creative and devoted to a project as I can get.  When life and synapses seem still and sluggish.  Waiting for the next bolt of motivation to strike.  Authors would probably say that these are periods of writer's block, and those with a decidely artistic bent may call it waiting for the muse...though I hardly think that dusting, vacuuming and mopping require a muse...a fire under one's rearend perhaps, but not a muse. 
The philosophically-minded may spin this toward the positive, believing that the mind continues to work even when the body isn't.  Those lovely do-nothing afternoons on the back porch are not periods of dormancy, but rather are moments when the internal processes are still doing their thing...the mind is percolating and motivation and imagination are recuperating and regenerating, getting ready to burst to the surface in another flurry of something-or-other. 
Again, the cleaning-the-house test raises its dusty head...does the brain really need to cogitate and shoot off chemical fireworks just to get the floor mopped?  Obviously it does not. 
But...another big but...hmmm, consider that motivation may just be energy (mental/physical/spiritual/whatevah)...free-floating energy looking for an outlet.  So, if the house is dirty (and four dogs and an acre of mostly dirt means the house is usually dirty), that energy gets applied to a mop.  If I am thinking about a play, or a book, or a recipe, and coincidentally my mind has dumped a surplus of this ambiguous energy into the psyche...2 + 2 = new obsession. 
Example:  the other day, sitting on the back porch, flipping through magazines, that funny feeling starts poking at me somewhere between the brain and the spine and the stomach and then it hits...blogblogblogblogblogblogblogblog, wait, wait, maybe, I could, whatabout, Yes, I like it...The ABC's of Baking.  And so we begin...

A is for Anadama Bread. 
An old-fashioned bread with a silly story behind it (suffice it to say the name supposedly derives from the phrase "Anna, damn her" said with a New England accent).  It is a nice, easy bread that I always think of in the fall, perhaps because it has molasses in it, which, in my mind is a colder weather ingredient.  Nik is not a fan of molasses, so I twisted the recipe a little and used brown sugar (which does contain molasses) and honey, which results in a notably lighter (and I think, better) bread.  Anadama dough also must have cornmeal in it (according to the Bread Police?).  And because I still have several bags of cranberries from last year in the freezer, I added some of them (and some orange juice) to the dough as well. 

Makes 2 loaves
Active Dry Yeast........................2 1/4 tsp
Warm Water............................1 1/4 cups
Orange Juice............................1/3 cup
Butter....................................2 Tbl
Honey....................................1/8 cup
Brown Sugar.............................1/8 cup
Salt.......................................1 Tbl
Cornmeal................................1/2 cup
AP Flour..................................4 cups
Whole Wheat Flour.....................1/2 cup
Whole Cranberries......................1 cup

1.  Rehydrate yeast in 1/4 cup water in small bowl.
2.  Combine 1 cup water, orange juice, brown sugar, honey, and salt in small saucepan and heat over low until sugar is dissolved and butter is melted.  Let cool to barely warm.
3.  Combine yeast mixture and sugar mixture in mixer bowl. 

4.  Add the flours and mix with dough hook 2 minutes on low speed.  Dough should be soft but not wet - add more orange juice is it feels too dry.  Mix an additional 2 minutes on second speed.  Turn dough out onto lightly floured counter and briefly knead in the cranberries, a few quick folds should do it. Form into a ball, place in a buttered bowl, cover with plastic and let rise until doubled (about 2 hours).

5.  Butter two loaf pans.  Divide the dough in half.  Pat each half into a rectangle shape, then fold two sides over each other (as with a letter).  Roll each piece into a log and place, seam side down, in the buttered pan.  Cover and let rise until nearly doubled.

6.  Preheat oven to 375.  Just prior to baking, using a sharp thin blade, score the top of each loaf with a long cut.  Bake for 40-50 minutes, until lightly golden on top.