Deborah

Fougasse: Bread from the Heart

February 10, 2016 by Deborah

I’ve been experimenting this week with fougasse for Valentine’s day in hopes of sharing some loaves with supporters this week. It’s a beautiful bread. A mix of sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts in the dough, and a very slow rise in my frigid mid-western kitchen created a bread that was just barely pink and tasted heavenly with a soft cheese and champagne. It’s a perfect Valentine’s treat. Sadly, it just doesn’t seem to do well after it leaves the kitchen, and I gave up on the idea of a fougasse bake sale this year. Fougasse is meant to be eaten fresh from the oven.Stretched thin to make the Valentine’s heart shape, this bread is almost all crust. It’s cracker like where the dough is most thin, but dense and chewy inside the thicker parts. Right out of the oven it is unbeatable, but it doesn’t travel well. The same crust to crumb ratio that makes it so delicious also makes it short lived. Fougasse is, after all, a hearth bread. Once made to test the heat of the hearth (an experienced baker would know how hot the fire was by how quickly the thin loaf baked), it’s still best when eaten close to the hearth where it was baked. In honor of that heritage, it’s traditionally shaped to resemble a flame. But since the hearth has always been regarded as the heart of the home, I think the less traditional heart shape makes sense too. And I guess it also makes sense that my favorite Valentine’s bread is meant to be eaten at home. It’s truly a bread of the heart, meant be shared close to home with people we love, and if we are lucky (and I am) that is often where our biggest supporters can be found anyway.

Baking & Breaking Bread

January 21, 2016 by Deborah

It’s a snow day here in Missouri, and I’m making a huge batch of breakfast toasting bread to celebrate. Like most of our bakery breads it’s made very slowly, folding the dough every thirty minutes or so throughout the morning. The best thing about this particular bread, and the thing that makes it a universal favorite, is the way the dates gradually melt into the dough with each fold. As I developed the recipe last year, I kept adding more and more dates with each variation until my mom took a bite and declared it perfect. I wrote down the amount of dates (and raisins and nuts and berries) and declared it the perfect breakfast toast formula to anchor the Little Flour weekend menu. Then I promptly made the recipe again and added more dates. After all, if 100 grams of dates are perfect, wouldn’t 125 grams be even more perfect? The answer is no. At some point, too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing.

I am reminded of that this morning as I knead the dates into the dough (the trick is to do this after a nice autolyse allows the two types of flour to absorb all the water making the dough easier to work with) and then tuck it back into a warm bowl to rest. This seems to be the time of year when we all think about what to change, how to grow, or who to be in the new year. Too often, for me, this had led to a temptation to add “more” of whatever is good in my life. More dates to the bread dough. More breads on the menu. More ovens in the kitchen. More classes on the calendar. All good stuff, but adding too much can be, well, too much.

I got to spend a week at King Arthur’s Baking School in Vermont last summer with a dozen great bakers from all around the world who were considering ways to start new bakeries or expand small bakeries into larger ones. The class was taught by Jeffrey Hamelman, who is the Director of King Arthur’s gorgeous bakery. What I remember most, and what I am pondering again this morning as I work with my breakfast bread dough, is that he did not start the class with a list of ways to grow a bakery. Instead, he started with a list of questions about why we wanted to do that. What is the thing you most want to do, he asked. And if you are doing it well as a small bakery, what makes you think that doing it bigger is a good idea? What are your motives? What are your resources? Who do you really want to feed? What makes you unique? After answering these questions, he stressed, the key to success might have nothing to do with getting bigger. I learned a lot about how to run a bigger bakery, and my respect for those that do it grew every day. I continue to be fascinated by big, beautiful bakeries. But my honest answers reavealed that I like my small bakery. A few breads a few days a week. Enough time left over to focus on the community that eats the bread after it comes out of the oven. Because for me, baking is about community. And the bakery is as much about the good breaking of bread as it is about the baking of good bread.

So it will be another small year here at Little Flour. Some baking. Some teaching. Some speaking and advocating about ways to end hunger here in our community. And some time to enjoy breakfast toast with just the right amount of dates, not too many and not too few, as the snow falls outside my kitchen windows.

Holding it all together

December 3, 2015 by Deborah

My gingerbread house post yesterday failed to give an icing recipe to hold those houses together. Gingerbread houses aren’t the only thing that can be hard to hold together this time of year, and you need to know what works for you. I’ve found that a little bit of quiet time each week helps me hold it together, and most weeks I start my Monday morning alone in a coffee shop with a frothy coffee (St. Louis has a lot of great independent coffee shops and bakeries where you can still get coffee in a real mug and beautiful pastry made by hand) and some time to reflect and make decisions about how I want to spend my time that week. Often the thing that appears to be the most urgent at first glance is really not the most important thing upon reflection. The retail world may think shopping is urgent right now, but this week I decided to make gingerbread houses for the kids in my life. It’s an important tradition for us, and one that holds us together as a family from year to year. My daughter gave me the best gift of the season when she came home and decorated one for my kitchen, and I’ve loved creating the Little Flour gingerbread house kits so that other kids can share in the fun. When it comes to gingerbread houses, as my friend Emily pointed out yesterday, you really do need a good icing to hold it all together. Here is the recipe I have found does the job the best…

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No Perfect Houses

December 1, 2015 by Deborah

Somewhere out there hangs a Norman Rockwell painting of the perfect family gathered together at home for the holidays. There’s a mom and a dad, a son and a daughter, a well groomed dog and a perfectly decorated tree. No dishes in the sink or crayons on the walls. I’m sure the leaves are raked and the laundry is folded too. At least that’s how I remember it and for some reason believed it ought to be each year. But it’s not. Not for me or for anyone else really. For years that bothered me, and if any piece of it was missing I ached for the way things “ought” to be. But there are no perfect houses – certainly no perfect families – and we can waste a lot of precious time comparing our actual lives to the fictional ones we see around us this time of year. Instead, I’ve learned a holiday lesson from the gingerbread houses we bake each year. If I try to make them perfect, no one has any fun. It’s okay if the lampposts are different heights and someone ate the other half of the roof. There is no reason you can’t put stripes on the walls or Minions in the living room. There is no such thing as too many M&Ms, and Bugles make the best kind of trees if they don’t all get eaten in the car on the way to grandma’s house. In other words, gingerbread houses can be a bit messy and every one is different. That’s what makes them fun. This year we’re baking gingerbread house kits (cows and minions optional) and delivering them to some of our special young friends to decorate. They won’t be perfect, and we wouldn’t want them to be.

If you’d like to make an imperfect house for someone in your life (or yourself-you’re never too old for gingerbread!), here is our favorite recipe for easy cutting, long lasting, and delicious gingerbread. The whole process is made easy with these great gingerbread house cookie cutters!…

Pumpkin Oat Bread

November 4, 2015 by Deborah

Here’s the breakfast bread our supporters are eating this month. Each loaf is filled with house made apple butter, roasted pumpkin, and sprouted wheat and oats. These demi-loaves are moist with just enough sweetness for breakfast or a late night snack. They are filled with sprouted whole grain goodness so they are good for you, and around here proceeds from all sales pay for Thanksgiving dinner at our local drop in center. What could be more delicious than that? Try making a batch for the hungry kids in your house or neighborhood!…

Apple Butter

November 4, 2015 by Deborah

It’s ok to give yourself a gift every now and then. For me, loading the freezer with apple butter each fall is a gift to myself for the winter. Apple butter sweetens most of the quick breads we make during the winter for bake sales and cooking classes, and it’s also the key ingredient in a lot of our snowy day pancake recipes at home. Every year on one of these late fall weekends, I’ll head to Tower Grove and buy as many varieties of local apples as I can find. If I can talk the kids into picking the apples at a local orchard, all the better. Then I’ll spend a lazy afternoon peeling apples and listening to great music on the patio. I toss the apples and spices into my big dutch oven and forget about it. The apple butter cooks itself overnight, slowly filling the house with the aroma of happy days ahead. Make enough to eat on pancakes this weekend and freeze the rest in half cup containers for baking. You’ll thank yourself this winter….

Be a Good Cookie!

November 1, 2015 by Deborah

The history of the cookie swap in this country is about sharing more than cookies. It’s about sharing recipes and stories and time as well. It’s about making your best and then giving it away, hoping that someone else will love it as much as you do. That’s why it was so much fun to participate in The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap to raise money for Cookies for Kids’ Cancer this year. This great organization encourages all bakers to “be a good cookie” and raise money to help end childhood cancers. The organization’s founders are fellow believers that a batch of cookies made with love really can change a kid’s life, so it was a joy to bake with them this year. For the big event, I tweaked one of our classic Little Flour cookie recipes by adding sweet dried bing cherries to our dark chocolate and toasted coconut cookie batter. The recipe makes eight dozen cookies so it’s perfect for cookie swaps, teacher thank you gifts, and sharing with friends. The toasted coconut infused dough is delicious and adaptable. You can use milk, dark or semi-sweet chocolate or a blend all three. Little Flour supporters love them with dried bing cherries this time of year, and that’s the way we made them for the swap, but you can also use blueberries or no fruit at all (as my true chocoholic family still prefers). No matter what you choose to add to the dough, the real fun is in giving them away. Enjoy!

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Special Orders

September 30, 2015 by Deborah

We’re at full capacity for weekly subscriptions right now, but are enjoying working with some of our supporters on special orders for fall events. For a parent meeting with a farmer’s market theme last week, we turned to the fall issue of SIFT for this great Roasted Apple Pecan Bread and paired it with homemade apple butter and Vermont maple syrup butter. It was great fun to tailor bread to a special event, and the proceeds paid for all the toppings at a pizza baking class for hungry kids that afternoon. What a great way to make special orders truly special. Thank you!

And if you are curious about how to make great pizza at home, check out Thursday Night Pizza from Father Dominic Garramone who is a great teacher of both how and why to cook for the people we love! In keeping with our Cooking Matters goal of teaching kids to eat more whole grains, and just because it’s delicious, I’ve been using about a cup and a half of King Arthur’s White Whole Wheat Flour in place of some of the bread flour in each batch. Give it a try and see what you think…

Gratitude

September 29, 2015 by Deborah

This might be the best tasting bread that ever came out of our kitchen. If Peter Reinhart calls it “my all time favorite bread” you know it must be good. Check out the swirls of cinnamon in that beautiful raisin bread dough. The recipe includes quite a list of grains: polenta, oats, wheat germ, wheat flour, brown rice. And if you read the story of the bread, you know that it was meant to be made for today, September 29, Michaelmas. It is a harvest bread, celebrating the many grains of the harvest. But it celebrates more than that. The original blessing of the bread starts with this wonderful language “each meal beneath my roof, they will all be mixed together…” That language struck me as I mixed together all of those grains this morning. Every grain, every meal, every person with whom we break bread-they all get mixed together into the fabric of our loaves and the fabric of our lives. As I kneaded the dough I was grateful for all of them. As I rolled it out I realized that each grain had its own shape and texture, but they were all necessary to get the perfect dough. It made me think about all the things that make us each unique, and the ways that we are so much better when we come together. So I am grateful tonight. For the smell of cinnamon lingering in my kitchen. For warm bread and butter with my son after school. For the family and friends I break bread with almost every day. For the kids I bake with on Friday afternoons. For the supporters who buy our breads and donate funds to keep our programs running. They are all part of the Little Flour mix, just like all the grains that go into the Struan. So while the Struan recipe is perfect exactly as written, I think part of what made it taste so good today was the gratitude that went into it. Its another one of those intangible ingredients that make all the difference in baking. Try it yourself and see what you think.

Why Bread?

September 8, 2015 by Deborah

Bread is not fast. Invariably someone will point this out when I talk about baking classes for hungry kids. The ingredients are simple and readily available on almost any budget: flour and water, salt and yeast. Even the yeast is optional when bread is naturally leavened like the sourdough baguettes we love on weekend nights around here. But bread requires time. And in today’s world time often seems like the costliest ingredient. You have to mix those few ingredients and then let them rest. This is the critical “autolyse” during which the flour absorbs the water. Then a bit of salt gets added and more time is required for kneading. Since both hands are required the baker can’t do anything but knead and think about the the dough transforming in her hands. It’s a time to think about the the people that will eat the bread, too, and about the ways they might be nourished and transformed by the meal. Then the dough rests again. The dough is much better if the baker lets it rest for a while and then folds it gently to develop the gluten. And it’s made better still if she does this several times over the course of the afternoon. That means staying close to the bowl of dough, watching its temperature and feeling the texture change. Rest. Rise. Shape. Wait. More time. More attention. Bread is more than the sum of its simple ingredients, it is a gift of time. A gift of self. There are faster ways to get people fed, but few send the same message. A loaf of bread made by hand says something powerful. To break that bread and hand it to someone to eat is to hand them a bit of yourself. It means you cared enough to spend a day thinking about them, that you were willing to spend some time on them, that you want them to be well fed on the journey. And when you bake bread with someone, and break bread with someone, you build a relationship that can only come with time. Those relationships are as nourishing as the bread itself. So yes, we could teach kids to make a faster meal, and in fact we often do, but the weeks when we bake bread together are the weeks that feel special. Time may be a costly ingredient these days, but it’s also the one that changes things.