Banana nut bread

I know I haven't updated this blog in forever - not because I haven't been cooking and eating lots of delicious things, but just because I've been so busy with other stuff like studying, dancing, and traveling! However, the second I bit into this bread/cake I knew I had to post the recipe, if only so that I can remember it to make it again!

And again and again and again...


For some reason, I've suddenly started making all sorts of American dishes that I've never made even once in my life before. I suppose it all started a couple weeks ago when an Italian friend asked me for a recipe for chocolate chip cookies (which I have made, plenty of times) and followed up with a request for a recipe for brownies (which I never have made, not even once). I immediately emailed my mom for both recipes and, as I was translating them into Italian, I thought "hmmm, these sound really good..." and a few days later, there I was, scouting out my local grocery store for baking chocolate, butter, and vanilla extract!

The banana bread was even less planned than the brownies, but several days ago my housemate bequeathed a couple of medium-ripe bananas on me, and as I already had several bananas of my own, the obvious solution was to wait a few days for these new bananas to get super-ripe and then turn them into delicious banana bread! Having never baked banana bread before, I scouted around for some recipes, and finally settled on a recipe by David Lebovitz, which I then tweaked quite a bit to fit my tastes/available culinary options! The original recipe can be found here. My own version is given below. It's a bit breadier than most (uses whole wheat flour, yogurt, etc.), but it still tastes quite sweet, and the nutmeg really adds a kick.

Ingredients:
2 very ripe bananas
125 g. cake flour
125 g. whole wheat flour
125 g. sugar
A largish spoonful of vanilla sugar
A small spoonful of salt
A small spoonful of baking soda
A spoonful of baking powder
175 g. plain, whole milk yogurt
50 g. unsalted butter + extra for buttering the pan
2 eggs
75 g. walnuts
Half a nutmeg
A spoonful of cinnamon

Leave the eggs out until they are at room temperature. Then preheat the oven to 180º C / 355 º F, and butter a loaf pan.

Melt the 50 g. butter and let cool a bit. Grind the nutmeg, and sift together the two flours, the salt, the baking powder, the baking soda, the nutmeg, and the cinnamon. Stir the sugar and the vanilla sugar into this mixture.

Chop the walnuts into small bits and mash up the bananas until they are very soft. Beat the eggs and combine them with the melted butter, the yogurt and the bananas. Stir the liquid ingredients together thoroughly, and then make a well in the center of the dry ingredients. Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients, stirring until just combined but no longer (until you can no longer see any bits of flour or anything). Stir in the walnuts, and spread the whole mixture into the loaf pan.

Bake for 40-45 minutes until the top is browned and a fork stuck into the middle comes out clean. Let cool and then eat!

Panzanella (Tuscan bread salad)

Panzanella is a classic Tuscan summertime dish. Simple to make, it requires no cooking and is best if made at least an hour before serving, so it's a great dish to bring to potlucks and parties.


The version I made is the most basic one, but it's easy to make your own variations by adding whatever ingredients you want. Some common additions include hard-boiled egg, anchovies, capers, or lettuce.

Ingredients (for a large salad):
1/2 loaf of high-quality, somewhat stale bread (though the typical bread would be Tuscan bread, which is made without salt and in my opinion is a complete waste of flour, I used some older sourdough walnut bread I had, and it was delicious. The walnuts were a great addition to the salad as was the extra flavor of the sourdough)
1 cucumber
5 medium-sized salad tomatoes
1 red onion (the fresh kind if possible)
A handful of basil leaves
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar

Cut the bread into thick slices and place the slices in a large bowl of cold water to soften up. Depending on how stale your bread is, this could take from about 5-15 minutes. The bread should be soft but not disintegrating.


When the bread is softened, remove it from the water and squeeze out any excess water from the bread. Taking a bit at a time, crumble the bread into smallish bits (not as small as real crumbs), and place the crumbled bread in your salad bowl.

Slice the onion into half-rings. Wash and peel the cucumber (if it's the kind that needs to be peeled) and slice it fairly thin. Wash the tomatoes and dice them. Wash the basil leaves and tear them up by hand.

Add the onion, tomatoes, cucumber, and basil to the bread. Add in several spoonfuls of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Stir everything up, cover, and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Just before serving, add in a spoonful or two of balsamic vinegar, and extra olive oil, salt, or pepper, if necessary.

Sourdough walnut bread

Though I'm not a big fan of walnuts per se, I adore walnut bread - somehow the bread part manages to bring out the best of the walnuts and the walnuts bring out the best of the bread!


I've been baking a loaf or two of bread every week for awhile now, and though I try to vary it up from week to week with different types of bread, I've found that I just keep coming back to the walnut bread. I know it will be delicious, and I know I'll never get tired of it. The only downside to this bread is that it's so good that I hesitate to pile on lots of sandwich toppings because I'm afraid they'll drown out the flavor. In fact, this bread is fine to eat just by itself - add a bit of olive oil and salt and it's absolute heaven!

Ingredients:
350 g. whole wheat flour
150 g. bread flour
A spoonful of salt
A spoonful of olive oil
Half a cup of walnuts
Sourdough starter
Warm water (as much as is necessary)

Naturally, to make sourdough bread, you'll need to have some sourdough starter. If you don't have the time to make starter, I suppose you could just use yeast, but the starter really adds a wonderful flavor here, so I strongly advise you to make your own. Once you make a starter, you can keep it in the refrigerator for years, just feeding it with flour and water every so often, and it will only get better over time!

The method I've been employing to make my sourdough bread recently is to make the dough one evening, let it rise in the refrigerator overnight, and then give it a second rise and bake it the next day. While this does require a bit of planning ahead, it definitely improves the flavor of the bread, and I kind of like being able to spread out the bread-making over 2 days - that way I don't have to worry about not giving the dough enough time to rise.

So, if you want to follow that method, the day before you plan to bake your bread, make the dough. When I have time, I try to feed my sourdough starter about 5 hours before making the dough, so that I can build it up from roughly half a cup to almost a cup and a half - again, this is all with the aim of strengthening the flavor of the bread, and if you have time, I definitely recommend it.

Measure out your starter and add equal parts water and flour (I generally use whole wheat flour, but you can use any sort of wheat or rye flour), place in a covered container, and let sit several hours in a warmish place.

When you're ready to make your dough, mix together the two flours in a large bowl. Chop the walnuts into medium-small pieces and set aside. Prepare your kneading space by dusting with flour, and have a large cup of warm water ready. Also, just in case you forgot, make sure to remove any rings and watches, tie your hair up if it's long, and wear an apron (I know these are very basic bread-making tips, but I often forget at least one of these things until I'm already halfway through the dough-making and my hands are covered with flour, so I thought I'd include them here). The apron is not always necessary, but it's a good idea, especially if you're wearing dark clothing.

Measure out a quarter cup of the freshly fed starter, mix with a quarter cup of flour and a quarter cup of water, and return it to the refrigerator. The rest of the starter will go into the dough. Form the flour into a sort of well, and sprinkle the salt around the outside of the well. Pour the olive oil into the middle of the well, and then add in the starter. Incorporate the flour into the starter, starting from the inside and working your way out. Add water as needed, pouring in a bit and then mixing until the dough starts to become dry, and then adding more. Continue this way until all the flour has been incorporated into the starter and water, and you have a slightly wet, sticky dough.

Turn the dough out onto your floured board, and do something called "fraisage". I first read about this on the baking site The Fresh Loaf, and though it's generally recommended as a way to get flakier pastry crusts, it's featured in this video of Danielle Forestier showing Julia Child how to make french bread, and I've found that if nothing else, it cuts down on the kneading time. Probably improves the flavor too, but I haven't done any scientific experiments to determine that yet...

In any case, fraisage is just a technique in which you turn the dough out and then sort of stretch it all out. Place the palm of your hand in the center of the dough and then push it out towards the left end of the board. Repeat, only this time push out the dough at an angle slightly closer to the center, and continue pushing out the dough all around. After this, let the dough sit for a couple of minutes (you can use the time to wash any dishes that need it).

Once the dough has sat a bit, turn it out again, and knead for 5-10 minutes, until it is resistant when you push down on it. Fold in the walnuts by taking a few spoonfuls, placing them in the middle of the dough, folding the bottom of the dough over the top, giving the dough a quarter turn, and then pushing it down again. Repeat with another few spoonfuls of walnuts, and continue this way until you have used up all the walnuts. Then fold the right and left sides of the dough over into thirds, give the dough a quarter turn, and repeat.

Shape the dough into a ball and place in a floured bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit in the refrigerator overnight.

The next day, take the dough out of the refrigerator at least 2 hours before you want to bake it, more if possible. Because the dough will be cold, the second rise takes longer than it would if you had let the dough rise at room temperature - for that I generally give the dough a second rise of one hour, but here I aim for more like 3 hours.

Punch the dough down, and divide it into whatever shapes you want your final loaves to be. I went for two oval-shaped loaves this time.


Cover the dough with a well-floured cloth, and let rise for 2-3 hours. 45 minutes to an hour before baking, preheat your oven to 450º F / 235º C. If using a baking stone, make sure the baking stone is in the oven before you preheat it!

Just before baking, score the loaves, by making several deep cuts into the tops with a sharp knife or razor blade. Place in oven, and after about 5 minutes turn the heat down to 400º F / 205º C. Let bake another 20-30 minutes, remove from oven, and let cool.

Serve as a tartine, a sandwich, a complement to a meal, or simply on its own!

Toasted bread with pecorino and honey

Sharp pecorino sardo and sweet honey complement each other in this super-tasty toast - a perfect snack for a cold, wet afternoon.


I got the idea of pairing pecorino with honey from a friend of mine who in turn got it from a friend of his, who said the combination was incredible. Unfortunately, this friend couldn't remember what kind of pecorino to use and so I had to do some experimenting to figure out which one went best.

There are 4 main types of pecorino that I'm aware of (pecora, by the way, means 'sheep' in Italian and unsurprisingly, pecorino is made from ewe's milk, which is higher in fat than cow's milk, thus giving the cheese a delightfully creamy texture when it's soft, and a rich flavor both when it's soft and fresh and when it's aged and hard). The two most common types of pecorino are Pecorino Romano, which is well-aged, sharp, and generally used in a manner similar to parmesan (grated over things, etc.); and Pecorino Toscano, which is usually not aged a very long time and is much softer and sweeter than Pecorino Romano. This kind of pecorino works well in sandwiches.

Pecorino Sardo

The other two types are Pecorino Siciliano and Pecorino Sardo. I have never tried the Pecorino Siciliano, but the Pecorino Sardo is similar to Pecorino Romano - just a bit less sharp - and it seems to work the best for this recipe. The Pecorino Romano tends to be too hard and burns easily, while the Pecorino Toscano is not as sharp and so doesn't complement the honey as nicely. The addition of the bread was my own idea, because what dish cannot be improved by good bread?

If you have a toaster oven, just use that, but if you are without one, you can toast the bread under the broiler of your oven. Turn the heat up very high and be sure not to let the bread sit in there too long - about a minute is all you need; any more time and it will burn.

Ingredients:
Not-too-thick slices of good crusty bread. This is a great use for bread that's about to go stale and won't work for sandwiches anymore.
Pecorino sardo
Honey

Turn the broiler on your oven to high, or alternatively, preheat your toaster oven. Place some aluminum foil on a baking sheet/toaster tray and place the bread on it. Cut the pecorino into thin slices and cover the bread with the pecorino.

Put the bread into the oven or toaster oven and let cook about a minute. Do not overcook or you will get burnt toast and wasted pecorino!

Remove from oven and spread honey evenly over the toast. Eat right away!

Besan roti (Indian chickpea flour bread)

This must be the simplest and easiest bread I've ever made. I was a bit worried about the fact that no salt is used in this recipe, but the chickpea and whole wheat flours add enough flavor to make up for that, and the bread is a great and quick-to-make accompaniment to a meal, especially a spicy one!


This bread is unleavened and is made by rolling the dough into thin discs and heating them quickly on a griddle. Because the baking is so fast, I recommend baking the roti immediately before serving them - you can keep the finished bread discs warm by putting them on a plate covered with a clean cloth.

Ingredients
200 g whole wheat flour
200 g chickpea flour
A spoonful of oil or ghee if you have it (optional).
Water

You can use more or less flour, depending on how many roti you want - this recipe makes 8-10.

Combine the whole wheat flour and chickpea flour in a bowl, making sure to mix the two flours together thoroughly. Add the oil/ghee to the mixture if using, and then slowly pour in the water, mixing until you get a slightly sticky dough.

Knead the dough for about 10 minutes. The dough will not become as resistant as more standard bread doughs, but it will firm up a bit as you go. After kneading, place the dough in a bowl and cover it with plastic wrap or a damp cloth. Let the dough sit in a warm, non-drafty place for at least half an hour.*

After the dough has rested, divide it into 8 equal portions. Roll each portion into a ball just a bit smaller than a golf ball.

Roll out the balls into thin discs, and then heat a griddle over the stove until it is hot enough that a drop of water will skip across its surface.


Place the first disc onto the griddle. As soon as it starts to bubble on top, flip it over with a spatula, and let it cook on the other side. The cooking times are very short - about a minute for the first side and just 15 seconds or so for the second side.

Remove the roti from the griddle, place on a plate and cover with a cloth. Repeat the process to cook the rest of the roti, stacking them up on the plate as you finish.

Serve warm with some good Indian food (or whatever your choice of cuisine is)!


*Most of the recipes I saw gave 30 minutes as the resting time for the dough, but I think this is the time needed in an Indian climate. If you live in an area without such a warm climate, you will likely need to let the dough rise a bit longer - an hour should be fine.

Pan Tomate

This Catalan "dish" is about as simple as you can get, and yet it's one of my favorite appetizers because it's so fun to make, especially with a big group of people.


I was introduced to Pan Tomate (literally "tomato bread") while staying with the family of a friend in a little village way up in the Pyrénées. They were wonderful people with a very lively family full of small children and animals. And Chantal (my friend's aunt) certainly knew how to cook! Every meal she served was sumptuous, fun, and far more food than we could possibly eat. But we gave our best efforts!

Even with all the fancy cooking, my favorite dish was this simple appetizer which came, as they told me, from the typical workman's lunch in the region. The way they explained it, the men's wives would set them off in the morning with a hunk of bread and some tomatoes, and at lunchtime the men would use their work knives to slice the tomatoes in half and then rub the halves all over the bread. A very practical way to get a nice, fresh meal without having to come home!

We ate pan tomat in the same way, rubbing the tomatoes on ourselves, and that's what makes this dish so fun, despite the sparsity of its ingredients. I highly recommend this for largish dinners with family, friends, and of course, good wine. As this can be somewhat messy, it is not advisable for fancy dinner parties where you're trying to impress people, but those aren't nearly as enjoyable as the other kind!

You will need:
A couple of loaves of good, fresh bread. High-quality bread is important here (and in my mind, everywhere else as well). The bread should have a good hard crust. Otherwise, tomato juice will get all over you!
Several fresh tomatoes. I recommend medium-sized round tomatoes - the kind you would put in a salad.
Olive oil
Salt
Several slices of prosciutto crudo (or jambon de pays, as we called it there), again of high quality. The prosciutto is optional, but I think it's a nice addition, especially for special occasions.

Cut the bread into largish hunks, and then slice the hunks down the middle, so that each piece has crust on the bottom. Place the bread into one or more baskets for people to grab from. Wash the tomatoes and slice them into halves, or quarters if they're large, and place them into one or more bowls, just like the bread. You could also have people slice their own tomatoes at the table, but that might get a bit complicated. As it is, this dish requires a lot of passing around of olive oil, salt, etc.

Put out the olive oil and salt, along with the bread and the tomatoes, and a plate with the prosciutto if desired.

Pour everyone a generous glass of wine (featured here is a lovely prosecco - carpené malvolti di conegliano).


Next, demonstrate for your guests how to make pan tomat: take a hunk of bread and drizzle a bit of olive oil onto it. It's not important to spread the olive oil out evenly because the tomato-spreading will take care of that. Sprinkle salt onto the olive oil. Then, with gusto, take a tomato half and rub it all over the bread, leaving the leftover tomato on if you want, though that's not necessary. Top the tomatoed bread with a slice of prosciutto, take a good sip of wine, and eat, encouraging your guests to do the same!

Ideally, this appetizer course should go on quite a bit, with lots of tomato-rubbing and merry-making.

Chocolate Rye Bread

While I'm a big fan of rye bread simply as is, the addition of cocoa powder here adds a richness and a complexity to the flavor that make for an almost hedonistically satisfying bread that goes well with pretty much any topping, whether sweet & creamy, sharp & cheesy, spicy, nutty, or whatever else!


The first time I made this bread, I failed to document it in pictures because, after what seemed like ages of attempting to knead the dough, I was utterly convinced the bread would be a failure.

Now, I am no expert baker, but I have had fairly good luck when it comes to baking bread. I love bread more than pretty much any other food, and so I am quite willing to knead for as long as it takes, to let the dough rise for hours and hours, and to make whatever other sacrifices are necessary for the loaf to emerge perfect and crusty from the oven.

But this dough was different. No matter how long I kneaded, no matter whether I added more flour, more water, more anything, it just wouldn't behave. Usually, I knead until the dough starts to fight back a bit - when I push it down, it bounces back up, as if it were alive. Once I reach this point I know things are going well, and I'll knead for a few minutes before setting the dough aside to rise.

But this bread would not fight back. It was completely malleable and obedient to my every move. If I stretched it out, it would stay stretched. If I folded it down, it would just sit there - no rise, no bounce, no nothing - a disaster! I kneaded and kneaded and kneaded, hoping the dough would show some signs of change, but eventually I had to admit to myself that it was pointless. Distressedly, I left the dough in a covered bowl to rise, hoping that maybe if I let it rise for a realllllllly long time, some sort of miracle would happen and it would start to look and act more like it should.

5 hours later, the dough had barely risen. Okay, maybe it had risen a little, but I'm still not sure if that was just my wishful thinking or not. I was without hope for this bread, but I soldiered on anyway (no point in wasting good flour), and punched the dough down, shaped it, gave it a second rise, and put it in the oven to bake.

Well, a few minutes into the baking, and the room started to fill with this delicious, incredible chocolatey aroma. I no longer cared if the bread was flat as a doorstop or hard as a rock - I just wanted to taste it, wrecking teeth if necessary! Somehow I did manage to restrain myself long enough to let the bread bake and cool, and then I cut myself off a small (but dense) sample.

Needless to say, it was delicious. Though the chocolate smell was nearly overwhelming while the bread was baking, when I tasted it the chocolate was much more subtle, complementing the slightly sour rye very nice. Furthermore, though the bread was dense, it was also surprisingly soft and chewy, and extremely satisfying.

I later discovered that rye flour is in fact very different from wheat flour, and if you make a bread with 100% rye flour, as I did, the dough is not going to act like normal wheat flour dough at all. It all has to do with the amount of gluten in the different types of flour and these things called pentosans, and what it boils down to is that you shouldn't worry because while the dough may act strange, the bread will be good, and that's really all that matters, isn't it?


So without further ado... the recipe for Chocolate Rye Bread!

You will need:
About 200 g rye flour
About 50 g cocoa powder (more if you want the bread to be more chocolatey, less if you want it to be less so)
One large spoonful of honey
One small spoonful of salt
As much water as necessary
Sourdough starter*

*Though I just used sourdough starter because I have it on hand and don't like to spend pointless money on yeast, it turns out that sourdough starter is actually very important for making breads with rye flour. The higher the percentage of rye flour to total flour, the more important the starter is. Again, it comes down to the flour chemistry. Those nasty pentosans gobble up all the water and so the gluten can't bond with it to make long chains, the way it should. The acidity of the starter can counteract this by interfering with the pentosans, allowing the gluten to the water first. If you don't have your own starter, you can make a quick one the night before by mixing some rye or whole wheat flour with some water and adding water and flour to it every few hours or so. For instructions on how to make your own starter, see here.

Sift the flour together with the cocoa powder. Make the flour into a sort of fountain, and add the salt and honey around the edges of the fountain. Mix the starter into the center, adding more flour from just around the center, until the flour has absorbed all the starter. Then add in the water, a bit at a time, again starting in the center, and working in more flour from outside until all the ingredients are well mixed.

The dough will be very goopy, but do not let this deter you! Turn it out onto a well-floured surface and, with the help of a dough-scraper (one of the best kitchen tools in existence), knead the dough for about 10 minutes.

Once you've kneaded for awhile, fold the dough into thirds horizontally by folding in the right and left sides, and then also vertically by folding in the top and bottom. Turn the dough over so the folded part is on the bottom and shape it into a ball. Place the ball into a floured bowl, cover with plastic wrap or a towel, and leave in a warm non-drafty place for at least a couple hours, possibly more.

After the two hours are up, take a baking sheet and cover it with parchment paper. Spread a bit of flour or cornmeal onto the paper, and place the dough onto the paper. Punch the dough down and then, with the help of your dough scraper again, divide the dough into as many portions as you want loaves. Shape each loaf according to your wishes, and cover them all with a floured towel. Let sit for another hour.

After about half the hour is up, preheat your oven to 425º F / 220º C. Once the rest of the hour has passed, uncover the loaves, and score the tops with the help of a very sharp object, such as a razor blade. This will help keep any air from getting trapped and forming large, unsightly bubbles while the bread is baking.

Place the baking sheet in the oven and let bake for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, turn the heat down to 375º F / 190º C, and let bake 25-30 minutes more.

Turn off the oven, move the baking sheet to a cooling rack, and let the bread cool as long as you can stand it!