Friday, January 27, 2012

Our Father, who art in leaven, Challah be thy name

I must say, dear readers, that last week's challah fiasco caused two feelings to emerge inside me. The first was a feeling of abject failure. How, I asked myself, could someone who could create some foods so effortlessly, be completely loser-ific at making a simple challah...in a BREAD MAKER, no less!

The second feeling was just as powerful, but possibly a  bit healthier. It was a sense of determination.  I decided that if so many people in this world had the ability to bake a challah, then by gum, so could I! And with this simple thought and new attitude, I set off yet again on my quest to bake a challah that could not double as a paper weight.

My first stop was to the local library. I pored over bread recipes in beautiful books, but decided upon what I felt I needed most, "Bread Machines for Dummies". With alternating feelings of self pride in recognizing my need for help and seeking it, and the other being utter embarrassment, I sidled up to the counter. With eyes lowered, quite aware that everyone around me was witnessing the fact that this woman is inept when it comes to yeast, I checked out the book. I couldn't wait to get home to find out the answers to my two burning questions, (a) do you have to proof the yeast before adding it to the bread machine, and (b) is there something I need to be doing that I'm not? I had so much to learn.

Thumbing through the manual only got me more frustrated (I was obviously too dumb), so I abandoned the book altogether. The next day at work, I approached my friend and colleague, Tracey. Besides being a great teacher, Tracey is an expert challah baker (I know because she has brought her challah to school a number of times, and it has never made it up the stairs to the staff room). I was confident that she could answer all of my queries, especially because I knew that she uses a bread machine to make her dough. She not only answered my questions ((a) I didn't need to proof the yeast, and (b) I should be using bread machine yeast), but she graciously and generously offered me her challah recipe to try. She promised me that it would work. The thought was suddenly intruiguing...I could use a different recipe than the one I had, and I had guaranteed results. Could it work? I needed to give it a try.

So on Friday, when no one was looking, I grabbed the ingredients and began concocting. As I measured everything into the machine, one thought kept ruminating in my head---'This is stupidly simple. There must be a catch'. I then mused to myself, if it doesn't work, I still have the good one from last week in the freezer. When all of the ingredients were in the bowl, I hit the 'dough' setting on the maching and went off to do my chores.

All seemed fine until I realized that my hearing, or lack of it, had caused me a potential problem. Tracey had instructed me to add the raisins at the machine's first beep. Well, I missed the bleepin' beep! I was so frustrated that I just opened the magic little breadmaker door and threw the raisins in anyway, hoping against hope that somehow the machine would mix again. It didn't.

I did, however, manage to hear the bread maker beep after the mixing was done. I peeked through the window, just like I had done the week before. I took a deep breath and opened the little door. To quote Jed Clampett, 'Weeeell doggies'!

I took out the dough and mixed the stray raisins in by hand. I divided the mixture in two, fashioned two challot, 'took challah' as is the tradition, and popped them into the oven. I then walked away. I couldn't bear the possibility of these guys not rising.

One half hour later, I opened the oven door and....oh my goodness...they looked....AMAZING! All that was left was the taste test.

It was just me and New Hubby for Shabbat dinner....just us and two large challot. After the motzei, he sliced into one of the puppies. Lo and behold, it had worked! The challahs rose. They weren't raw in the middle. They tasted great. Tracey was right...they came out perfect.

Here's the recipe!

Tracey's Sweet Challah

1 cup water
4 tbsp (1/4 cup) oil
1 egg
1/2 cup sugar
3 1/2 cups flour
2 1/4 tst baking machine yeast
1 cup raisins

Combine ingredients in order according to bread machine. Set dough recipe. Add raisins at first beep.
Bake at 350 for 30 min.

Enjoy, and Shabbat Shalom!
A quick P.S. Due to a mishap involving my camera, I do not have the photo of my great opus. You'll just have to rely on the recipe!

Friday, January 20, 2012

Veni, Vidi and....well...

One would think that after conquering the zemel, I would have been satisfied. I had overcome my 'thing' about yeast and that should have been enough. No such luck. Zemels were only the beginning. For some strange reason, the zemel episode had somehow freed the Great Yeast Monster lurking inside of me. Let me explain.

The euphoria had suddenly given me the courage to address the bigger issue at hand--my decades long obsession with my personal Moby-Dick--the sweet challah. In all those years,  I had never quite understood what I had done wrong, why the challah never came out right. Had it been me? The recipe? Was it my technique? Something had made it impossible for me to get it right. Until now. Now I felt that I would be able to tackle it. After all, now I have a secret weapon. Now I have.... a breadmaker! From deep inside me, I could hear Liza singing in my head, 'Maybe this time....I'll be lucky..'. Okay, the song is about a guy, but nevertheless... I was stoked!

So, with an aire of hope and flowers and butterflies and all things beautiful, I dusted off my old recipe. I was Captain Ahab, setting off to capture my Great White Whale!

I sailed around the kitchen, sifting through the fridge and pantry, gathering the necessary elements of the beast. With a sense of higher purpose, I carefully placed everything on my counter. Meticuously, (and with just the right touch of giddiness) I measured everything out and added the ingredients into the breadmaker. When that was done, and with a sense of new found pride, I drew a deep breath and finally pressed the glorious button. The process of kneading the individual ingredients together to create a whole new being began. With child-like wonder, I watched the machine dance (literally). And then, I went to the grocery store, because...really...how long can a person stare at a bread machine?

An hour and a half and a hundred dollars in groceries later, poof! The timer beeped. The moment of truth had arrived. The dough was ready for me to braid. I practically trembled in excitement. Had I really, finally done it?

Furtively I crept up to the window of the breadmaker to see what had transpired (I'm not making any of this up. I actually tiptoed up to the breadmaker, like it was a jack-in-the-box ready to blow). Like Goldilocks,  I peeked inside the little window to see what I could see. There before me, was a beautiful ball of dough!

And then, I gulped. It really should be bigger than this, I thought....but in my desperation I reasoned that it had been many years since I had attempted the recipe...maybe I had forgotten how big the challah should have been. I decided to take it out of the breadmaker for a better look, and to see how it felt.

Hmmm. Not quite a bowling ball, but I could tell this was not boding well for me. Sensing that Moby had eluded me yet again, I pressed on. I broke the dough into thirds to create braids. As I worked, I became increasingly crestfallen as the reality and gravity (in more ways than one) were sinking in. The dough seemed dry. It didn't feel right. I tried to buoy myself by invoking the lyrics to Liza's song...."Not a loser, anymore...". I let the dough sit for the last rising. I egg washed it, made my famous 'crumma crumma' topping (a handful of flour, a handful of brown sugar, some cinnamon and drops of oil...enough to make it come together to the right consistency) and popped it in the oven to the requisite temperature.

And then I waited.

Well, it smelled good, I can tell you that.

I'll get to the point. The challah had turned out, just like the lyrics had suggested, 'Like the last time and the time before". Everyone at the table was very polite. They ate around the part that was raw in the middle and gave me many encouraging words. Luckily for everyone, I had a perfect, store bought challah sitting beside the dud that my family opted not to touch. I think they felt my pain, so they opted to inflict themselves with some of the lead bread in solidarity. And with that meal, so ended my relationship with this particular recipe, and why I'm not sharing the recipe.

Now, any bright person would end the story here. But now, I'm more determined than ever to get this right. Stay tuned for Part 2, because there will be one.

Hit it, Liza!

"All the odds are, they're in my favor
Something's bound to begin
It's gotta happen,
happen sometime
Maybe (the next) time I'll win"

Friday, January 13, 2012

Beet it!

My disdain for beets (and almost all red food...except raspberries) began as a young child at the seder table.

For some ridiculous, insane reason that I could never figure out, my uncle (my mother's brother) did not adore my grandmother's chicken soup, the recipe which remains in my family to this day. I don't get it. It's irrational, I know, but there's no accounting for taste. In order to appease her firstborn, my grandmother made him beet borscht, (and although it could have been served at our house at other times during the year, I only remember this occasion vividly) which he adored.

Each year, I watched as the bowl of soup was placed in front of him. I remember becoming horrified that someone might actually drink that red stuff. To me, the whole event was akin to a vampire lapping up his victim. My stomach turned at the thought, and thus my aversion to most foods red was born.

Beet borscht became even more abhorrent when I saw it served with a dollop of sour cream. Two images constantly came to mind....calomine lotion and Pepto Bismol, neither of which seemed appetizing. For the next almost half century, I managed to avoid beets, and other red foods (save raspberries, which are, holy....well, to me they are), including tomato juice, red Kool Aid and even red Smarties (I definitely ate the red ones last....if at all).

Alas, life moves on. Over the years, I would accidentally and occasionally be introduced to beets. Usually it happened that I would meet them on a dish served to me at a restaurant. Politely I would give them a try, and oddly enough, found them to be...gulp....tasty. Still, it's a long road from giving them a taste and actually buying them and bringing them into my home to cook them.

Enter Facebook.

A few days ago, I got mired (ok, involved) in a conversation with some friends, some foodies and wannabe foodies about how we might decide to eat more vegetables in 2012. Somehow, the topic of how to best prepare beets came up. Recipes galore ensued, and my interest was piqued....but not enough to CTRL C and then paste. However, beets were in the cards.

Enter Jamie Oliver and his Meals in Minutes. What did he choose to cook the very day following this discussion? Beets. That was it..serendipity won. I was off to the supermarket to experiment.

I decided to try a cold beet salad. I grated the beets with visions of beet borscht pasts dancing visciously in my head, creating.my personal, gastronomic post traumatic stress reaction. Nevertheless, I pushed on, adding some olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper as per Jamie's directions. I took a spoonful,

Tasteless. Now what?

I grabbed some raisins and some almonds, and called my daughter into the room to do some taste testing. She so innocently remarked that my concoction reminded her of charoset (even SHE was reminded of Pesach!!!). We did a bit of brainstorming and decided that a bit of honey was in order.

And voila! It tasted pretty...not bad! Everyone seemed to enjoy the salad, which now means that I will experiment with beets more often.

But don't expect beet borscht on the table any time soon!

Friday, January 6, 2012

Zemel, Zemel Lach (apologies for the terrible pun)

I'm afraid of a few things. Number one on my list is my fear of lightning. During a rainstorm, I prefer to get into bed, pull the covers over my head and hide until the storm passes. It's childish, I know, but it's my fear and I accept it.

My next fear is completely irrational (unlike the former). I call it, Saccharomyces cerevisiaephobia....the fear of yeast. To be fair, I'm not afraid of yeast per se; I'm afraid of working with it.

When I was a teenager, I managed to make a number of fine, raisin challahs at summer camp with my friends. I have fond memories of spending the day with my buddies, working with the dough until it was perfect. After the challahs were kneaded, we decided to disperse and go take our showers while we waited for the last rising. Lucky for us, we covered the beasts before we left. When we came back, we realized that some squirrels had decided to tiptoe over our masterpiece. Brilliant teens that we were, we figured that the heat of the oven would kill any possible bacteria. Whatever we did must have been brilliant. We received rave reviews. The challahs disappeared, and we bakers shared knowing glances and chuckles for the remainder of camp.

My luck at baking with yeast was never to be repeated (Divine retribution?). In the years following, I seemed to strike out at any attempt to make a challah. After three or four tries at most (more than 20 years ago), I decided that yeast and I were simply not friends. Gradually over time, I became downtrodden. I developed a growing fear that I could never produce anything made with yeast. It haunted and taunted me. In truth, I longed to conquer that same fear, especially when I realized that my errors had nothing to do with the yeast, but had everything to do with my (mis)timing of adding raisins to the mixture.

Enter my new mother-in-law, Queen of the Zemel.

Zemel is a Yiddish word for 'roll'. MIL's zemels are cinnamon rolls, light, sweet, delicious and a staple of New Hubby's diet. Not long after we met, MIL offered to teach me how to make them. All of a sudden I was frozen. What do I do? Do I decline the offer or do I face my fear?

It was a Sunday. MIL showed up to the house, ritually bearing the requisite vessel needed to make zemels. On her head, she wore a shmatte, because, she explained, that's what her bubbe did (there's a joke about brisket that fits in nicely here, but I digress). Before I knew it, we were getting down to business.

As I gave the recipe a first glance, I noticed one thing--the ingredients were listed, but the directions were conspicuously absent. According to my MIL, instructions, along with the ingredients were redundant; after all, she knew the recipe off by heart, so who needed them! This is no surprise to me. My grandmother worked the same way, as do I to a certain extent. It was all about cooking by 'feel', or in this case by 'sight'. The cinnamon/sugar mixture had to be a certain colour to be considered correct. and the zemels had to rise to a certain, invisible line in the magic bowl. It became evident that baking zemels was a science, and my MIL had, over decades, had turned it into a fine art. I obviously had a lot to learn.

In what seemed like no time flat, the dough had been mixed, risen and formed into buns. Before I knew it, the smell of cinammon and bready goodness was wafting through my kitchen. Those little devils had risen to perfection and were now baked to golden brown perfection. In the end, the taste test proved it. I knew that with the help of my MIL, I had conquered my fear.

Saccharomyces cerevisiaephobia be damned! With the help of Daughter #2 and brand new Step Daughter, we made magic in the kitchen the other day, baking beautiful zemels. Most of them are gone now, the true mark of a successful baking adventure.

So buoyed by my success, I am now on to the next hurdle. Next week, I shall endeavour to tackle my next food item avoided since childhood...beets. Stay tuned as this little girl decides to finally grow up!

And still to come will be my attempt at making that raisin challah. New Hubby must have faith in me. He bought me a bread maker for Chanukkah.

I just won't use it during a lightning storm!