hanseata's blog

In Quebec the one thing I'm always really looking forward to is, of course, French cuisine. For our daughter's graduation in Montreal we put up in a fairly nice hotel near campus, and went down for breakfast with pleasant expectations.

Heading straight for the croissants I noticed their lack of crispness, cold and tired they were sitting in the display. Well, there was the toaster, and innocently pretending not to understand the warning: "Pas des croissants" ("Nix comprengg!") I revived my lackluster pastry (no smoke alarm).

Back at our table I garnished my croissant with some butter and jam and took my first bite. At once red lights started flashing as my taste buds yelled: "Beware of cardboard!!!" In utter disbelief I took a second bite, and there it was - a total blandness and the faint but unmistakable taste of shortening!

In two days we will be home in Maine, and next time we visit Portland we will go to our favorite breakfast place: "Mornings in Paris", where they have the most wonderful, buttery, crisp croissants...

There are two things members of our patchwork family have in common - we love good food and we hate olives! Even the pickiest of our kids, Valerie, producer of the famous "square mouth" whenever I made her try at least one bite before she said she didn't like it; and Francesca who ordered "just white rice" when we ate at a restaurant, ended up as foodies. Valerie even became a chef!
The Andersons and their offspring pick olives off pizzas, and leave them untouched in the salad bowl. They don't order tapenade and don't drink martinis. But then something strange happened...
Knowing that a lot of people are olive fans and crave them in all kinds of foods, I looked for an olive bread recipe to satisfy those die-hards. I found one in my favorite "Brot aus Suedtirol" and decided to give it a try, tweaking it a bit (using pate fermentee and overnight refrigeration).
I had a long struggle forcing slippery olives into the dough (maybe they sensed my negative vibes). My first batch of "Pane di Olive" looked like misshapen scones, with dark bruises (from my abuse?), but they didn't smell bad. With some apprehension and no great expectation I bit in an olive laden roll. Took another unbelieving bite and was deeply shocked - the olive bread tasted good, really good, incredibly good!
I gave one to Richard, the most willing guinea pig of all husbands, who eyed it with distrust. "You should probably call that 'Malfatti' (= badly made) he suggested, but then obediently tried the olive roll. In no time it was gone!

I had a visit by a rep from my wholesaler, Downeast Food Distributors, who left a sample of a new gluten free bake mix to test some bread and pastry recipes. It consists of a mixture of rice flour, potato starch, sugar, salt and 5 different gums plus methylcellulose. This chemical array is necessary to enable the bread to rise at all and not fall apart.
I haven't tried it, yet, but I don't envy those poor people with celiac disease. I could go without a lot of things, but living without bread? Apart from that they have to pay a lot for gluten free goods: a 5 lb bag of bake mix costs 40 - 50 bucks - wholesale!

Last week I had bad baking karma. On Monday I wanted to make Broetchen, the deceptively simple, crispy, white roll, as German as baguettes are French.
After several trials that never yielded the soft, fluffy, "pull-out" crumb typical for Broetchen I finally got it right with Italian 00 flour (from "Micucci" in Portland). But would simple American pastry flour work, too?
I made a beautiful looking batch, sprinkled with sesame, poppy and sunflower seeds. It went into the oven, I set the timer and started tidying the kitchen. The smell of something burning did not bother me at first, I thought it was some spill on the oven floor.
But the nasty smell grew stronger, and an anxious look into the oven showed a sheet full of charcoals instead of cute golden rolls. Even though not even half of the baking time was over, my rolls were completely burnt. The LED display showed the right temperature, so it must have been a short in the oven's electronic brain - or was it simply a bad bread day...?
Tuesday I tried a new bread - "Wheat Almond Bread", adapted from one of my German baking books. This time the oven meekly supplied the right temperature, and the loaves came out just right, golden brown, and smelling wonderful.
One was for Aaron and Lynn from Richard Parks Gallery, my cheerful part time employers. Their bread was ready to go, but I was distracted and forgot the bag in the hallway. We were not even down Cottage Street when I realized my mistake and went back.
I opened the door, and Buffy the Chow Hound ran upstairs - always a sign of a dog fleeing its owner's rightful wrath. Brown paper pieces littered the floor - but not even a crumb of the Almond Bread. It had been completely wolfed down, in less than five minutes!
I was still steaming when Richard, the best of all husbands, suggested that I might just see it from a different point of view: the Almond Bread was excellent - Dog Approved!