Home Bakery » Israeli Kitchen

Condensed Milk, Milk Cookies, Dulce de Leche, and a Ramble

Cookies, dairy, Preserves and Pickles, Sweet Things 12 Responses »

Jan 252012

It’s really much cheaper to make your own condensed milk. And you can make quantities of it at one time with almost no effort. But it does require time and patience. It’s something to stir while doing other kitchen projects. Like an intensive cooking or cupboard-cleaning session, or a morning of phone calls you’ve been putting off. Actually, the coolest thing would be to have a magical spoon that stirs all by itself. Lacking that, just old-fashioned patience and time will do.

Why would I want to make my own condensed milk? Well, here in Israel, all condensed and evaporated milk is imported in squeezable tubes and cans. Living in a dairy-rich country, it seems wrong to buy a milk product that’s been shipped across the planet. That’s Noble Reason Number One.

Anadama Bread Recipe

Bread, Home Bakery 1 Response »

Jan 022012

On a rainy day like this, what better thing to do than stay in and bake bread?

I wanted a new bread, something I haven’t done before. So I turned to my cookbooks – too many cookbooks, some of which are dedicated to bread, and to bread alone. Lugging about five into the living room, I spread them out on the coffee table. Spent about 10 minutes leafing through them, rejecting all the recipes for one reason or another. You know how that is, when your fancy can’t seem to light on one thing. Sighing, I put the books away again.

But I did want to bake. I imagined the Little One coming home from school cold and wet and a little grouchy, then brightening up as she smelled warm, fresh bread. Domestic magic! Love, security, and fresh bread! (I have these fantasies. I call them Yiddisheh Mamma dreams.)

Guest Post: Cinnamon Bun Cake Recipe

Cakes, Home Bakery, Sweet Things 28 Responses »

Dec 122011

Katherine Martinelli is an internationally published food and travel writer and photographer who contributes regularly to publications on three continents. A native New Yorker, she currently calls Be’er Sheva, Israel home.

That’s how Katherine introduces herself on her delicious blog, www.katherinemartinelli.com . But I can say more. She writes the kind of blog you and I love. It’s chock-full of recipes that turn ordinary ingredients into food experiences (like her Sour Cream Smashed Potatoes), and humor, and the most sensuous, mouth-watering photographs. Everything that the ardent foodie likes.

I’m tickled pink that Katherine has agreed to write a guest post on Israeli Kitchen. (I’m telling you, just looking at that photo makes me want to reach into the screen and tear a chunk off that cake.) So please welcome Katherine, and read on… Continue reading »

Peanut Butter/Cranberry Cookies Recipe

Cookies, Home Bakery, Sweet Things 9 Responses »

Dec 112011

Sometimes nothing but a peanut butter cookie will do. With a glass of milk, naturally. And something different in the cookie – not chocolate chips. Looking through my freezer, which often yields gratifying surprises, I find a bag of cranberries. Ah! Perfect.

Khachpuri, Georgian Cheese Bread

Appetizers, Bread, dairy, Home Bakery 7 Responses »

Nov 132011

I once made friends with three Russian butchers in my neighborhood supermarket. For some reason, they took me to their collective hearts. It amused them, I think, to share their wisdom with this American-accented lady who was always asking things. Saturnine Serge gave me a great lesson in sharpening knives. Dark, quick Reuven showed me how to cut a pocket into a half-breast of turkey for stuffing. And the bear-like Avi gave me the recipe for a luscious, cheese-filled bread from his native Georgia. In return, I brought them a bottle of my fruit wine (and the story is here).

I’ve since moved out of that neighborhood, but still think of my three friends with affection. Especially when I bake khachpuri, the cheese bread Avi taught me. Continue reading »

Sourdough Rice Bread

Grains and pulses, Home Bakery, Sourdough No Responses »

Sep 132011

This makes quite a dense loaf. If you love sourdough tang, just omit the baking soda. I made it with brown rice.

Continue reading »

Sourdough Pancakes

Everyday Cooking, Sourdough 9 Responses »

Sep 042011

Sometimes, when I’m stirring a sourdough batter, I think of my great-grandmother Rose.

Like thousands of Jewish women in the 1800s, she stayed in Russia and waited for her husband to send money for tickets to America. She arrived at Ellis Island around 1898 with three children, no English and no kosher food. Her husband, working in Chicago and expecting to fetch her and the kids, didn’t know she’d arrived.

The story goes that she wandered in New York, bewildered and hungry, for three days. A kindly Jew rescued the family and put them on the right train. Who this angel was, no one knows today, but we do know that Rose went on to raise a good family on American soil.

My Dad told me that Rose was an excellent cook who knew how to make everything. She used to ferment beets for borsht; brew mead for Passover. I’m sure Rose knew all about sourdough, because that was the only leavening she would have had till she immigrated to the States. What would her blintzes have tasted like, I wonder? Did she ever catch onto American flapjacks?

My family had left sourdough behind in history by the time I was growing up. We never baked any kind of bread. Ordinary bread and challah came from the supermarket, from the bakery. Pancakes were Aunt Jemima’s, out of a box.

Now I love baking bread, muffins, and pancakes from my sourdough starter. It’s the connection with the past, yes, but there’s more than that. It’s the satisfaction of managing a natural, living fermentation well. Because the starter in the jar is a live thing, as live as the basil and mint growing in containers on my porch.

And accepting sourdough’s slow rhythm grounds me. There’s no instant anything with sourdough, no megabytes, no nanoseconds, no optical fiber. Sourdough’s main ingredient is unfolding Time. If you’re willing to learn its secrets, you can make sourdough, and Time, your own.

There are two ways that I know of to make sourdough pancakes or muffins. One is to take starter and make a new fermentation – a batter, not a dough. Another is to take about a cup off a sourdough sponge . That’s the first rise, which has almost all the required flour and is light and bubbly but soft and tacky. (Adding the rest of the flour, you make a sturdier dough to knead and allow to rise the second time.) For a full explanation, see my plain sourdough bread recipe.

You thin this cupful of sponge with egg and oil, adding soda and flavorings. If necessary, add some milk. I made these pancakes the second way, but didn’t need more liquid than the egg and oil. It was a sourdough rice bread. I’ll post the bread recipe next post, but pancakes can be made from any dough, not especially this one.

Sourdough Pancakes

Ingredients:

1 cup dough from risen sourdough sponge

1 tablespoon oil

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons sugar

1 beaten egg

1 teaspoon baking soda

Mix the ingredients in the order given, stirring thoroughly but briefly – just a minute or so.

Fry as you would any other pancake.

That’s it. Enjoy!

I topped the pancakes with apricot-passiflora jam from The Well Delicatessen, and it was fabulous.

Apricot Swirl Cheescake

dairy, Home Bakery, Shavuot, Sweet Things, What's Cooking for Shabbos and Yom Tov 10 Responses »

Jun 052011

Do you have to be Jewish to love cheesecake?

Well, no.

But it helps.

Shavuot is coming up next Tuesday night. We have reasons – religious reasons – for eating dairy on Shavuot. For many, that’s cheesecake.

And what, you might ask, rolling your eyes, does cheesecake have to do with receiving the word of G-d on Mt. Sinai?

Well, nothing.

The custom is to eat dairy. Cheesecake is modern tradition, based on the indisputable fact that it’s delicious.

Two commonly accepted reasons for dairy on Shavuot. The gematria, or numerical value of chalav – milk – is 40. We eat milk to remember the 40 days that the Jewish people waited while Moses received the Torah on Mt. Sinai. (Moses was fasting the whole time, by the way). Another reason is that the laws of ritual slaughter and kashrut were unknown till the Torah was received: to avoid eating un-kosher foods while spiritually preparing ourselves, we refrained from meat entirely and got our protein from dairy.

I’m afraid that if cheesecake had been around while we were waiting, our minds would not have lingered long on things spiritual. But – we are also commanded to rejoice on our holidays. Is cheesecake a cause for rejoicing, or one of many ways to rejoice?

This recipe takes a certain amount of focus. And two or three mixing bowls. And some time. But it’s worth the effort because it’s one of the best I’ve ever made. Rich and dense, with a tart-sweet marbling of puréed fresh apricots – a melting mouthful.

If you use a springform pan and grease it well with butter, you will have a smooth-edged cake. I was chicken about its being hard to remove so I placed baking paper in a pan with a removable bottom and got bumpy edges all around.

But when I served the cake to the ladies of the book club, nobody refused to eat the bumpy edges and got up from the table enraged. In fact they loved it.

The cake goes in four stages: bake the cake bottom, pureé the apricots, mix the filling and bake. It needs at least 3 mixing bowls. But don’t be daunted. Read the recipe through and follow my tips for a seamless baking session.

Apricot Swirl Cheesecake

adapted from Junior’s Cheesecakes by Fine Cooking, The Taunton Press

1 9-inch cake – 12 slices

Printable version here

The Cake Base

Ingredients:

1/3 cup flour, sifted

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Pinch salt

2 large eggs, separated

1/3 cup sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

Zest of 1/2 lemon

2 tablespoons melted, unsalted butter

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

Preliminaries:

Preheat oven to 350° F, 180°

If using a springform pan, grease all inner surfaces very well with butter. If using a pan with a removable bottom, place a sheet of baking paper inside.

Wrap the entire outside with tin foil. This is necessary because at the second stage of baking, the cake will bake inside a water bath.

Have ready a pan into which your baking pan will fit easily, for the water bath.

Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together into a small bowl.

Zest the lemon.

Melt the butter.

Separate the eggs, with the yolks in a large bowl and the whites in a bowl big enough to contain them whipped.

Measure the sugar, leave it in its measuring cup, and put a measuring spoon on top of the measured sugar. This spares last-second hunting for the spoon when you’ll need to remove a little of the sugar.

Method:

Beat the yolks for 3 minutes, using an electric mixer set on high. Keep the mixer running and add 2 tablespoons of the sugar from the 1/3 measured cupful. Beat another 5 minutes.

Beat in the lemon zest and vanilla.

Sift the dry ingredients over the egg yolk/sugar mix and beat in on low, just to blend lightly. Blend the melted butter in.

Wash the beaters absolutely clean. In the second bowl, beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar till stiff. With a spatula, remove about 1/3 of the whites and fold them into the batter. Then add the remaining whites, mixing lightly. Stop when the whites are evenly distributed throughout the batter.

Spread the batter evenly in the pan. No water bath yet – that’s for when the whole cake is assembled. Bake 10-12 minutes or until just set and the center springs back when touched. It shouldn’t be baked till brown.

Keep the oven on. Leave the crust in the pan – you will bake the cheese filling on top of it. Put the pan on a rack to cool while you’re preparing the filling.

The Filling

Ingredients for Purée:

3-5 fresh apricots: enough to make 3/4 cup puréed.

1 teaspoon cornstarch

1-2 tablespoons sugar

Blend apricots and cornstarch and add sugar to taste. The amount of sugar will depend on the sweetness of the apricots. The purée should still be tart.

Ingredients for Cheese Filling:

3 cups full-fat cream cheese at room temperature. If using American cream cheese, use three 8-oz. packages. Israelis: I used Ski.

1/4 cup cornstarch

1-1/3 cup sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla

2 large eggs

2/3 cup whipping cream

In a large bowl, mix 1 cup (1 package) of the cream cheese, 1/3 cup sugar, and the cornstarch. Beat on low for 3 minutes or until all is creamy. Beat in second cup (package) of cream cheese, then the third.

Increase the speed to medium and beat in 1 cup sugar, vanilla, and eggs, one at a time. Beat in the cream. Mix thoroughly but stop when everything is mixed; don’t overmix.

Spread the batter over the prepared crust.

Spread the apricot purée over the cheese filling, pushing it down with the back of the spoon here and there. Cut through the purée and batter in a figure of 8, going deep enough to just feel the cake on the bottom. Do this three times, but no more or the cake will will be yellow instead of marbled.

Put the cake in the second pan. Carefully pour hot water between the two pans, up to an inch from the top of the cake pan. Bake for 1 to 1-1/4 hours or until completely set.

Remove the cake from the water bath and put it to cool on a wire rack. Don’t move it for 2 hours lest it fall. When it’s totally cool, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 4 hours to overnight.

Leftovers stay delicious if wrapped well and kept cold, for 4 days.

Iraqi Stuffed Pastries for Purim – Ba’aba Beh Tamur

Home Bakery, Purim, Sweet Things, What's Cooking for Shabbos and Yom Tov 13 Responses »

Mar 152011

Turning away from grief – for us in Israel and for the suffering of Japan – I’ve been putting my mind towards Purim. I confess, after the shock and tears, it’s a strange feeling to know that a joyful holiday is only around the corner. I hope that this coming Purim will truly foretell hasty redemption and rejoicing.

It was therapeutic to turn to my kitchen, take up my measuring cups, and get to work on something delicious. I found an interesting Iraqi recipe on this eclectic site. Rich pastries stuffed with cheese, nuts, or dates. They’re meant to be eaten on Purim, I guess, because each one hides a sweet or savory filling in the dough (symbolizing how Queen Esther hid her Jewish origins from Ahasuerosh until the time came to plead against the genocide Haman had plotted).

I must say – this reminds me of the wry joke that goes around the Internet every so often: How do you define a Jewish holiday?

Like this: 1. They wanted to kill us. 2. We were saved. 3. Let’s eat!

Not true for all holidays of course, but close enough, close enough.

So here is what I baked today, adapted from the original recipe.

Ba’aba Beh Tamur – Iraqi Stuffed Pastries for Purim

About 30 pastries

Notes: the original recipe calls for butter. Pareve margarine works fine too. Likewise, it assumes that you’ll be mixing the dough in a mixer. I just beat everything up by hand.

Here in Israel, you can get concentrated essences of rose and orange water. They’re much stronger than the “waters” and I prefer to use them.

I substituted 1 teaspoon freshly-smashed cardamom seeds for the fennel in the recipe because I dislike fennel. Lacking either of those, use 2 teaspoons cinnamon or the zest of 1 lemon. The dough must have something aromatic or it will be too bland.

My filling was almond/pecan, the nuts ground up quickly in the food processor. I’ll include the recipe for date filling as well. Finally, the buttery dough does seem to call for cheese. I’ll suggest alternative cheeses to the original version’s.

Ingredients:

For Dough:

1 cube fresh yeast

1 cup warm water

3 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon ground fennel seed

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons melted butter (or marg)

1 beaten egg for glazing

For Almond Filling:

1 cup ground almonds

1/3 cup sugar

1 tablespoon each rose water and orange water or 1/4 teaspoon edible rose and orange essences.

Method:

1. Dissolve yeast in water. Add flour, baking powder, fennel or other spice, and melted butter. Mix until you have a soft dough that forms a ball.

2. Cover with plastic bag or damp cloth; allow to rise 1 hour or until doubled.

3. Preheat oven to 425°F – 200°C.

4. Work with a quarter of the dough at the time for convenience. Roll it out 1/4″ thin. Use a large biscuit cutter or glass to cut into 3″ rounds. Brush the rounds with a little water.

5. Mix filling ingredients in a small bowl. Put 1 teaspoon filling in the center of each round and fold it over. Press your fingers down all around the edges to seal, or use the tines of a fork. Brush beaten egg on pastries.

Bake 25 minutes.

Date Filling for about 30 pastries:

8 oz. – 250 grams pitted, finely chopped dates. Here you can get date paste in blocks and that’s better.

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 tablespoon milk

1 egg white

sesame seeds

Combine ingredients in top of a double boiler and cook 5 minutes, stirring a few times. Allow the mixture to cool and roll it into balls for stuffing the pastry. When forming the pastry, place a small ball at the center of each pastry round and pinch the sides upwards to make a closed bundle. Flip over and flatten slightly with the rolling pin. Pierce with a fork in several places. Paint the pastries with an egg white and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Bake as directed above.

Cheese Filling:

1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese

1/2 cup mild yellow cheese, grated

1 teaspoon dried, crumbled za’atar, oregano or rosemary

1 finely chopped scallion

1 egg

Combine cheeses, herbs, and egg. Bake pastries as half-circles as in the almond filling.

Too good.

By the way, I wonder if the correct name for this pastry is ba’aba beh tanur, no “m.” I don’t speak Arabic, so I can’t tell if someone’s typo may not be going around, as typos do.

The Miracle of Bread

Bread, Home Bakery, Just Thinking, Sourdough 14 Responses »

Feb 232011

It happens when I pick up a slice of my own bread. I turn it around, inspect the crumb and color. Bite, and judge the yield of the crust to my teeth. The age-old smell of fermented flour. The mysterious workings of yeast upon sugars and starches. Bread, a miraculous thing. Gratitude and wonder fill my mind.

How wise and beautiful is the blessing over bread: Blessed be You, G-d, our Lord and King of the universe,Who brings forth bread from the earth. It amazes me that people ever learned to harvest, thresh, and winnow wheat, grind it into flour, and ferment that flour with water to bake into loaves. How did it happen, so long ago – how did people have the wisdom to go from step to laborious step and in the end, produce bread to eat? In wonder, I can only believe that the wisdom was a divine gift.

Bread must have been the first product of human technology. When you think of it, the first convenience food too, as it’s edible for days after production, unlike vegetables and meat. But not easy to get, even if the wheat field extends right up to your doorstep.

In ancient societies, people grew and processed their own bread, but it was arduous work. In this article, I read that the ancient Israelite woman might have spent three hours on her knees every day, bent over a stone quern, grinding wheat into flour. To feed your curiosity, this article by Jane Howard describes bread in ancient Egypt, and this Wikipedia article talks about the history of bread (with an awesome photo of a petrified round loaf retrieved from the ruins of Pompeii).

In medieval Europe, getting bread was not only back-breaking but expensive. Landowners demanded two-thirds of villagers’ wheat production and set overseers to make sure the tax was met. The physical work of milling was taken out of the people’s hands, but not with kindly intention. Grinding flour and baking at home became illegal, so that the humble were forced to carry their wheat to the miller and then carry the flour to the communal baker – and pay for the work. In kind, because they had no money.

No, bread wasn’t taken for granted. Many lived and died without ever having eaten their fill of bread at one time.

Bread will always be a moving force in history. To learn more about it, I recommend H.E. Jacob’s Six Thousand Years of Bread. Much in this book can be taken, like bread itself, with a grain of salt, but the author gives you a panoramic view of bread’s historic role, from neolithic times to modern days. It ends on a poignant reflection of what bread was to Jacobs as he struggled to keep his humanity in Hell:

“In the Buchenwald concentration camp we had no real bread at all; what was called bread was a mixture of potato flour, peas, and sawdust. The inside was the color of lead; the crust looked and tasted like iron. The thing sweated water like the brow of a tormented man… Nevertheless, we called it bread, in memoriam of the real bread we had formerly eaten. We loved it and could scarcely wait for it to be distributed among us.”

Bread is holy, Jacobs concludes. And bread is profane.

Yes, and yes. Nourishment to the body and to the soul, derived from G-d’s grace yet requiring bodily toil and sweat to have.

How wonderful, what a miraculous thing.