Tex-Mex quiche

I know that sounds a bit odd but the recipe of this quiche uses influences from western tex-mex cuisine. I first used corn flour for the dough, mixed with half white flour. Then for the base I used 3 eggs and a block of firm tofu, 1 capiscum (paprika) diced and 1 tomato; and some texmex mix of spices. I prepare a sable dough, roll it to 1mm and prepare a pie dish. In a bowl I mix the tofu (drained of course) the eggs and the spices, add the diced capiscum and set in the dough, slice the tomato and add on top. Bake 40min at 160deg.

March 26, 2016

Apple, vanilla and cinnamon cookies

I love to eat freshly baked and still warm bread, pancakes, brioche or whatever for breakfast, but it is unfortunately not possible every morning. So sometimes I bake in the evening so that we have something ready in the morning. And for that tarts, cakes and cookies are the best. I love the classic mix apple-vanilla-cinnamon, so i made some kind of thick cookies with fresh apples on top for our breakfast. The trick is to have them not too sweet for breakfast, so I mixed the flour with oat bran and just a little of sugar and a little of butter, I added one egg and a little of baking powder, plenty of cinnamon powder and vanilla beans. I then roll the dough to 3mm thick and cut the shapes of the cookies. I peeled the apples and cut the shape too a little smaller and topped the cookies with it. Baked them at 170deg for 20min. And added a little of vanilla on top. Simple and perfect anytime of the day actually!

March 23, 2016

Breakfast time

When we were in Karuizawa, they would serve delicious scrambled eggs for breakfast, so this morning when I asked A. What he wanted to eat he asked for creamy scrambled eggs to accompany the dried tomatoes fougasse I was making. Perfect since I just bought fresh eggs. For the fougasse I used my classic recipe, just add Sicilian dried tomatoes. For the eggs, simple, pre-heat a small pan and grease it a bit, keep a low heat during the whole process, add 2 eggs per personne in the pan, and with cooking chopstick start to mix gently, to obtain an homogenous batter. Then anytime the bottom and the edges start to harden mix again and again until the eggs have the consistency you like. Serve immediately, add a bit of salt and pepper on top. Have a good Sunday!!!

February 21, 2016

Cinnamon buns

Last weekend, to change a bit from French bread and pastries I decided to try a recipe from my new Nordic cookbook and tried some cinnamon buns. As a first try, I didn’t know exactly what it would look like but I found the quantities quite unbalanced and in particular too much yeast, so I deliberately changed them. That plus the poor temperature control in the house in winters led to delicious but rather dense buns. So this time I decided to make it differently and to put a little less butter and more yeast and got a pretty decent result saying that for the second rise I let the dough out in the kitchen all night, where the temperature is anout 17deg when we’re up and it drops to 7deg by the time we wake up.

The process is actually simple. The ingredients for about 8 buns are the following: 250g of flour (hard flour for bread); 80ml of milk (I used soya milk because that’s what I had); 40g of butter + 40g at room temperature; 40g of sugar + 20g (I personally use only brown suger); 1 egg; 5g of salt; 6g of natural dry yeast; a few cardamom pods (I love the taste it gives to the buns, but it’s optional); cinnamon powder.

In a small pan heat the milk, the cardamom and the first 40g of butter, until the butter as melted. Add the 40g of sugar. Stir well. In a bowl add the flour, the yeast, the salt , the egg. Stir well. Add the mix from the pan and knead until smooth, and shiny. Let rise under a wet clothe until the dough is about twice bigger. If, like me the room temperature is low it takes quite some time. Once it has risen, move the dough on a sheet of cooking paper and roll the dought softly into a flat rectangle of a little less than 1cm high. With a spatula spread the butter at room temperature in a thin layer over the dough (on the long side of the dough leave a few cm without butter to close the rolls, then sprinkle cinnamon and the rest of the sugar on top of the butter. Roll the dough along the long edge starting from where the butter is, finishing where there is none, to for a long log. Then cut the buns and wait for the second rise (probably 1h). Heat the oven at 200deg. Move the buns in paper cases (I didn’t the first time and all the good filling went away instead of soaking into the bun, a pity!), add a egg wash if you fancy (I don’t) and bake for 12 to 15min. Just out from the oven is for me the best way to enjoy them!!

January 24, 2016

My first original recipe for bread

It’s been some time now that I’m baking bread following thoroughly recipes from books, but this time I felt like I can change that and start thinking about my own mix and recipes without opening a book. once you’ve learned the basic proportions and you know what kind of texture you need to achieve after kneading it’s not difficult at all.

So my first original recipe is a warming whole wheat and rye bread. I used 160g of rye flour, 90g of whole wheat flour, 180g of water, 12g of sourdough, 5g of salt, 3g of yeast, knead until smooth and soft. After the dough has taken enough volume I shaped it, leave again a few hours, and finally baked it at 235deg for 10min, then at 220deg for 20min.

October 19, 2015

Rye baguette

It’s been some time I haven’t posted a simple bread recipe. Not that I haven’t made any, on the contrary! But I made a lot of my classical breads: whole grains… Now that it’s becoming chilly it’s going to be difficult to control accurately the proving time. For this rye baguette for example the recommended proving time was 1h, but the house is now about 18-19deg so I had it prove for 5h. The result was perfect.

The basic ingredients are: 175g of rye flour, 75g of flour, 13g of dry sordough, 180g of water, 5g of salt, 2g of yeast. The process is just as usual. I shaped my bread as a baguette, but any shape can do. For the baking, 30min at 225deg.

October 14, 2015

Pompe à l’huile

We are weeks before Christmas and this year again I plan to bake the traditional pompe à l’huile for everyone. So right now once in a while I bake one just to polish my recipe. And I think I got it right this time! The pompe à l’huile is a traditional Christmas dessert in Provence. It is often mistaken with Gibassier. Pretty much every family has a recipe or a preference. Pompe brioche, with orange, with neroli, with anise… In our family we like a thin rather dry one, with neroli and a bit of orange peels.

Since it is an olive oil base dough it is extremely easy to knead and with the neroli it smells extremely good. A real pleasure to prepare!

For a 30cm pompe à l’huile I used: 180g of flour (regular flour not the strong one), 6g of dry yeast, 3g of salt, 35g of brown caster sugar, 60g of water, 75g of olive oil, 1 table spoon of neroli, a few candied orange peels, or a zest of orange.

I mix all the ingredients and add the orange peels in the last few minutes of kneading. I knead until the dough is smooth and soft as usual. Then I wait for 2 to 4 hours depending on the room temperature before shaping it. I roll the dough in a circle, cut and if you want you can strech the dough so that the cuts open loose for 1 cm. Then wait for a few hours before baking at 180deg until it goldens. While still hot with a cooking brush apply a thin layer of olive oil.

October 6, 2015

Buckwheat bread

A new variation of a classic bread: buckwheat and plain flour bread. It is really simple it consists in replacing half of the flour by buckwheat flour and add a little more yeast. It has a subtle taste perfect for breakfast.

September 23, 2015

Ingredients for bread

Multi grain and whole wheat little bread made for breakfast

At first when I started to bake my own bread I didn’t know much about it and I didn’t know how to chose the ingredients. As in any preparation the quality of the ingredient is crucial and it is not easy to understand what is a good flour and what is not, and also there are so many types of flours and bread that it took me some time. More over as I access information about bread mainly from French sources adapting to the Japanese available products was a hard task!

After using a lot of French organic products and random flours I could find in Japan, I think I have found a good set of resources locally. My main source of ingredients and in particular raw yeast is Cuoca. They have a wide selection of products, you can order on-line, but for me the best is that they have a shop that covers half a floor at Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi. My favorite flour there is the “Tradition Francaise” by Viron, perfect for every white bread, and in particular baguette.
For most of the bread now I use the organic flour I can find in the supermarket. It is not a local product but the whole wheat flour and the hard flour are really perfect for my breads.
For the seeds, I haven’t find yet something that satisfies me fully in Japan. A lot of the seeds are not organic or comes from China, which I must say worries me because of pollution problems. Right now I use seeds that I buy in France in any organic shop such as Bio C Bon, Naturalia etc… but I hope I’ll find something suitable soon in Japan!

Happy week-end, for me it’s going to be a lot of baking I know!!!

September 18, 2015