Bread & Babka at GoldStone Farms

Steamed Chinese Buns (No pork products involved) These buns are basic steamed buns, made with yeast and baking powder. The project is adventuresome for a baker or cook in a kosher kitchen because of the implication of pork.  I'm more interested in the dough making process and found various meat fillings in a cookbook given to me by a Chinese Filipina friend when I left Manila in 1983. The book is called Chinese Snacks: Wei-Chuan's Cook Book and is written in Chinese and less than fluent English (Edited by Miss Huang Su Huei, translated by Miss Nina Simonds). The imprint is 1976, no publisher named, although We-Chuan is (was?) a food purveyor in Hong Kong. The recipe for the dough I used today comes from Momfuku's food blog.  Even though the attempt documented here was my first try, the dough was easy to work with. The final product looked reasonable, certainly not perfect.  With practice I think I can do this. The meat recipe comes from a combination of source

Thin Crust BBQ Pizza  Adam and I made pizza at home regularly (until he went away to school that is.....) In the absence of a wood burning outdoor  brick/stone oven (hint to Fred) our gas BBQ works well for baking pizza crust and making pita bread.  I crank up the heat to the highest level it will go (the thermostat should be close to 500 degrees) and use a pizza stone that works on grills. I happen to have a granite stone, but Emile Henry makes one that is clay - these are the only two I know that are "BBQ proof, " but I'm sure there are others. Adam and I did try a traditional pizza stone and it cracked. In the winter its a bit trickier to heat the BBQ all the way to 500, test your BBQ before trying this.    I started making pizza when the kids were little and we lived in Florida. Dominoes and whatever other chains were the only pizza choices and the pizza was terrible.  Mikah commented, while in High School (do  you remember this?) that her friends

Onion Rolls These onion rolls are reminiscent of the onion rolls found at the former Ratner’s restaurant or at Junior’s in Brooklyn. They are more like onion puffs with a savory filling. Bubby and her friends love them. This particular recipe is adapted from the book Inside the Jewish Bakery  by Ginsberg & Berg. The dough is fast rising, due in part to the flour (bread flour) and the large ratio of yeast to flour (2 packages of yeast to about 4 cups of bread flour). There is a bit of choreography: make the dough and while it proofs, make the filling, assemble the rolls.   Once you are practiced at this a batch of rolls can be made in an evening. If you are new to bread baking, you can check out my post on yeast and kneading flour .  Start with the dough: Ingredients: 22 oz bread flour (bread flour will create a better texture in the final product, but you can use all-purpose flour)  4 1/2 tsp i nstant yeast (I use SAF gold for swe

Finding Ingredients Thanks to Eli's friend Emily for reminding me that if she wanted to try any of the recipes, some of the ingredients or equipment are unknown to her and may be hard to find. This is the day of the internet, and I am often ordering even mundane ingredients like flour through the King Arthur website (especially when they run the no-shipping deals).  This saves me time and energy, although the UPS man isn't necesarily a fan. So anyway, here is a list that I can update when someone asks me "huh? whats that and where can I get it?" Websites: Some good website sources for baking ingredients and cooking: King Arthur Flour : kingarthurflour.com The New York Bakers: nybakers.com Filling (ready made) Chocolate Schmear and the other "schmears" are canned fillings from Love 'n Bake, the home baking arm of American Almond company, a commercial baking supply company located in Brooklyn. They have a great website, lots of fun recipes a

Haroset Cookie Bars  This is the recipe for the cookie bars I make with the left-over (and long frozen) Passover haroset that Fred makes. Even though the blog recipes were meant to more or less document yeast dough recipes, this one has no leaving agent at all- although it's definitely not kosher for Passover. For a great kosher for Passover sweet - check out my  Gluten Free Brownies , which are absolutely kosher for Passover. I like cookie bars because they are done 1-2-3, no dropping the cookies one by one onto the cookie sheet. We haven't met anyone who doesn't like this haroset at the seder, nor anyone who doesn't like this cookie. The haroset is made up of dry fruit, ground nuts, coconut and jam and is cooked like a jam mixture. It very much looks like a lumpy unattractive morter mixture that could hold the pyramids together.  (By now you might not even remember that we ever used the  Ashkenaz apple-walnut-wine mixture at all.)  It's an adaption