Flour

When it comes to holiday and festival breads, the varieties and secret family recipes are endless. But when broken down to their basic components, they are pretty much variations on a theme. This is especially evident in the various Greek breads. Artos is the general name for Greek celebration breads, but they are given particular names and twists and turns for specific festivals. It is the twists ands turns that make the breads special, bringing visual drama, history, and family tradition into the process. For instance, the color of the fruit is different for Christmas breads than for Easter since Christmas is a festival of incarnation, while Easter is a festival of resurrection and transformation. The breads are often brought to church by home bakers, blessed by the priest, and then brought to the table or given to the needy. I love the designs of the nativity christopsomos, with its bread-dough cross laminated on top of a round loaf and of the Easter egg–braided lambropsomo, also called tsoureki (a Turkish variation). The orange and brandied vassilopita, served on New Year’s Day in honor of Saint Basil, always has a gold coin hidden in it, not unlike the three kings cake of New Orleans and Spanish cultures. The following master formula can be used as the base for any of these breads, and some specific holiday variations follow. The formula uses a wild-yeast starter, along with a spiking of commercial yeast, to create an authentic-tasting, yet manageable, bread. Nowadays, most versions are made completely from commercial yeast, but this is only a recent innovation. If you do not have any barm on hand, you may replace it with an equal amount of poolish. The fermentation and proofing times will remain the same.

Now that I live in New England again, after twenty-two years in California, I felt duty bound to revisit one of the great New England breads, anadama, and to come up with a definitive version. There are conflicting stories of the origin of the name. Judith and Evan Jones, in their wonderful The Book of Bread, tell the story of a Rockport, Massachusetts, man who was upset with his wife not only for leaving him, but also for leaving behind only a pot of cornmeal mush and some molasses. The angry husband tossed the mush and molasses together with some yeast and flour and muttered, “Anna, damn ’er!” This was later amended by the more genteel local Yankees, as they retold the story, to anadama. Sounds likely to me. Traditional formulas for this bread are usually given as a direct-dough method, but this version utilizes a soaker and a sponge to evoke more flavor from the grain. Corn is chock-full of natural sugars, trapped in the complex carbohydrate starch base, so any trick we can employ to break the sugars free can only improve the already wonderful flavor.

Pair this cornmeal-coated fish with Garden Coleslaw (page 75) and Green Beans and Corn (page 236) for a healthy southern meal.

It won’t take you long to do the actual preparation for this aromatic bread. During its resting and baking times, you can take a walk, fix dinner, or just relax.

Get back to basics, and take pleasure in baking your own nourishing bread.

Homemade corn muffins make mealtime special. Try them with Lima Bean Soup with Ham Bits and Crisp Sage (page 70) or Pecan-Crusted Catfish with Zesty Tartar Sauce (page 106). Any leftover muffins are super for a grab-and-go snack.

For those who love to make simple seasonal fruit desserts, making a rustic tart is one of the most enjoyable ways of creating a beautiful dessert. A proper dough is important, but the overall shape created for the actual tart is up to you. In this recipe for an Italian tart, the pears and apples are first roasted until lightly caramelized, which increases their flavor.

This tart has a crunchy cornmeal crust filled with an earthy combination of wood-roasted mushrooms and chard paired with caramelized fennel and nutty cheese. If chanterelles or oyster mushrooms aren’t available, use all cremini mushrooms. The tart will still be sensational.

This is a very simple bread to make either at the campsite or at home. it requires no kneading, and is baked in a Dutch oven or clay baker. This bread’s flavor is developed through extended fermentation.

Cookbook author Joanne Weir is known for her flavor-packed Mediterranean-inspired food. Her book From Tapas to Meze shows the breadth of her Mediterranean influences. Here, Joanne shares a favorite pizza recipe that we adapted for grilling using a Tuscan grill that fits into the fireplace of her home in San Francisco. The bitter escarole on this pizza is balanced by the sweet pine nuts, creamy cheeses, and the salty olives. The dough for a grilled pizza needs a bit more structure from gluten to keep it from oozing through the grates of the grill, which is why this one is kneaded for a longer time than other pizza doughs.

Peter Reinhart is a well-known cookbook author; his Crust and Crumb, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, and Whole Grain Breads have been graced with prestigious awards. At Ramekins, where he occasionally teaches bread classes, Peter and I baked bread and pizzas together in the wood-fired oven after his last class. This recipe came from his The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It is an amazing formula that can be turned into baguettes, ciabatta, focaccia, and pizza. That baking session was about a lot more than the recipe. It was about the primary message of this book: joyfully cooking and sharing with others at the fire.

Though pita bread is made throughout the Middle East, we have come to identify it with Greece. When baking, it puffs up like a small balloon and then deflates when removed from the oven. This version has a bit of whole-wheat flour in it for extra nuttiness and added flavor. Make a batch or two ahead and freeze some to use later; these pita reheat easily. Try these filled with strips of roasted Mustard and Lemon Chicken (page 92) and topped with a dollop of Greek yogurt.

Tim Decker and his wife, Crystal, are the owners of Bennett valley Bakery in Sonoma County. A former apprentice of Peter Reinhart’s, Tim makes artisan breads with a beautifully browned crust by baking them in a wood-fired oven at unusually high temperatures. You can also make this bread successfully in a conventional oven, with the heat as high as it will go.

When the talk is about biscuits I always think of Leah Chase, chef and owner of Dookie Chase’s in New Orleans, and those she baked for us on one of our Master Chef TV programs. They were the tenderest, the lightest, and really the best I ever remember eating. This is our interpretation of her method. The key to tender biscuits is using light, rapid movements, so that you activate the gluten in the flour as little as possible, and the flour itself plays a role. Southerners make their famous biscuits with soft wheat (low gluten) flour, and to approach its equivalent use part regular all-purpose and part cake flour as indicated here.

You will note the mixture of flours and fats here. Without them, our general American all-purpose flour, which is relatively high in gluten, can give you a brittle rather than a tender crust. But if you have “pastry flour,” you can use that alone, along with all butter rather than a mixture of butter and vegetable shortening.