Spring Thing: Maple Bread Pudding with Nancy Harmon Jenkins

It's Easter weekend and I can't think of anything more appropriate than my friend Nancy Harmon Jenkins's super-easy maple bread pudding, especially if you use the first of the season's local eggs from a farmer who raises her chickens on pasture. (A trip to the farmers' market on Saturday morning would be awesome!)

Get the recipe here and make it for brunch served with yogurt, or drizzled with warm syrup and a dollop of whipped cream for dessert after your ham dinner. What could be more perfect? Thanks, Nancy!

Simple Pleasures: Avocado, Toast and a Poached Egg

I am slow to warm to food fads, so when I started seeing the words "avocado" and "toast" together and read dripping prose extolling its intoxicating, if not orgasmic, properties…well, I have to say there was a certain amount of eye-rolling that ensued. The photos were beautiful, of course. It's almost impossible to take a bad picture of those luscious green-and-yellow-tinged slices of avocado, and slathered on a thick piece of good bread it's hard to go wrong.

I did order it a couple of times at local cafés, but was underwhelmed with the experience. So the other morning when I was getting ready to poach an egg for breakfast, I remembered that there were a couple of ripe avocados sitting in the fridge. Should I try it again? Of course!

Nothing could be simpler: peel and slice half of a large avocado. Cut a thick slice of good artisan bread and put it in the toaster. When the water boils for your poached egg (I always add a scant teaspoon of vinegar), crack it in and while it simmers, toast your bread. As soon as it pops up, butter the bread, top it with the avocado slices and then, when your egg is perfectly cooked to your personal preference—mine is with the white cooked and yolk jiggly—put it on top of the avocado slices. A shower of flake salt and fresh-ground pepper and you can call it breakfast. (A nice one, too, even if it was the darling of the moment. But that was a few minutes ago.)

How Panzanella Solved My Bread Problem

I have a bread problem. Not that many people would feel much sympathy for my situation. You see, my husband has become a bread maven. He might even be tiptoeing along the edge of evangelism, such is his passion for his newfound calling. At least twice people have shown up at our doorstep to be shown "the way"—actually Chad Robertson of Tartine Bread's way—of producing perfect artisan loaves in a home oven.

How could this be a problem?

Now, in his defense, I have to say I've been encouraging this discipleship every step of the way. The guy has a definite touch with flour, water and salt, and when you throw in a natural tendency toward tinkering plus a creative bent, that's pretty much the definition of a baker. So every two weeks for quite awhile now he's been making six loaves of sourdough, interrupted only by a trip out of town or summer temperatures soaring into the 90s.

Our five-year-old nephew spent the night last week, and his first question before being taken to daycare the next morning was, "Does Uncle Dave have any bread I can take with me?" He was comforted only by the promise that yes, indeed, Uncle Dave would bake bread for him in a couple of days. Oh, the obligations!

A perfect (and delicious) solution.

So the problem comes when one of those loaves is brought to the bread board. Being artisan-style loaves, when sliced there's always the rounded bit at the end that ends up, if it's not eaten immediately, sitting on the board and getting stale. Big deal, you say. But multiply that over dozens and dozens of loaves and you've got quite a pile of bits.

I've been chopping them up into cubes, drying them completely and then freezing them in bags, but I just don't make that many croutons for salads. And I utterly refuse to toss them out—there's nothing worse than wasted bread karma, believe me.

Then the other day, needing to make a salad for dinner and having some ripe, heirloom tomatoes on hand, I hit on the perfect solution: panzanella! I don't think of it often, since it needs tomatoes that only come at this time of year, perfectly ripe, not-too-hard, not-too-soft and terrifically flavorful. And I wasn't sure the rock-hard cubes would absorb enough of the juices to soften up to just the right consistency.

But I threw it together anyway, chopping up a little cucumber and some basil from my neighbor who couldn't use all that was in her CSA share. And you know, those dried crusty bread ends turned into luscious tomato juice bombs and solved my bread problem, at least for the duration of tomato season. What could I say but hallelujah!

Panzanella, Italian-Style Tomato-Bread Salad

For the dressing:
1/4 c. red wine vinegar
2/3 c. olive oil
2 cloves garlic, pressed through a garlic press or minced fine
1 tsp. salt

For the salad:
4 c. bread, 2 or 3 days old, cut into 1/2” cubes
4-6 c. tomatoes, chopped in 1/2” cubes
1/2 c. basil, sliced into chiffonade
1/2 red onion, finely chopped
1 cucumber, peeled and seeded, cut into 1/4” cubes
1/2 c. kalamata olives, pitted and chopped (optional)
Salt to taste

In medium mixing bowl whisk dressing ingredients together. Set aside.

Put salad ingredients in a large salad bowl. Pour dressing over the top and combine thoroughly. Allow to stand 20-30 minutes before serving (an hour if the bread is very dry), mixing occasionally to distribute the juices.

Panzanella Redux: A Million Options

In the time since my last post on the bread salad the Italians call "panzanella," I've made at least two different versions of the recipe. As long as the tomatoes are juicy—perfect for those overripe specimens you just couldn't fit on your tomato platter—and the olive oil is plentiful, you're in business.

The raw material.

The two versions? Well, considering I have access to a virtually endless supply of bread because of Dave's homemade sourdough habit, we've had bread salad as both a main dish and a side salad. The first version consisted of the basic recipe combined with about a tin's worth of leftover albacore that I'd had the foresight to bag and freeze. The second was based on a variation of my friend Michel's panzanella (above) that she whipped up for an evening of wine and snacks to celebrate her new job, which eschewed the basil and added capers and chopped castelvetrano olives.

Seriously, that's it. As long as the bread has soaked up enough of the tomato juice and dressing, which takes about an hour, it's ready to eat. Talk about fleeting pleasures of late summer…grab a loaf of your favorite bread and as many ripe tomatoes as you can and get to it!

Artisan Bread: Don't Put It Away

The advertising business has a maxim that goes something like, "If you want your message to get through, repeat it. Then repeat it again. And again. And again. [etc.]" It's why we remember classic slogans like "it's the real thing," "the un-cola" and "you deserve a break today."

A few years ago I bought a giant—and I mean at least 20 inches across—loaf of artisan bread from Pearl Bakery to take on a beach weekend with friends. As she handed it to me, the sales clerk said, "Don't wrap it in plastic or put it in the refrigerator. Leave it out on the counter even after you cut it open. The outside will get nice and crusty and the flavor of the bread will continue to improve."

We got to the beach and, when we'd used some of the bread with our crab Louies and it was time to clean up, I just couldn't do it. The bread was popped into a plastic bag and went into the fridge. It was fine, of course, but lost that crusty crunch of an artisan loaf.

Years later we were on a road trip to the Okanagan region of BC to check out its food and wine scene and ran across an artisan bakery called Walla in Penticton. We bought a loaf of artisan bread from owner Benjamin Manea, a Romanian-born Israeli, and as we left he said in a stern, heavily accented voice, "Before you buy, you need to know about this bread." He instructed us to never, ever put the bread in a plastic bag in the fridge, that when it’s cut open it needs to be stored cut edge down on the counter and that it would last for four days. As we were paying, he grumbled something about people not knowing how to take care of fresh bread.

When Dave started making his own sourdough bread we remembered Mr. Manea's instructions and started leaving the bread out on the counter, standing it up on its cut side after slicing what we needed. As the clerk at the bakery said years earlier, the outside gets a nice hard crust and the inside keeps its chewy, moist texture for several days—up to a week, though a loaf rarely lasts that long.

My brother, who regularly is given a loaf so his son can have toast for breakfast in the morning before heading off to school, leaves it on the counter as instructed. But if it happens to be a day when their housekeeper comes to clean, she wraps the bread in plastic and puts it in the fridge. I guess she just hasn't heard the message often enough yet.

The Bread of Life

I was raised in the Episcopal Church in the "mission diocese" of Eastern Oregon. Oddly, contrary to that region of the state's right-leaning politics, the diocese was quite liberal theologically, which meant it didn't have the "smells and bells" of incense and ringing of chimes to signal the progress of the service. Instead, in 1979 it was among the first dioceses in the nation to get (paperback) copies of the brand new Revised Book of Common Prayer, which translated the ancient cadences (and at times indecipherable language) of King James into American English.

That new version of the old book changed everything, from the iconic Lord's Prayer to the words said during Holy Communion when, instead of receiving wafers of pressed cardboard…I mean, um…flour and water, we got actual pieces of bread torn from loaves made by the women of the church.

Though I've left those religious beliefs behind, I still embrace the idea that whole foods, whether made at home or store-bought, nourish both body and soul. Which is why I was so thrilled when Dave started making bread here at home.

At first it was hit-or-miss as he tried one recipe after another, nothing really measuring up to the rustic, hard-crusted, flavorful loaves he wanted to produce. He tried the no-knead style, which was pretty good, and the technique of misting the oven during baking, which improved the crust but still wasn't hitting the mark. He even made his own sourdough starter from the yeast left at the bottom of a bottle of Hair of the Dog's Doggie Claws.

He went through a dozen kinds of flour, from bulk unbleached to whole wheat to packaged brands, and shapes from boules to baguettes. He cruised blogs and artisan bread web sites like The Fresh Loaf, searching for hints from other folks who were on the same quest. After more than a year of less-than-stellar results, he was getting a little frustrated.

Cast iron pans did the trick.

Then, one Christmas, our friends Kathryn and Jeff got him a book, Tartine Bread, by Chad Robertson of San Francisco's legendary Tartine Bakery. Like the revised prayer book from my youth, it became a game-changer. Following Robertson's suggestion, Dave invested in a cast iron "combo cooker," the bottom a deep pan and the top a shallow frying pan. By inverting it, he could plop the risen dough into the shallow section, score the loaf and cover it with the deeper pan, containing the moisture released by the bread during baking. Halfway through baking the top pan was removed and the loaf returned to the oven to finish baking.

His biggest fan.

The results that first time were so startling that Dave ordered another cast iron pan and hasn't looked back since. He continues to tinker with the dough, and every two weeks he spends a day making several loaves that are stored in the freezer until we need them. It's called "Uncle Dave's bread" by our 3-year-old nephew, who asks for it every time he comes over and who invariably goes home with a loaf. Talk about nourishing body and soul…for us that's what it's all about.

The Bread Man Cometh

The bread pictured above just came out of our home oven after two years in the making. (Talk about long fermentation…)

It started innocently enough one day when Dave stumbled across a blog called The Fresh Loaf, a news and information website for "amateur bakers and artisan bread enthusiasts." And enthusiastic they are, to the point of obsessiveness, with a focus that edges right up to crazy. Interestingly, if not surprisingly, it's based right here in Portland, so perhaps that single-mindedness is understandable, considering how this town feels about other foodstuffs like bacon, waffles and fried chicken.

In any case, Dave made a few stabs at baking his own bread using recipes he garnered from various websites and books, even going so far as to start his own sourdough from the yeast left at the bottom of a bottle of Doggie Claws from Hair of the Dog. Results of these experiments were mixed, from lumpen to acceptable, but none had the crisp crust and bubbled interior of the artisan-style loaves he was dreaming of.

Then on Christmas a year ago some friends, aware of his growing interest (read: budding obsession), gave us a book called Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. Robertson's use of a wet dough fermented over many hours along with his method of baking each loaf in a cast iron Dutch oven became the catalyst Dave needed to start turning out the gorgeous loaves he'd imagined.

This is not to say he's completely satisfied—after all, what obsessive…er…I mean…"enthusiast" is—but he's happy with the results he's getting. And, needless to say, so are those of us who've been lucky enough to have a thick slice warm from the oven or sopped with soup or braises.

Food Farmer Earth: An American Baker in Portland

In this interview for Food Farmer Earth, Tim Healea explains how his little t american baker got its name, and says that even after baking tens of thousands of loaves, the magic of bread still bowls him over.

Tim Healea, renowned for the quality of the breads that he makes at his little t american baker in Portland, Oregon, said he never dreamed he’d have a career in the food business, much less own his own bakery. As a matter of fact, he calls his discovery of his passion for bread a complete accident.

Artisan breadmaker Tim Healea.

Growing up the Pacific Northwest, Healea had always wanted to work in the magazine business. So when he graduated from college with a degree in journalism, he went to work at a magazine in New York City.

“I started as an editor for a trade publisher that did magazines for restaurants and retail,” he said. “And I hated it. It was a corporate desk job and it just wasn’t me.”

The finished product.

Thinking he might prefer working with food, he quit the magazine to give culinary school a try. It was there that he ran across "Breads from the La Brea Bakery," Nancy Silverton’s landmark book on artisan bread. He started baking using her recipes and fell in love.

Read the rest of Tim's story.

This week's recipe is for an easy holiday soda bread. Get regular updates on this series about our local food scene by subscribing.

Old Bread Is Good Bread

"In Italy, it is said that for every crumb of bread you waste, you will spend a year in Purgatory collecting crumbs with your eyelashes. It is no wonder the Italians have produced such a catalog of toppings for crostini and bruschetta."
- Kelly Myers on Culinate

Stale bread isn't dead, it's just waiting for you to put it to good use, at least that's what Kelly Myers, chef de cuisine at Nostrana, said in an excellent piece in the new food site Culinate. She talks about heading into work and finding piles of leftover bread from a busy weekend. Inspired, she made up a white bean, dried bread and escarole soup that sounds absolutely intoxicating. (The article includes two other recipes, a bread pudding and an Italian zuppa bastarda.)

She says the best bread to use is one that is crusty, chewy and has a dense texture, such as ciabatta or pugliese. While I like to use leftover bread for toasting, Kelly talks about crostini, bread crumbs and strata. Her philosophical musing on the subject ends reflectively: "A certain amount of waste is inevitable. But when we dismiss food that’s day-old or boring in its abundance, we lose more than time and money. In failing to find uses for all the food in our possession — whether it’s stale loaves, very ripe fruit, or too much kale — we miss the chance to force ourselves to cook in a new way. With luck, when we transform a familiar ingredient into a new recipe or a new dish, our minds open once again to what’s possible in the kitchen, and we feel the freshness of surprise."