Well, not a day off, but kind of a “working vacation” at the Shoresh First (hopefully annual!) Food Conference yesterday. I was covering it for the Canadian Jewish News, but I let someone snap this delightful shot of me kneading some authentic flour-and-water-only half-whole-wheat matzah.  There was a timer present, and indeed, the whole process was complete in under 18 minutes. Tons of fun! I attended two other sessions:  “Kosher Curds” and “Is Kosher Meat Fit to Eat?”  Tons of food for thought – it was kind of obvious that this was a pilot run, as some aspects weren’t as well-thought-out as others (I don’t think anybody thought to invite the mainstream kosher organizations here in town), but what a great concept!  I really hope they do it again next year.

This is from last week… Tuesday?  I wanted to have a plain meal, with tinned comfort-food tomato soup and awesome bread.  And I had a dream, not a literal dream, but an in-my-head-so-close-I-can-almost-taste-it dream of a savoury RYE bread full of ONIONS.  No poppy seeds, not a pletzl.  FULL of onions, like almost to bursting.  And not just an ordinary loaf – a ROUND loaf. Luckily, I had everything I needed just sitting around.  I modified this Sourdough Rye Bread recipe , using some sourdough but the full amount of yeast for the yeast version, and cutting the rising time by about ten hours.  While the dough was rising, I caramelized two regular supermarket yellow onions, using my no-fail, idiot-proof caramelization technique:  cast-iron skillet, little bit of oil, salt the onions, let them sweat until translucent, then just keep dumping water in and simmering on medium-low until the water was gone.  Repeat a few times, boiling water of...

3 pm on a winter Friday afternoon is NOT the best time to realize the challah that has been lovingly rising since late the previous night actually contains NO YEAST. I was lying down with GZ when I realized… I started visualizing me getting out all the ingredients the night before: salt, sugar, flour, water, oil, eggs… nope, definitely no yeast.  Eeeeeek!!! I basically threw GZ down on the bed, raced to the computer to Google “forgot yeast bread help” or something like that.  Yay – a solution! I took the FULL AMOUNT of yeast called for in the recipe, added a bit of sugar and enough water to make a thin paste.  (note to self: use a bowl next time, not a teeny tiny container, because it WILL bubble up) 5 minutes later, it was bubbly – ready to go!  I smeared the paste everywhere and kneaded it in as well as I could (the site I found suggested not overkneading the dough, but how the heck do you do that without the finished bread being full of yeasty-pasty blobs?...

Question!  What do you do late Thursday night when you are ravaged by a painful – ahem – something-or-other, not a single mixing bowl or counter is clean, you and your lovely spouse are both exhausted… but your mother is expecting Delicious Challah for Twenty in less than 18 hours??? (to his credit, the lovely spouse did offer to BUY challah the next day… and to my credit, I didn’t throttle him) Answer:  a large heavy-duty no-name zippered freezer bag!  The zipper isn’t essential, but the heavy-duty probably IS. This formula is based on the Blender Challah recipe I discovered a while back, but I lovingly stuck it into my ever-evolving Breadsheet (TM) so that I can scale it up or down – it even tells me, based on the quantities I’ve selected, how many loaves it will make, in this case, approximately “3 x 680g challahs, 0 x 450g challahs, and 6 x 60g rolls.” (my default challah now is the 680g size, or, since I use a 4-braid, the 4x170g challah) So here’s how I ...

Hi!  This is an old post, but I’m still making kichel.  In fact, it’s one of the few baked desserts that have seamlessly managed the transition to life in Israel.  Here’s a newer update on The Secret to Kichelicious Kichel . Drat.  As with almost every other erev-Shabbos baked delicacy I try out, I didn’t get a chance to take a picture when they came out of the oven; by now, of course, 26 hours later, they are ALL GONE. I made BOW TIES!!!  Also known as kichel, also known as egg kichel and also, obscurely, as “eyer kichel.”  Around here, people sometimes call them “nothings,” perhaps to differentiate them from the type of pasta (which I’ve also made) which is also called bowties.  The ones generally called “nothings” are sometimes baked in a square shape with no sugar on top, but there are exceptions. They were super-easy, too, thanks to Joan Nathan’s recipe from A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking (I found the recipe, improbably, at the Calgary...

I have taken one giant step forward in my Ongoing Quest to create the perfect round and malty bread, which will sustain me through the winter!  And I also got to test-drive the newly-toivelled Pyrex Bake-a-Round baking “pan.”  (which is really just a tube in a rack) Here’s the Bake-a-Round, all greased up (with shortening, per the instructions, NOT Pam, though I don’t know why) and ready for action. I decided to use this British Malt Loaf Recipe , for authenticity.  I figured it’s from the Flour Advisory Bureau.  Even their name is FAB; how bad could the bread be?  I liked the fact that most of the ingredients were scaled, and quickly switched my scale to pounds and ounces so I wouldn’t have to convert.  I also appreciate its use of the word “whilst.” (I doubled everything, because it didn’t sound like very much.) Ingredients for Malt Loaf (bastardizations of the original, for necessity or preference, shown with strikeout below) 75ml (2 ...

Actually, this is more than a New Baking Toy – it’s Step 1 in a however-many step plan to bake the perfect Malt Bread, exactly as I remember it from childhood, or as near as makes no nevermind. Here’s the toy… Bought new in box on etsy for not too much money, and shipped BEAUTIFULLY packed – I’m very impressed. The actual malt bread I’m thinking of is NOT the “malt loaf” popularly known by the name Soreen in the U.K.  That looks icky; it’s full of fruits and whatnot.  What I’m searching for is authentic Canadian malt bread, such as that turned out every day in the Dempster’s factory and sold without a hechsher in supermarkets very near my home. The bread itself is sweet, but not too sweet.  It has a definite malt taste, and – I’m thinking now – perhaps some molasses as well.  It has a dark colour, but that could easily just be caramel colour… which I don’t have.  Definitely no fruit, no puréed dates or raisins or whatever else British people think bel...