We Knead To Bake #5 : Bialys (Chewy Rolls Topped With Caramelised Onions)

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ast month’s bake for this group was a sweet one so I thought it would be a good change to make something savoury for this month so I picked Bialys from my to-bake list. The Bialy (pronounced bee-AH-lee) maybe thought of as a cousin to a Bagel but is quite different from it. For one thing, a Bialy is baked whereas a Bagel is boiled and then baked.

A Bialy is round with a depressed middle, not a hole, and typically filled with cooked onions and sometimes poppy seeds. So it is not shiny on the outside with largish puffy bubbles on the inside. A good BIlay should have a springy soft crumb and a chewy and floury crust. A lot of people slather Bialys with butter or cream cheese but the best way (in my opinion) is to eat them as they are. Bialys are best when eaten within 5 to 6 hours of making them.

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The name Bialy comes from Bialystocker Kuchen which translates as “bread from Bialystok” which is in Poland. Apparently, Bialys are rarely seen or made in Bialystock these days (I wouldn’t know if this was a fact and I’m going by hearsay). In the days when there used to be Bialys in Bialystock, it seems the rich Jews ate Bialys with their meals, while the Bialys were the whole meal for the poorer Jews.

In the early 1900s, many Eastern Europeans, including the Polish, immigrated to the US and settled down in New York. Naturally, they also brought their Bialy making skills with them and that is how the New York Bialy became famous.

 

What lends Bialys their signature chewiness is the use of flour that is high in gluten. So to make Bialys, use bread flour if you can find it. Otherwise use all-purpose flour and add 1 tbsp vital wheat gluten (for the 3 cups). If like me, you can find neither bread flour nor vital wheat gluten, go ahead and make it with plain flour. You’ll still have very nice Bialys that are slightly softer, that’s all.

 

One way to make them slightly chewier is to refrigerate the dough overnight after the first rise. The next day, take the dough out and keep it at room temperature for about half an hour. Then shape the rolls and proceed with the recipe. These Bialys are on the softer side so do not over bake them or they will dry out and become tough.

Bialys usually have a thin layer of caramelised onions and poppy seeds. I decided to use only onions, and then lots of it. I also made one batch with some crumbled paneer too. Being Indian and having been brought up on spices in my food, I also added some garam masala to spice up my filling. You can use whatever filling you would like. Remember the filling needs to be savoury.

 

This video is shows a pretty good demonstration on making Bialys and here's one that tells you how to eat one, if you'd like to take a look!Here are a couple of videos, if you want them.

Bialys

(Adapted from King Arthur Flour)

 

Ingredients: 

For the dough:

1 teaspoon instant yeast

1 tbsp sugar

1 1/4 cup warm water

3 cups all-purpose flour (use bread flour if you can find it or all-purpose flour + 1 tbsp vital wheat gluten)

1 tsp salt

Milk for brushing the dough 

For the Onion Filling:

1 tbsp oil

3 medium onions, finely chopped

1 1/2 tsp cumin seeds

3/4 tsp garam masala

Salt to taste

100gm paneer, crumbled (optional)

 

Method:

Make the dough first. If you are using bread flour or vital wheat gluten, then your dough will be tougher to knead so if you have a machine you can use, I would say go ahead and use it. Me, I always take the easier way out provided I get good results. If you’re doing this by hand, just adapt the instructions to that.

Put the yeast, sugar, salt and flour in the food processor bowl. Pulse a couple of times to mix and then add the warm water in a steady stream. Knead until the dough comes together as a mass and then let the dough rest for 10 minutes. This will help the dough absorb water. Knead again, adding a little more water or flour (not too much) if you need it, until your dough is smooth and elastic but not sticky.

Shape it into a ball and put it in a well-oiled bowl, turning the dough till it is well coated. Cover and let it rise till about double. This should take about 2 hours. If you’re not making the Bialys right away, you can refrigerate the dough overnight at this point. When ready to make them, keep the dough at room temperature for about half an hour and then proceed with the rest of the recipe. 

 

 

In the meanwhile, make the filling. Heat the oil in a pan, and add the cumin seeds. When the crackle, add the onions, and sauté over low to medium heat. Sprinkle a little salt and continue sautéing until they become soft and turn golden brown in colour. Add the garam masala and stir well. Keep the caramelised onions aside to cool.

Sprinkle your work surface lightly with flour and place the dough on it. Divide it into 8 equal pieces and shape each one into a roll by flattening it and then pinching the ends together to form a smooth ball. (See this video for shaping rolls, if necessary) Place the rolls on a lightly greased baking sheet and cover them with a towel. Let them rise for about one hour (about  1 1/2 to 2 hours for refrigerated dough)  till pressing with a finger on the top leaves a dent. 

Work on one piece at a time, while you keep the others covered so they don’t dry out. When the rolls are ready, pick them up one at a time and using your fingers, form the depression in the middle. Hold the roll like a steering wheel with your thumbs in the middle and your fingers around the edges. Pinch the dough between your thumb and fingers, rotating as you go and gradually making the depression wider without actually poking a hole through. 

 

 

Remember not to press on the edges, or they will flatten out. Once shaped, you should have a depression about 3” in diameter with 1” of puffy dough around the edge, so your Bialy should be about 4” to 5” in diameter. Prick the centre of the Bialy with a fork so the centre doesn’t rise when baking. 

Place the shaped dough on a parchment lined (or greased) baking tray leaving about 2 inches space between them. Place the caramelised onion filling in the depressions of each Bialy. Brush the outer dough circle with milk. If you’re using crumbled paneer, add it to the Bialys in the last 5 minutes of baking or it will get burnt.

Bake the Bialys at 230C (450F) for about 15 minutes till they’re golden brown in colour. Cool them on a rack. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature. I found that the Bialys keep well in an airtight container for a day or two and just need to be warmed up slightly before serving. This recipe makes 8 largish Bialys.

 These Bialys are being YeastSpotted too.

Easy Banana Bread Pudding

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here are very few people who don’t like some kind of dessert and there are some who would happily have dessert for lunch or dinner if it’s something they really like. However too much of a good thing can be bad a lot of the time, especially when it comes to dessert!

So I’ve tried to create some sort of balance between the good and bad of desserts whereby we do have dessert often enough not to miss it and that’s a good thing, but not so often that that it becomes a bad thing, if you get where I’m going. The way I do this is by making dessert for our Sundays because it’s the one day that everyone is at home and has the time to enjoy not only breakfast, lunch and dinner but also dessert.
 

That doesn’t mean that we don’t have the occasional dessert on weekdays or that we have dessert every Sunday, and there are always exceptions to the rule. I also tend to make easy and simple desserts that focus on low fat and low added sugar while trying to incorporate as much seasonal fruit into them as I can.

Most weeks I plan what I’m making so I have the whole business well in hand. But every once in a while, it just happens that it is Saturday evening or Sunday morning and I’m still wondering what to make. Last Sunday morning found me in such a situation, and this time I had to plan a dessert around a couple of ingredients because I had a large loaf of sandwich bread and 4 very ripe bananas, that needed to be used up.

 

The most obvious thing to make was bread pudding which I’m not very fond of unless it is this one, and my daughter will do her best to avoid. However, we generally of the opinion that bananas can generally make quite a few desserts better, so bread and banana pudding it was to be.

This bread pudding requires no butter or oil (except 1 tsp to panfry the raisins and cashewnuts). Also the use of bananas means that one can cut down the sugar a bit, especially if you can find really sweet bananas.  It’s a recipe that’s so easy to put together, and you can make it early in the day and just warm it up before serving.
 

I used sandwich bread because that’s what I had, but if you have any leftover challah or brioche you should use that instead for a much better tasting bread pudding.
I used the sweet green variety of bananas that we get here called “Robusta”, which I believe is a cultivar of the Cavendish. So if you’re using smaller bananas, go with your intuition and use 4, 5 or 6 bananas instead.
You could also try flavouring your bread pudding with cardamom instead of vanilla for really nice bread pudding. Adding some chocolate chips would also be an interesting thing to do.

 

Serve this pudding warm with some unsweetened cream, vanilla custard or ice-cream.

Easy Banana Bread Pudding

 

Ingredients:

1 tsp butter + a little more for the baking dish

1/4 cup chopped cashewnuts

1/4 cup raisins

1 egg

1/2 cup sugar

 1 tsp vanilla extract

 1/4 tsp salt

2 1/4 cups milk

10 slices medium sized day old sandwich bread cut into 1 1/2" pieces

3 ripe bananas, sliced into 1” thick rounds

 

Method:

Heat the butter in a small pan and add the raisin. Over low to medium heat, pan-fry the raisins till they plump up. Remove them to a plate and add the cashewnuts. Pan-fry them till they turn a light golden and add them to the raisins with any butter that’s in the pan. Keep aside.

Whisk together the egg, vanilla, salt, the sugar and the milk, in a big bowl, until combined.  Add the bread cubes, bananas, raisins and cashewnuts and toss them gently so they’re well coated with the liquid. Do not let the bread break up or you will have a mushy pudding. 

Transfer the mixture to a buttered 11” by 7” baking dish and set aside for about 10 minutes so the bread absorbs the liquid. Gently stir the mixture once after about 5 minutes.

Bake at 170C (325F) for 30 to 45 minutes until the bread pudding is golden brown on top and a skewer pushed into the centre comes out clean. Take the bread pudding out and let it cool for about 15 minutes before serving. Serve it warm as it is or with cream, vanilla custard or ice-cream.. This recipe serves 6.

 

This Banana Bread Pudding is being YeastSpotted!

 

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Leek, Potato and Carrot Soup / Potage Bonne Femme (The Good Woman’s Soup)!

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oups and I, we’re just not very good friends. At the worst, we tend to give each other a very wide berth, and the best we try to tolerate each other as best as we can. I like to think of myself as a reasonably good cook but when it comes to soups, I’m cannot say so with any confidence.

I’m really not a lover of soup and for some reason my experiences with soup making haven’t always been the best. In fact, my daughter will get a worried look on her face if I mention I’m making soup and will ask if there’s anything else she could have for dinner! That’s just in case my soup for the day does not turn out right.

 

However there are days when the stars are aligned just right and the “Soup Gods” up there smile favourably at me and there’s no way my soup could be anything but good and the hero of this post, my “Leek, Potato and Carrot Soup”, otherwise known as the “Potage Bonne Femme” is definitely one of them.

I made this sometime back when leeks were in season, and they were everywhere at my local market, pale and almost white with a growth of white beard/ moustache-like roots and one end, and almost fish tail-like arrangement of deep green leaves at the other. A sort of almost overgrown, spring onions-on-hormones sort of vegetable, I thought when they first made an appearance at the market a couple of years back.

 

Not being able to resist the green freshness of this vegetable, and then finding out that they weren’t expensive at all, unlike a lot of the more “exotic” variety if vegetable and fruit which keep tempting me on my market trips, I triumphantly took home a bunch of these leeks. Only to sit down and wonder what I was supposed to cook with them, since leeks are not a vegetable I grew up with.

I did remember seeing recipes for Leek and Potato Soup somewhere on the net, so I went hunting for it. After a little searching, I came across a version which included carrots. A little more digging and I found this was apparently a classic and traditional French country soup called the “Potage Bonne Femme” or “The Good Woman’s Soup” though some refer to it as the “Housewife’s Soup”!
Leave out the carrots and make a soup with just leeks and potatoes and you have a Potage Parmentier. Make a leek and potato soup enriched with cream and serve it chilled and you have a Vichyssoise.
 

I couldn’t find any information on why this soup was called a “Good Woman’s Soup”. Was it meant only for good women, or was it cooked only by good women or perhaps a good soup for women? If anyone knows I’d be glad to hear how this soup came about its name. I will however tell you that it is a soup that’s good not just for women, but also for men and children.

The beauty of this soup is in its simplicity and all it needs in terms of seasoning is salt and crushed black pepper, but I couldn’t resist adding a little powdered cumin which I felt was just perfect. Creamy, thick and filling yet light, a Potage Bonne Femme is typically served with a simple parsley garnish.

 And just one more thing; I’ve never grown leeks but I understand that leeks can be very dirty and require a bit of meticulous cleaning. I say I “understand” because for some reason, the leeks I get my local market are always extremely clean.

Apparently, leeks are grown such that a large part of the lower part is under the soil so that the part of it under the soil is paler in colour and very tender. This means that the soil tends to get into every bit of the leek that it can. Check this article for tips on how to clean leeks without too much of an effort.

Leek, Potato and Carrot Soup / Potage Bonne Femme

 

Ingredients:

1 tbsp butter

1 tbsp olive oil

2 leeks

1 onion, chopped

1 tsp cumin powder

1 tsp salt

3 cups water

1 cup milk (or water if you prefer)

4 medium to large sized potatoes, peeled and cubed

2 medium sized carrots, peeled and sliced

Freshly crushed black pepper, to taste

More salt, if needed, to taste

 

 Method:

Trim the roots and the top part of the leaves of the leeks.  Make sure the leeks are washed well, as they can have dirt inside. Chop them up.

In a largish pan, heat the butter and oil together. This gives you the flavour of butter without it burning. Add the onions and sauté them till they turn soft and translucent. Add the leeks and sauté till they turn soft.

Add the potatoes and carrots and sauté for a couple of minutes and then add the chilli and cumin powders. Stir in for about a minute and then add the water and 1 tsp of salt. Bring to a boil, and then turn down the heat. Cover the pan and let it simmer until the potatoes and carrots are cooked well. This should take about 15 to 20 minutes.

Turn off the heat and let it cool a bit. The transfer in two batches to your blender and purée it till smooth. If you are not serving the soup right away, you can refrigerate the soup. This soup will keep refrigerated for a couple of days, but do not add the milk to it if you’re planning to refrigerate it.

Otherwise, return the soup back to the pan and put it back on the stove top. Re-heat gently (do not boil) and add the milk or water (as much of the 1 cup you need, or all of it) to thin the soup to desired consistency and season with a little more salt and crushed pepper according to taste. This is a thick and creamy soup.

Serve hot garnished with cream (or grated cheese), parsley or chives, and bread on the side. This recipe serves 3 to 4.