Author: petebakes

savory

fresh pasta

if you’ve got a few hours to kill on a sunday afternoon, why not whip up some pasta? hold on, you’ve never made fresh pasta? it’s easy – here, i’ll show you. now you have no excuse.

take 2 cups flour and pour it out on a work surface. form it into a little volcano. add 1 tsp salt in the middle. now things are about to get messy (and fun).

crack 3 eggs into the middle (or crack 1, mix, crack another, mix, etc). carefully mix the flour with the egg, being sure not to break the edge of the flour volcano. you can use a fork to start, but after a few minutes, get your hands in there and really work the dough.

after a bit of mixing and kneading, you’ll end up with this. if the dough is too wet, add a touch of flour. if it’s too dry, sprinkle in some drops of cold water.

divide the dough into a few pieces and run them through a pasta maker. if you’re without a pasta maker, use a rolling pin to get it as thin as possible. it will take some time and elbow grease, but eventually you can get it to about 1/16-inch thick (or thinner). the dough will be springy, so it’s best to work on one piece for a while, let it rest while you work on the next, and just move through each one until little by little until it’s thin.

loosely roll the dough up jelly-roll style and cut them into small rolls. sprinkle some dust on the pasta rolls and unroll them into long strands. don’t worry about tearing it – the dough is surprisingly resilient. from here, you can cook this up immediately or hang it on a rack of some kind (a laundry rack will do) to dry. when you’re ready to cook, only boil the pasta for 3-4 minutes at most. i suggest serving it with creamy caramelized leeks and crispy bacon. that’s what i made, but, true story, i couldn’t get a good picture of it before i ate it all. yes, it was awesome.

quick reminder – there’s still time to sponsor my upcoming 5k for the susan g. komen breast cancer foundation. to everyone who has already donated, i can’t thank you enough. to those who would like to donate, please click here and then click on the “donate to pete” button.

pastry

cannolis!

before i moved down to dc, i spent 4 years at school in baltimore. people say a lot of disparaging things about baltimore (most of which are based entirely on episodes of the wire), and granted, it did take a while for me to warm up to the city, but looking back it was a really incredible place to live. one of the things i miss most about baltimore is the food.

there’s akbar, with its excellent all-you-can-eat lunch buffet that exposed me to all sorts of new indian dishes, and sterlings, a literal hole in the wall seafood joint near my old house that still stirs up hunger pangs when i think about their crab cake sandwiches. by the way, i lived just around the corner from charm city cakes, duff goldman’s bakery on the food network’s ace of cakes (we never got the nerve to actually go in).

one of my fondest food memories is of vaccaro’s, an italian pastry shop located in the inner harbor’s little italy neighborhood. a two-story sit-down bakery and cafe, it’s a great place to end a night if you’re in the mood for authentic gelati or tiramisu. if you want the most for your money though, go on a monday night, where $12.95 will get you ALL YOU CAN EAT AND DRINK (alcohol excluded)

the game wasn’t merely to see if you could eat $12.95 worth of desserts, coffees, smoothies and gelati (that could be achieved in about 15 minutes). the real fun came from seeing just how far we could go in the 3 hours they give you to order. my personal best was somewhere between $30 and $40, but i watched others approach $60 in eclairs, amaretti cookies, cheesecake, and yes, cannolis.

luckily vaccaro’s has a branch here in dc, although it’s just a stand in the union station food court. still, i can satisfy my cravings if need be.

but the only thing better than buying a fresh cannoli is making one of your own. and get this – it’s really not as hard as you think! most recipes i found for the cannoli filling included some kind of flavoring with the ricotta. after making a batch of orange-tinged filling, i made another batch with nothing but ricotta and a touch of confectioner’s sugar. i definitely preferred the more stripped down filling, but then again, i could probably just eat a tub of ricotta for dinner and be happy.

the hardest part of the whole process is getting the dough really thin, and this is where a pasta roller could come in handy. but i didn’t let that small snag keep me from enjoying more than one of these cannolis.

one last thing: i’m going to be running in a 5k on june 6 to benefit the susan g. komen breast cancer foundation. i would be eternally humbled if you could be generous enough to sponsor me, even if it’s just a few pennies. every dollar really does count, so you can click here and hit the “donate to pete” button to donate if you are so inclined. thank you!

bread

pain de campagne

not only has it been a while since i last posted (sorry), it’s been a long while since i’ve made bread from scratch (double sorry). i had convinced myself that i would try to make fresh bread each week so i could stop buying it from the grocery store, but it’s proven harder to keep up than i thought.

luckily, baking bread is like riding a bike in that the old mixing, kneading and shaping methods become instantly familiar again once you dive in. it felt good to be throwing flour all over the counter again and making a giant mess.

i was lucky to get a few brotforms for my birthday and this seemed like a great opportunity to test one out. a brotform is essentially a bowl with ridges that helps shape and create designs on the dough during the final proofing. since these pieces of dough were pretty small, the effect was less dramatic than i had hoped, but it looked cool nonetheless. next time i need to remember to dust the inside of the brotform with whole wheat flour instead of unbleached white, because the whole wheat is much easier to get out. afterward. susan at wild yeast blog has a must-read tutorial on brotforms that i consulted more than once.

oooh, see how pretty?

here i tried another technique where you snip the top of the dough with kitchen shears to make the whole thing look like a hedgehog. i had never done it before, but i think it’s usually reserved for smaller dinner rolls instead of entire loaves. oh well!

after a long day of apartment hunting (more on that later), it felt great to open the oven to find these beauties ready to be sliced and slathered with butter or sweet pea puree – delicious! pain de campagne is an all-purpose french bread (literally countryside bread) that has no one single recipe – it allows for a lot of experimentation using different fours and rising methods, so it’s a good way to play around and learn.

the hedgehog bread came out looking and tasting great, but those spikes were surprisingly sharp. like cut your finger/mouth open sharp. i may have to refine my technique next time.