Bread and Muffins and Valrhona

Making bread is one the simple, cheap, and fast pleasures of cooking. I made my first breads --- focacce --- out of Dunaway's great book No Need to Knead.



I chose that book because I wanted to learn to make Italian bread --- the title make it look easy and fast. And its true, you don't need to knead in those recipes. But you do have to stir more vigorously than usual --- and I've since found that kneading isn't hard if you're just making a loaf for yourself. But anyway I've been delighted with every bread in that book that I've made.

But lately I've been making bread out of The Tassajara Bread Book by Brown.



This is a great book --- its all whole wheat. There's a decadence to white bread that whole wheat changes to worthiness. Whole wheat has a familiarity, an easiness. When I eat whole wheat that I baked, I feel good --- when I eat white bread that I baked, I feel a little celebratory.

Brown also also great muffin recipes. I was never a big fan of whole-wheat muffins, but I am a chocolate aficionado, and I've been dragging around several plastic containers of Valrhona cocoa that I bought from Surfas years ago and have always been saving ... So I put 2+2 together, and now I douse Brown's muffin recipe with Valrhona cocoa and some roasted nuts. In this recipe, by the way, Brown mentions mixing the dry and the wet ingredients separately and combining and mixing as little as possible. I used to skip that since it seemed like one of those fussy instructions that someone writes because thats how they always do it... But that one makes a difference in terms of the lightness of the muffins. I don't know why. Well this is the recipe I make which I've adapted from Brown's. Now I am also a fierce devotee of Elizabeth David's, and so I won't write out recipe in the ingredient/step1/step2 fashion, but more in her conversational fashion.

Preheat to 375.

So first the wet bowl, put in 1/4c olive oil (butter tastes better if you like). Use the same measuring cup to put in 1/2c molasses or honey (I found that when I reuse the oil-coated cup the honey or molasses doesn't stick to the cup.) Beat an egg in and then pour in 1 1/2 cups milk.

In the dry bowl, measure out 2C whole wheat. Mix in 2 tsp baking powder, a large pinch of salt.. And then the cocoa. I pretty much go all-out, I'd say about 1C or more, and I'm burning Valrhona.

Anyway, then grease the muffin tin. Now muffin tins are something else. I used to use the nonstick ones you get at the supermarket --- but as I said in the stocking-up post, I now avoid all nonstick. Nonstick wears off, and then you have to buy another pan while digesting some odd substance. So I got a heavy aluminumized steel muffin pan from Williams-Sonoma (before Lehman Brothers crashed.) It makes a big difference, and it was worth the money --- and its not nonstick and still it sticks much less than the cheap nonstick pan did. I think nonstick coating is just a way to sell cheap muffin pans that don't stick for a month or 2. I say avoid the nonstick, either use a disposable aluminum one from the store or get a good quality non-nonstick one.

So... grease up the muffin pan.

Now for the key, subtle step. Combine the wet and dry bowls into the larger bowl, and mix as little as possible to get a lumpy batter.

Hold the bowl over the muffin pan ``slots'' and very gently tip the bowl and pour the batter into the slots. First time or 2 will be a mess.

Finally, I chop some dried fruit over the muffins and pop the pan in the oven. I do the chopstick test: take a chopstick and see if it comes out clean, for me its 18min, but Brown says 15.