Farine

Crazy for Bread

You are here: Home / blog

Buckwheat Love

So the other day, I bought a small bag of organic cracked buckwheat (marketed as “creamy buckwheat”) thinking I would make porridge for breakfast and use the rest in a rustic bread. Maybe because I grew up eating buckwheat crêpes regularly, I have a huge fondness for blé noir (literally black wheat) as my grandmother used to call it (the other name being sarrasin) and as it is still called in half of Brittany and I was looking forward to a new buckwheat experience.
Well, I was disappointed: not only did the cracked buckwheat boil into a solid clump but it had no taste at all. To the point that it ended up in our little dog’s food bowl (she didn’t seem to mind, maybe because I added a non-inconsiderable amount of shredded chicken and sweet potatoes). In any events it had a very positive effect on her innards which had been rather scrambled because of her unbridled passion for sand crabs (we walk her on the beach most days and she treats it not only as her personal race track -which is good- but also as an all-you-can-eat sushi bar -which is less beneficial to her health).
Anyway I had buckwheat on my mind in a generally dispirited sort of way when French chef and pastry chef Philippe Conticini was invited on On va déguster, one of my favorite French weekly food radio shows, and I heard him describe, among other things, a topping he makes with buckwheat and hazelnut meal. Unlike the other recipes the chef shared on that day, this one was pretty simple and I jotted down the reference, thinking it could come in handy.
A few days later I got an interesting oat chocolate crumble recipe in my mailbox from Smitten Kitchen, a blog I love not only for its food but for also the verve, energy, humor and otherwise sheer New-Yorkishness of its author, Deb Perelman.
The recipe called for pears. That caught my attention. A dozen big organic pears had been ripening on the counter for the better part of two weeks and I knew they were about ready to eat. I was idly trying to remember if we had any oat flakes left over from the last time I made granola when the Conticini buckweat topping popped into my mind. Bingo!
Next thing I knew, I was caramelizing pears and grinding cracked buckwheat into flour. When all the ingredients were ready, I put the caramelized pears in an oven dish, covered them with a layer of unsweetened frozen raspberries, added dark chocolate chips and a generous sprinkling of buckwheat topping, and into the oven it went for about thirty minutes. I won’t lie by saying it came out gorgeous. In my experience, melted chocolate always looks iffy under a toasted surface but it smelled divine and tasted even better, especially with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream.

For 5 or 6 people


Ingredients 


For the fruit base

  • 4 ripe pears, peeled, cored and diced
  • 60 g sugar
  • 60 butter
  • 200 g frozen raspberries
  • 1 teaspoon of corn starch

For the topping
(makes way more than you need for this recipe but can be refrigerated and used on other desserts or even on oatmeal or yogurt)

  • 100 g buckwheat flour
  •  50 g salted butter
  • 50 g brown sugar
  • 65 g hazelnut meal
  • 2 generous pinches of fleur de sel (or regular coarse sea sal

Since Deb explains in details how to make the fruit base and the process is pretty straightforward, I won’t go over it again. As suggested, I added a teaspoon of cornstarch to the caramelized pears to thicken up the juices a bit. If you do that, remember to mix the cornstarch with some cold liquid first. (I took two tablespoons of pear juice out of the pan, added an ice cube until cool, removed the ice cube, mixed in the starch and put the whole thing back in with the pears.)
The recipe for the buckwheat topping being given in French, I’ll run it by you in English: basically all you have to do is mix the buckwheat flour, butter, salt and hazelnut meal in the food processor until you get a finely granulated powder, toast it for a few minutes in a frying pan until satisfyingly blonde and fragrant. Et voilà, you have a dessert that’s both reasonably healthful and decidedly decadent. Enjoy!

About love

Love is when an eight-year old French girl decides to make a Pithiviers (an almond cake) for her family. She has baked Pithiviers before and is confident it will come out well. So confident that she forgets to use flour. Butter goes in and ground almonds and sugar and who can remember what else but what comes out of the oven is a flat disk. At the end of dinner that night, the so-called Pithiviers is solemnly brought out and sliced. But the smell and taste are off-putting (mushroomy in fact, probably because of the baking powder) and nobody is actually able to eat more than one bite of his or her share except the little girl’s dad who pronounces the sorry cake the best flourless Pithiviers he has ever had.
Love is when you bake a brioche for your Valentine and you make it a hundred percent whole wheat to compensate for all the butter you used that he shouldn’t be eating and you bungle the shaping because really you never learned how to make a brioche à tête like the ones you see all over Paris and because of the poor shaping, it doesn’t rise as well as it should but you bake it anyway and when you slice it open to reveal a somewhat under-baked center, your Valentine says there is nothing wrong with your brioche that a little browning in the toaster won’t fix.
Love is a lot like gluten in bread dough: it binds us together, yet leaves enough breathing space around each of us that we can grow and change and still be part of a whole. In the face of the relentless waves of violence, ugliness, intolerance, and plain old stupidity that are threatening to sweep us under, the humble metaphor is reason enough to keep on baking.
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Red gold on rocky hills: harvesting saffron in Provence

I was out walking the pups (in addition to our own, we were taking care of our youngest son’s dog) around nine one morning last week. Having just barked their heads off at a plumber getting out of his truck, they were strutting down the street (all eighteen pounds of chihuaha-terrier mix, combined), one with his ears perked up, the other one with her ears flapping down, both tails up in the air, clearly very pleased with themselves, when I experienced one of these minutes when Time seems to coalesce and hang in the air like an all-encompassing drop of luminous peace. The sky was a deep blue, the sun bright, far away the highway rumbled, birds were tweeting somewhere, the cool air smelled of pine and eucalyptus, I felt that if I reached out, I might actually touch life itself and it would be almost gel-like because there was no flux, only the present. A perfect minute. I stopped walking, awed. Then the dogs started sniffing and panting, pulling towards a red squirrel on a low limb, the world resumed its spinning. Still I had had that moment and I filed it away in my box of wonder. Albeit a very different, experience, our visit to a saffron farm back in the fall when we were in Marseille also felt suspended in time. Maybe it was the setting…

Or the twenty-minute walk up the fragrant hills from Lascours, the sleepy village where we had parked the car…








Maybe it was the beloved friends we were with and the good-natured group of locals we had joined for the occasion…

Maybe it was Delphine Douet, the owner of the saffron farm, a knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide. Maybe it was the weather, maybe the colors, maybe the aromas… Maybe a combination of all this. In any case, a morning so perfect that it could only foster hope and healing.

I didn’t know much about saffron before visiting the farm. I knew I loved its smell and taste, I knew it was the most expensive spice in the world and I knew it came from a specific variety of crocus. Beyond that, not a clue. I suspect such is the case with most visitors because the first thing Delphine did was sit us down at a long table on a restanque (narrow terrace where the crocuses are cultivated) and tell us everything we could possibly want to know about the precious or rouge (red gold) as saffron is sometimes called.
Although I enjoyed hearing about the role of saffron in history, its place in religious rituals, its medicinal benefits, its cosmetic uses, its dyeing properties, its culinary assets, etc. I am not going to overload you with this info because you can easily find it on the web. If you read French, a good place to start would be 13’Or Rouge, Delphine’s own website or this report she referred me to. For English-speakers, there is Wikipedia and other resources including this page of gardening tips in case you decide you grow your own (which I’d like to try).
What mostly got my attention was the fact that while the world produces about two hundred tons a year, four hundred tons are actually traded, meaning that not all that is labeled saffron is the real thing. As explained in this article (in French), some producers may substitute marigold, safflower, arnica, corn silk, seaweed, etc. or use dyes. They may make saffron threads heavier by coating them with sugar, oil, honey and mineral powders.
Others may include some non-aromatic parts of the plant itself. The stigma is the red thread which, once dehydrated, becomes the spice. The style is its yellow “foot.” Cheaper brands often contains both stigmas and styles. Delphine explained that she always has her harvest helpers (us on that particular day) gather the stigmas in red bowls so that she can see at a glance whether or not they mistakenly included any of the yellow styles. Bowls containing yellow specks do not pass muster. To make her point, she passed around two little bottles, the first one containing dehydrated stigmas, the second one containing dehydrated styles, and invited us to uncork them and smell. The red stigmas smelled divine. The yellow styles smelled like old hay. In other words when you buy saffron that’s both red and yellow, you are not getting one hundred percent pure saffron.
I normally get my saffron from Trader Joe’s. When I got back home from France, I checked the bottle I had in my spice drawer.

Here is what TJ’s saffron looks like on a red plate.

To be compared with the saffron in one of our bowls (prior to Delphine’s inspection)…

Knowing what I know now, I understand why TJ’s saffron is more affordable than others. I checked out saffron at Costco too. At first glance, it looks pretty much the same as TJ’s and I assume it smells and tastes about the same as well. Less fragrant and aromatic that the one in Provence but a reasonable alternative although you will have to use it in bigger amounts to achieve comparable results.
One trick to find out whether the saffron you bought has been dyed is to rub some threads (or powder) between two wet fingers. Your fingers should turn yellow. If they turn red, dye has been used. Delphine advises against buying saffron powder because it is often adulterated.
The saffron-producing crocus is crocus sativus. The bulbs are buried in the summer for a fall harvest. They multiply underground during winter and spring then go dormant. Early summer is a good time to deter them, so that the cycle can resume. Dependent on man’s help for reproduction, the crocus has been grown that way for five thousand years. To harvest the saffron, one pinches the flower at its base and snips it off (pulling would damage the bulb). When all the flowers have been harvested, the stigmas are pulled out. There are three stigmas per flower.



Delphine demonstrating where to cut off the style

We were directed to a pile of little straw baskets…

…and off we went, the two youngest (age nine and fifteen) racing ahead and filling their baskets in record time. When the whole restanque had been plucked over and all the stigmas pulled out, Delphine weighed the contents of our combined harvest: twelve grams.

Well, it was twelve grams when she first weighed it but by the time I took the picture (like two or three minutes later), desiccation had set in and the weight was already down by one centigram. Just so you know, one hundred grams of fresh stigmas yield 20 g of dry saffron. For one kilogram of saffron, you need the stigmas of about one hundred and sixty thousand flowers.
Once enough stigmas have been collected, they are dehydrated for twenty minutes at 140-158°F/60-70°C, then stored in tightly closed containers away from any light source.
To maximize aroma and flavor, saffron must be rehydrated before use, preferably for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. A baker might want to soak it in the water to be mixed with the flour.
Delphine took out various saffron-infused products (jams, marmalades, honey, tea) to taste with bread from Dame Farine, the lovely Marseille bakery we had just visited. A match made in heaven!


Spent crocus flowers…

If you ever are in the Marseille area in early fall and would like to visit the farm, you may want to contact Delphine at +33 6 86 22 16 88 and put your name on the list for a group tour. She speaks English. Outside harvest season, she also organizes saffron-themed breakfasts at regular intervals.

Happy Holidays!

We are in the throes of kitchen renovation, which means we haven’t had a sink or a stove since the first week of November. I have learned to make dinner on an induction cooktop in the garage (glum!), to scrub veggies and do the dishes in the bathroom sink (cramped!) and to eat out of paper plates (sorry, trees!). We were hoping everything would be finished by early December but it wasn’t. Now I am hoping the kitchen will be mostly functional sometime next week. Meanwhile my hopes of baking something in time for a Christmas blogpost have been dashed. Unless I go for microwave baking like this guy? Just kidding…

Anyway I was sorting through old photos on an external hard drive when I happened upon this picture dating back to September 2008. I was in California (already!) visiting our youngest son and his family. We had brought back plums from the farmers market and I had made a tart. While I remember neither how it turned out (there are no post-baking pictures) nor how it tasted, I love the way it looks pre-oven.

To me it suggests an old mosaic gently swept with an archeologist’s brush. Perhaps a tile found in the ruins of an ancient Roman kitchen. Buried in dust and ruble and unattended for centuries.

Suddenly brought to light and glowing from within, it speaks of the ages. It set me thinking of Christmases past, of the faces once gathered around the holiday table. I have always found it a sad comment on the human condition that the persons we love the most as grown-ups so rarely get to meet the ones that meant the most to us as children. There is little comfort in the image of Time as an endless chain of which each of us can only see so many links because it begins and ends in darkness. If a family could exist outside of Time, I like to think it would form a mosaic. The patterns might vary from one family member to the next and each of us might interpret the story differently but we would still all get the whole picture and be the richer -and maybe the wiser- for it.

Time being unescapable, we are left with the chain. Which will never make a mosaic no matter how many times we try to coil it upon itself.

Still some of the light is carried over from one generation to the next. Not so much in the stories we tell about a long departed great-grandparent -although the kids clearly love hearing them- but in the way we tell them or even in the simple fact we tell them at all. When my dad retired, he spent a couple of years writing the history of our family. What started as a simple memoir turned into three volumes plus a fourth one, a year later, in which he collected his and my mom’s favorite recipes (always a passionate eater, he had turned into a passionate cook in his old age). He had the pages typed (he wrote in longhand), added scores of old photos and documents, had it all photocopied and collated and gave a copy to each of his children and grandchildren. It makes for very interesting reading and it illuminates a part of the chain that would now be in complete darkness were it not for his efforts.

I love it that he -and my mom who helped out- cared enough to do it.

There are no stories of Christmas in these memoirs. We did celebrate when we were kids. It just wasn’t as major an event as today. It wasn’t as commercial either. At least not in France. Not then.

Christmas acquired a different aura when I met my mother-in-law who was Danish and for whom December 24 was the most important day of the year. The Danes know a thing or two about light and she knew a thing or two about family. She had had a very interesting life (she was born in St. Petersburg to a Russian mom who died giving birth when she was three, was raised by a stepmom she loved, fled Russia at the time of the Revolution, spoke several languages, was so beautiful than men vied for her hand in marriage, married a foreigner, visited pre-Castro Cuba, moved to Switzerland, then after the war, to Paris, etc. ).  But although she shared a few details, she was the quiet type and not a born storyteller. Hers is a different kind of legacy. One I cherish very much.

The holiday season has become painful since our grandson was killed. But the kids love it. So we make it a happy time for them. Some are still young enough to believe in Santa, others like to hold on to childhood a while longer by pretending they still do. Either way they clearly feel the magic and that’s as should be.

As for me, having learned over the years that nothing is more important, I am content with spending time with family, friends, and pets, and grateful for our connected world which makes it possible to video-visit the ones who live far away.

And if the kitchen works out, I’ll bake something. Not a plum tart (this is December after all) but maybe one of my mother-in-law’s favorite holiday dish, a salmon koulibiac. My way to conjure her presence at the table. Plus our son’s own mother-in-law loves koulibiac as well. As do we. Maybe one of our common grandkids will remember that one day and make it part of his or her Christmas lore.

See how the chain gets forged…

Happy holidays to all!