Blue Cayenne

Oh Instacart!

It’s not you, it’s me.  Well…actually…it’s you.

How did we lose that beautiful thing that  we had? We’ve been so close since March. Whatever I’ve needed, you were there.

Wine? You’ve always given my glass a generous pour.

Ripe tomatoes? You’ve searched for them like a trooper, knowing that the transcendent flavor of truly ripe tomatoes would make me happy. I loved you for that.

Makrut lime leaves? OK. My bad. I told you I knew that order was unfair. I didn’t think you held a grudge.

But, then, this happened.

My usually flawless Instacart order arrived this week with a bouquet of six grossly overripe avocados–packed at the bottom of the box. Six overripe avocados! (You know…the squishy ones that would have been perfectly ripe like two days ago but are now…ugh!…on. their. decline.) That was hurtful.

We need to talk.

You’ve forced Sweet Juliet and me to struggle so that we wouldn’t waste food. In the end, we decided that one foodie wannabe and one small dog could only eat so much guac and avocado toast–although Juliet was more optimistic than I about the guac gorge.

As luck would have it, I had  been leafing through the pages of a newly-acquired cookbook, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Flavor, when this week’s avocado crisis reared its ugly head. And…there it was on page 83! Chilled Avocado Soup With Crunchy Garlic Oil. Once again, Yotam saved the day.

Is there a future for us, Instacart, or have you kicked me to the curb? (That would be Ralph’s curbside.) Sad.

The Yotam Ottolenghi  cookbook Flavor is available at your local bookstore.

We owe a big thank you to H. David Dalquist. He invented the bundt pan for the Nordic Ware Company in 1950.

As the story goes, Mr. Dalquist, a co-owner of Nordic Ware in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was approached by two women from a local Jewish women’s service organization, Hadassah. They were looking for a heavy pan that would bake the dense Eastern European-style cakes they remembered fondly from their youths. They brought Mr. Dalquist a ceramic kugelhopf pan as an example and he used it as the prototype for his first cast aluminum bundt pans. He coined the name for the pan from the German word for community, bund, and added a “t.”  The first pans were modest sellers for the company.

Then—bam! (as Emeril would say)—the market for bundt pans exploded thanks to Texas home baker Ella Helfrich. That year her Tunnel of Fudge Cake won second place in the annual Pillsbury Bake Off. Suddenly, every baker wanted to bake a bundt! Soon, Nordic Ware was manufacturing 30,000 bundt pans a day to keep up with demand. Today, it is estimated that there are more than 70,000,000 bundt pans in use in American kitchens.

The Nordic Ware Company, a privately held family business, is a real American entrepreneurial success story. Their products continue to be made almost entirely in their American factory in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their company employs hundreds of American workers and is renown for producing quality products. Their bundt pans carry a lifetime guarantee.

Here is a short video showing the technique for baking a bundt in a Nordic Ware pan. The pan, by the way, is the company’s 60th Anniversary pan, manufactured as an exact replica of their original 1950 pan.

Here is a great bundt cake recipe for a Bundt de Noel.

This cake is billed as a breakfast cake. I’ve been testing it–a lot.  I can personally attest to the fact that it is a great cake for any time of the day or for that late night snack craving that rolls you out of bed at 3 a.m.

This recipe was adapted from one on the Anson Mills site. You can find the original recipe here.

Need some rolls for your Thanksgiving table? These Hokkaido Milk Bread Rolls are wonderful.

The original recipe for these rolls comes from the King Arthur Baking site (here), although King Arthur Baking gives credit to Yvonne Chen, author of the cookbook 65 Degrees C. Bread Doctor, for the technique that makes this recipe work.

Chen popularized the use of a roux starter called tangzhong in baking bread—a bread-baking technique believed to date back to WWII when rice was rationed in Japan and many bakers turned to the development of recipes using wheat. 

At the decided risk of sounding a bit wonky, here is what is so special about the tangzhong method of bread baking. Japanese bakers discovered that by precooking a slurry of a small amount of flour and water until the starches gelatinize (and then adding the slurry to their bread ingredients) they could enhance the ability of the gluten in their dough to stretch and develop. This increased the amount of water the bread dough was able to absorb, increased the activation of the yeast in the recipe, and kept the bread from drying out during baking. The result was a bread with a remarkably softer mouthfeel and a longer shelf life. 

You’ll enjoy this recipe. Slather one (or many) of these rolls with marmalade and give some serious thanks.