For my first bake from the United States, I chose my personal favourite of Californian carrot cake. But if I’m being honest, the archetypal American bake (leaving aside apple pie, which is really Dutch), is the chocolate brownie – born in the U.S.A and the favourite of millions. Somehow, I’ve managed to live all these years and eat countless brownies without ever having tried to make a batch, so it was about time to try.
There are a million variations on the basic brownie recipe, mainly to do with how gooey you do or don’t like your brownies, but also about choices of nuts and additional flavourings (there are even “blondies” if you prefer white chocolate or you want to omit chocolate altogether). If you are keen to calibrate your recipe carefully to your own taste, Felicity Cloake in The Guardian is probably a good place to start. This being my first time, I went for authentic Americanness rather than perfection and headed for Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker’s The Joy of Cooking, probably the most famous American cookbook of all time and the book bought by my mother in New York when my family lived there briefly in the early 1960s.
On the grand scale of things, brownies are not a difficult bake: there’s just one tricky bit, namely knowing when they’re done. Again, this is a function of how gooey you want them: I got panicky and left mine in too long, so they were considerably too cake-like for my taste. So don’t use the “skewer has to come out dry” test if you want them remotely sticky.
With my usual aversion to measuring things in cups, I’ve turned everything to metric.
Brownies are, by tradition, square or rectangular. I used a pretty standard 30cm x 40cm baking tin which resulted in fairly thin brownies. If you like them thicker, either go for a smaller tin or multiply up the recipe.
100g chocolate (I used Menier 70%)
60g unsalted butter
4 eggs (mine were of mixed size and weighed about 200g in total)
¼ tsp salt
350g sugar
Vanilla essence to taste
100g pecans
120g flour
Preheat oven to 175℃ fan
Prepare your baking tin by lining its base with baking paper
Melt the butter and chocolate in a double boiler, blend well and leave to cool.
Add salt to the eggs and beat at high speed until frothy and mousse-like.
Still beating, add the sugar gradually and then the vanilla essence.
Gently fold in the chocolate-butter mixture.
Sirt in the flour and stir.
Chop the pecans coarsely, add them and stir.
Pour the mixture into your baking tin, smooth it out so that it’s level.
Bake for around 20 minutes – less for more fudgey, more for more cakey.
Cut into squares or rectangles. For the full Americana (and particularly if, like mine, you’ve overbaked the brownies so they’re too dry, they go well with blueberries and whipped cream.
There have been many types of flatbread in this series. Persian flatbread – nân barbari – is my favourite, by a long way: its pillowy texture and crisp top are a winner. The recipe I’ve used is adapted from Sabrina Ghayour’s warmly recommended Persiana; it’s slightly westernised in that I don’t think they use melted butter for the top in Iran and I’ve westernised it further in that suspect that a self-respecting Iranian baker wouldn’t use a stand mixer either. But these are details: this is reliably the best flatbread I know and it works with just about any Middle Eastern dishes, not just Persian ones.
This recipe makes two flatbreads, which feeds around 10-12 people as part of a buffet including one other starch like rice or couscous. The multiple kneading and resting process described here results reliably in a fabulously stretchy dough; you could try taking shortcuts on it but it’s always worked so well for me that I try not to.
7g dried yeast
500 ml warm water (around 40℃)
700g strong white flour
15g salt (Sabrina is a diehard devotee of Maldon salt, I’m not all that convinced)
75ml olive oil
20g butter
A handful of nigella, sesame or caraway seeds
Mix yeast with 50ml of the water, leave to rest for 5 minutes or so until frothy
Put the flour and salt into the bowl of your stand mixer, along with 50ml of the olive oil.
Add the yeast mix and the remaining water to the bowl and combine thoroughly.
With the dough hook at low speed, knead for 7 minutes. With a scraper, take the dough of your hook, reshape into a single ball.
Leave to stand for 10 minutes, then knead for another 2 minutes, then recombine the dough. Repeat this three times in total; after the second time, add the rest of your oil.
After your third 2 minute knead, reform the dough into a single ball, cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave to rise. Sabrina suggests three hours for the dough to triple in size; I bailed out after 2½ hours, by which time the dough was coming close to the top of the bowl. Your yeast and kitchen temperature will vary.
Line two baking trays with silicone sheets or baking paper. Preheat your oven to 220℃ fan.
Divide the dough into two equal parts and stretch each part into a large rectangle covering most of the length of your baking trays and around half as wide as they are long. Actually, you can pretty much use any shape you like, but try to make them of fairly even thickness.
If you like, cut a pair of slashes into each flatbread, which will make your bread easier to “tear and share” at the table.
Cover with a tea towel and leave to rise for another 40 minutes.
Brush the top with melted butter, and sprinkle your chosen seeds over the top.
Bake for around 15-20 minutes until golden. The loaves should feel springy if you press them gently.
The ideal timing is for the bread to come out of the oven so that you can cool it to around 10 minutes before taking it to the table. Most of us don’t actually manage this and it doesn’t really matter.
Yes, we all know the (probably apocryphal) history of the upside down tart made by mistake. But the reason for including a Tarte Tatin in this series is that quite simply, it’s the single thing that I bake that is most requested by my family. There’s something about the way that caramel blends into the fruit that is quite irresistible.
Tarte Tatin is most commonly made with apples and there’s plenty of room for debate as to which variety of apple to use. The most authentic version uses a French variety called “Reine de Reinettes”, which is equivalent to an English “King of Pippins”, but neither of these are readily available in UK supermarkets. Many modern French recipes specify Granny Smiths, although these can be very acid and even a touch watery. You’ll also see Golden Delicious: the trouble here is that there are some wonderful Golden Delicious apples around, particularly in Italy, but also some really powdery, tasteless ones. When I’m not using apples from the tree in our garden, I tend to use a half-half mix of Braeburn or Jazz and Granny Smith.
However, for this post, I’m not using apples at all. A fabulous new French restaurant, Les Deux Garçons, has opened down the road from our home and they do a stunning pear Tarte Tatin. Our apple tree has finished producing for the year, but we have a glut of slightly underripe pears which, the chef at Les Deux Garçons explained, should be perfect for making a Tatin. I checked this out and it worked like a dream: a gentler, more subtle flavour than the apple, but very fruity and truly scrumptious. The only real downside of using pears (at least our ones) is that they release at lot more moisture than apples, so any surplus caramel is considerably more runny than I’d like.
Depending on your level of patience and skill, there are various ways of cutting your fruit. The posh way is to cut out a circular core with a dedicated apple-corer, and then cut the fruit in half. This is fairly difficult to execute, but allows you to pack your fruit really tightly in a regular shape. For those of you with less time and patience (like me), just peel each fruit, chop it into four and cut out a triangle around the pips, which is what I’ve done here. I remember one recipe which suggested cutting each fruit into three: I tried this and it struck me as particularly tricky to do with no obvious benefit.
You can use pretty much any pastry: shortcrust, rough puff or full puff – just don’t go for a sweet pastry because the caramel makes the tart plenty sweet enough as it is. In this recipe, I’ve gone for a rough puff because I really like the flakiness, but it’s a fairly lengthy process. You can always use shop-bought puff pastry instead of making your own, but try and find the stuff that’s made with butter (unless, of course, you’re vegan or lactose-intolerant).
Some twenty years ago, I made an impulse purchase of a dedicated ceramic Tarte Tatin dish. At the time, it seemed a ridiculous overpriced indulgence. Since then, the number of tarts I’ve made in it must be approaching three figures, which makes it seem quite reasonable, really. The truth is, though, that you can use pretty much any pan that has sides which are 5cm or so deep and is robust enough both to be used both on the hob and in the oven.
The quantities here are for my dish, which is around 29cm in diameter and produces 8 generous portions. Adjust the quantities for the size of your own dish but remember that it’s a square law, so you’ll need just under half the quantities for a 20cm dish and 1/4 for a 15cm one.
The rough puff pastry
200g plain flour (I use OO grade) plus some more for dusting and rolling
180g butter, frozen
100ml (approximately) ice cold water
1 tsp lemon juice
If you have time, measure out the flour and put in the freezer for half an hour or so before you start.
Put the flour into the bowl of your food processor.
Grate 30g of the butter and add to the bowl; process until you have a fine mixture
Add the lemon juice and most of the water and process some more. You want the dough to be pliable but not actually sticky. Take it out of the food processor, bring it together into a ball, adding a bit more water or flour as needed to get to a good consistency.
Wrap the dough in cling film and freeze for 30 minutes
Just before taking the dough out, grate the rest of the butter
Flour your board and rolling pin, take the dough out and roll into a thin rectangle
Do a book fold: add half the butter to two thirds of one end of the rectangle, fold the unbuttered end over, then fold the other end over.
Seal the edges, roll the rectangle out again, turning it by 90 degrees. Repeat the book fold process with the second half of the butter.
Wrap the dough in the cling film again and freeze for another 20 minutes (now, by the way, is about the right time to start on your filling).
Take the dough out again, roll it out and do another book fold. Now it’s back into the freezer for 20 minutes and do it again. You will have done five book folds in total.
Finally, you’re ready to roll your pastry into a thin circle, big enough to overlap the edges of your dish. Don’t worry about making it a perfect circle: you’ll be tucking it in around the edges and if there are some huge areas of excess, you can trim them off.
If you have time, measure out the flour and put in the freezer for half an hour or so before you start.
Put the flour into the bowl of your food processor.
Grate 30g of the butter and add to the bowl; process until you have a fine mixture
Add the lemon juice and most of the water and process some more. You want the dough to be pliable but not actually sticky. Take it out of the food processor, bring it together into a ball, adding a bit more water or flour as needed to get to a good consistency.
Wrap the dough in cling film and freeze for 30 minutes
Just before taking the dough out, grate the rest of the butter
Flour your board and rolling pin, take the dough out and roll into a thin rectangle
Do a book fold: add half the butter to two thirds of one end of the rectangle, fold the unbuttered end over, then fold the other end over.
Seal the edges, roll the rectangle out again, turning it by 90 degrees. Repeat the book fold process with the second half of the butter.
Wrap the dough in the cling film again and freeze for another 20 minutes (now, by the way, is about the right time to start on your filling).
Take the dough out again, roll it out and do another book fold. Now it’s back into the freezer for 20 minutes and do it again. You will have done five book folds in total.
Finally, you’re ready to roll your pastry into a thin circle, big enough to overlap the edges of your dish. Don’t worry about making it a perfect circle: you’ll be tucking it in around the edges and if there are some huge areas of excess, you can trim them off.
The fruit and caramel filling
Juice of 1 lemon
Around 8 medium to large apples or pears (see above)
170g caster sugar
50g butter
Preheat oven to 180℃
Put the lemon juice into a bowl big enough to hold all your fruit
Peel and chop the fruit (see above for details). As you do each one, put the pieces into the bowl and coat them with juice – this will help to stop them discolouring.
Put your dish onto the hob at medium heat. Spread the sugar over it in an even layer. Keep heating and stirring until you have a smooth caramel. How long you keep going is very much a matter of personal taste: if you take it off fairly early, at a sort of butterscotch colour, you will have a smooth, gentle flavour. Leave it on for longer and you will get to a dark colour and a flavour that is stronger and more bitter: I’ve had both in perfectly respectable French restaurants, so it’s really up to you.
Remove from heat, add butter, stir in until smooth. The caramel will froth alarmingly, but don’t be frightened. And if bits of hardened caramel stick to your spoon, just hack them off. They’ll melt into the rest in the oven even if they don’t do so straightaway.
Array the apples or pears into your dish, packing them as best you can to get a reasonably level top. If you used quarters, once you’ve filled the dish with one layer, cut the remaining quarters in half and use them to fill in the gaps.
Spread pastry on top, trim off any large bits of excess, and tuck the rest in around the sides. Pierce the pastry in lots of places: you want steam to be able to escape.
Optionally, sprinkle a little more
Bake until golden. Your oven may differ, but mine took around 40-50 minutes.
Take out from oven and leave for around 20-30 minutes.
Now say a quick imprecation to your favourite deity to stop pieces of fruit staying stuck to the dish (I tend to go for “Bismillah” because my favourite Persian cookery book specifies it at a critical point in its main rice recipe), cover your dish with a flat heatproof plate or wooden board and turn the whole lot upside down.leave at least 30 mins, then turn it over onto a plate or board, then remove the tin in the fervent hope that the tart has fallen out onto your board (the caramel will run, by the way, particularly if you used pears, so make provision for dribbles). If your deity wasn’t looking kindly on you, there may be a need for some swift repair work.
If you’ve timed it such that you can serve the tart warm, so much the better. But it’s pretty good cold as well. Either way, vanilla ice cream makes a great accompaniment; a splash of Calvados doesn’t hurt either.
Polything 