bread Archives - Hungry Travelers

bread

Beer with us #2: Beer bread

Posted on February 29, 2024February 29, 2024 by Pat and David

When we went through our store of beer bottles and cans, we discovered that we still had some Moosehead Grapefruit Radler from a visit to that Canadian's stalwart's brewery in Saint John, New Brunswick (89 Main Street West, Saint John, NB; 506-635-7000, ext. 5568, moosehead.ca). That's the brewery taproom at the top of the post. We remember the radler as a powerful warm-weather thirst quencher, but old beer is usually stale beer, so we decided to cook with it. Moosehead is known in the U.S. mainly for its export lager, a nicely balanced but hardly surprising beer for all-day drinking. The grapefruit radler was an anomaly. Even in Canada, the most popular Moosehead fruit-infused beer is the Blueberry Radler. But the grapefruit tang and slight...Read More

Visiting the bakery of New York’s guru of bread

Posted on December 26, 2023December 20, 2023 by Pat and David

Jim Lahey was a hero to us and many other home cooks during the pandemic shutdown. That's no exaggeraton. He's the baker behind the ‶no-knead bread″ method that had us all making delicious crusty bread in preheated Dutch ovens. Mind you, he's also the baker behind the overnight cool-rise pizza dough recipe for home cooks that we've been using for the last decade. We're not foolish enough to suggest that Lahey invented the crusty Dutch oven bread or the wonderful pizza dough. But he did carefully craft recipes for home cooks. His fame rests on the propensity of the New York Times food section to spread them far and wide. Never underestimate the power of Big Media. The original bakery at 73 Sullivan Street in...Read More

Monas de Pascua are edible Easter treats

Posted on April 17, 2022April 16, 2022 by Pat and David

We both grew up with the American tradition of Easter baskets—baskets with cellophane “grass” that were filled—ostensibly, by the Easter bunny—with candy. Easter after church was always the time for kids to spoil their appetites by gorging on jelly beans, chocolate eggs, and marshmallow peeps. (For our European readers, “peeps” are small yellow chicks made of marshmallow.) Here in Valencia, the tradition is a little different. The mona de Pascua is a baked Easter sweet bread with a decorated hard-boiled egg on top. Some sources call it a cake, but the texture is very much like a sweet brioche. In recent years, the hard-boiled egg has been widely replaced by a Kinder chocolate egg, and many bakeries (like the one at the bottom of this...Read More

Why we miss Paris—and what to do about it

Posted on November 21, 2021November 20, 2021 by Pat and David

Two new cookbooks from Flammarion just might be the next best thing to being in Paris. We were last there in early February 2020. We cherish those last few days in the City of Light as the waning hours of our pre-pandemic innocence. Those poor Chinese people, we thought as we watched BBC's reporting from Wuhan. Poor world, we think now. There was no way we could fill our luggage with croissants, gateaux, baguettes, éclairs, and all the other delectables of French bread and pastry making. If only. Our photos remind us how ubiquitous great breads and pastries are in Paris. Getting chilled stalking the winter streets during the end of the Paris sales? The obvious solution is to pop into a cafe for a...Read More

Going Greek: the pleasures of homemade pita bread

Posted on July 7, 2020July 6, 2020 by Pat and David

Greece was the last place we were able to visit before the worldwide pandemic struck. The Parthenon, Delphi, and all the rest fulfilled that bucket-list desire to see the origins of western civilization. And we really enjoyed the food—everything from simple salads with slabs of feta to roasted whole fish. We had never really tried cooking Greek dishes at home, but as long as we're in a travel holding pattern, there's no time like the present to remedy that. We're focusing on some of the staples we enjoyed on our sojourn in Athens last winter. That begins with the simplest of breads. Pita isn't a quick bread, but it takes very little time to make Except for the fresh strawberries with super-thick yogurt we ate...Read More

Diego Rivera’s food paintings lay bare Mexico’s soul

Posted on June 1, 2020 by Pat and David

Now that we've run out of other tidying projects, we've been sorting and cleaning up our files of travel photos. We're using Zoner Photo Studio X (zoner.com) for sorting purposes because it lets us tag large groups of photos with key words. Then we can look at related photos together. One thing that jumped out at us was that Diego Rivera obsessed about food almost as much as we do. As we looked at our photos of Rivera murals in Mexico City, we were struck that bread, tortillas, and tropical fruits all turned up even more often than the hammer and sickle of the Communist Party. His sympathies may have been with Marx and Lenin, but his truest devotion was to home cooking. The large...Read More

No yeast? Treat yourself to Irish brown soda bread

Posted on April 24, 2020 by Pat and David

We confess to scoring a half-cup of instant yeast last week when we were walking past our ‶sales-by-pickup-only″ neighborhood butcher shop, Savenor's. (Yes, the one where Julia Child bought her chicken, ducks, and breast of veal.) That should keep us going until we're out of flour. But a lot of folks aren't so lucky, so we'd thought we'd post one of the all-time great bread recipes that doesn't require yeast. It's for an Irish brown soda bread, as served on the breakfast buffet at the Marker Hotel in the hip Docklands district of Dublin, Ireland. Seeds in brown bread are nothing new, though the classic recipes only call for oat groats to add texture. This version adds the perfect balance of sesame, sunflower, and flax...Read More

Pan de Muerto: sustenance for Día de los Muertos

Posted on October 31, 2019September 26, 2019 by Pat and David

We don't need to be convinced that food plays a central role in people's lives and cultures that goes way beyond the basic need for sustenance. But if we did need proof, Mexico's Day of the Dead observances would be Exhibit A. On November 1, families decorate the graves of their lost loved ones with marigold flowers. It's a custom, several women told us, that brings them close to their loved ones and makes them feel contento (content). The bright orange flowers almost cover the gravestones and their pungent aroma fills the air. We've really never seen anything else quite like it. As we looked more closely, we realized that families also leave personal belongings and mementos that their loved ones had enjoyed in life....Read More

Sixteen Bricks Bakery makes Cincy’s daily bread

Posted on October 11, 2019September 19, 2019 by Pat and David

Ryan Morgan is not a man you can easily forget. Neither is the bread that he creates at Sixteen Bricks Bakery (sixteenbricks.com). We'd been eating our way around Cincinnati for a couple of days before we had the chance to tour the bakery that supplies bread to many of the city's restaurants—both casual and high end—that insist on a high-quality product. Morgan revels in his role as the most unlikely of bakers. He left a career as a mechanic making medical equipment at Johnson & Johnson to help his mother in her struggling bakery. Not one to pull any punches, Morgan told us that the bakery turned out “some of the most garbage bread.” He shakes his head at the memory. “I don't know why...Read More

Serve hearty soup and rustic bread for St. Patrick’s Day

Posted on March 10, 2019March 11, 2019 by Pat and David

No corned beef and cabbage for us this year. As we were contemplating a lighter meal to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, we turned to two new cookbooks by great Irish chefs. We've written before about Darina Allen, the cookbook author and co-founder of the Ballymaloe Cookery School, which is located on an organic farm in County Cork. Her new book, Simply Delicious: The Classic Collection (2019, Kyle Books, $29.99), gathers some of her favorite recipes from her television cooking show and cookbook series of the same name. The 100 recipes illustrate Allen's love of traditional Irish cooking as well as her enthusiasm for cuisines around the world. They represent her straightforward approach to creating good, flavorful food. We have to admit that we were initially...Read More