With abandon

Writing term papers is not a pretty affair--at least in my case. The dishes pile up. I don't bother with my hair. I grimace a lot. So, I'll have to be brief today.

A few weeks ago, I finally kneaded together a batch of Milk Bar "mother" dough and baked up a few bagel bombs to share with the other sleepy-eyed folks in my early-morning political philosophy seminar. The bagel bomb is Christina Tosi's nod to the New York bagel, sesame seeds, dried onions, garlic powder, and all. Bite into one and you'll get the "bomb" bit--think bacon-scallion cream-cheese explosion. I think they went over pretty well with the class. I might have seen a person or two reaching for a second, maybe even a third bomb...but I won't mention any names.

Munching on bagel bombs definitely helped the morning along, but, really, I still think that I got the best of it while making them earlier that week. That bacon-scallion cream cheese? Totally amazing and dead easy to make too. I'll admit to having had a taste or two and maybe to licking the stand-mixer paddle clean. Hey--I get to when I'm doing the baking, right?

But in all seriousness, I have to say that after its spell in the oven, the cream cheese tucked into each bomb isn't nearly as good. The scallions lose their pluck. The cream cheese gets a little curdled. Next time around, I think I might just try my hand at some proper bagels and paddle together this cream cheese to mound on top. If you ate sour-cream-and-onion chips with abandon as a kid like I did, this is your cream cheese.

Bacon-scallion Cream Cheese
Adapted from the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook

50 g / 1 3/4 oz bacon, the smokier the better
200 g / 7 oz cream cheese
2 g scallion greens, thinly sliced (about 2-3 scallions' worth)
5 g / 1 teaspoon sugar
2 g / 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

Cook the bacon in a skillet over medium heat until it's auburn brown and crunchy. Remove it from the pan and chop it into small pieces; reserve it and, separately, the rendered bacon fat.
Put the cream cheese in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and cream it on medium speed. Pour in the reserved bacon fat and paddle to combine. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the chopped bacon, scallions, sugar, and salt and paddle briefly to incorporate.

One last thing: to help out those of you who already have the relevant cookbook and who might want to tackle a project I've posted about, I'm going to be adding a few technical notes to the end of my project posts from now on. I hope some of you out there will find them helpful!

Technical Notes for Milk Bar's Bagel Bombs

• Oven temperature: the recipe directs you to bake these at 325 degrees F, but even when I baked the bombs at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, I wasn't getting any colour on them. I tweeted Tosi about it (it's a thing she does every Friday), and she suggested that I give them a minute or two on low under the broiler. It did the trick.
• Yeast: the "Ingredients" section at the beginning of the Milk Bar cookbook says to use active-dry yeast, but I'm pretty confident that you should be using instant yeast for the mother dough. First of all, the active-dry stuff won't break down unless you dissolve it in liquid. Second, the quantity of yeast and the time allotted for proofing are more appropriate for instant.
• Dough: the mother dough is probably a little wetter than the average bread dough--just keep your hands floured.

Macaroni, matrimony, and cheese

It came out in conversation a few months ago that my friend Ben doesn't like macaroni and cheese. Doesn't like macaroni and cheese! I didn't think that that was humanly possible--at least for someone who'd grown up in this country. Worse yet, he admitted, his fiancée loves mac and cheese. How was this going to work out once they tied the knot this summer? Would Ben have to sneak his share of mac and cheese to the dog? Would the dog even welcome a pile of mac and cheese in his bowl? It didn't matter--there would be no room for a dog and two people in a Hyde Park apartment. Ben was a little apprehensive.
So, naturally, I invited him over for dinner. Ben's a good guy--the picture of a southern gentleman, really--well-dressed, soft-spoken, warm and, of course, appreciative of the good things in life, like fine bourbon and bluegrass. I wanted to do what little I could for his and his fiancée's matrimonial happiness. So, it was time to subject him to a good plateful of mac and cheese, hot, golden, and bubbly--something that would be irresistible, even to a hardened sceptic like him.

Okay, so it turned out that Ben was not all that hardened a sceptic. His past experiences with mac and cheese had been of the orange-powdered, cardboard-boxed variety. And that's probably enough to leave most at least somewhat sceptical. All that Ben really needed was a little push, and I was happy to be the one to do it, to acquaint him with the good stuff.
The mac and cheese we made that night was a southern variation on the standard bubbly, baked sort. Instead of starting with a roux and making a cheese sauce for the macaroni, you douse it in a rather immodest mixture of cream and eggs, scattering cubes of cheddar throughout, and then finish it off with another good heap of cheddar. It bakes up golden and creamy, almost custard-like beneath that cheesy lid.
That said, I can see how an absolute die-hard mac and cheese lover might not be entirely satisfied with this particular plate--it doesn't ooze cheese. But I still think it's fantastic, especially with a mess of braised collards on the side. And most importantly, it won Ben over. I look forward to the wedding!

Southern-Style Macaroni and Cheese
Adapted from Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock's The Gift of Southern Cooking via the May 2010 Saveur
Note: I used 2 cups of heavy cream and 1 cup of milk in place of heavy cream and half-and-half with no issues. I'm pretty confident that using less heavy cream wouldn't have been a problem either. And if indeed you're a die-hard mac and cheese lover, a few more ounces of cubed cheddar probably wouldn't hurt.

12 oz elbow macaroni
Butter, for greasing
13 oz extra-sharp cheddar, 7 oz (about 1 1/2 cups) cut into half-inch cubes + 6 oz (about 2 cups) grated
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1⁄4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1⁄4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1⁄8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2⁄3 cup sour cream
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 1⁄2 cups half-and-half
1 1⁄2 cups heavy cream
1⁄3 cup grated onion
1 teaspoon Worcestershire

Heat oven to 350° F. Bring a 4-quart saucepan of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until cooked halfway through, about 3 minutes. Drain pasta and transfer to a buttered 9" x 13" baking dish. Stir in the cubed cheddar cheese and set aside.
Combine the salt, flour, mustard, black pepper, nutmeg, and cayenne in a large mixing bowl. Add the sour cream and the eggs and whisk until smooth. Whisk in the half-and-half, heavy cream, onions, and Worcestershire. Pour the egg mixture over the reserved pasta mixture and stir to combine. Sprinkle the grated cheese evenly over the surface. Bake until the pasta mixture is set around the edges but still a bit loose in the center, 60-70 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes before serving.
Serves 8-10.

Truffles in the sandbox

My boyfriend, Octavian (yes, he has a name!), has a knack for fixing things. Mostly, he tinkers with vintage audio parts, but he's pretty handy with a hammer or a hacksaw too. It's not too uncommon to find him over at a friend's putting something back into working order or assembling something new. Most recently, he's been helping some friends of ours re-arrange their kitchen's layout--basically, breaking down a cluster of wall cabinets and converting them into serviceable base cabinets (hooray for more counter space!). The job's almost done, and it's looking great. Though this sort of thing is just what Octavian likes to do in his spare time, our friends wanted to thank him for his help. So, late last week, they put together the most wonderful box of gourmet goodies for us. Quail eggs! Foie gras! A bottle of summer truffles! It was like Christmas.
I was more than a little giddy, but I wanted to play with something straightaway, jump right into that sandbox. It was hard to know where to start. Quail eggs first? Or truffles? Or both? I'd never worked with (or tasted, in fact) either before. So, I started a little research, thinking I'd carefully weigh my options. But then it hit me: Hermé has a recipe for black truffle macarons; I have a bottle of truffles. Conclusion: I have to make truffle macarons.

Now, I still don't know that much about truffles, but I can tell you this. The black truffles you've probably heard of--the ones that can go for $100 or more apiece fresh--are Périgord truffles (Tuber melanosporum) and come mostly from the south of France. These, I'm told, are the mother of all black truffles, the most fragrant and flavourful of the lot. They're available late in the fall through early winter and go for something like €1000 per kilo (that's just over two pounds) at farmers' markets. Unsurprisingly, it's some of these that Hermé expects you to be able to get your hands on for the macarons. All I have to say to that is: yeah right.
My truffles were summer truffles (Tuber aestivum), which, apparently, are a good second to the Périgord (like Robin to the Périgord's Batman?). And though these in particular were bottled (a lot of people, it seems, have been disappointed by bottled truffles, i.e. have found them to be completely flavourless), my friends and I thought that they were extraordinary--wildly deep, earthy, and aromatic, unlike any other mushroom we'd ever had. Bottled truffles might not compare to fresh specimens (again, I'm not in a position to say), but I was more than happy with these.

Oh, and if you're balking at the thought of mushrooms and white chocolate together...well, I did too. In fact, I was pretty convinced mid-way through the process that the macarons were going to be abhorrent, a terrible waste of truffles. But Hermé proved me wrong. Black truffles make for an incredible macaron. Somehow, all that milky sweetness just works with them. Their mushroomy earthiness blooms out of it and leaves you a little bewildered, a little awestruck. These macarons are unexpectedly marvellous. Hermé does it again.

Summer Truffle Ganache
Adapted from Pierre Hermé's Macaron
Note: About the truffles. Truffles are sold in a number of ways--fresh, frozen, bottled, and canned. I can't speak to the differences between them, but I'll say a little about the bottled variety. People tend to be disappointed with bottled truffles, and maybe it's warranted, but it might also have to do with the fact that the bottled ones lose their aroma especially quickly (or so I'm told). One place suggested that you add them immediately to whatever you're planning to cook them with and leave them in an air-tight container for a few hours to lock in their aroma. That's what I ended up doing--I chopped up my truffles, added them to the heavy cream, and let them sit together overnight. Of course, people also warn you not to overheat truffles and advise adding them at the end of cooking, which you can't do here if you've already added them to the cream. So, I don't have anything conclusive to say on the matter, only that I didn't note any serious loss of flavour after bringing the cream to a boil. One last thing--I left the ganache piping to Octavian, and he reported having some trouble keeping the ganache the right consistency. It warmed up very quickly in the pastry bag and made for some very sloppy-looking macarons. He even gave it a few minutes in the freezer when it got really runny. I don't know what to make of this. I added the little bit of truffle juice from the bottom of the bottle to the heavy cream before boiling. I don't know what effect that had. It might have just been an execution problem with the ganache. Macaron shells. For these macarons, I made some pretty standard Hermé Italian-meringue shells done up with 7 g or so of black gel food colouring. You can get a sense for them here. If their feet don't look particularly impressive, it's because I didn't check my new oven's temperature settings against any thermometer readings. From the looks of the shells, my oven's burning a little on the cool side.

175 g heavy cream
35 g summer truffles (see notes above)
219 g good quality white chocolate, finely chopped

Put the chopped chocolate in a heat-proof bowl over a pot of simmering water to melt. Stir occasionally.
Bring the cream to a boil. Chop the truffles finely. Add the truffles to the cream and mix with an immersion blender or in a blender until smooth, about 2 minutes. The truffle pieces will still be visible. Pour the cream in three rounds over the melted chocolate, stirring with each addition. Pour the ganache into a wide, shallow dish and cover with plastic wrap, touching it to the surface of the ganache. Chill in the refrigerator until thick and creamy, 3-4 hours.
Makes enough ganache for 36 macarons.

P.S. Has anyone ever tried the black truffles grown in Oregon? Though they're still expensive, they aren't prohibitively priced like the Périgords. And from what I've read, some people really like them. I'm tempted to order just enough for another batch of macarons while they're still in season. Can anyone recommend a vendor?
P.P.S. An English translation of Pierre Hermé's classic book, Macaron, was just released at the end of 2011 in North America, so now, you don't have to beg a friend going to Paris to scour the city for a copy and then struggle with your grade-school French translating recipes. I hear that the translation isn't great but still passable.

A heady affair

I complain a lot during these dreary months. Nearly everything is drab, grey, and dead. It wears on me. A girl can only eat so many plates of root vegetables, can only drag herself through so many sunless days in a season. But even so, I'd hardly say that I dislike winter. There's something to be said for bright and biting winter mornings, taking in the cold, clean air, and, better yet, for being chased inside by the wind to blankets and tea and warm things bubbling in the oven. Yes, that's what this season is really about for me: keeping the oven glowing.
Though I've gone back to eating meat, there are still few things I welcome more than an earnest pot of beans on a dark, wintery day. I like the simplicity of beans. With the day still before you, you can stir together a few handfuls with some water and salt and keep them bubbling modestly in the oven hours. You can forget them for a while, let the day unfold, and then come back to find yourself with something truly sumptuous. It's surprising sometimes just how sumptuous and satisfying a pot of beans can be. Beans in the cupboard can look so spare.

My favourite pot of beans this winter has been one with a tangle of greens, leeks, and chopped tomatoes. These beans aren't much to look at, admittedly, but they will surprise you. With a plate of them, you're in for spoonful after spoonful of some pretty serious umami. Prepare yourself for a heady affair.
For the first issue of Lucky Peach, Harold McGee wrote a great piece on umami and MSG. The short of it was: MSG, which occurs naturally in lots of foods, is umami and nothing that we should shy away from. In fact, it's the reason, for those of us who love tomatoes, why we love them. When I first read this last summer, I wasn't quite sure what to think. Tomatoes just didn't really scream umami to me. But with these beans, I think I finally get what McGee means. Give tomatoes, beans, and collard greens a few good hours together in the oven, and you'll see. You'll have something to savour.

Smothered Beans

Adapted from Peter Berley's The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen

Note: Greens. Collards, I know, are not as popular as Swiss chard or kale, but trust me, collards are what you want with these beans. They have a certain savour to them. Anything else will be disappointing. Beans. If, like me, you sometimes like to splurge on dried heirloom beans, this is the dish for them. Much of its final flavour depends on the beans' pot liquor, and quality beans always make for a better one. Leeks. Leeks are often rather gritty. I think the easiest way to clean them is to slit them vertically and then run them under the tap, spreading out their layers with your thumb. Cooking time. I haven't been in the habit of pre-soaking my beans lately and baked these beans for closer to three hours than one-and-a-half. The collards held up splendidly, and the flavours, I'm sure, only got better. Next time, I might let the beans soak at least a couple of hours at room temperature to give them a head start. They could have baked for longer and gotten more tender, but I was getting hungry.

1 cup dried white beans (I like Rancho Gordo's alubia blanca), sorted, soaked, and rinsed
1/4 cup dried pinto beans, sorted soaked and rinsed
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 leeks, white and tender green parts, thinly sliced
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse sea salt
1 bunch collard greens, trimmed of tough stems and sliced into 1/2-inch-wide strips
1 14-oz can of chopped tomatoes
Freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees F.

In a saucepan over medium heat, combine the beans with 4 cups of water and bring to a boil. Skim the foam, reduce the heat, and simmer, covered, for 30 minutes.

While the beans cook, warm the oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the leeks, garlic, oregano, and 1 teaspoon of the salt. Sauté for 5 minutes, until the leeks begin to soften. Cover the Dutch oven, reduce the heat to low, and simmer gently for 10 minutes.

Place the collard greens in a large bowl, add the cooked leeks, and stir to combine.

Place a strainer or colander over a bowl and pour in the beans. Measure out the cooking liquid and, if needed, add enough fresh water to equal 2 cups.

Place half of the greens mixture in the bottom of the Dutch oven. Add the strained beans. Spread the remaining greens over the beans and top with the tomatoes. Sprinkle the remaining 1/2 teaspoon of salt over the tomatoes and add a few grinds of pepper. Without disturbing the layers, gently pour enough of the bean water down the side of the Dutch oven to barely cover the tomatoes.

Place the Dutch oven over high heat and bring to a boil. Remove from the stovetop, cover, and bake for 1 hour. Remove the cover and check the Dutch oven, adding a little more water if it is drying out. The casserole should be just slightly juicy when pressed gently with the back of a wooden spoon. Replace the cover and continue to braise for 20 to 30 more minutes, until the beans are tender and the greens and leeks have melted.

Serves 6.

The first

I have a problem when it comes to complicated, days-long baking projects. As you may have noticed, I can't seem to take on enough of them. I want to better understand ingredients. I want to master techniques. I want to be challenged in the kitchen. I want to be awestruck. So last week, when I found out that two of my classes wouldn't be in session that week, I decided, naturally, that I would use the free time to get ahead in my reading and make some croissants.

I'd wanted to tackle croissants for a while. You should know by now how I feel about buttery, flaky things, and croissants are pretty much the pinnacle of buttery and flaky. I'd just been putting it off because I knew that it would be an especially demanding project and that there was plenty that could go wrong. But with two days in a row clear of commitment, it was time. Hello, Tartine Bread croissants.

I ran into problems from the start, and these just compounded as the process went on. First, the sheer amounts of flour, milk, leaven (sourdough starter), and poolish (a similar mixture of flour, water, and commercial yeast) that went into the croissant dough made it really difficult to pull together. The biggest mixing bowl in my kitchen could barely contain it all (I should have foreseen this). And this led to a dough that wasn't evenly hydrated and rather lumpy (I should have mixed it more instead of rushing it). I tried fixing this by giving the dough a few more turns in the bowl during bulk fermentation, but that just overdeveloped the gluten in the dough. So when it came time to rolling it out and laminating in the butter, rolling was a huge struggle and led to tears in the dough.

So I was pretty sure that the croissants were doomed. Croissants, after all, are only as wonderful as they are because of their buttery, flaky layers. And to get those layers, what you do is pound cold butter into a pliable slab, encase that slab completely in the croissant dough, and then repeatedly fold the dough onto itself as you would a letter and roll it out again. When the butter hits the oven, it creates steam, and all of those lovely layers you made separate: buttery, flaky heaven. (How cool is that?) But, of course, if your dough tears repeatedly like mine did, the butter escapes, and you lose those layers. But I was already a day in at that point, so what could I do? I held my breath and hoped (and fretted and fretted some more).

It all turned out all right. My croissants had buttery, flaky layers aplenty. We ate the first few in a matter of seconds, leaning over the kitchen sink to catch all the buttery shards. They weren't perfect, mind you--not quite airy enough, a little too chewy--but they were satisfying, a good first attempt, anyway.

These croissants definitely won't be the last I make. I want croissants that will transport me to Paris. So, if you have a favourite formula or a tip or two for me, I'm listening. (Though I still love Tartine Bread for its country loaf, its croissant directions weren't always clear--some of them even conflicted with what was going on in the accompanying photographs.) Tell me what I should be doing or what else I might be doing wrong. Really, I want to know!

P.S. I really have to thank my friend, Freerk, for responding to my frantic messages about my poor torn croissant dough so promptly and with such kindness. Thank you for the reassurances!

Uncommonly luxurious

I want to be upfront about one thing--making this cake right here, it can get a little messy. Flour can fly. Chocolate can splatter. Yolks can run. Beets can splash. Don your apron. Have a stack of kitchen towels at the ready. Trust me, you'll need them.

But let's back up a bit. Beets? In a cake? Yes, and they make for an uncommonly luxurious one, one that is velvety, dark, and yielding--every bit the chocolate cake of my dreams. And I'm saying this as a girl who almost never goes out of her way to bake with chocolate, who lets half a bar of Scharffen Berger languish in the pantry for nearly a year. It's not that I don't like chocolate. Often enough, it's just that I'm more captivated by other things (lemons, tomato jam, salted caramel). But this chocolate cake--I've fallen for it. After my friends left the other night, I snuck a second slice. I couldn't resist.

And the beets? Their presence is a little hard to describe. It's faint after baking, just a quiet harmony against that dark, resonant chocolate. They make a good pair (next, I'm thinking: dark-chocolate and beet ganache).

Unsurprisingly, maybe, this cake is Nigel Slater's. If you're not familiar with him, you should know that he's a man who cultivates and cooks his vegetables with real affection. He appreciates each on its own terms. He works to make them all sing. The chocolate cake is from his recent book, Tender. I received it about a month ago, and it has kept me spellbound. It is lovingly written, the sort of cookbook that you can curl up with at the end of the day and just read. It is page after page of gorgeous vegetables, inviting recipes. I've been cooking a lot of wintery one-pot dinners from it lately, but the recipe for this cake was the first that caught my eye. A beet-laden cake topped with crème fraîche and poppy seeds? Say no more.

Tender has made me want to take more care with my vegetables, to coax new things out of them, to lavish them with whatever they deserve. And what better way to start than with butter and dark chocolate? (Okay, that could get dangerous...)

An extremely moist chocolate-beet cake with crème fraîche and poppy seeds
Adapted from Nigel Slater's Tender

Note: Crème fraîche and poppy seeds. Slater says that these are not just a nod to beets' Eastern European heart but an important part of the cake. I agree. They play beautifully against the chocolate's deep notes. Take the trouble of getting both. Reserve them until you're just about to serve the cake. Otherwise, you'll end up with sodden cake and crème fraîche shot through with hot-pink streaks. Pan size. Slater uses an 8-inch spring-form and bakes the cake for forty minutes. I think most of us in North America have 9-inchers for the standard cheesecakes we've learned to bake from our mothers, so I've adjusted the baking times accordingly below. Make ahead. The cake keeps well for a couple of days on the counter wrapped in plastic. Somehow, it's even more moist on the second day.

8 oz / 250 g beets (about 4 small or 2 medium ones)
7 oz / 200 g good-quality bittersweet chocolate (70 percent cocoa solids)
4 tablespoons hot espresso
1 3/4 sticks / 200 g unsalted butter
1 cup + 2 tablespoons / 135 g all-purpose flour
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons good-quality cocoa powder
5 eggs, separated and at room temperature
1 scant cup / 190 g sugar
crème fraîche and poppy seeds, to serve

Lightly butter a nine-inch springform cake pan and line with a round of parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Cook the beets, whole and unpeeled, in boiling unsalted water. Depending on their size, they will be tender when pierced with the tip of a knife within thirty to forty minutes. Young ones may take slightly less. Drain them, let them cool under running water, then rub their skins off with your fingers, slice of their stem and root, and then process in a blender or food processor to a coarse purée.

Melt the chocolate, broken into small pieces, in a large bowl set over a pot of simmering water. Don't stir.

When the chocolate looks almost melted, pour the hot espresso over it and stir once. Cut the butter into small pieces and add to the melted chocolate. Push the butter down under the surface of the chocolate with a spoon (as best you can) and let soften.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and cocoa. Stir the yolks together.

Now, working quickly but gently, remove the bowl of chocolate from the heat and stir until the butter has melted into the chocolate. Let sit for a few minutes, then stir in the egg yolks. Do this quickly, mixing firmly and evenly so the eggs blend into the mixture. Fold in the beets. Whisk the egg whites until still, then fold in the sugar. Firmly but gently, fold the beaten egg whites and sugar into the chocolate mixture. A large metal spoon (or a large flexible spatula) is what you want here; work in a deep, figure-eight movement but take care not to overmix. Lastly, fold in the flour and cocoa.

Transfer quickly to the prepared cake pan and put in the oven, decreasing the heat immediately to 325 degrees F. Bake for thirty to thirty-five minutes. The rim of the cake will feel spongy, the inner part should still wobble a little when the pan is gently shaken.

Set the cake aside to cool (it will sink a tad in the centre), loosening it around the edges with a thin icing spatula after half an hour or so. It is not a good idea to remove the cake from its pan until it is completely cold. Serve in thick slices, with crème fraîche and poppy seeds.

Makes for 12 modest slices.

A little oven magic

Like I said a few days ago, my boyfriend and I thought that our dear friends--the ones who bore with us all summer while we painted and problem-solved and were often just too tired to be much fun--deserved a party.  So last weekend, finally, we flung open our doors and had them all over for a little food and drink. My boyfriend played bartender and had everyone sipping our lemony riff on this gin sparkler (the Meyer lemons are here at last!). I had the oven roaring and passed around various little nibbles just as soon as they were cool enough to pluck off the half-sheet. There were gougères, a pizza patate, spiced hummus, pear bread, carrot cake truffles, and, of course, these little pillows of buttery, flaky, cheesy goodness right here, pogácsa.

You should know by now that just about anything that puffs up golden and buttery in the oven is enough to get me excited. Butter and a hot oven work magic together. You can't get me away from the oven window if I have pastry going. I have to peer in every few minutes, cheer on the pastry: puff now, you can do it! But these pogácsa have had me especially excited lately, not just because of how amazing they are--though they are that--but because the recipe for them is a family recipe, and I'm very happy that my friend Agnes was willing to share it with me and with you too.

I first had these pogácsa at her place last winter when she graciously invited a crowd of us over to make up for a cancelled class. We piled into her living room, listened raptly, and thought hard about De Motu Animalium...until the smell of pastry in the oven, rich and tantalizing, drifted down from the kitchen. I, at least, found it hard to concentrate. It was a long twenty minutes before class was over and the pogácsa came out. And when they did, we snapped them up fast. Like I said, buttery, flaky, cheesy goodness. I had to ask for the recipe the next day.

Pogácsa, generally speaking, are a pastry of Hungarian provenance. They vary a lot in size, consistency, and flavouring--some are more biscuit-like, some are yeasted, some are made with pork cracklings. The pogácsa that Agnes' family makes, though, are more like bites of puff pastry than anything else--but with a tang and tenderness that remind me a little of a good buttermilk biscuit. The dough is simple, just equal parts flour, butter, and farmers' cheese, along with a little salt, repeatedly layered and rolled out. And with that taken care of, you just let things work their magic in the oven.

Pogácsa

Note: Farmers' cheese. It's a soft, fresh, tangy cheese often sold in plastic containers by the pound. I haven't had any trouble finding it in Illinois and New York, but Agnes says that she never managed to find any when she was living in California. Make ahead. You can certainly complete the turns a day or two before you bake off the pogácsa, so long as the dough is tightly wrapped in the refrigerator. I have a handful of cut squares that I tucked away in the freezer. I'll let you know soon how well they fare there. Update, 01-25-12. The pogácsa bake up beautifully from the freezer. Once you've cut up the dough, place the pieces on a parchment-lined half-sheet and chill in the freezer until firm, about half an hour. Remove them from the half-sheet and store in a zip-top bag. When ready to bake, follow the directions as written below.

225 g butter, just a little under room temperature
225 g farmers' cheese
225 g all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
10 g parmesan cheese, grated
1 egg, beaten

Cream the butter in a stand mixer, 1-2 minutes. Add the farmers' cheese and mix to incorporate. Then, add the flour and the salt, mixing just until incorporated.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and pat into a rough rectangle. If it's warm and tacky, wrap it loosely in plastic wrap and leave it the refrigerator to chill for at least 30 minutes. When the dough is ready, generously flour a clean work surface and a rolling pin. Roll the dough out into a rectangle, about 8 by 15 inches and a 1/4-inch thick, and then fold the dough into thirds as you would a letter. (The dough might be a little tacky and difficult to work with at first. It will improve with more rolling and folding.) Rotate the dough 90 degrees and repeat the rolling and folding. This completes a full turn. Return it to the refrigerator in plastic wrap to chill for an hour.

Complete 1-2 more full turns, leaving the dough to chill for another hour between turns. The more turns, the flakier the pastry will be.

Heat the oven to 400 degrees F. Roll out the dough into a rectangle, about 8 by 15 inches and a 1/4-inch thick. Cut bite-sized circles out of the dough, as would be traditional, or cut it into squares no less than 1 1/4-inches on each side. Place on two parchment-lined half sheets. Brush each with a little egg wash and dust with the parmesan. Bake in the centre of the oven until puffed and deeply golden, about 20 minutes. Serve immediately.

Makes about 60 bite-sized pogácsa.