Dorie’s Cookies Parmesan Galettes: Ooh La La

Here’s something delightfully intriguing: the Dorie’s Cookies cookbook has a chapter devoted to savoury cookies. I’m not used to seeing non-sweet things in my baking cookbooks, but there are plenty of interesting (and weird: I’m looking at you, hot-and-spicy togarashi meringues and honey-BLUE CHEESE madeleines) recipes here.

(I am never going to make those madeleines. I hate blue cheese.)

A little while ago, I was supposed to head to a friend’s house for a pre-dinner birthday gathering. I thought the Parmesan Galettes sounded perfect for an appetizer, so I decided to try my hand at my first savoury cookie.

(I ended up having to turn the car around and skip the party because the roads were horrible – so I had these all to myself.) (Note: I wrote this post back in February when snow was still a thing…)

The ingredient list is short and sweet: all-purpose flour, butter, Parmesan cheese, and a bit of sea salt. If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you to buy the kind of Parm that you have to grate yourself. But just in case… there you go.

This recipe doesn’t require a mixer; it uses the food processor to mix the butter, flour, and Parmesan. Here’s how the dough is described: “process in long bursts until you have a moist curds-and-clumps dough”. Although that sounds incredibly vague and non-scientific, somehow, I knew exactly what Dorie meant when the time came.

I’m pretty sure this is what moist curds and clumps looks like?!

It’s super easy to smush the dough into a log. I was surprised at how teeny tiny the log was, but the recipe yielded 15 galettes, as the book said it would. Before slicing, you pop the log into the fridge for a couple of hours (or the freezer for just one hour, if you’re of the opinion that time is money).

After the dough has chilled, it’s time to slice and dice. The sidebar of the recipe says that these galettes pair nicely with a variety of herbs and spices, so I experimented (conservatively) by grinding a bit of fancy pepper over each galette. (If you’re wondering what fancy pepper is, it comes from France and includes tasting notes – thanks Mom and Dad!!!)

Note: If you look closely, you can see that some of my galettes have a tiny hole in the middle. This is because I didn’t roll my log quite tightly enough. Lessons learned!

The cookbook says that you can either bake the sliced galettes in a muffin tin (for a perfect circular shape and satisfying edges) or free-standing on a cookie sheet.

I baked 12 in the muffin tin and the rest on a baking sheet, and while the muffin ones looked prettier, I found they took a little longer to bake than the designated 15 to 17 minutes. They were more like 20 minutes.

Here’s the verdict on the galettes:

I LOVED them. They reminded me of dinner parties when I was younger. I feel like my mom used to serve cheese straws or something that were just like this. I loved the slightly crumbly texture and I thought they tasted just the right amount of Parmesan. I like Parmesan, but usually as a side cheese, not as a cheese on its own. Like, I wouldn’t typically eat Parmesan alone on crackers. These galettes were fantastic and felt fancy to me.

Cedric did not like them. I did not see this coming from a mile away – in our relationship, I am the one who favours sweets and he likes all things savoury (though he’s never met a chocolate chip cookie he didn’t like). Not only that, but he LOVES cheese – including Parmesan. He will gladly slice Parmesan and put it on a panini (which is exactly what he did with the leftover Parmesan from this recipe). But for whatever reason, this recipe didn’t do it for him.

Oh well. More for me!

Bread Illustrated’s Quick Cheese Bread

In the summer, I’m all about great big salads with fresh ingredients straight from the Farmer’s Market. But this time of year, my theme in the kitchen is: bring on the soup.

Soup has been on the menu a lot as of late. Turkey soup, sweet potato curry soup, broccoli soup, cauliflower arugula soup… it’s all delicious, but sometimes, you need to spice it up a little.

I usually serve our soups with a crusty bread, a grilled cheese, or maybe a salad. On the broccoli soup night, I wanted something a little more exciting than regular sourdough – but I didn’t have time to make a very labour intensive bread. I found the perfect recipe in my Bread Illustrated cookbook: Quick Cheese Bread.

This bread only takes an hour and a half to make – and half of that time is spent in the oven. And here’s the kicker – it doesn’t even require the use of the stand mixer. This bread is EASY PEASY.

The first step in making this bread calls for sprinkling a layer of grated Parmesan on the bottom of the loaf pan. You already know this bread is going to be delicious.

Then you whisk flour, baking powder (baking powder! in bread!), salt, pepper, and cayenne in a bowl. By hand. The old school way. You stir in a cup of cheddar chunks (I just grated my cheddar), then you add the wet ingredients (consisting of milk, sour cream, melted butter, and an egg).

You fold the whole thing together very briefly and very gently – and that’s it! The whole thing gets plunked into the cheese coated pan, then you add another layer of parm on top of the loaf and bake.

Is it quick? YES. Is it easy? YES. Is it cheesy? YES.

Cedric could not believe his luck when he discovered that this bread basically included a crust of cheese. His favourite thing ever is when the cheese spills out of a grilled cheese and becomes a hard cheesy crispy thing, so this bread was right up his alley. I liked it, too – though neither of us loved it quite as much as the Cheddar Pepper Bread.

Here’s the thing: it had a distinct taste was oddly familiar.

Eventually, I figured out what it reminded me of: the cheesy biscuits from Red Lobsters. My Papa loved Red Lobsters and we went pretty frequently when I was little, and I lived for the cheese biscuits. I’ve actually tried to replicate the recipe a few times in the past, but nothing has turned out like I hoped. This quick cheese bread had the right crumbly consistency, so I decided to do a little recipe doctoring.

I remade the recipe with a few modifications:

1. I cut Cedric’s favourite part, the Parmesan crust. I had to stay true to the Red Lobster biscuit style – although I did sprinkle a little parm on a few of my biscuits just to see if it would be good. (It was – but somewhat undetectable.)
2. I added 2 teaspoons of garlic powder and a big minced clove of garlic.

I put grated Parmesan on the ones on the right. You know, as evidenced by the Parmesan shards.

I scooped the batter with an ice cream scoop onto my silicon Silpat, then I baked for 15 minutes, rotated, and gave it another 15 minutes. I wanted them a liiiiittle more golden, so I turned off the oven and left them in for a bonus 5 minutes.

They are delicious, especially still warm out of the oven. However, I find they actually taste more Red Lobstery the longer they sit out. They aren’t the perfect reproduction, but they’re really, really good.

That picture makes my stomach rumble.

So there you have it, folks: a bread that is actually better in biscuit form.

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Pita Bread! Bread Sticks! And a Very Bready Sneak Peek…

Let’s talk bread.

I can’t remember if I already posted this, but I finally bit the bullet and ordered my very own copy of Bread Illustrated by America’s Test Kitchen. I had an Amazon credit and I couldn’t think of a better way to spend it. I’m sure the Squamish Public Library will be happy to see its copy returned (I think I’ve had it for like, 8 weeks).

This week, I have two breads to discuss… and a third AWESOME bread, with its very own post, will follow soon.

Bread #1: Pita

Of all the breads I have made thus far, the most exciting has been the pita. It is a simple recipe (consisting only of bread flour, yeast, salt, water, olive oil, and a little sugar) and it doesn’t take much time to make (between 2 and 3 hours – which isn’t a lot compared to many of the other breads I’ve made). I guess pita just always seemed to me like something you have to buy, so making it felt really exciting. (I acknowledge that this may not be as exciting to other people as it is to me.)

I halved the recipe, which originally yielded 8 pitas. Two of my pitas came out PERFECTLY, while the other two were a little overdone. Here’s why: when it comes to actually baking the pita, the instructions are as follows: “… bake until single air pocket is just beginning to form, about 1 minute [then you flip them and bake the other side]”. When I baked my pitas, a few small air bubbles would form at various points. Eventually, they would puff up and creep forward until they joined, forming one large bubble. (Side note: this was SO COOL to watch). With two of the pitas, I flipped them around the 1 minute mark, where only small bubbles had formed. For the other two, I flipped them when the one large bubble had formed, which actually happened closer to the 2 minute mark. The confusion stemmed from the fact that the two cues – the 1 minute timing and the single large bubble – did not occur simultaneously. The two that turned out best were the ones I flipped at the 1 minute mark. Waiting until the large bubble formed resulted in overdone pitas.

I served our pitas with a Buddha bowl type of dinner. DELICIOUS.

I made Cedric puff open the pita to really feature its pocketiness.

Bread #2: Parmesan Breadsticks

Next bread: parmesan breadsticks. There was nothing wrong with these, but they weren’t quite as good as restaurant breadsticks. The recipe called for 1.5 cups of parmesan, which is plenty, but I still would have liked an even cheesier flavour.

They were DEFINITELY better than grocery store breadsticks, however. The grocery store ones taste like they were made with Kraft singles – yuck.

(the left photo is the before baking picture)

My fatal flaw with the breadsticks was that I tried to keep them warm until the rest of the dinner was ready, but I think they kept cooking a bit so they were ever so slightly dry. They were still delicious. I halved this recipe, too (which originally makes 18 breadsticks).

Now, the bread that has really taken centre stage in my bread making life is a certain bread that took THREE WEEKS to materialize. Stay tuned for a Very Special Post about my new pride and joy … SOURDOUGH BREAD!