Two weeks of camping has a way of simplifying one's needs. Or, at least, it should. I must admit that I was rather taken with a supply run at REI's flagship store in Seattle. Amazing what we can schlep along with us as essential gear, but gone are the days -- thank goodness! -- of wet wool, freeze-dried food and heavy tents. And remember the taste of water after sloshing around in one of those metal canteens?

I was more than happy to wander back into civilization as we made our way home. If you're planning a trip yourself to the Pacific Northwest, here are two places worth visiting. I'll post more once I get back to San Francisco, but for now, a taste of my travels....


TOP POT DOUGHNUTS



It's only natural that a city obsessive about its coffee would develop a gourmet doughnut chain. Top Pot Doughnut already has three shops scattered in Seattle, and a few more will likely pop up soon. Known for their sleek modern take on the donut stop, Top Pot is a place for lounging as much as dunking.



Their downtown location on 5th Avenue has a spacious mezzanine, outdoor seating and an onsite coffee roasting facility. You'll need to get there early in the day for a taste of their famous pumpkin doughnuts and their much-loved, fast-moving apple fritters.

Top Pot leans toward classic interpretations of cake and old-fashioned doughnuts. I ordered a dozen and managed to take two bites of every single one in the box. I loved the chocolate topped with raspberry icing and the old-fashioned frosted, but the good, ol' jelly doughnut sprinkled with powdered sugar won my heart. And yes, the apple fritter deserves all that fuss. Selling out of their "hand-forged" doughnuts isn't a hard thing to do when they taste as good as these.

Top Pot Doughnuts
2124 5th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98121
(206) 728-1966


VOODOO DOUGHNUT



Just down the skid from my favorite bookstore in the world, Powell's "City of Books" in Portland, is my new favorite doughnut shop. If you're in the neighborhood of Burnside and 3rd Avenue, then be sure to stop in at Voodoo Doughnut for the pure glee and fun of it. Where else could you get a massive 10-inch, chocolate-covered Cock & Balls? Or a Captain Crunch Doughnut? Or the incredibly impressive Maple Bacon Bar? The decor is cheeky-grunge, the hours are 24/7, and the revolving donut display will hypnotize you with its colorful promises.



If you have time, you can get married in their wedding chapel or, like me, just settle for a soothing voodoo doll pierced through the belly with a pretzel stick. I can now assure you that biting off the head of your ex-boss is even more satisfying than sticking it with straight pins.



A special shout-out to their collection of vegan doughnuts. Honestly, the only vegan baked good I've ever recommended. As someone who's always trying to figure out how to slip an egg yolk and/or butter into my recipes, this is not a frivolous compliment.



Voodoo Doughnut
22 SW 3rd Avenue
Portland, OR 97204
(503) 241-4704




I'll be back in San Francisco in a few days. It'd be great to hear from all of you about your own favorite local sources for dunkers and sinkers. Any suggestions?

Labels: doughnuts, portland, restaurants, seattle, thy tran, travel

So many fried doughs, so little time....

Labels: doughnuts, thy tran

I lined up plates in the order they appeared on the menu. This trick helps cooks plate food with speed and efficiency during a busy service.

Last week many of you participated in having a bit of fun with your food. You played The Plated Dessert Menu Game! Although it began as a lark, I must admit I might make this a regular thing if I get another pastry chef job in a restaurant. Many of you created a menu the likes of which I would not have thought of myself! Thank you! (I hope, of course, that it means you are adventurous eaters as well, supporting dedicated pastry chefs wherever you eat...)

Every day since the dessert tasting/job interview, my phone voicemail and email inbox has been full of one question, "So, how did it go?" But I don't know what to say. They sat, I plated, we ate, we talked, I left. There were 6 of them and one of me. The chef I've been discussing this position with for the last 4 months asked me to speak about what was on the table, another chef asked a lot of questions, a few comments were made and now it's all about the waiting game.



I did get to be really nerdy when it came to talking about the history of butterscotch, and why a graham cracker is called that, and why one need understand osmotic reciprocity when attempting to cook rhubarb. That was extremely fun and satisfying!



And it was amazing to see desserts that had been living in my head, as ideas or a dizzying array of free-floating components, come together on a plate, be set forth in front of humans, and eaten as if they were finished sentences, cohesive concrete visions. Like digital photography, plated dessert making can produce immediate results, an on-the-spot culmination of the conceptual and the actual.

Of course one hopes that one's desserts will also be delicious.

Without further ado, I give you The Menu presented as my dessert tasting on Monday May 14, 2007, 12 noon, at an undisclosed downtown San Francisco restaurant for the purpose of trying out for a pastry chef job:

Butterscotch Pot de creme with Pecan Shortbread
-- Extra component: chantilly.
Cherries & Cream, a Napoleon with Poetic License
-- Double vanilla shortbread, carnaroli rice pudding infused with California Bay Laurel, cherries reduced in cherry vinegar and pitted cherries au natural.
Ricotta Cheesecake with Crunchy Poached Rhubarb
-- Served with rhubarb-rose geranium sauce.
Warm Milk Chocolate with Various Chocolate Textures and Malted Ice Cream
-- El Rey milk chocolate veloute baked atop Devil's Food Cake lifted by cocoa meringue, warmed by hot fudge sauce and garnished with malt ice cream sitting on candied cacao nibs.
Hot Doughnuts with Blushing Sugar and An Egg Cream Chaser
-- Pate a choux doughnuts rolled in sugar made with mesquite flour, fleur de sel and ground cacao nibs served with vanilla bean egg cream.
Bright Lemon Baked Alaska, Brown Butter and Shuna's Famous Graham Crackers
-- Shuna's famous graham crackers sitting against lemon sherbet and brown butter ice cream hiding under torched Swiss meringue.


The cherry Napoleon.


Warm Milk Chocolate with Various Chocolate Textures and Malted Ice Cream.

I've written about a number of plated dessert tastings I've done in the past few years. Interested in knowing more? Click here.

Thank you, all of you, for playing last week's game, reading, imagining, and coming along for the ride!

Labels: chefs, culinary education, dessert, doughnuts, food businesses, games, pastries, restaurants, san francisco, shuna lydon

One of the first cookbooks in my collection is also one of my favorites: Polish Heritage Cookery. I came across this heavy tome at a quirky bookstore that once lived on Polk Street, before a fire ravaged the floors above and water rained down upon its randomly, precariously stacked books. The store's hours were irregular, and those who paid in cash received half off new cover prices. While it was the absolute last place a claustrophobe would want to spend time, Books and Co. was heaven for lovers of books about art, history and food. It epitomized the browsing experience at its most enjoyable.

Polish Heritage Cookery has the voice I miss in old recipes, where strong opinions and sometimes random advice were sprinkled in among the teaspoons and tablespoons. The authors, Robert and Maria Strybel, gathered an impressive 2,200 recipes covering a wide expanse from vanilla sugar to air-dried Pomeranian pork sausage. While illustrated with helpful drawings for the more complicated recipes, the book is free of photographs. Instead, the recipes unroll in story-like paragraphs and Polish names add poetry to every title. Old World classics and their multiple variations reveal Lithuanian, Italian, French, Jewish, Bohemian and Bavarian influences and trace a fascinating culinary history of Eastern European food.

Whey Soup with Rice (or the sweeter Whey Soup with Raisins), Roast Hare in Sour Cream Polonaise, Carp Baked with Apples, Carpathian Mountain Cake, Cherry Butter, and pages upon pages of pickle recipes include hints that only a grandmother might pass along. Adding skins from black bread helps "hurry-up" the curing of pickles. A glass of cold sour milk is recommended for the morning after "an overabundance of partying." At the end of a baked potato recipe, the authors note that adding a piece of kielbasa and a tomato would make a balanced meal, while on the next page, hearty Potato and Salt Pork Sausage is not recommended for "those with delicate stomachs."

The most stained pages in my own copy of the Strybels' cookbook span the pastry and preserve chapters. For the last two years, I've been hosting Doughnuts of the World brunches. A loose definition of doughnut allows me to experiment with angel wings, churros and beignets. Polish jam-filled paczki, however, would please even the most hard-core of the purists.

Below are excerpts from the Strybels' detailed description for making small paczki.


Homemade raspberry jam stands in for the rose-hip jelly, cherry preserves or powidla (thick plum butter) suggested in the original recipe.

"Although these luscious doughnuts are available year-round at Polish pastry shops, they reign supreme on Thusty Czwartek (Fat Tuesday), which begins the final fling of the Pre-Lenten karnawal of zapusty. More paczki are sold that day than at any other time of the year. You can try your hand at making your own by proceeding according to this recipe. Dissolve 2 cakes crushed yeast in 1 c. lukewarm milk, sift in 1 c. flour, add 1 T. sugar, mix, cover, and let stand in a warm place to rise. Beat 8 egg yolks with 2/3 c. powdered sugar and 2 T. vanilla sugar until fluffy. Sift 2 1/2 c. flour into bowl, add sponge, egg mixture, and 2 T. grain alcohol or 3 T. rum, and knead well until dough is smooth and glossy. Gradually add 1 stick melted lukewarm butter and continue kneading until dough no longer clings to hands and bowl and air blisters appear. Cover with cloth and let rise in warm place until doubled. Punch down dough and let rise again. Transfer dough to floured board, sprinkle top with flour, and roll out about 1/2 inch thick. With glass or biscuit cutter, cut into rounds. Arrange on floured board." [NB: I substituted 1 1/2 packets of dry yeast for the yeast cakes.]


The soft dough feels lovely. Still, some of my guests decide flat, American-style jelly doughnuts are easier to form and fry.

"Place a small spoonful of fruit filling (rose-hip preserves, cherry preserves, powidla, or other thick jam) off center on each round. Raise edges of dough and pinch together over filling, then roll between palms snowball fashion to form balls. Let rise in warm place until doubled."


The Strybel's write that Polish pastries like paczki "may be fried in vegetable shortening or oil instead of lard, but they won't be as tasty. The choice is yours."

"Heat 1 1/2-2 lbs. lard in deep pan so paczki can float freely during frying. It is hot enough when a small piece of dough dropped into the hot fat immediately floats up. Fry packzi under cover without crowding several min. until nicely browned on bottom, then turn over and fry uncovered on the other side another 3 min. or so. If fat begins to burn, add several slices of peeled raw potato which will both lower the temp. and absorb any burnt flavor. Transfer fried paczki to absorbent paper and set aside to cool, When cool, dust generously with powdered sugar, glaze or icing."

Labels: doughnuts, pastries, polish, recipes, thy tran

First of all, it's doughnut not donut. Let's give this pastry the respect it deserves. I suppose Mr. Doughnut is a bit much-- this treat is far too familiar to most of us for such formality. By familiar, I mean taken for granted. We've invited doughnuts into our homes often enough and spent endless hours with them in coffee shops, but what do we know about them? Have you ever bothered to ask one anything about itself? Of course not. They've infiltrated our children's schools, yet I doubt any County Administrator has ever bothered to do a background check on a single one.

Well, I have. Sort of.

You can say dank u to the Dutch. While you're at it, you might also want to thank them for cobbler and the koekje (cookie, if you couldn't figure that out on your own). The Dutch brought their recipe for olykoeks with them to the New World, where the name easily translated to "oily cakes"-- balls of sweet dough fried in pork fat. Sound like heaven on earth. Sweet dough and pork fat. I'm not kidding.

Somewhere in history, the oily cake hired an image consultant and changed its name to doughnut, most likely because they were, quite simply, little nuts of fried dough. Washington Irving mentions them as early as 1809. He seemed to know a lot about Dutch Americans.

There are a few tales, some of them tall, about how the doughnut got its hole. The best and most famous is that of one Captain Hanson Gregory whose mother sent him off to sea with-- what else?-- fried pastry. During a violent storm, Captain Gregory needed both hands free to man the wheel of his ship, so he impaled his doughnut upon the top spoke of the wheel, thereby creating the center hole.

Believe it. Or not.

A more likely explanation is that the center of the pastries had been notoriously hard to cook thoroughly. They usually ended up a doughy, oily goo. By punching a hole in the center, more surface area is created, therefore allowing for faster, more even cooking. But if you prefer to believe the first explanation, by all means do.

For a really good read about doughnuts, please visit Mr. Breakfast. I think he might be my new hero.

The Dutch, and through them, Americans, are not the only people on earth in love with puffy fried dough. The Argentines have their facturas, the Austrians love a good krapfen (giggle, it's okay), the Chinese go for youtiao (though it is not sweet), and the French, of course, are dating the beignet.

Wherever in the world you may eat them, eat them warm and fresh. A doughnut made yesterday dunked into this morning's coffee might be fine, but it really cannot compare to a doughnut still warm from the fryer. I almost typed friar, which might say a lot about me.

The last time I made doughnuts was in June of 2001. I must have been in love or something. I was going to my boyfriend's cousin's annual oyster party on Limantour Beach. I wanted to make a favorable impression on them and, for some reason, doughnuts seemed the perfect thing to make. Perhaps I had hoped that, had the wind kicked up a bit too much, no one would notice the sand that would stick to the pastries, camouflaged as they would be by their coating of granulated sugar. My boyfriend thought I was crazy to go to so much trouble. Maybe I was, but everybody still remembers the doughnuts.

Try making a batch for yourself. They're really easy. I mean it. You'll need a good thermometer though. The temperature of the oil is key.


Buttermilk Doughnuts



What I like most about this recipe, which has been borrowed from Epicurious.com, but altered slightly, is that the sweetness is rather subtle. I'm just not a super-sweet fan. I tend to regard these doughnuts as, well, cakes, though hopefully not oily ones. I like these served up on a plate with a bit of fruit sauce. Blueberry compote works really, really well. It's sort of like a lazy man's version of a jelly doughnut. Or, looked at in a more positive way, a healthy (or healthier) man's version.

Servings: Makes about 10

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/4 cups sugar
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons solid vegetable shortening, room temperature
3/4 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/4 tablespoon almond extract
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt

Vegetable oil (for frying)

Powdered sugar

Preparation:

1. Place 1 1/2 cups flour and 1 1/4 cups sugar in large bowl.
2. Add buttermilk and next 7 ingredients.
3. Using electric mixer, beat mixture until just smooth.
4. Beat in remaining 1 cup flour.
5. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour and up to 6 hours.

6. Turn dough out onto floured work surface; roll to 1/2-inch thickness.
7. Using 3-inch round cookie cutter, cut dough into rounds.
8. Using 1-inch round cookie cutter, cut hole from center of each round, making doughnuts.
9. Gather scraps and reroll dough, cutting additional doughnuts until dough is used up.

10. Pour oil into heavy large pot to depth of 5 inches. Heat oil to 350 degrees Farenheit.
11. Add 3 doughnuts at a time to oil and fry until golden, turning once, about 6 minutes total.
12. Using slotted spoon, transfer to paper-towel-lined rack to drain. Repeat with remaining doughnuts. Cool.
13. Sift powdered sugar thickly over doughnuts.

Labels: doughnuts, michael procopio, recipes