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Upma-The Art of Spice
There’s okra and there’s okra. I haven’t done a formal survey, but it’s a fair bet a lot of people don’t like the stuff. It’s cool-looking-a green, faceted pod-but tough to cook. You can’t eat it raw, and, heated, it releases a strange sticky white gel. Sound gross? Not at all. The entire thing-nutty, crunchy seeds and toothsome skin-is edible and even hearty, a rare quality in a green vegetable.
That is, if you cook it right, i.e. nicely browned and al dente. If you screw it up you get that plateful of nasty vegetal ooze, which scares, off cook and diner alike.
To my mind, Indian cooks have truly mastered okra. They slice it in small chunks and give it a quick toss in a hot pan with plenty of spices. Not only does the vegetable retain its integrity, but the spice heightens the flavor. It’s what I love about Indian cooking: respect for the ingredient paired with respect for the spice.
Tamarind, a few blocks from us, is a fantastic Indian place. A giant, airy two-level loft, it attracts a sharp-dressed crowd. A far cry from the neighborhood Indian place of my childhood, with its oppressive red velvet walls, neon-red tandoori chicken, and soul-deadening sitar music, Tamarind is an Indian restaurant for the modern era.
The spice pantry at Tamarind must be cavernous, and most of it seems to go into the okra, a mixture of okra, ginger, and a wild handful of ground and whole spice. Whole spice is among the best elements of this cooking: the seeds add crunch and a strong but not overwhelming flavor, which is muted by hot oil.
Upma, introduced to me years ago, is the quintessential whole-spice Indian dish. Like the best quick curries-okra, eggplant, or other-it’s a mix of a simple ingredient and complex spice. Although fortified with potatoes and tomatoes, the main ingredient couldn’t be more basic-cream of wheat-making upma essentially a dish as suited to breakfast as it is lunch or dinner.
Lending a great crunch to the otherwise soupy cream of wheat, the whole seeds make upma a great starting point for anyone interested in cooking Indian food. It’s like sinking into a bubble bath: the warm water is great, but nothing without the bubbles.
Upma
Serves 4
¼ cup olive oil (or canola)
3 tablespoons toor dal (or any small-sized dal, i.e. not chana)
2 tablespoons cumin seed
2 tablespoons mustard seeds (black, preferably)
2 yukon gold or red bliss potatoes, peeled in 1-inch chunks
3 plum tomatoes in chunks
1 inch ginger, peeled and minced
1 cup cream of wheat
salt
3-4 small red chiles, chopped thinly, with seeds (if you can deal with the heat)
- Add the oil and spices to a medium pot over medium heat. When the mustard seeds pop and the dal starts to color (about 30-40 seconds), add the ginger, potatoes, and tomatoes.
- Cook a few minutes, stirring, and season with salt. Not too heavily-this is just the first seasoning-you don’t want the final product to be too salty. Adjust at the end.
- (This is where we go off recipe a bit.) Add enough water as you want-it’ll determine how much upma you want. For this amount of spice and other ingredients, I add quite a bit-enough to cover the veg by probably 2 inches.
- Raise the heat a bit and bring to boil. Stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, add the cream of wheat in a thin, slow stream. You don’t want lumps.
- Reduce to low heat and cook, stirring, until the upma thickens. You don’t want cement, rather, a smooth, thin porridge. Season again with plenty of salt. If you’re being fancy, plate it and garnish with chiles. Otherwise, just stir em in. Serve hot. (But it’s great cold the next day.)
Makin’ Bacon
I smoked my first bacon this weekend. It was at my parents’ place outside the city.
Two Wednesdays ago I bought a giant slab of pork belly, smothered it in salt, sugar, and pink salt, and let it sit in a few ziplock bags. We drove up there, me in the passenger seat clutching my pork like an old lady grips her purse on the subway.
Already it was early afternoon, and I needed to get this thing on the fire. First to Wal-Mart for the chips then shoot down the curving country roads to the house.
A partially used weekend house isn’t like other homes you pass by on suburban roads. No one’s standing in the kitchen stirring tomato sauce dodging a pack of little kids. There’s no “mud room”: I learned what that was about a month ago. The garage isn’t full of toys and bikes. Life inside the weekend place doesn’t evolve. Neither the contents nor their placement have changed in decades. Books, magazines, photographs, light switches, television: everything is decades old, but tidy as the day it came.
Having hacked away at the rust-coated grill grates and shoveled out half a foot of ash, I started the pork and eased into the pool with our little kid. He loves to swim but started screaming inconsolably when we uncovered a frog caught in the skimmer.
Like the rest of us, he’s pure city, through and through.
Meanwhile, the bacon came out great: salty and smoky, dark and a tad sugary from the molasses.
(Note #1: If you don’t have a butcher, get the supermarket guy to remove the bones from a slab of spare ribs. However, supermarket spare ribs are skinned, so your bacon will lack that critical smoked pork skin. The first step, namely, drying it over a very gentle heat, is absolutely not my invention. I copied it from bbq expert on the web, who claims pork and other meats have to be fully dried before they can “accept” smoke. I assume he’s right, but I don’t even own a grill. I did rub the pork with a touch of nitrites, probably not necessary, as I’ve seen a bunch of recipes which don’t use them. I’m going to slice it up and freeze in batches.)
(Note #2: As amateurs, we wanted to confirm meat safety, hence the final low-oven roasting-it’s easier than dealing with more coals. I recommend this stage, but who knows. All I know is we made a mean bacon.)
Makin’ Bacon
2 ½ pounds pork belly, skin-on
½ cup kosher salt
¼ cup sugar
½ cup molasses
pinch nitrites (pink salt-optional)
- Mix the spices in a bowl. Spread half on the bottom of a baking sheet and lay the belly on top. Spread the rest over the belly. Massage the cure all over the belly. It should really be worked into the meat. Cover and refrigerate. We sliced it in half so it fit in ziplock bags, which work well.
- Cure the belly for about a week, flipping it every day. Ziplock bags make this easier.
- When ready to smoke, soak several handfuls of wood chips (I used hickory) in a pan of water for 1 hour then drain. Meanwhile, remove the belly and rinse under running cold water. Dry well.
- Heat about 12 coals and use a grill rake or some other utensil to divide the coals to opposite sides, leaving the center bare.
- Lay the belly over the center of the grate skin up. Close the grill and roast for ½ hour. Make sure the temperature doesn’t exceed 150. If so, remove a few coals.
- After the ½ hour, add the same number of coals to the fire and divide a small handful of chips over each mound of coals, close and keep the temp at 150 or so. Do this every ½ hour. We did it for 2 ½ hours.
(See note #2 for this step.) Preheat oven to 150, lay the pork on a rack over a sheet pan and roast 2 hours. Remove, rest, slice, freeze, or whatever you like. We immediately roasted delicious, crispy lardons
Summer brunch-preserved cherries
A restaurant menu is like an anagram. Ingredients are shuffled, puzzle-fashion, from dish to dish, facilitating smooth and quick service. It’s often said the test of a chef is if he can he make a perfect omelet. Equally important, he should be a good Scrabble player.
This is especially necessary when it comes to pricey perishables. Those parsnips, tossed in olive oil, salted, and roasted to a rooty candy? Glance over at the next table; there they are, pureed with cream and butter, peeking out from underneath a braised short rib.
Brunch is the ultimate mix and match meal. Brunch dishes tend to be fatty, sweet, salty, and confined to homey tastes. It’s a time to splurge rather than strain the mind choosing between cod and calf’s liver or lamb curry and four types of dal. Hence the heavy use of a a limited number of ingredients: eggs, bread, etc.
Still, there’s brunch and there’s brunch, and the Barbuto version is exceptional: frittatas, strawberry and ricotta filled crepes, fontina and pancetta panino, spaghetti carbonara, poached eggs on crusty bread with a small salad.
Untangle the menu, you’ll discover the same 5 or 6 items woven throughout. The same wonderful caramelized onions melted into the fontina on my panino show up in the spinach frittata. The same fontina oozed like a warm blanket over the charred brick oven pizza. Not to mention the crusty bread and arugula salad, which lands on every table and plate in one form or another.
Behind the scenes lies a truly utilitarian universe. Celery trimmings, onion peels, meat and fish scraps: all chucked into a vessel for stock, sauce, flavored oils, preserves, and so on.
It’s possible to construct a similar, miniature, larder at home: condiments and sauces which cut down on food cost and complement a variety of foods.
Only three people occupy our apartment, one of whom is 3 ½ and likes to dress up as Buzz Lightyear, leaving two normal (sort of) inhabitants. Pots of relishes, pickles, preserved lemons, oil-packed vegetables, multiple varieties of salt, etc. would wither and die a sad, moldy death.
One or two such items, however, prove nearly as useful as the caramelized onions in Barbuto’s brunch kitchen. Especially if seasonal, as they pair with other timely items. Right now, cherries are everywhere; preserved, they can be spooned into a small bowl and served with cheese. Or heated and arranged around slices of roasted lamb. The liquid alone can be reduced to a glaze, brushed on grilled meats for a last minute sear. Or dunk those meats and poultry into the liquid and marinate a few hours.
Toss a few cherries with vinegar and stick them in a jar. Follow your tastebuds and play around with combinations, which is a lot easier than mastering Scrabble.
Preserved Cherries
Makes 1 quart
½ cup sugar
1 cup balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
2 sprigs thyme
1 pound cherres, pitted and halved
- In a small saucepan combine all ingredients except cherries and bring to simmer, stirring to dissolve sugar.
- Pour liquid over the bowl of cherries. Let cool, pour into a container, cover and refrigerate for up to 2 weeks.
Upma – Are You A Homecook?
I have a problem with the term “home cook”. Does it refer to someone who cooks at home? If so, I suppose my dad qualifies: he’s an expert at peeling carrots as well as burning bagels. Granted, he just eats said carrot raw. I mean, that thing isn’t a recipe ingredient. Also, too impatient to wait for the toaster, he balances a frozen bagel over the stove, charring the outside just enough to soften. He just wants something…anything to eat while he reads the paper.
In colonial times, people cooked out of necessity. There wasn’t anyone else around to make food for them. More important, they were close to the food source: pigs, fish, fruits and vegetables…orchards. Frankly, though, I doubt they savored braving the freezing dawn air to milk the cows, purify the maple syrup, churn the butter, press the apples into cider, or whatever else you do on a farm. If someone opened a takeout Chinese place down the cobbled road, there’d be a run on dumplings.
So were the settlers home cooks, or did they cook out of necessity? In the last century, we’ve been moving away from cooking. Food is prepackaged, pre-frozen, pre-fried, pre-dried, pre-sliced, pre-diced, pre-jarred, pre-canned, pre-rolled, pre-squeezed, pre-shredded, and the price is right.
Yet, the thought process is warped. A whole chicken with some side will feed a family for a reasonable cost and minimal labor. Though we’re obsessed with people who cook on tv, studies have shown that we cook less than ever.
So where are the home cooks? And I’m not talking about hipsters in Brooklyn who butcher pigs on their rooftops. I mean the family that cooks together every night, that enjoys putting together a bunch of ingredients and laying out a simple meal-people for whom it’s in their DNA. If you choose to make spaghetti with meat sauce from scratch a few times a week, you’re a home cook.
First generation immigrants have us all beat. They cook out of necessity, but also because they’re steeped in the tradition of the home country, where you can’t hop to Walmart, where families live together, and every grandmother plucks recipes from a copious mental cookbook.
I had an acquaintance whose parents were South Indian. The house was fragrant with toasted spices, curry leaves, and baking naan bread. Lunch was homemade chapatis (round flatbreads) with a simple cauliflower curry and mango pickle: scoop up the curry with the bread, add a little pickle. Dinner was whipped up in perhaps a half hour: baby eggplants stuffed with a curry mixtures, sambal (a delicate tomato chutney), yogurt rice (basmati rice with cashews, lemon and yogurt), a variety of dals (dried legumes stewed with ginger and spices).
Breakfast was dosai (a thin, crispy, torpedo-shaped pancake rolled around a mild potato, cabbage, or other curry. But most of the time for breakfast they ate upma. Upma is essentially cream of wheat, but like all Indian food, it’s layered with complex flavors. You fry cumin, mustard seeds, ginger, onions and tomatoes, add water, add potatoes, simmer, stir in the cream of wheat and season well with salt.
Make upma. For breakfast, lunch, dinner. It’s real home cooking.
Upma
(Note: this is an approximate recipe, jotted down on a stained piece of notebook paper, lost, and semi-recovered from memory. It’ll work out but it’s mainly by eye so pay attention. Read the recipe for moral guidance.)
Serves 4-6
2 tablespoons canola oil
2 tablespoons urad dal
2 tablespoons black mustard seeds
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
1 ½ inch piece of ginger minced
1 medium onion, diced
3 small tomatoes, diced
½ russet potato, diced
Cream of Wheat (see recipe)
A few chopped green chilies
Salt
- In a medium pot over medium heat, add the oil and spices. When the mustard seeds pop, add the ginger, stir until fragrant, then add the onion and tomato. Stir well.
- Add enough water to cover. The amount of water you add determines the amount of upma, but don’t add too much, as the upma will lose flavor. Add the potatoes and simmer until cooked through.
- When the potatoes are done, slowly whisk in the cream of wheat. You’ll probably need less than one cup. You want it to be sort of soupy, not too thick. Season with plenty of salt and serve hot.
Hard-Boiled Eggs – Perfection!
I read something interesting in the Times the other day. And it wasn’t that the Knicks got killed again. Alinea, the restaurant in Chicago famous for its elaborate presentation, molecular wizardry, and an $800, 21 course meal for two, received three Michelin stars.
It’s one of those places where the chefs use tweezers to arrange your food on the plate: a tiny square of sous vide pineapple here, a sprig of candied bay leaf there, adjacent to a curling slice of compressed pheasant.
At Alinea, said pheasant is served alongside a pile of burning leaves, meant to conjure the aromas and sensations of fall. I don’t know what they do about the guy at the next table eating scallops: maybe a waiter drizzles seawater over his head. But I don’t think that’s on the menu…yet.
To me this seems a lot of nonsense, a misguided striving for a warped concept of perfection.
To read Thomas Keller’s cookbooks (the Alinea chef is a protégé) is to enter the mind of a chef obsessed with perfection. The photographs are inhumanly beautiful. A recipe for “Chestnut-stuffed Four Story Hills Farm Chicken with Celery and Honey-Poached Cranberries” accompanies a brilliant photo: two shellacked cherries perch on a white plate, dotted with three glistening cranberries, two celery slices, and two off-center cuts of meat each studded with a chestnut. Three tiny microgreens lean langorously about the arrangement. Each product on the plate is, supposedly cooked as nature intended, and Keller is there to guide us.
I’m sure Keller serves the most delicious carrots you’ll ever eat. In fact, I’m somewhat leery of eating his carrots for fear all others will pale and I’ll have to go to Per Se for carrots. However, this mindset creates an unfortunate divide between diner and kitchen. Back there in the kitchen lab, they preen with their tweezers and carrots, but in the dining room I’m ready to eat my chair.
There is an arrogance going on here: from the carrots to the heritage farm, the chefs assume an achieved perfection. But the diner may have a different notion of perfection. I’ve never heard of Four-Story Hills Farm, and I’m sure they breed a nice bird, but please refrain from appending their name to the dish. Once, we ate at a restaurant which served “This Morning’s Egg…” Thank God it was this morning’s: anyone who knows me knows I never eat yesterday’s egg.
To me, Chirping Chicken makes the absolute perfect bird. Cooks grill massive quantities of split chickens to a perfect char, fling them to cutting boards, whack into four pieces, and box them up with a few halves of warm soft pita, which eventually absorb the chicken juices. The meat is perfectly moist, but the key is the seasoning, which I’ve theorized results from the grill grates which are full of charred chicken flavor.
So, I do believe in perfection, or rather, that we all have our own idea of what is perfect. Perfect short ribs should be melting and accompanied by a richly flavored sauce, not oddly shaped cubes of meat tweezed onto a plate by a guy in a lab coat.
The exception is eggs. Eggs are always described as “unforgiving”. They’re so sensitive that an extra thirty seconds of heat can ruin them. And, of course, you can’t peek to see what’s going on in there. A hard-boiled egg yolk should be bright yellow and free of that unappealing sulphurous over-cooked egg odor. Once you’ve mastered them, you can create unbeatable deviled eggs or egg salad. Or slice them into a variety of salads and sandwiches.
I don’t care what farm produced your egg, and please don’t come near it with a pair of tweezers. It’s just an egg, and this is the way to make them delicious.
Hard-Boiled Eggs
Makes 4
4 eggs
salt and pepper
- Fill a medium saucepan with plenty of water, bring to a boil. Place the eggs on a slotted spoon or ladle, and gently add to the boiling water, being careful they don’t fall and crack on the bottom of the pot. Set a timer for 13 minutes.
- Drain, rinse or soak in cold water until just cool enough to handle. Peel, slice in half lengthways. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve warm.
Sandwich Wednesday – Lox & Bagels – Early Food Memories
Sometimes I wish my dad had been a mobster: they have such fantastic Sunday suppers! A long, loud table and boatloads of pasta, sausage, roasts eaten amidst a blinding fog of garlic. Alas, Sunday on the upper east side was a bit different: the only gathering going on was around the dog-eared stack of takeout menus pulled reflexively from a shelf above the kitchen phone.
I do, however, have two profound food memories, both from the annual Christmas visit to our grandparents in Atlantic City. My parents would send my brother and me there by bus primarily, I now assume and appreciate, to get rid of us. But I will always treasure those times.
If you feel a little blue, I wouldn’t recommend a trip to Atlantic City, which is an unbelievably dismal place, especially in the heart of winter. The town has failed on virtually every level of the civics chart. In the late seventies, casinos invaded, tsunami-like, rapidly demolishing the old boardwalk hotels and shops. A neon skyline arose, with names like Trump, Resorts, and Tropicana. The highways and turnpikes were studded quickly with signs for high payout slots and Robert Goulet shows. Casino buses rolled in and out, carrying gamblers from surrounding states.
Long story short, it was a colossal failure. Instead of providing jobs, the casinos, facilitated by a series of corrupt officials, sucked the already limp life and commerce from the rest of the town, leaving in their wake a moonscape of urban carnage.
I sometimes drive there to pick up a few of the glorious torpedo-sized subs from White House Subs. I park as close as possible, make a run for it, like a marine dodging landmines, and sprint back clutching my subs as an old lady guards her purse.
You’d think it would be somewhat criminal to dump off your young children at Port Authority onto a bus headed straight for this nightmare, but the city wasn’t quite so bad then, and we were spoiled for a week by a fine set of grandparents. Actually, my grandfather was great, his wife was unpleasant, but we avoided her as much as possible.
They’d pick us up at the bus terminal, drive us to their apartment, where we bolted for the kitchen and flung open the cabinets over the fridge, revealing a small aisle of sugary cereals waiting to be devoured. For kids whose parents practice a monastic culinary self-denial (tasti-d-lite good, ice cream bad; the outside of bagels good, the inside of bagels bad; salt bad, sugar bad, fat bad, fat people worse), this was mecca. My grandparents beamed as we gorged ourselves on sweet, freakishly colored cereals. We must have been bouncing off the walls, which, I now realize, is a good reason to limit your kids’ intake of the stuff.
So a bowl of Sugar Smacks is my earliest and fondest food memory: an introduction to how food can lift you up and bring you down (All-Bran). But there was a greater sensation to come.
To Jewish grandparents, lox and bagels is an essential food group, and during that Christmas week, we consumed plenty of lox and bagels. At the end of the day, they would lay out a plate of sliced tomato, sweet onions, cream cheese, and lox. We piled them high between an onion bagel and ate in a silence broken only by my grandfather, who occasionally took deep swallows from his Michelob. Dinner was concluded with a square slice of Entenmann’s crumb cake, a sweet end to a perfect meal.
Because the lox and bagel sandwich is so simple, it requires first-rate ingredients i.e. ungreasy lox, a fresh bagel, Vidalia onion, a good tomato, and cream cheese which isn’t gummy. Lucky for us, Russ & Daughters is a short walk, and everything there is perfect: gravlax, whitefish, chopped liver, herring, a variety of cured salmon, pickles, cream cheese, caviar cream cheese, bagels, flagels, and so on.
For a recent family baby shower, we spread the table with a sackful of Russ & Daughters stuff.
The next evening, I was home alone. Our son was sleeping. I stood over the cutting board, opened an onion bagel, spread it with scallion cream cheese, sprinkled it liberally with thinly sliced sweet onion, draped over the remaining salmon, finished with tomato and the other half bagel. I sat down at the counter and ate in silence, washing it down with my beer.
Lox and Bagels
Makes 4
4 bagels (I like onion, but poppy seed or plain are perfectly fine)
3/4 pound good cream cheese (I like scallion)
1 vidalia onion, sliced thinly
1 large beefsteak tomato, sliced thinly
¾ pound fantastic lox, sliced thinly
- Open bagel. Spread one half liberally with cream cheese. Top with, in order, a layer of onion, lox, and tomato. Close with the other half bagel. Eat.
Cinnamon Buns – Baking With Our Almost 3 Year Old
At what age do we start uniting concepts? Or, since we tend to frame everything in school-terms, is it 5th grade, 6th, 7th?
And what does that even mean, to link notions? One of our favorite This American Life episodes, “Kid Logic”, explores how kids think. Little kids, watching a plane fly away, believe that it becomes physically smaller. The producers visited a summer camp, where they recorded pre-teens convinced, essentially, of the bogeyman. I recall my camp days, around the fire, shivering in fear as the counselors told of homicidal prison escapees lurking in the dark woods.
As we age, we comprehend empirical evidence: one thing leads to another (or doesn’t), depending on our experience. Until I had my own kid I never thought about any of this, but it’s sort of interesting to see his small mind developing. Context: Henry is almost three and, as far as I know, normal, despite having a superhuman motor. Sometimes I think he could talk and run for days without dropping of exhaustion.
Henry’s mind is a memory collage. He can’t follow a narrative film (yesterday it was Elf), but he’ll retain certain pleasing or arresting highlights. And so, for the past week, he’s been saying “remember Santa push the button and the sled go down and…” To no avail, I try to remind him of the surrounding story. As far as he’s concerned, the film is worthless save for this moment. The same goes for everything else in his young life: “Remember she had three lollipops…remember the banana shake place…remember I go party…remember Buzz Lightyear and he fly and hit Woody…?” And that’s one sentence.
Sometimes we bake with him. At first, we cooked a bunch of carrot cakes. We heave him onto the counter by the standing mixer, and he dumps in the butter, flour, sugar, eggs and so on. He flips the switches too and so far hasn’t gotten his hand caught in the whirling paddle, which would be problematic. His mixing done, he gets bored. We pour the batter into the pan and stick it in the oven. Generally, we do this at night. Come morning he sprints out to the kitchen as usual, and lo and behold, there’s the carrot cake. Even though he made it last night, he’s surprised to see it, but soon recall kicks in.
We’ve also mixed pizza dough and cinnamon buns, but he calls them pizza buns and cinnamon dough: just like Elf, he registers the act of mixing, but doesn’t necessarily follow that through to their distinct end products.
As parents, our instinct is to teach and correct: “no, Santa’s riding the sleigh because…” or “the buns rise because there’s yeast, and yeast makes…” Yet, he’ll get it soon enough: maybe this is the time to have some fun. Cover a cinnamon bun with cheese and call it pizza, or, as his tiny hands fold carrots into the cake batter, tell him we’re making a raisin bagel.
The recipe is word for word from Peter Reinhart’s great book The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. The book has a lot of great recipes, but I like this the best. First, perhaps due to the butter, the dough feels smooth and supple, like one of those squishy hand exercise balls. And second, it’s kind of magical to roll up the sugared dough and see that tray of sweet spirals emerge from the oven, smelling of, well, warm cinnamon buns.
Reinhart instructs how to transform these wonderful buns into sticky buns. It’s a simple matter of baking them atop butter and sugar, which caramelize the undersides, so that when served flipped over, they are coated in a lustrous, sticky, dark glaze, much like a tarte tatin or upside-down cake. Of course, they taste great, but we prefer the plainer, unadorned bun which, when opened releases an indescribably comforting puff of yeasty, cinnamon steam. Biting into it, you aren’t assaulted by sugar, rather a light sweetness and the occasional crunch of granulated sugar.
Cinnamon Buns
(from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Peter Reinhart, Ten Speed Press 2001)
Makes 8 to 12 large or 12 to 16 smaller cinnamon or sticky buns
6 ½ tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
5 ½ tablespoons shortening or unsalted butter at room temperature
1 large egg, slightly beaten
1 teaspoon lemon extract or grated zest of 1 lemon
3 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons instant yeast
1 1/8 to 1 ¼ cups whole milk or buttermilk at room temp
½ cup cinnamon sugar (6 ½ tablespoons sugar plus 1 ½ tablespoons ground cinnamon)
white glaze for cinnamon buns
caramel glaze for sticky buns
- Cream the sugar, salt, and butter or shortening on medium-high speed in an electric mixer with a paddle attachment. (If doing it by hand, use a mixing bowl and large spoon.) Whip in egg and lemon extract or zest until smooth. Add flour, yeast, and milk and mix on low speed until the dough forms a ball. Switch to the dough hook and increase speed to medium, mix for about 10 minutes until dough is supple, tacky but not sticky. (Or if by hand, knead 12 to 15 minutes.) You may have to add a little water. Lightly oil a large bowl, transfer dough ball to bowl, rolling to coat with oil and cover with plastic wrap.
- Ferment at room temp about 2 hours or until dough doubles.
- Mist the counter with oil, transfer dough to counter. And roll out the dough.
- To roll: roll with a rolling pin, lightly dusting top of dough with flour to keep from sticking to pin. Roll into a rectangle 2/3 inch thick and 14 inches long by 12 inches wide for larger buns, or 18 by 9 fro smaller ones. Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar over the entire surface and roll dough into a cigar-shaped log, creating a cinnamon sugar spiral as you go. With seam side down, cut log into 8 to 12 even pieces for larger buns, or 12 to 16 for smaller buns.
- For cinnamon buns, line 1 or more sheet pans with parchment, place ½ inch apart so they don’t touch but are close to one another.
- For sticky buns, coat the bottom of 1 or more baking pans with sides at least 1 ½ inches high with a ¼ inch layer of the glaze. Sprinkle on the nuts and raisings. Lay the dough on top, spacing ½ inch apart. Mist with spray oil and cover loosely with plastic wrap.
- Proof the buns (both cinnamon and/or sticky) at room temp for 75 to 90 minutes until they’ve grown into one another and nearly doubled. You may also retard the shaped buns in the refrigerator for up to 2 days, pulling the pan out before baking and allowing 3-4 hours to proof.
- Preheat oven to 350 with rack on the middle for cinnamon buns, but the lowest shelf for sticky buns.
- Bake cinnamon buns for 20 to 30 minutes or sticky buns for 30-40 minutes, or until golden brown. Remember, if making sticky buns, the bottom will become the top so the key is getting the bottom nice and golden. This takes practice to know when to pull them from the oven.
10. For cinnamon buns, cool buns in pan for 10 minutes and steak with white fondant glaze (we omit this step) across the tops while the buns are warm but not hot. Remove from pan onto a cooling rack and wait 20 minutes before serving. For sticky buns, cool in pan 5 to 10 minutes, remove by flipping over onto another pan. Carefully scoop any remaining glaze back over the buns with a spatula and wait 20 minutes before serving.
White glaze
4 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon lemon extract
6 tablespoons to ½ cup warm milk
- Sift the sugar into a bowl, add the extract then slowly add the milk, whisking to dissolve the sugar, only enough to make a thick, smooth paste. Streak them over the warm buns by dipping the tines of a fork into the glaze and waving over the tops.
Caramel glaze
½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
½ teaspoon salt
½ pound unsalted butter at room temperature
½ cup corn syrup
1 teaspoon lemon or vanilla extract
- Cream together the sugar, brown sugar, salt, and butter in the bowl of a standing mixer with the paddle attachment for 2 minutes on high speed. Add corn syrup and lemon or vanilla extract. Cream for 5 minutes until light and fluffy.
