Friday Bread Basket 1/14/22
A bagful of baguettes
Welcome to the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. This week’s email includes a bunch of bready links from friends, along with one porcupine. Let’s get right to it!
Poblano Oil Tortillas
Concha / pan dulce wizard (and future Wordloaf contributor!) Teresa Finney recently published a recipe for poblano oil tortillas that I just knew I had to share with you all. The idea of using the oil left over from roasting poblano peppers to flavor tortillas is genius, and suggests all sorts of spin-offs:
At a 425F oven temperature, the peppers blister and blacken in spots easily. What I love about this recipe is that there is basically no waste. Remove the skins from the poblanos after they’ve cooled with the back of a butter knife or just your fingers. Slice the now softened peppers into strips and make a quesadilla with the tortillas. You will have about ¼ cup of leftover poblano oil from roasting; store it in an airtight container after it cools completely and use it anywhere you would use vegetable oil or olive oil. The slight smokiness and sweetness from the peppers perfumes the oil in just the way I hoped it would. It would make a really nice base for a vinaigrette, I think.
→ Poblano Oil Tortillas Recipe
Focaccia de Recco
My pal Sasha Marx just published a recipe for focaccia de Recco over at Serious Eats that I cannot wait to make. For those of us used to the classic Ligurian poofy focaccia, this is an entirely different beast:
Focaccia di Recco is the ultimate zag to the focaccia most of us are familiar with. Instead of a tender, open-crumb bread, this is a cracker-thin, crunchy, gooey, cheese-filled snack, made with an unleavened dough that’s closer to paratha dough or flour tortilla masa than the kind of high-hydration dough typically used for yeasted focaccia. The dough gets stretched into two paper-thin sheets that are draped over a large round metal baking tray, with dollops of creamy Stracchino cheese sandwiched in between them, before getting drizzled with olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. A quick bake in a hot oven yields a crisp crust that still has a tender chew, with a bubbling cheesy center.
Watching the above Eater video made me want to make my sourdough bagels again, and it prompted a long, fun chat with my friend (and also future Wordloaf contributor!) Dayna Evans, who just launched her own side-hustle bagel shop, the perfectly-named Downtime Bakery.
I am jealous of those of you who are in the Mt. Airy, Philadelphia area, who have access to Dayna’s clearly amazing breads. Send reports if you get there!
That’s it for this week’s Friday Bread Basket. I hope you all have a peaceful weekend. I’m spending mine taking Camilla Wynne’s marmalade workshop and Cheryl Holbert’s challah Braid-a-Thon back-to-back on Sunday! Links below if you want to join.)
—Andrew
I'll never complain about paying $2.50 for a bagel again. A lot of work goes into the entire process: wow! Thanks for posting.
Hi Andrew, I’ve ransacked your site looking for a way to stream the Baguettes sans Peur class. How can I find it and pay to watch? Thanks!