works of wanderlust

Tag: baking

  • Ten Sweet Desserts Made Sweeter By Cast Iron

    If your Easter weekend was anything like mine, it involved a lot of food.

    And like many holidays it also happened to involve a lot of sweet desserts. Here’s hoping you got your fill of flavourful delights this year. And for next time, here is some inspiration for how to get you holiday sugar rush with help from your cast iron pans.

    1. Cobbler. Almost any fruit will do, but peach or apple slices baked with a crumbly sweet streusel topping can be scooped right from the oven to waiting dessert dishes.

    2. Apple Pie. With a flaky pastry crust, a cast iron pan makes for a natural pie pan.

    3. Dutch Baby. Call it popover or German pancake, or maybe even a Bismarck, this puffed pastry dish in a cast iron pan is delicate and tasty.

    4. Ollie Bolen. My Oma’s recipe for these small, sweet apple fritters was passed down through the generations and we deep fry in our Dutch Oven for New Years every year.

    5. Funnel Cakes. Fried in a few centimeters of oil, swirly sweet funnel cakes topped with powdered sugar remind me of being a kid at the summer carnival.

    6. Coffee Cake. A standard cake doesn’t do great in cast iron, but the dense, crumbly consistency of a traditional coffee cake works just great.

    7. Brownies. Thick and chewy bars of chocolate baked right in a big old skillet. No excuse required.

    8. Cinnamon Rolls. Sweeten your sourdough bread recipe and then roll it with butter, cinnamon and sugar. Baked up golden and caramelized are great plain or drizzled with cream cheese frosting.

    9. S’mores. No campfire required, a graham cracker, chocolate and marshmallow open faced sandwich toasted under the broiler on a cast iron skillet is a close second to the camping version.

    10. Skillet Cookie. A big lump of cookie dough smashed into a small 6 or 7 inch cast iron pan, served hot from the oven and topped with whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate syrup and sprinkles is a sharable hit for kids of any age.

  • Our Well-Loved Cookbooks: How to Cook Everything

    Had I realized how often over the last fifteen years I would be referencing Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything I would have splurged for the hardcover edition.

    As it stands, our trusty copy of this loaf of paper filled with basic recipes rarely makes it back onto the bookshelf, and is so tattered and splattered, I’ll likely be lamenting it’s numbered days before it stops being useful.

    The front cover of a cookbook.

    I’ve started a small series of cookbook posts here on castironguy.ca because despite adding to my collection almost monthly, I find that most cookbooks are only useful or interesting in a limited way. Sure, you can learn a great recipe from almost any book out there, and half the fun is picking something that looks like a challenge or a tasty goal, and seeing how well your skills match with the intended product. That said, there are perhaps only a dozen cookbooks on our shelf that would make a cull if I was forced to simplify my library… and these are them.

    The best analogy I have for this book is that it’s like my paperback edition of Google.

    You know those times you are standing there in your kitchen, hands covered in flour, thinking about how you are actually supposed to be cooking something, say a roast or a whole spaghetti squash or maybe a pie crust.

    How long at what temperature?

    How much water was I supposed to add?

    Should I be covering this?

    Today I might Google it, or ask my digital assistant. Hey, Alexa, how do I… ?

    But even still, and especially back when I bought this, it was and still is that one reference book that gives solid, simple advice on the nuances of basic food prep.

    Sure, there are a few fancy recipes hiding in it’s pages, and lots of ideas about stuff like how to make your waffles more interesting, or how to spice a whole chicken, or variations on making your own salad dressings. But the core function of this book is basically aimed at people like me who mostly know enough to get started, have the ingredients in their hands, but are stumped on locking down the process. The how-to. The what was that one crucial step or ingredient that is going to change the outcome if I get it wrong. A reference guide.

    This might not be the exact title for you, but there are a few big reference cookbooks out there with a similar purpose and you should generally keep one on your shelf. I do.

  • This is Pi Day

    Any excuse to bake something, my pie skills are not top game but with the assistance of my daughter we managed to bake a pair of non-standard cast iron pies to celebrate the dad-jokiest of days.

    We doubled the recipe below to make a six inch mini (or as the teenager would have it, personal) pie and a super-large double-dip pie in the big ol’ twelve inch lodge pan.

    Pi day also falls at the wrong time of year for some proper fresh fruit, so where we’d have a couple thousand baking apples to work with in August, in March we used our fallback: cherry and blueberry pie filling from a can.

    Recipe

    1/2 pound lard
    2.5 cups flour
    1 teaspoon salt
    1/2 cup orange juice
    1 can of pie filling

    The flour, salt and lard got mixed up roughly in a bowl, being careful not to overwork. Unlike with a good gluten-strong bread, pastry and gluten are cautious friends and too much gluten development makes for chewy crust where a flaky pastry is preferred. Blend lightly, my friends. Oh so lightly.

    When just mixed, the orange juice was combined in and the whole thing was wrapped tight for a couple hours of rest in the fridge.

    Rolled out, panned up, filled, and topped, we baked these at 475F for ten minutes then dropped the heat to 375F for a finishing bake watching for the desired browning. The filling was pre-cooked, so the cast iron pan on the bottom and the hot air on top ensure the whole thing is cooked through.

    Happy Pi Day. Enjoy something round!

  • Pi Day, Eve

    We spent the evening making pies.

    Tomorrow is March 14th.

    It’s one of those “we celebrate the day because it’s funny“ kinda days.

    The third month.

    The fourteenth day.

    3-14

    3.14

    Pi.

    π

    Pi day.

    Last year I bought a pie on my way back to my office after lunch. It was March 13th. I got called into a meeting fifteen minutes later and didn’t go home until almost 9pm that night having been drafted to the emergency communications team reacting to COVID-19.

    I ate a cold piece of pie late the next day after another 16 hour work day, stressed, deflated, and shell-shocked from the pandemic hitting our little city full force.

    I went a bit overboard on this baked pie.

    I used the 12 inch frying pan as a pie plate.

    Two cans of store-bought pie filling.

    It’s so big.

    The kid helped, and in fact she did most of the work.

    This year’s pie is going to be so much better than last year.

  • Our Well-Loved Cookbooks: Flour Water Salt Yeast

    So . . . I ordered yet another cookbook yesterday.

    I’ve recently been watching a cooking channel on YouTube (perhaps one you have heard of, unlikely one you figured I’d watch) and the host released a cookbook last year, so I splurged. Until a make a few recipes from the book itself, I don’t feel that I’m in a solid or fair position to offer a review or opinion. Hopefully in about a month or so (after I spin up a few of the recipes and get a sense of the style) you’ll see such a post here. Until then…

    My lacking of an opinion is not the case with Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast.

    I remember when my newly kindled interest in sourdough bread-making started to really heat up. I’d begun culturing a starter and then I went scouring the internet for advice. A lot of people recommended this particular tome. I added it to my collection and spent a few solid days reading the details, pondering the techniques and anticipating my next loaf… mostly because that first starter was still pretty new and not ready to use.

    I could write a lot about this cookbook.

    I could tell you that the tone has always struck me in the same way as I felt when I worked my way through university and had this one lab-rat job for a boss who had a PhD in molecular biology and couldn’t believe he had to explain this stuff to me and fine, but pay attention and do you mind if I crank up the radio and we’re all going out for beers after work, you in? Pleasantly mentoring? Friendly condescending? Lovable know-it-all-ish?

    Or, I could tell you that within the words contained on these pages there is as much elaborate history and detail about bread theory as there is actual recipes, and if this was online everyone would complain that they need to scroll for five minutes to get to the ingredients list but since this is a book it’s as much a beautiful read about bread (and pizza crusts) as it is anything else. Be prepared to read as much as you cook.

    I could even tell you that if you read this book, no if you seriously read it and understand it, you’ll change the way you cook and you’ll go out tomorrow and buy a digital kitchen scale and understand that the math and French you learned in high school could serve more than an abstract purpose in your life as you start to refer to bread as having desired hydration levels and calculate flour percentages in your dreams. Shush! My sixty-percent levain is resting!

    Basically I could just tell you that if you want to make good bread, I haven’t found a better volume. This is a great cookbook and one that will endure in my personal collection for a long time.