Apple Pie, Patis, and Pâté

Realizing that I’ve been using the oven almost exclusively lately, turning to other kitchen appliances seems to be in order. I hear that stove tops get heavy use in other kitchens so I’m dusting off the skillets and cooking with (gasp) fire instead of hot air.

Gamja jeon are savory skillet-crisped pancakes made with grated potatoes. In this version, diced peppers and pyogo (shiitake) mushrooms are added to the potato batter for added flavor and texture. A vinegar soy sauce dip, cho ganjang, is typically served with the lightly seasoned pancakes.

View Gamja Jeon - Korean Potato Pancake Recipe »

This semolina cornbread recipe calls for equal parts cornmeal, semolina flour, and soft wheat flour. It’s much like your typical buttermilk cornbread that bakes up moist, crumbly, and slightly gritty.

Naturally golden coarse semolina flour gives cornbread a creamier yellow crumb and nuttier finish than using only cornmeal and wheat flour. I’m not Mr. Sensitive Palate over here, but a side-by-side taste test (seriously) makes the subtle differences more obvious. This fluffier cornbread may be a bit more to your liking.

View Semolina Cornbread Recipe »

With all of the Irish pubs in Chicago and the consequent massive amounts of Guinness and Jameson consumed, I should be some sort of leading expert on Irish food by now. The fact is, I’ve never had soda bread in the traditional sense before.

The base recipe is probably similar, but the brown bread served with Irish beef stews in this, the city that dyes its rivers green, always has raisins. The addition of dried fruit makes a spotted dog or spotted dick, an appropriately named Irish soda bread variation.

That being said, add a handful of raisins to the following recipe and you get a spotted dick.

Unfortunately, I was giggling like an idiot while writing that.

To get the right texture and tenderness in your soda bread, use coarsely milled whole wheat flour with a low protein content. Here are a few options, in order of desirability:

• Irish-style whole wheat flour
• two parts whole wheat pastry flour to one part coarsely ground wheat flakes, as suggested in the original recipe
• graham flour
• stone ground whole wheat pastry flour
• traditional whole wheat flour

View Irish Soda Bread Recipe »

This month’s Bread Baking Day brings us starch-on-starch action by way of potatoes on pizza. If you cook Italian food every once in a while, you probably already have potatoes, rosemary, onions, and extra virgin olive oil ready to go.

There’s just one caveat — you’ll need an active liquid wild yeast starter for the biga naturale. Don’t have one? Replace it with 2 tablespoons of flour, a tablespoon of water, and a pinch of instant yeast and proceed as directed. Or just ignore the pizza dough recipe altogether and use your favorite focaccia recipe.

If you’ve read this far, you may also be interested in the following bread recipes:

• Panmarino – rosemary potato bread
• 100% whole grain rosemary potato bread

View Rosemary Potato Pizza Recipe »

Gotta love it when experiments in the kitchen turn out great. I’ve always wanted to do some sort of ice cream cake. With the chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream recipes featured in this month’s Daring Bakers challenge, I came up with this idea. From top to bottom:

• Flourless chocolate cake moistened with Kirschwasser (German “cherry water” brandy)
• A thin layer of pureed cherry preserves
• Plain vanilla ice cream
• Frozen liquid sablé crust

If the frozen liquid sablé crust sounds weird, that’s because it’s borrowed from the Alinea cookbook. You won’t need to sneak into a laboratory and steal a tank of liquid nitrogen, though. The sablé crust is actually pretty straightforward.

The sandy textured frozen crust starts off as a normal shortbread made with a bit of almond flour. The baked sablé is then blended with oil, poured into a springform pan, and frozen to kickstart the bottom-up cake assembly.

View Chocolate Cherry Vanilla Ice Cream Cake Recipe »