Ravioli with avocado sauce vierge

When I first came across this dish at the Château de la Chèvre d'Or, I thought it was sheer madness. Then I tasted it and decided otherwise.
A few weeks later, I can no longer buy sheets of Niçois ravioli stuffed with beef and Swiss chard or spinach without also picking up a ripe avocado and a punnet of cherry tomatoes. It helps that the first time I served this combination at home, Sam - who had never previously gone wild for avocadoes - declared it the best thing he had ever eaten as he lapped up the last drops of sauce.
Of course, I appreciate how lucky I am to have the fresh pasta shop Barale at the end of my street. Founded in 1892 and still run by the Barale family, it's the place I turn to whenever I feel like eating something delicious without going to any effort (which turns out to be quite often). I buy the pâtes vertes (thick-cut spinach tagliatelle) for pâtes au pistou, panisses (a kind of chickpea polenta) to cut into strips and fry as an apéritif or side dish, and ravioli à la ricotta to serve with a simple tomato sauce.
Until recently, it had never occurred to me to serve ravioli niçois, otherwise known as ravioli à la daube, with anything other than daube sauce, or perhaps tomato sauce (with or without meat). These ravioli were originally designed to use up leftover beef stew, known as daube in these parts, and the extra sauce from the stew would be spooned over the ravioli. Pasta shops in Nice almost inevitably sell this rich, winey stew, more for serving with pasta than eating on its own.
Avocado, lemon and tomato make a brighter, more summery accompaniment, one that works surprisingly well with these earthy-tasting ravioli. A generous quantity of freshly grated parmesan brings it all together, balancing the acidity of the lemon. If you don't have access to Niçois ravioli - I'll post the recipe one of these days - it would be worth experimenting with other types of meat or ricotta ravioli or even plain pasta.

* I'm thrilled to report that Les Petits Farcis was featured alongside other small and informal cooking schools in this month's issue of Gourmet magazine. If you happen to have a copy, turn to page 88 for the article and page 199 for my recipe for Lemon curd tart with olive oil.

Niçois ravioli with avocado sauce vierge
Serves 3

8 dozen Niçois ravioli, or about 450 g (1 lb) other ravioli
1 small avocado or 1/2 large avocado
150 g cherry tomatoes (6 oz)
Juice and zest of one organic lemon
Good-quality olive oil
Salt and pepper, to taste
Plenty of fresh parmesan cheese
A few fresh basil leaves

Heat a large pot of water for the ravioli. Cut the avocado and tomato into small dice and toss together with the lemon zest. Squeeze the lemon, measure the juice and add it along with the same amount of olive oil to the avocado and tomato. Season with salt and pepper.

Cook the ravioli just until tender and drain carefully (they are fragile). Top with the avocado-tomato mixture and its juice, a generous amount of freshly grated parmesan and the torn basil leaves.

Pane Pugliese

I wasn't planning to bring you a bread recipe today, but when this chubby loaf came out of the oven I found it irresistible. It's the first time I've made bread in weeks: my once thrillingly active starter has been languishing at the bottom of the refrigerator looking gray and neglected (though I know it will be quick to forgive me).
The recipe is a remarkably simple one using fast-acting yeast from Australian-born, London based bread guru Dan Lepard. The difference is that it calls for fizzy water - Dan uses Italian, I substituted Badoit - and soft 00 flour, the kind that goes into fresh pasta. Containing a spoonful of delicate-tasting Nice olive oil and Claude's incredible deep amber honey that tastes of wild mountain herbs, the dough was soft, velvety and a joy to knead by hand.
While I made tabbouleh for lunch I had Philippe take over the kneading, which he did with such enthusiasm that my marble board broke in half. Talk about stress relief!
With a creamy-colored, bouncy crumb and surprisingly distinctive honey taste, this bread reminded me of a crusty milk loaf. It's definitely going into my file of "breads to make again and again."
A little tip for Thermomix owners: when I make bread using bottled water or milk, I give the liquid 1 minute in the Thermomix at 40 C to warm it up.

Pane Pugliese
Makes 1 round loaf

Slightly adapted from an article in The Observer Food monthly.

Sponge:
1 tsp fast-rising (easy-blend) yeast
150 g 00 pasta flour
200 g sparkling water, warmed
1 tsp honey

350 g 00 flour
100 g sparkling water, warmed
2 tsp fine sea salt
1 tbsp good-quality olive oil

Cornmeal or semolina, for the baking sheet

In a large bowl, whisk together the ingredients for the sponge to make a smooth batter. Cover with a plastic bag and set aside in a warm place for 1 hour.

Add the remaining ingredients and combine with your hands or a plastic pastry scraper to form a slightly sticky dough, adding a little more water if necessary. Clean your hands and rub a marble or other work surface with 1 tsp olive oil, also rubbing some oil into your hands. Knead the dough for a few minutes, until very smooth and velvety. Return the dough to the cleaned bowl, cover with a plastic bag and set aside in a warm place to rise for 45 mins.

Turn the dough onto a lightly floured marble or other work surface and flatten with your hands, then shape into a ball. Line a small bowl with a floured tea towel, or use a linen bread basket if you have one. Place the dough seam-side up in the bowl or basket, cover with the plastic bag and let rise until doubled in volume, about 45 mins.

Meanwhile, heat the oven to 220 C, with the baking sheet in the oven and a ramekin filled with hot water on a shelf underneath it. When you're ready to bake the bread, sprinkle some cornmeal or semolina onto the hot baking sheet. Gently turn the ball of dough upside-down into your floured hand, then slide it carefully onto the baking sheet. Slash a cross in the dough using a very sharp knife or serrated bread knife.

Bake the bread (I used the convection setting) for 35-45 minutes, until golden brown and very crusty. Leave to cool on a wire rack before serving.

Celeriac and kohlrabi rösti

With spring around the corner, the last thing I should be thinking about is knobbly, hairy vegetables that grow under the ground.
There are true wild asparagus at the market, which I've tossed with cappellini pasta, lemon zest and juice, cream and parmesan, and stirred into just-laid eggs with cubed potatoes for a frittata to be eaten on the beach (it has been that warm).

Finger-thin carrots taste sweet and delicate, even if they are just a tiny bit knobbly and hairy; I bite into them just as they are or glaze them in butter and honey with whole cumin seeds.
How do you like these violet artichokes? Trimming them is a fastidious task but the result is always worth the effort, whether I slice them raw, cook them quickly in lemony water or stew them for an hour in white wine and olive oil.

On Sunday, at the Libération market north of the train station in Nice, I spotted the season's first fava beans (also known as broad beans). They cost €8 a kilo, but I didn't hesitate for a second. "Une caprice," said the farmer, smiling knowingly. There is no better snack in spring than emerald fava beans straight from the pod, each one peeled of its bitter skin if you have the patience.
But, just as it's not quite time to put away my winter coat, I can still get excited about the earthy taste of celery root (or celeriac) and the turnipy crunch of purple-skinned kohlrabi. I picked up one of each from an organic producer at the market last weekend, not quite knowing what I would do with them. As I was idly flipping through a folder of clipped recipes, I came across a brilliant idea from Clare Ferguson in an old (2005) issue of Homes and Gardens magazine.
Her recipe called only for celeriac, but as my root was small kohlrabi seemed the obvious addition. The use of chickpea flour made these rösti slightly reminiscent of socca, that Niçois classic (note: these rösti are gluten-free). I was also delighted that the recipe called for parsley stems, something I throw away unless I'm planning to make vegetable stock.
The tomato sauce with sweet chili that Ferguson suggests would have been perfect, but as a light lunch with salad and nothing else they were very good too: sweet, slightly nutty and fresh-tasting all at once.
I seem not to be the only one who has celeriac on the brain: I was surprised to see, as I blog-hopped after that lunch, that aforkfulofspaghetti also has a post on celeriac fritters this week. They involve whole slices of celeriac, but look equally delicious.

Celeriac and kohlrabi rösti
Serves 4-6 as a side dish, 2-3 as a light lunch with salad

1 small celeriac (about 325-350 g)
1/2 kohlrabi (about 100 g)
50 g chickpea flour
A handful of parsley, stems and leaves
1 egg
2 tbsp cold water
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp cracked black peppercorns
Good quality olive oil, for frying

Scrub and peel the celeriac and peel the kohlrabi. Shred coarsely by hand or using the grating attachment of your food processor.
If using the food processor (I did), replace the shredding blade with the chopping blade.
Add the chickpea flour, thinly sliced parsley leaves and stems, beaten egg, water, and seasonings. Process, in brief bursts, until the contents are fairly evenly mixed. By hand, simply mix well.
Heat a good tablespoon of oil in a non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat. Drop tablespoons of this mixture into the hot oil and cook for 2-3 mins on each side, until browned and cooked through. Set aside in a warm oven until all the rösti are cooked (you may need to cook them in two batches).
Serve alongside meat or with a tomato-chili sauce as a snack or light lunch.

Mandarin marmalade

My downstairs neighbor Tony is normally quite friendly. When I run into him in the street, he says hello and sometimes stops for a chat.
On Saturday, though, he backed away from me slowly as if I were a madwoman, muttering "no thanks, no thanks" without meeting my eye. It was my fault for asking the seemingly innocent question that no-one who lives in Nice wants to hear during the month of March.
"Would you like some citrus fruit?"
Local lemons, oranges, grapefruits and kumquats, untouched by chemicals and with glossy green leaves, sell for €3.50 a kilo at the market. Yet just about anyone who has been in Nice for any length of time knows someone with at least one productive citrus tree that produces a glut of fruit at this time of year. Just when I start to long for sweet French strawberries (which have, rather bizarrely, already made their first appearance at the market), I find myself cooking up enough bitter-orange marmalade to supply the whole reluctant neighborhood.
A well-meaning friend with a lovingly-tended garden filled my shopping cart to the brim with mandarins and bitter oranges this weekend. Mandarins have a mysterious, almost exotic scent that I would love to bottle and wear as a perfume. But there is a good reason why they have fallen out of favor over the years: they are absolutely stuffed with pips. Try to juice a mandarin with an electric citrus juicer and these will fly all over the kitchen, I've discovered the hard way (I now squash them with my hands directly over a sieve).
With heaps of mandarins in my kitchen, there was no excuse not to make the most labor-intensive jam in my repertory (I've decided to ignore the bitter oranges for the time being). Thanks to Philippe's help with the slicing and de-pipping it wasn't as painful as I had expected, even if it was a little disheartening to see 2.5 kilos of mandarins become a mere 7 jars of marmalade.
Still, when I've had enough of strawberries I know I will be glad to have given those mandarins a home.

Mandarin marmalade
(Sorry, it's hard to predict the number of jars! Allow about a dozen, just in case.)

An important trick when making marmalade is to save the pips as you slice the fruit. Place them in a small bowl, covered with water, overnight. The next day, drain the pips and add the water to the jam as it cooks: it's full of pectin. Unfortunately, my pips got thrown out by accident this time, which meant that the jam had to be reduced more than usual before it set.

2.5 kg mandarins (about 5 1/2 lbs)
1 lemon
2 kg sugar (about 4 1/2 lbs)

In one or two large bowls, soak the whole mandarins in cold water overnight.

The next day, drain and discard this water. Cut the mandarins and lemon into thin slices, removing the pips. Set these aside in a small bowl, covering them with water. Place the mandarin slices in one or two large bowls, with the sugar and just enough water to cover the fruit. Set aside overnight once again in a cool place.

The next day, dump the fruit in its syrup and the pip water into a very large saucepan or copper jam basin. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a steady bubble and cook until the juices set when a small amount is dripped onto a plate. This can take anywhere between 1-2 hours.

Pour into sterilized jam jars. I sterilize my jars by washing them well, then placing the wet jars on a tray in the oven at 180 C (375 F) for at least 20 mins.

Socca and sundried tomato hummus

Like most people who make a sort of living from writing, I rarely spring into action until I sense a deadline looming. With just two days left to take part in Susan's Legume Love Affair, I started thinking seriously about my own passions: lentils, especially the small, flinty-green ones from the volcanic land around Puy in central France; white beans, particularly the pearly coco de Paimpol from Brittany and the coveted crop from the town of Albenga in Liguria; and chickpeas, which make up for in versatility what they lack in glamor.
Everyone loves hummus and chana dal (don't they?), but not so many people know what to do with chickpea flour. It has become a staple in my kitchen since I settled in Nice, where a curious chickpea pancake called socca is sold at stalls throughout the Old Town. Consisting of nothing more than chickpea flour, water, olive oil and salt, it probably once served as a sort of plate. These days, rough slices of it are wrapped in paper, sprinkled with pepper and eaten as a snack at any time of day or night. Socca made its way across the border from Liguria, where it's called farinata, and may have African origins.
Wherever it comes from, socca doesn't always inspire love at first sight. Bread guru Dan Lepard describes spitting out his first bite of socca in Nice before growing to appreciate this unleavened bread. I don't want to point fingers, but it may be that the socca he tried had been kept warm for too long or even (gasp!) reheated. Socca must be very, very fresh and very, very hot to be good.
The Niçois believe that only a wood-fired oven produces true socca. Don't listen to them. If your oven will heat to around 240 C (500 F or so), there is no excuse not to make socca. I love my copper socca tin, which doubles as a pizza pan, but again it's not a necessity - before investing in this, I used ordinary cake tins with great success.
I often depart from tradition slightly by adding some chopped rosemary to the socca batter; half a teaspoon of chili paste is just as welcome. With chickpeas on the brain, I was intrigued to see Mark Bittman's recipe in the New York Times this week for hummus with sundried tomato. For Susan's event, I decided to put together a double shot of chickpea by serving this with socca. I pretty much stuck to the recipe, though I felt compelled to add 1/4 cup of tahini and replaced the pimenton with Espelette pepper from the Basque region.

My little experiment had surprising results. On its own, the sun-dried tomato hummus didn't completely win me over - I think it's hard to improve on classic hummus and found the dried tomato taste a little overbearing. But with the socca the tomato hummus suddenly seemed right, its acidity and sweetness balancing the natural heaviness of the chickpeas. Plain socca will seem naked from now on.

Socca
Enough for 2 cake tins or 1 large socca or pizza pan

125 g chickpea flour (about 1 cup)
250 ml cold water (about 1 cup)
45 ml olive oil (3 tbsp)
1/2 tsp salt
1 sprig rosemary
Freshly ground pepper

In a mixing bowl, combine the water and chickpea flour. Add 15 ml (1 tbsp) olive oil, the salt and chopped rosemary leaves. Mix well until smooth. The batter should have the consistency of light cream – add water if necessary. Set aside at room temperature for at least 2 hours or, better yet, let the batter rest overnight, covered, in the refrigerator.

Heat the oven on maximum heat for at least 20 mins, with the cake tins or socca pan inside. Pour 1 tbsp olive oil into each of the 2 tins, or 2 tbsp oil into the large pan, and place in the oven to heat for 5 mins. Pour the socca batter into the tin(s). Place in the upper part of the oven.

After 5 mins, turn on the oven’s broiler (grill). Cook for 3-4 mins, until the socca starts to brown and even burn a little in spots.

To serve, cut into rough pieces and sprinkle with plenty of freshly ground pepper.

La trouchia - Swiss chard omelette

Something I've learned over time at the Cours Saleya market is that things are not always as they appear.
So, with my heart set on trouchia for lunch, I didn't panic when I saw that the producer famed among local chefs for her Swiss chard had laid out nothing more than mixed salad leaves, a dozen lemons and a few cartons of eggs on her trestle table. Sneaking a discreet peek under the table, I asked her sweetly, "You wouldn't happen to have any blettes, would you?"
Her eyes narrowed. "How many bunches do you need?"
Triumph. The chard - or silverbeet, as it's sometimes called - had been set aside for those who could prove they wanted it badly enough. Happily I've shopped at this market long enough to know just who might be hiding what, and for whom (as I walked away with the chard I saw the chef who had no doubt reserved most of the day's harvest).
I've always had a fondness for chard's thick ribs and crinkly, spinach-like leaves, but only in Nice has this vegetable become something I couldn't possibly live without. Centuries before they tasted their first vine-ripened tomatoes, the farmers in the hills behind Nice made hardy Swiss chard their staple vegetable. It stretches small amounts of meat in Niçois ravioli and lentil-sausage stew and stars as the main ingredient in tians and tourtes, including a sweet variation with pine nuts, raisins and rum. Some producers sell a thin-ribbed local variety, which is perfect for recipes that call only for the leaves.
I love it that a chef like Franck, who goes through caviar and truffles by the case at the Louis XV in Monaco, can get so excited when instructing me on how to make la trouchia, a thick Swiss chard omelette with just enough egg to bind it together. They key is not to precook the chard but to get the temperature just right so that the leaves don't give off too much water as they cook. It's safest to cook it in a non-stick pan, though I've got away with using my well-seasoned cast iron pan.
If you find yourself with any leftovers (we never have), try them tucked into a sandwich, just as Franck's mother used to do - preferably standing on a mountainside with wild thyme and rosemary at your feet.

Because trouchia makes great picnic food and is vegetarian to boot, I'm submitting this recipe to Mansi's blogging event Game Night. Eat it hot, warm, cold, in a sandwich or cut into bite-sized pieces and served with toothpicks.


La trouchia
Serves 2-4

The quantities for this recipe aren't precise - just use enough egg so that the mixture doesn't seem too dry and don't skimp on the parmesan. Feel free to add chopped garlic and some mint or basil if it's in season.

1 bunch Swiss chard (silverbeet), leaves only
1/2 bunch flat-leaf (Italian) parsley
3-4 eggs, just enough to bind the mixture
50 g parmesan cheese (about 2 oz)
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
2-3 tbsp good quality olive oil

Wash and dry the chard leaves well (I often let them soak for about 30 mins in salted water to remove some of the bitterness). Slice them very thinly and place in a large bowl with the chopped parsley leaves. In a small bowl, whisk the eggs and add to the chard, adding three eggs at first and a fourth (or even a fifth) if necessary. Grate the parmesan and stir it into the mixture along with the seasonings.

Warm the oil over medium heat in a heavy frying pan (24 cm seems to be an ideal size) with a tight-fitting lid. Add the chard and press down with a wooden spoon to flatten the mixture. Cover, lower the heat a little and cook for about 15 mins, until the base is browned. Keep an eye on it to be sure that it doesn't cook too quickly or slowly. Now place a large plate over the pan, put on some oven mitts and flip the omelette over onto the plate. Slide it back into the frying pan, cover again and cook for another 5-10 mins, until lightly browned on the other side. Serve hot, warm or cold.

Saffron rice pudding

I'm having a hard time concentrating on my chosen subject this morning, so potent are the chocolatey aromas wafting from the oven at Emilie's Cookies. I have set up shop here while some major renovations take place in our apartment, and it's only because I'm meeting a friend for lunch at La Merenda that I have steeled myself while fist-sized balls of dough studded with chunks of finest-quality bittersweet chocolate emerge from the oven as comic-book-perfect cookies.
Besides, today I'm here to talk about saffron, a scent that doesn't soothe in the way of chocolate but titillates and intrigues, occasionally dominating a dish completely (as in risotto alla milanese) but more often blending mysteriously with other spices. A yellow tint is, of course, no guarantee that a dish contains saffron - turmeric often stands in as a cheap substitute, as do some dubious substances that mimick the real thing.
Being the world's most expensive spice, saffron is subject to an alarming amount of abuse and fraud. Nothing illustrates this better than the golden threads that some Iranian friends of Nadim's brought him back from a trip to the Himalayas. They had visited a spice market and were curious to compare Indian saffron with that of their own country, which is considered the best in the world. Nothing on the front of the package set off alarm bells, so Nadim happily threw some of the saffron into his rice. It came out smelling and tasting like wet nylon carpet. Only then did he notice what was written on the back of the box. Read it carefully and you'll understand just how far cynicism can go in the spice business.

One spice grower who is most definitely not cynical is Thierry Pardé, who cultivates the precious crocus sativus bulb on a one-hectare farm in the fields of the Gâtinais south of Paris. The idea of French saffron seems surprising these days, but in the 17th century the Gâtinais was renowned for its saffron and over the past several years a few dedicated growers have revived the tradition.
I first came across Thierry at the Salon Saveurs in Paris, one of the food events I consider most worthwhile because it brings together producers from all over France who would otherwise be tricky to track down. On my first encounter with him I bought three small tubes of saffron, which disappeared in no time and left me longing for more. These long, deep ochre threads were not only the most perfectly formed I had ever seen, they were also the most potent – two qualities that make them prized among the top chefs in France.
At December’s Salon Saveurs I wasn’t about to make the same mistake, so this time I picked up 1.5 g of saffron, a relatively huge amount considering that Thierry produces only 1 kg in a year from 150,000 flowers. The little jar cost just over €30, but it’s money well spent as it takes just a few of the stamens to transport a dish to Italy, Spain, North Africa or the Middle East.


Thierry warns never to buy powdered saffron, which he says could be mixed with bricks, chalk, rust or even lead. Judging from Nadim’s experience I’m inclined to believe him. Once you’ve got your hands on the real thing, he urges you to treat it with care to preserve all of its qualities. This means infusing it in liquid (warm or cold, never hot) for at least three hours and adding it to any dish just before the end of the cooking time over gentle heat. You can infuse it in water, broth, white wine or milk, though I’ve noticed that milk seems to absorb and temper its dramatic yellow-orange color. Use about 2 threads per person in desserts, 3 per person in savory dishes.
Thierry gave me the idea of adding saffron to rice pudding, bringing a distinctly adult twist to this childhood dessert. Since the recipe in his booklet was charmingly vague, I adapted my own recipe from the cookbook Petites recettes pour grandir. In that recipe I used orange zest and orange flower water; here I replaced them with lemon zest and saffron. One of the things I love about rice pudding is that it doesn’t need much sugar, making it the perfect post-Christmas indulgence. It’s also an economical dish that is only as rich as you want it to be (you can use partly skimmed milk or make it richer, and yellower, by adding an egg yolk or two along with the saffron).
I like my rice pudding on the runny side so that it doesn’t go solid after resting overnight in the refrigerator, so don’t be alarmed if it still seems a little liquid at the end of the cooking time. To me it tasted best cold out of the fridge a day after it was made, but there is a good chance it won’t last that long.


Rice pudding with lemon and saffron
Serves 4

When this pudding didn’t turn deep golden as I had hoped, I infused more saffron in a little water overnight and added it the next day. As you can see, the milk again soaked up the color – but fortunately not the flavor, which enlivens this otherwise soothing dessert.

8-12 saffron threads, depending on their strength
30 ml whipping (double) cream or crème fraîche (2 tbsp)
750 ml whole milk (3 cups)
60 g sugar, raw cane sugar if possible (1/3 cup)
70 g short-grain rice, such as Arborio (a generous 1/3 cup)
Zest of 1 lemon, finely chopped
A pinch of salt

Stir the saffron threads into the cream and set aside at room temperature (or in the refrigerator in summer) for a few hours to infuse.

Bring the milk to a simmer in a medium saucepan and add the sugar, rice, lemon zest and salt. Lower the heat and cook very slowly for about 1 hour, stirring every few minutes and removing the skin that forms on the surface.

When you can see the rice grains at the surface of the milk and the liquid has thickened, turn off the heat and stir in the saffron-cream mixture. Cover the pot and set aside to cool. The rice will continue to absorb the liquid.

Pour into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap (clingfilm) directly on the surface to stop a skin from forming, and serve chilled.

I'm submitting this post to Weekend Herb Blogging, which was created by Kalyn's Kitchen and is being hosted this week by Cooking in Westchester.

Brioche des rois

Just when you think you can't eat another cake or drink another glass of champagne (well, ok, I can always drink champagne), the French find another reason to bring the workday to a halt and indulge.
The epiphany is a serious culinary event here, lasting not just one day - officially January 6th - but the whole month of January. Pâtisseries vie to outdo each other with their epiphany cakes, inside each of which lurks a small porcelain figure known as a fève because in the original version it was a humble dried bean. Finding the fève makes you king or queen for the day and is a highlight of any French childhood - I can still remember wearing the golden paper crown and choosing a king from among my classmates at Sam's age, when my family spent a year in Paris and changed the way I would look at food forever.
For many people, the fève - though inedible - is the best part of the epiphany cake, which most often consists of two layers of puff pastry with a frangipane filling. No matter how flaky the pastry or how rich the almond cream, I think there is something a little monotonous about the cake known as the galette des rois. So I was happy to discover that Provence has its own version of the epiphany cake, made with brioche and decorated with candied fruit and coarse sugar crystals.
A brioche des rois that feeds four to six people sells for around €10 in bakeries, and since I had some candied fruit hanging around after Christmas it made sense to attempt it myself. For reasons I'm still trying to understand, the first recipe I tried, from Andrée Maureau's Desserts et douceurs en Provence, nearly went horribly wrong when the dough stubbornly refused to rise even when left overnight. Determined not to let it go to waste, I dissolved another packet of yeast in a little warm water the next morning, making sure it bubbled, and incorporated it into the dough with a couple of scoops of flour. Left in a warm place, the dough finally cooperated and the resulting brioche would have looked at home in a bakery window.
In the meantime, feeling the first recipe was not to be trusted, I had started on a second brioche from the blog Eggs & Mouillettes. French blogger Fabienne is from Provence and this was her mother's recipe, so I was fairly confident that this one wouldn't flop. Indeed, this was a brioche better than anything I could have bought in a bakery thanks to its almond filling, an embellishment that bakers in Nice invariably leave out.

The brioche is very good in itself, but the gooey almond, sugar, candied fruit and egg mixture in the center takes it to another level. If you're one of the millions of people who finds candied fruit too cloying, it's entirely optional and can be replaced with dried fruit or simply forgotten. Fabienne uses angelica and raisins, but I substituted some not-too-sweet candied orange rind from producer Loulou, which had also gone into my Christmas pudding. I topped one brioche with candied fruit just for the fun of it, but the other looked almost as pretty sprinkled only with the coarse sugar. I had to visit three specialty shops before I found coarse sugar and ended up paying a ridiculous €10.50 for it at Le Pain Quotidien (so much for the money I saved making my own brioche), but the cake did look naked without it.

Sam helped with placing the fèves and there may have been method to his madness because, after instructing me where to cut the finished cake, he promptly became king for the day. His fève collection is growing by the minute.

By the way, I'm off to Rome tomorrow for a few days and will have internet access, so if you have any favorite places to tell me about I'd be extremely grateful!


Brioche des rois
Adapted from Eggs & Mouillettes
Serves 10

Brioche:
150 ml milk
1 packet dried yeast
400 g flour
75 g sugar
125 g butter
2 eggs
1 tbsp orange flower water

Filling:
100 g sugar
1 egg
50 g butter
150 g powdered almonds
50 g candied orange rind, finely diced

Egg wash:
1 egg
A pinch of salt

Glaze:
2 tbsp strained apricot jam
2 tbsp icing (confectioner's) sugar
1 tbsp water
Candied fruits
Coarse sugar crystals

For the sponge, warm the milk and stir in the yeast, 50 g of the flour and sugar. Place in a warm spot, such as near a radiator, until the mixture bubbles and doubles in size, 1-2 hours.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and beat the eggs in a small bowl. Place the sponge mixture in the bowl of a mixer with a dough hook or continue working by hand. On low speed if using the mixer, add the rest of the flour, butter, eggs and orange flower water. Mix for 5 mins on low speed or knead by hand for 10 mins, until smooth and silky. Cover with a plastic bag and set aside in a warm place for about 1 1/2 hours, or until doubled in size.

Work the dough a little by hand, then stretch it out to make a large rectangle (the dough should be easy to work with at this point). Fold it in three, give it a quarter turn and stretch it out again into a rectangle. Repeat this process 4 or 5 times, then let the dough rest, covered with a dish towel, for a few minutes while you make the filling.

For the filling, melt the butter in a small saucepan and stir in the sugar, egg, ground almonds and candied fruit (if using).

Roll the dough out into a long, narrow strip. Spread the filling along the center of this strip, then fold the dough over the filling to cover it completely, pinching it well. Join the ends of the strip to make a doughnut shape (my strip wasn't quite long enough, so the hole filled up as the brioche cooked). Carefully transfer the brioche to a baking sheet and let it rise, covered, for about 35-45 mins.

Beat the egg for the egg wash with a pinch of salt and brush this all over the brioche. Bake the brioche at 200 C for 20-30 mins, being careful not to burn the base.

For the glaze, bring the ingredients to a boil in a small saucepan until slightly thickened. Brush the cooked brioche with the glaze and top with candied fruit and sugar.

World Peace Cookies: rejoice!

I'm not the first blogger to discover Dorie Greenspan's all-time favorite World Peace Cookies, but I must add my voice to the chorus of praise from people whose lives have been changed forever by these chocolate sablés.
As Dorie herself points out, this recipe is really a straightforward slice-and-bake cookie. The difference is that it comes from Paris pastry chef Pierre Hermé, who has been described as "having a computer in his mouth." When Pierre tastes a chocolate cookie his computer tells him, "just think how much better this would be with fleur de sel."
It's a simple addition, just half a teaspoon of pure white Atlantic salt crystals, but what a difference it makes. Just about any cake or biscuit is improved by the addition of a little salt, yet here the salt brings a new dimension, one that makes these buttery cookies laced with cocoa and hand-chopped chocolate simply impossible to stop eating.
The name comes from a neighbor of Dorie who believes that if everyone ate these cookies every day there would be no more reason for war. But what I like about the title is that it's open to interpretation. The way I see it, if each of us gives a few bags of these cookies to the people around us at Christmas (or at any other opportunity), the world will be that much more peaceful. If you happen to live in Paris, imagine how the attitude of that bus driver - the one who closes the door on the young mother with the stroller - might change if you handed him a bag of World Peace Cookies (well, it's worth a try).
I've set the example by selflessly giving two bags of these cookies to Sam's teacher and her assistant - something I was able to do only because I hadn't allowed myself to taste them yet. It's a mystery to me how kindergarten teachers maintain any kind of peace in the classroom, so I thought these couldn't be more appropriate.
These sablés mark the beginning of my Christmas baking, which has got off to an awfully late start this year. As I write there are two fruit-laden puddings steaming on the stove, one of which will make my parents very happy on Christmas Day. The other I will give to producer Loulou at the market, who was kind enough to contribute his candied orange rinds to this year's pudding.

Meanwhile, my local grocer Antoine is picking up a 3-kilo block of top-quality chocolate from the wholesale shop for me so that I can continue my bid to spread world peace.
Try Dorie's recipe and you too will rejoice, I promise.

Crisp oatmeal cookies

Sometimes what I want is not fanciful layers of meringue, mousse and ganache but a crisp oatmeal cookie studded with tiny purple-black currants. Raw mascobado sugar, its soft golden crystals speckled with molasses, streaked these cookies with deeply flavored caramel. They are perfect for a child's goûter and with a mug of thick hot chocolate in front of the fire (or, in my case, the oven), far from the madding Christmas crowds.
I had been after a recipe for crisp oatmeal cookies for years, ever since I stupidly lost the one handwritten for me by my ex-boyfriend's grandmother, and finally found it while flipping through The New Basics Cookbook. From the founders of the famed Silver Palate deli in New York, it's a book I had been neglecting for some years without good reason. I'll be coming back to it for the vegetable-packed soup recipes, buttermilk waffles and deliciously retro-sounding Spiced Party Nuts.
These cookies are buttery and crisp with a touch of chewiness, just the way I like them. The organic mascobado sugar from my local Fair Trade shop added so much character that I decided cinnamon wasn't necessary. I also dropped the walnuts, because I think that in a great oatmeal cookie there should be little to distract from the oats themselves. So, tempting as they might be, keep your chocolate chips for another cookie.

Lacy oatmeal cookies
Adapted from The New Basics Cookbook

1 1/2 cups quick-cooking rolled oats
3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (optional)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup brown sugar (preferably an interesting one like mascobado)
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup dried currants

Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C). Lightly grease 2 baking sheets and line with parchment paper.

Toss the oats, flour and baking soda together in a bowl.

Beat the butter and sugars together in a bowl until fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla and mix well. Fold in the dry ingredients and currants.

Drop the batter by rounded teaspoonfuls, 2 inches apart, onto the prepared baking sheets and bake until golden about 10 mins. Leave the cookies on the baking sheets for 2 mins, then transfer them to wire racks to cool.

Vanilla: bean there, done that

(Sorry about the bad pun, but there is no editor to restrain me.)
A task I look forward to every month is translating the newsletter of Olivier Roellinger, an inspired chef who is based in the fishing town of Cancale near Mont St-Michel in northern Brittany. I haven't yet found the right excuse to splurge on a meal at his restaurant Le Relais Gourmand Olivier Roellinger, but the easy-to-follow recipes he provides on his website each month provide some consolation.
Roellinger is devoted to his native region, but like anyone who has been lucky enough to grow up near the sea he always has his eye on the horizon. More than other French chefs at this lofty level, he relies on spices from afar to bring out the qualities of the extraordinary local seafood and vegetables (Cancale is where I tasted my first French oysters, an experience that spoiled me for life).
At his boutique L'Entrepôt Epices Roellinger in Cancale - as well as on his website - Roellinger sells a selection of the world's finest spices and his own blends, which have evocative names such as "Neptune Powder" and "Grand Caravan." Just a pinch of spice powder transforms the simplest preparation, giving it an unmistakeable Roellinger touch.
I always learn something from his newsletters and this month's had me so excited that the first thing I did when I finished the translation was order a large amount of the spice in question. The subject was vanilla, a spice whose sultry sweetness has long fascinated the French. Native to Mexico, where it was grown to flavor coffee and chocolate, the seedpod of this climbing orchid came to Spain in the 16th century before conquering the hearts of the French. But it wasn't until the 19th century that a technique was discovered for pollinating the flowers by hand, a task that had previously been accomplished by a bee native to Mexico.
Armed with this discovery, the French set about planting vanilla in Tahiti, Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion and Comores. Today it also thrives in Papua New Guinea, Uganda, the Congo, Tanzania, India and Indonesia. Like coffee or chocolate, the taste can vary wildly depending on the type of vanilla and its origin. Roellinger describes Papua New Guinea's vanilla as the most sensual, making it the best match for savory dishes, while the powerful vanilla of Comores can stand up to chocolate or sweet root vegetables. You can read more about the qualities of each vanilla here.
Vanilla beans are worth ordering online, as you can easily pay less than you might at the supermarket. The vanilla that is available on Roellinger's website costs less than I would pay at my local spice shop, and there are many affordable sources on the Internet, some of which Melissa provided in her beautiful post on making your own vanilla extract. I decided on Madagascar vanilla, partly because Roellinger describes it as the best for custards, pastries and ice cream but also because I love the acidity of Madagascar chocolate. Sure enough these long, thin Bourbon vanilla beans have some of the same liveliness, which prevents their nutty sweetness from becoming overpowering.
So far I have added the vanilla to my green tomato jam and stirred it into this snow white soup, a recipe whose artful simplicity is typical of Roellinger (even if the food he serves in his Relais Gourmand is far more complex). The diced Granny Smith apple is my addition, borrowed from other French chefs such as Michel Troisgros who use it to counteract sweetness in savory dishes. There was undeniably something dessert-like about this dish, which is a bit reminiscent of semolina pudding, and next time I might serve it in small portions as an appetiser rather than in big bowls. Not that we had any trouble finishing it.

Cauliflower soup with vanilla
from Olivier Roellinger
Serves 4

1 small head cauliflower, chopped (about 400 g or 15 oz)
2 cups water (500 ml)
1 cup milk (250 ml)
1 vanilla bean
1 tsp fine salt
Niora oil and Poudre du Voyage for the garnish (optional)

Chop the cauliflower.
In a saucepan, combine the cauliflower, water, milk and vanilla bean, which has been opened and scraped. Bring to a boil and cook for 20 mins at a simmer, so that the mixture is reduced by about 1/3.
Blend the soup until very smooth, straining if necessary.
Pour the steaming soup into bowls.
For an optional garnish, Poudre du Voyage and Niora oil from Olivier Roellinger make the perfect complements for this dish.

This post is my entry to Weekend Herb Blogging, created by Kalyn and hosted this week by Simona from Briciole.

Green tomato jam with ginger and vanilla

I've been doing my best to forget about tomatoes, loading up at the market on knobbly-skinned winter squash, the tender little broccoli known as brocoletti, and skinny carrots the color of beets courtesy of organic market gardener Joëlle. Oh, and lots of local oranges and lemons too, their leaves still clinging to the stems.
But on Saturday, at Pierre's stand, tomatoes couldn't help but catch my eye one last time. Pierre, you might remember, is the producer who cultivated more than 100 heirloom tomato varieties this summer. His plants continue to produce, even sprouting new seedlings which he has replanted under cover because on the Côte d'Azur there is an off chance that tomatoes could flourish in winter.
Saturday's heat-deprived green tomatoes couldn't compare to the summer's flamboyant display, but they brought to mind an extraordinary green tomato jam I had tasted at Oliviera with the fresh ewe's milk cheese known as brousse de brebis. As luck would have it Nadim, the maker of this jam, was standing next to me and all I had to do was turn to him and ask for the recipe. Armed with his generous advice I picked up two kilos, happy to give tomatoes a last hurrah before winter really sets in.
At home, I was curious to see what recipes might be circulating on the internet and soon came across one from the famed Alsatian jam maker Christine Ferber. Her recipe, although similar to Nadim's in its proportions, involved macerating the fruit overnight and giving it a 10-minute boil the next day before leaving it for another 24 hours and boiling it again. I rejected this method not because I'm against jam that takes three days to make, but because my Saturday expedition to the market had left not an inch of space in my French-sized refrigerator for the luxury of letting fruit macerate.
Ferber also advises carefully deseeding each tomato and removing the white membranes, directions that I took rather lightly as Pierre's heirloom varieties don't have many seeds or membranes. When I did come across a tomato with a lot of seeds, I squeezed them out.
I added ginger to recreate the taste I so loved in Nadim's jam, but also couldn't resist throwing in one of my lively-scented Madagascar vanilla beans that had just arrived in the post. You'll be hearing more about these beans and their uses very soon.
The result, after a relaxing hour and a half of bubbling and occasional stirring, was a beautiful translucent green jam flecked with black dots, its sweetness enhanced by the vanilla and offset by the ginger. You can of course spread it on bread, but I agree with Nadim that it's particularly delicious with fresh cheese or thick yoghurt.


Green tomato jam with ginger and vanilla
Makes about 4 11-oz (300 g) jars

4 1/2 lbs green tomatoes (2 kg)
1/2 the weight in sugar of the tomatoes, once the tomatoes have been deseeded and diced
2-inch chunk ginger, peeled (5 cm)
1 vanilla bean
Juice of 1 lemon, organic if possible

Cut the tomatoes in half horizontally and squeeze out the seeds if they seem to have a lot of seeds. Cut the tomatoes into small dice and weigh them to find out what quantity of sugar you will need. Slice the ginger against the grain and then chop it finely. Slit the vanilla bean in half and scrape out the seeds with a knife, holding each half flat against the board as you scrape.

Place the tomatoes, sugar, ginger, vanilla bean with its seeds and lemon juice in a large saucepan or a copper jam basin if you have one. Bring to a boil, stirring, then reduce the heat and let the jam bubble happily and reduce until thickened. It should look like a thick, syrupy green tomato sauce, which can take up to 2 hours. To test for doneness, drip some of the liquid onto a cold plate. If it sets, the jam is done.

Meanwhile sterilize the pots, either by boiling them in a large pot of water for 10 minutes or washing them well and placing them in the oven at 375 F (180 C) to dry for 20 mins. Fill the pots with the jam while both are still very hot. Seal with very clean lids.

Pumpkin pie with perfect pastry

Why pumpkin pie, you might ask, when Thanksgiving is over?
Well, for one thing, this pumpkin pie is good enough to make just for the pleasure of eating it, and not only as part of a harvest ritual that will leave you far to stuffed to appreciate it. And, for another, it gives me an excuse to talk about a method of making pastry that has changed my life - and just might do the same to yours.
I've published this pastry recipe before, as part of July's strawberry tart. But at the time I didn't realize quite how significant a revelation it was.
Over many years of making pastry, I'd come to accept that pâte sucrée, sweet pastry rich with butter and egg yolk, is tricky to work with. Unlike pâte sablée (short pastry), in which the butter is kept cold, pâte sucrée is usually made with butter at room temperature. This means that you have to chill the dough before you can work with it - at least for a couple of hours but preferably overnight. When you remove the dough from the refrigerator it is inevitably too hard to roll out right away, which calls for even more patience (or, in my case, some vigorous banging with a rolling pin to soften the dough). Once you finally roll it out, you have to let it rest again - preferably for an hour or two - so that it doesn't shrink when it bakes.
The soft-butter method, favored by star bakers such as Pierre Hermé and Eric Kayser, is ill-suited to the impulsive baker - what could be better, after all, than realizing that you have a couple of spare hours in front of you and deciding to treat your family and/or friends to a homemade tart? Enter this foolproof recipe, which I came across in the Books for Cooks no. 7 recipe compilation. This is the standard recipe in the Books for Cooks kitchen, which turns out beautiful cakes and tarts every day, and it has fast become my favorite too.
The ingredients are the same as for traditional pâte sucrée, but the butter comes straight out of the fridge and the water is ice-cold. You could make it by hand, but I've had the best results using the food processor, which keeps the ingredients cool. The magic part of the recipe is that once the dough comes together you roll it out right away, skipping a step that can take up to 12 hours in other recipes. Because the ingredients are cold, the dough is soft, silky and a joy to roll out.
You do need to let the rolled-out dough rest for at least an hour in the refrigerator, but that should be easy to do while you prepare the filling. For some recipes - such as my fig tart with almond cream and this pumpkin pie - I bake the pastry directly with the filling, but you can also bake it blind the standard way, by lining it with parchment paper filled with dried beans or rice. If you freeze the pastry before blind-baking it, you shouldn't need to weigh it down - just keep an eye on it and pop any bubbles with the tip of a knife.
Should you want to use this pastry for a savory tart, all you need to do is leave out the sugar. Try this recipe once and you'll wonder why you would ever go to the trouble of buying ready-made pastry.

Pumpkin pie
Serves 6

Canadian Thanksgiving comes several weeks before the American celebration, which means that I'm usually completely unaware of it. By the time American Thanksgiving rolls around, fall has really come to the Côte d'Azur and I'm in the mood to make this pie. It's a hit with the Niçois, who have been making sweet tarts with vegetables for centuries.

Pastry:
6 oz (1 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour (175 g)
5 tbsp confectioner's (icing) sugar (45 g)
Pinch of salt
3 oz very cold butter, in pieces (90 g)
1 egg yolk
2 tbsp ice water (30 ml)

Filling:
A piece of pumpkin or winter squash weighing a little more than 1 lb (500 g)
A little vegetable oil
2 oz Speculoos biscuits or other spice biscuits
3 eggs
1/2 cup whipping cream (double cream) (125 ml)
4 oz light brown sugar (110 g)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp dried ginger
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
A pinch of salt

For the pastry: Sift the flour and confectioner's sugar and place in the bowl of a food processor with the salt. Pulse once or twice to combine. Add the butter and process until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add the egg yolk and water and process until the dough forms a loose ball. Be careful not to overmix, but do let the dough come together. Turn the dough out onto a board and form into a ball with your hands. Flatten with the heel of your hand.

Flour the board and roll the pastry out quickly, turning it now and then and lightly flouring the board and rolling pin as necessary. Line a tart tin with this pastry, pressing it well into the corners to prevent shrinkage. Let the excess hang over the sides. Trim the pastry or, if your tin has sharp metal edges, cut off the excess with a rolling pin. Then press the pastry a little above the edge of the tin all the way around. Place the pastry in the refrigerator for at least an hour.

For the filling: Lightly oil the pumpkin or squash and bake in the oven at 375 F (180 C) for about 1 hour, until soft. Peel it and purée in a food processor or, better, though a food mill (mouli-légumes) to remove the fibers. If it seems very wet, drain the purée in a fine strainer for a few minutes.

Blend the spice biscuits to coarse crumbs in a blender or food processor, or place them in a plastic bag and crush with a rolling pin.

In a bowl, beat the eggs. Add the pumpkin purée, cream, sugar, spices and salt. Sprinkle the spice biscuit crumbs over the uncooked, chilled pastry and top with the pumpkin filling. Bake at 375 F (180 C) for about 45-50 mins, until the filling is set and lightly browned.

This tart tastes best to me when it's cold, and the cream, although pretty, is a rather unnecessary flourish. If you do use cream, you might like to sweeten it with maple syrup.

Kamut flour pizza

Homemade pizza might not seem like a very grand way to celebrate a birthday, but to that I reply: it depends on what you drink with it.
Accompanied by a bottle of velvety Taittinger Prélude made only from premier cru grapes, this humble standby became a feast worthy of a momentous event in Philippe's life. We had at first thought of takeaway pizza but decided instead, for the same price, to splurge on the best ingredients at the Italian deli.
I came home with a wobbly white ball of buffalo mozzarella, silky Parma ham, spicy sausage, marinated artichokes and bright red confit tomatoes, which are a little juicier than the sundried variety. I also made use of a fresh ewe's milk cheese I had bought at the market and baby spinach leaves (the combination pictured here). But what made the pizza really exciting - to me, anyway - was the crust, for which I used a combination of organic bread flour (type 65 in France) and kamut flour.
Last week at the Biocoop I picked up a small bag of this slightly coarse, creamy-yellow flour, which I had previously known only as the base for a dense bread sold in organic shops. I wasn't sure I wanted to make 100 per cent kamut bread at home, but I suspected it could work well in combination with other flours.
When I want to know more about anything from amaranth to quinoa I always turn to Jenni Muir's invaluable book A cook's guide to grains. Here, I was amused to learn that kamut is a made-up brand name, meaning "soul of the earth" in ancient Egyptian. The grain itself does have ancient roots, and one web site claims that its revival began when a Montana farmer planted seeds that may have come from an Egyptian king's tomb (he obtained the seeds from his son, a World War II pilot).
Whatever its origins, kamut has impressive properties. A relative of durum, it can be grown organically more easily than other wheats and is high in protein, lipids, amino acids, vitamins E and B, and minerals such as magnesium, iron and zinc. Interestingly, despite its high gluten content kamut is often tolerated by people with wheat sensitivity.
For my pizza crust I used 20 per cent kamut, resulting in a pale yellow, slightly sweet dough with a lightly crunchy texture. I mixed and kneaded it by hand, but you could of course make this dough in a food processor, mixer with a dough hook or bread machine.
I don't have a baking stone so coopted my socca tin instead, a heavy copper dish in which this Niçois chickpea pancake is traditionally baked. I let the socca tin get very hot in the oven and slid each pizza onto it, keeping the pizza on a piece of parchment paper. You could use a very hot baking tray instead, the heavier the better.

Does it seem strange to you to drink champagne with pizza? I think there are times when a really good wine tastes best with food that doesn't try to upstage it. Or maybe it's just that I would drink champagne with just about anything.

Though kamut is not a herb, it is a plant so this will be my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, created by Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen and hosted this week by Truffle from What's On My Plate.

Kamut flour pizza
Serves 3 greedy or 4 average people

Apologies to American readers for the lack of cup measures, but the longer I live in France the less I "do" cup measures. Keep in mind that 130 g of flour = 1 cup. If you can't find Kamut flour, feel free to use a small quantity of whole wheat and/or semolina and/or rye flour instead.

The dough:
400 g white bread flour (15 oz)
100 g kamut flour (4 oz)
1 1/2 tsp fine sea salt
1 packet dried yeast
1 tsp light brown cane sugar (or other sugar)
325 ml warm water (1 1/3 cups)

The sauce:
1 tbsp olive oil
1 big, juicy garlic clove
400 g canned Italian crushed tomatoes (15 oz)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp dried oregano
Freshly ground pepper, to taste

Toppings:
Pizza 1: Small pieces of buffalo mozzarella, torn by hand, thin slices of spicy cured sausage, sundried or semi-dried tomatoes
Pizza 2: Small pieces of buffalo mozzarella, torn by hand, Parma ham (prosciutto), marinated artichokes
Pizza 3: Fresh ewe's milk or goat's milk cheese, broken into pieces, sundried or semi-dried tomatoes, fresh baby spinach leaves

For the dough:
Combine the two flours and salt in a large bowl. Heat the water (I use spring water or filtered tap water, but by all means use tap water if yours tastes good!) until warm and combine with the yeast and sugar. Pour this mixture into the bowl with the flours and mix until a dough forms. I start off using a plastic pastry scraper and finish with my hands. Add a little more water if necessary to form a dough that's on the sticky side.
Wash your hands, then oil a work surface and your hands. Knead the dough for a few minutes, until smooth and velvety. Return to the bowl, cover with a plastic bag and set aside to rise for about 45 mins.

For the sauce:
Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over a medium flame. Before it gets very hot, add the chopped garlic. Stir for 30-45 secs, just until the garlic starts to turn pale golden. Add the tomatoes, bring to a boil and add the oregano and salt. Turn the heat to medium, letting the sauce bubble and reduce until thickened (about 10-15 mins). Season with pepper to taste.

When the dough has nearly doubled in size, punch it down and divide into three balls. Set these aside to rest, covered, for a few minutes so they will be easier to roll out. Heat your oven to its maximum setting, placing the rack near the bottom of the oven. Heat your pizza stone or baking tray at the same time.

Roll out each ball of dough quite thinly on a lightly floured board and place on a sheet of parchment paper. You can pile them up if you need to, lightly flouring the surface of the dough.

Prepare the pizzas one at a time, first coating them with a moderate amount of sauce, then scattering the toppings over the sauce. Finish with a drizzling of good olive oil. Using the paper to lift the pizza, transfer it to the hot pan. Bake until the crust is golden, checking underneath to make sure it's lightly browned.

Serve the pizzas as they emerge from the oven.

Baking bread again

The nights are growing nippy here and it's dark by 6pm, but I'm not complaining. For me, the official end of the scorching Niçois summer signals the beginning of bread-baking season.
I've been baking bread on and off for most of my life, but it only started to become a real habit last year. Bread baking, like yoga, is most satisfying if you do a little of it every day - which makes sense, since both are forms of meditation. I've used every imaginable machine to mix bread dough, including my new Thermomix (with good results) and a long-since-abandoned bread machine, but I always come back to using my hands. Kneading dough only takes a few minutes, it's therapeutic for the mind and body, and the satisfaction of cutting into a hand-kneaded loaf is incomparable. Besides, who wants to scrape sticky dough off a sharp blade?
My bread baking reached a turning point when I met Dan Lepard last year. You know when you feel an almost spooky affinity with someone you have just met? Dan and I crossed paths on a press trip to Finland, and from the moment we started talking we just kept talking and talking and talking. Always about bread, and how to make it better. When we discovered a mutual passion for babas au rhum, I knew I had found a kind of dough-mate.
One of Britain's leading bakers, food writers and photographers, Dan is on a quest - or perhaps more of a mission - to improve the quality of British bread. While working as a baker in top London restaurants, necessity led him to a new way of working bread dough. Instead of kneading the dough for 10 full minutes and setting it aside, he would work it for a few seconds, ignore it for a few minutes and come back to it. Lo and behold, the gluten continued to work its magic during these rest periods and the resulting loaves were even better than conventionally kneaded bread.
Dan used this method as the basis for his beautiful book The Handmade Loaf. I bought this book soon after meeting him and over the next few weeks and months worked my way through many of the recipes. I made bread so often that the electric radiator in my kitchen became superfluous: my gas oven easily gave off enough heat to keep the room toasty.
The first and most essential step was to make my own leaven, as most of Dan's recipes call for a natural leaven even if some of them combine this with yeast. Following his detailed instructions, I produced a bubbly, friendly starter that sprang to life as soon as I refreshed it with water and flour.
These loaves are some of the best I have ever turned out, particularly the white leaven bread which could rival that of any French baker. Some of the recipes do, however, demand a certain commitment. Even as a freelance writer who works at home, I don't always find it practical to knead dough at 10 and 15-minute intervals over the course of one or two hours, or make a loaf that takes 9 1/2 hours from start to finish. I alternate these artist's loaves with simpler, quicker breads, sometimes using plain old yeast or a combination of yeast and leaven or dough from a previous batch of bread.
Enter Andrew Whitley and his book Bread Matters: The state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own. As the title suggests, this book spends some time criticizing the state of industrial bread in Britain before showing ways to get around it by making your own from whole grain flours.
Having perfected Dan's leaven method I haven't really explored the one in this book, though I am intrigued by Whitley's Russian rye breads. For now I'm having fun with his second-simplest recipe, bread with old dough. Using dough from a previous batch of bread improves the quality of your loaf, and the longer you do this the better your bread will be: the famous bakery Poilâne in Paris has been using old dough since the 1930s.
Baking with old dough makes me feel slightly virtuous, almost as if I were using leaven but without the pampering attention that natural starter requires. What I also like about this recipe is that it will tolerate just about any combination of flours and the addition of seeds, raisins and/or nuts. Often I make it with half wheat and half spelt flour, adding linseed or sunflower seeds.
Dan Lepard and Andrew Whitley disagree on certain points, but I have picked up valuable advice from both that has changed the way I bake bread. These, for me, are the keys to good bread:
- Dough should be stickier than you think it should be.
If the dough is sticking to your hands, resist the urge at first to add extra flour. The wetter the dough (within reason), the moister the finished bread will be and the longer it will keep. Dan recommends oiling the board and your hands, which I often do as it keeps things tidier (and leaves my skin nice and soft). Andrew Whitley says to just keep working the dough until it becomes smooth, adding a little flour towards the end if necessary. I generally find that with French flours and in Nice's dry climate, I need to increase the liquid in British bread recipes.
- The longer dough takes to rise, the better it will be.
If you have to, you can make bread from start to finish in a couple of hours. But bread needs time to develop character, and the more you can draw out the process the better your finished loaf will be in both texture and flavor. If you work in an office all day, consider letting the dough rise slowly in the refrigerator either overnight or during the day.
- Keep the yeast to a minimum.
Dry yeast gives bread a yeasty flavor that can be overpowering, and a large quantity will make it rise too quickly. I sometimes use less yeast than Andrew Whitley calls for in his old dough recipe, with good results. I'm lucky enough to be able to find cakes of fresh yeast, which is preferred by both bakers, but I have no qualms about using dry yeast in small quantities when I have run out of fresh.
- The water temperature doesn't really matter.
My apologies to both authors, neither of whom would agree with this statement, but I don't think the home baker should get too hung up with water temperature. In winter, I use warmer (but not hot) water and in summer I use cooler (but not ice cold) water. That's it - no formulas, no thermometers.
- Protect your dough with a plastic bag.
I was washing an awful lot of tea towels before I started following Whitley's advice and re-using those pesky plastic bags from the market. The plastic shouldn't touch the dough, and you can even blow into the bag to create a kind of balloon that holds in moisture.

You might be wondering why I would even bother to bake my own bread, when I live in France. Well, I'm about to let you in on a little secret: the bread in Nice is not that good. Not compared to the incredible naturally leavened loaves I can find in Paris, anyway. A wonderful exception is the recently opened Boulangerie Lagache at 20, rue Arson, but that's a post in itself. I should note that the recipe below turns out bread that is quite unlike French bread, with its crisp crust and holey crumb.

I'm not publishing a recipe here from The Handmade Loaf because the instructions for making leaven are too long for my purposes, but I heartily recommend that you buy the book.



Basic Bread
adapted from Bread Matters

Makes 1 large or 2 small loaves

600 g flour (Whitley calls for wholemeal/wholewheat, but I usually use half organic unbleached white flour and half wholemeal wheat or spelt flour)
5 g sea salt (about 1 tsp)
400 g water (about 1 2/3 cups)
8 g (1/3 oz) fresh yeast or 1 tsp dry yeast

Measure the flour and salt into a bowl and combine. Measure the total amount of water and dissolve the yeast in about a quarter of the water. Add the yeast mixture and water to the dry ingredients and combine well (I use my trusty plastic pastry scraper from Dehillerin) until a soft dough forms, adding more water if necessary. Do not add more flour at this point.

Turn the dough out onto a large board - I use marble, even if it's a bit cool. If it's very sticky, rub your hands and the board with a little oil first. Knead the dough for 10 minutes, or until smooth and velvety. Set aside 160 g (6 oz) dough to make your next batch with old dough.

Scrape out any dry scraps from the mixing bowl, washing it if necessary, and return the dough to the bowl for its first rising. Cover with a large plastic bag, blowing into the bag if you like to form a kind of balloon. Set aside to rise in a warm place for up to 2 hours, or in the refrigerator for much longer if you wish.

When the dough has doubled in size, scrape it out onto the board and flatten it into a rectangle (if you are baking it in a loaf tin). Use a little flour so that it doesn't stick, but don't get too carried away. Roll it into a long sausage, then flatten this sausage and fold it in three. Press the dough down into a rectangle and roll it up, without tearing the dough, into a loaf shape.

Grease a large loaf tin with butter and place the dough inside, seam side down. Cover again with plastic, being sure not to let it touch the dough. Set aside to rise until it doubles in size. It should still give some resistance when gently pressed with a finger.

Preheat the oven to 230 C (475 F) or its hottest setting. Bake the loaf for 10 mins, then turn the heat down to 200 C (425 F) and bake for another 30-40 mins, until well browned all over. Turn out of the pan and cool on a rack. Try to resist cutting into the bread until it's completely cool.

Bread with old dough

Follow the above recipe, using:

500 g flour(s) of your choice (1 lb 2 oz)
4 g sea salt (slightly less than 1 tsp)
330 g water (1 1/3 cups)
8 g (1/3 oz) fresh yeast or 1 tsp dried yeast
160 g old dough (6 oz)

Knead all the ingredients except the old dough for five minutes, then add the old dough and knead until smooth.