Showing posts with label Bread. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bread. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 07, 2016
Shahi Tukda or Pauruti'r Ras Malai
I have not seen anyone use "regular white bread" in as many avatars as my Mother. It could be due to the fact that we mostly lived in small towns where buying sweets or shingaras for snack, or when an impromptu guest arrived, was not the easiest thing to do. It could also be due to the fact that we did not have a refrigerator(until I was in 8th grade) and so stocking sandesh and roshogollas for a guest who lands out of nowhere was not possible.It could also be due to the fact that my Mother had this amazing talent of making delicious edibles out of practically nothing.
One thing we did buy regularly was "a loaf of sliced bread". Buttered toasts appeared frequently with tea in the morning.But how much buttered toast can a Bengali household consume after all ? And so rest of the bread showed up at snack time in different avatars.
Neighborhood aunties dropping by for evening tea in winter, meant my Mother would make bread pakora by simply dipping slices of bread in a spiced besan batter and frying them in hot oil.
If it was hot summer, she would simply rustle up a paurutir dahi vada (bread dahi vada) with the yogurt spiced up with some imli chutney from neighborhood Jain Aunty.
For dessert, she would make paurutir malpoa(bread malpua) where squares of bread were fried crisp and then soaked in a sugar syrup until they became soft and melt in the mouth. My father was an avid sweet lover and he needed a dessert every day of the week. This helped!
The Shahi Tukda or Paurutir Rosh Malai was made only when guests came invited for dinner though. It involved a little more work in thickening the milk and making the rabri and so was not really impromptu. However once my Ma discovered "Gits Rabri Mix", even this became a super fast dish in her kitchen.
I did not know that this very simple dish that happened in my Mother's kitchen had a fancy name of "Shahi Tukda" and a fancier lineage, until our dessert connoisseur friend T served it one day. Her version looked fancier than my Ma's, who never bothered with garnishing and such.
As I searched for history of this dish, I learned interesting facts from here
"It is popularly believed that Shahi Tukray was a favorite of the Mughal emperors to break fast with in the month of Ramazan, thus the practice continues even today making it a very desirable dish at iftar, and a meetha famously served at the festive occasions of Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul-Azha.
There are many who claim that Shahi Tukray evolved from Um Ali an ancient Egyptian bread pudding. Legend has it that a Sultan with a group of hunters was hunting along the River Nile when they stopped in nearby village for some food. The villagers called upon their local cook Um Ali to cook up a meal for the hungry guests. The chef mixed some stale wheat bread, nuts, milk and sugar, and baked it in the oven. And thus the delicious Um Ali came to be. Another legend claims Um Ali to be a victory dessert made to order by a succeeding king."
While Shahi Tukda owes its origin to the Mughal emperors, the royals of Hyderabad had adapted this dish to make "Double ka Meetha", probably named so as bread was called "double roti" in Hindi.
Whatever you wish to call it and however fancy it may sound, it really is the easiest thing to make. And isn't it a beautiful coincidence that I made it during the holy Ramadan ?
Friday, November 22, 2013
Banana Bread with Orange zest, Fractions and Happiness
Banana Bread is becoming a frequent bake at our home these days.
We deliberately leave out two bananas from the bunch
When they are sufficiently soft and brown and almost ready to be trashed, the moment when I should have cranked up the oven and actually made the bread, I put them 'bananas" in the refrigerator. There they decay further.Albeit at a slower pace and in a cooler environment. I am sure the bananas are ever grateful to me for that.
Then when the FDA arrival looms large and I am pretty sure that I can do with some happiness in life I make the banana bread
You all know that banana has "serotonin", right ? The neurotransmitter which is thought to be a contributor of happiness. Well, I don't know about banana but carbs like white rice with musurir dal and buttered toast with sprinkle of sugar on it defintely makes me happy. The banana bread does too and that is why we finish off all of that loaf in a single day. All in pursuit of happiness.
This weekend, 80% of the baking work was done by BS and LS. They measured, mixed and did the clean up. I put it in the oven. And then I took it out.
LS wrote out the instructions saying Stir, Mix, Clean |
I don't have a family hand-me-down recipe for banana bread as my Mother never ever made one for my or anyone else's happiness. She made "kolar bora"-- sweet fritters -- with over ripened bananas instead. So the laurels of success of my banana bread now currently rests on Food Network. This is the recipe I have been following like a zombie for sometime now. So far it has failed me only once. Which is a good sign.Also the fact that the recipe calls for oil and not butter gives me some kind of relief.
Now given that there is already a recipe, why you think, I need to replicate and write it down again here. Well, the reason is Fractions. Baking recipes are a good way to introduce kids to fractions and that is what we did some years ago. That 4 of the 1/4th cups make 1 whole cup was a revelation in Arithmetic. Ahem. Scoff, Scoff. Of course, my generation got introduced to fractions without any cake to bake and we are darn good at it but then that was "tomader shomoy"(your time) as the girls like to say.
Without being cynical though, cups and measures and letting the kids handle them does give them a real life example of fractions. The fact that 2 of the quarter cups fill up a half cup or that 5/4th cup actually fills up 1 whole cup with 1/4th left over becomes more real when done with flour and sugar.
Recently for her fractions class, BS's math teacher gave them a homework, where they were supposed to get recipes of cookies and cakes and then quarter them, halve them, triple them or do some fraction conversion on them. Only of course she mentioned that the recipes should include mixed numbers. Which means the recipe should call for 11&3/8 th cup of flour and 3&2/5 th tbsp of butter. Which also means recipes I stay miles away from.
So, what I did is, I took my simple banana bread recipe, an awesome Lemon Yogurt cake recipe and this Hershey's Chocolate recipe and then changed around all the ingredient measures so that the banana bread now asked for 4&11/18th of bananas and 18/16th tsp of baking powder. She did her homework. I breathed easy.
I am eternally grateful that we didn't use those measures to bake. While baking the bread we stuck to the base recipe and asked BS to merely halve it. That was like child's play for her. Just like baking the bread was.
Original Recipe
Banana Bread
Dry Ingredient
1 cup of AP Flour
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp salt
To make Wet Ingredient
1 egg
1/2 cup Sugar
2 very ripe bananas
1/4th Cup Vegetable Oil
1/2 tsp Vanilla
How I Did It
Pre-heat oven to 350F
Wet Ingredients
In my Magic Bullet Blender jar put
1 egg cracked
1/2 cup Sugar
Mix for a minute, at 30 sec steps
To the above put
2 very ripe bananas
Give a whizz until bananas is mushed up
To the above add
1/4th Cup Vegetable Oil
1/2 tsp Vanilla
Mix again for about 2 minutes, at 30 sec step
You have your wet ingredient ready
Dry Ingredient
In a separate bowl add
1 cup of AP Flour
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp salt
Combine lightly
Slowly add the wet ingredient to the dry, mixing gently with a spatula. If you are adding walnuts, add 2 tbsp of chopped walnuts to the batter.
Add 1 tsp of orange zest if possible and pinch of cinnamon. The orange zest lends a very nice flavor to the bread so do try if you have.
Pour out in a 9x5 loaf pan, put in the oven and bake for 40 mins to 1 hr. Chances are after 40 mins, you will see the top has browned and has started to crack.
Then check the bread for done-ness by inserting a toothpick at 2-3 points.
Different ovens and different material loaf pans kind of change the bake time so I suggest this after 40 mins:
If inside is raw, cover the bread lightly with an aluminum foil and bake for the rest 20 mins.
If inside is done, take it out and let it cool.
Now take out of the oven and let it cool. The oven part needs to be handled by the adults but all else can be done by 9-10yrs old and up with little supervision.
Eat. All of it.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
A Rich Bread Pudding -- with chocolate and some liqueuer
August is a confusing month.
It is still summer but there is a faint hint of Fall in the air. You can feel that invisible tug in your heart, the one that whispers about colder days and bare trees.
When the alarm rings 5:30 in the morning, it is now dark outside and the dull yellow of the street lights seem kind of tired waiting for the sun to rise.The early sunrise and eager chirping of the birds are missing.I shush the alarm and snuggle into the quilted comforter.
Early morning when I juggle a coffee mug, a juice jar and umpteen bags, trying my best to slide into my car with minimum drama, I see fine drops of water droplets on the windshield. My heart skips a bit and the juice spills over.
The kids still play outside and draw on the sidewalk or ride their bike but the sun seems to plunge down early and by 8 in the evening big blobs of darkness has fallen around us. It is night, already, we ask ? Even a few days back we went for twilight icecream at 8:30.
You feel the days getting shorter. And yet you feel happy, lucky to cherish the warmth and the luxury of the remaining summer days.
August is also a special month for us, a year older, a year together, lessons learned, tears forgotten. For her birthday in August, LS did not want a party this year. Instead she wanted to spend it in a park and if it is an amusement park with rides that soar high she did not even want a present. So off we went to one such park that also had a chocolate factory next door, a 3 hour drive away to spend 3 days riding high and having fun. I mean I didn't. I mean I had fun but thank you no rides for me. LS had too much fun riding everything permissible with BS and BS's best friend who had come along with us. It was much fun to see the three girls together and though I spent 99% of the time just watching, I must say I had a good time.
Back home we are now getting ready for the new school year. Folders, Binders, notebooks, sharpened pencils are being bought. School is still 3 weeks away but I guess we are kind of ready for it. As much as we will miss summer, there are lot of things to look forward to.
And to pep up the feeling there can be nothing better than a warm oven and a home that smells of sweet vanilla and spicy cinnamon. So the husband man baked a bread pudding, a rich, delicious affair. The trusted recipe was from T, the one of the Tiramisu fame.
This bread pudding was exotic, at least it was very different from the bread pudding my Ma used to make very often. This one was rich, dense, gooey with all that chocolate and soft soaking in a sauce made with Irish Cream liqueur. It was PURE BLISS and I don't even like throwing my uppercases around.
If you are like me and lamenting the loss of summer, you should totally make this bread pudding. It will make you so happy that you will start craving snow and thick fleece blankets. Maybe it is the liqueur doing the talking but you will never know unless you crank up the oven and tear up that bread.
The recipe here is in T's exact words, so the "I" is actually "T". She wrote it in first person. Get it ?
The husband-man followed the recipe like a Bible.Okay, that might not amount to much. What I want to say is,He followed the recipe exactly as written.And you better do that too.
Bread pudding
14 cups 3/4-inch cubes white bread with crust (about 12 ounces) - apparently French bread would have worked better, but I used just plain store bought white bread
6 ounces bittersweet (not unsweetened) or semisweet chocolate, chopped
4 ounces imported white chocolate, chopped
4 large eggs
1/2 cup plus 4 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
pinch of cinnamon powder
2 cups whipping cream
Nonstick vegetable oil spray
For bread pudding:
Combine bread, chocolate, and white chocolate in large bowl; toss to blend. Using electric mixer, beat eggs, 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, cinnamon and vanilla in another large bowl to blend. Gradually beat in 1 1/2 cups cream. Add cream mixture to bread mixture; stir to combine. Let stand 30 minutes. (Here it should have stood about an hour, or an hour plus, but I was running short on time!)
Preheat oven to 350°F. Spray 13x9x2-inch glass baking dish with nonstick spray. Transfer bread mixture to prepared dish, spreading evenly. Drizzle with remaining 1/2 cup cream. (I didn't do this, I felt it was sweet enough ->) Sprinkle with remaining 2 tablespoons sugar.
Bake pudding until edges are golden and custard is set in center, about 1 hour. Cool pudding slightly, serve warm.
The sauce
1/2 cup whipping cream
6 tablespoons Irish cream liqueur
1/4 cup sugar (I didn't add this, was sweet enough already!)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Since I felt my bread pudding could do with a little more moisture, I didn’t thicken the sauce to drizzle consistency, rather kept it creamy and poured it in. Also I felt the bread pudding was sweet enough, so didn't add the sugar.
Mmmmm...just writing this is driving me into a tizzy... a tizzy.. is there a word like that ? I cannot wait to eat this again. Soon
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