Gerry's Kringle

Today, making kringles is a team effort at Tree-Top Baking, with Gerry and Larry taking turns mixing, laminating, shaping, etc. but back in the days when the bakery was just starting and Larry still had a full-time job off-island, Gerry made the kringles all by himself, week after week, the staccato beat of his big rolling pin on rock-hard butter his only company and thoughts of happy customers flocking to the market his lone motivation.
I have been captivated by Gerry's Danish kringle from the first time I saw and tasted it. Not only is it picture-perfect and melt-in-your-mouth scrumptious, the delicate pastry a crunchy accompaniment to the sweet duo of flavors inside: almond cream and tangy raisins, my favorites! But it also evoked achingly dear memories of long gone family members: my beloved mother-in-law was half-Danish half-Russian and when we were in Denmark not a birthday or holiday went by without a festive kringle bedecked with tiny paper Danish flags.
In between these kringles of long ago and Gerry's there had been none. So when I took that first bite, the layers of reminiscence were almost as delectable as the layers of flaky dough.

Of course I asked Gerry if he would teach me how to make a kringle and he agreed. He and Larry now own a sheeter, so they don't laminate their dough by hand anymore but he said he would make an exception for the occasion and show me how it could be done at home (see video below).
I arrived at the bakery at the appointed date and time. Remember how glorious the day was when I took the ferry over to see Larry make his sprouted spelt bread? Well, on that winter day it was nothing like it. The sky was streaked with grey and the sea opaque.

At the bakery, the welcome was just as warm as last time although the bakers were busy making not only two dozen other kringles but panettone and stollen. The radio was piping soft holiday music. Christmas was definitely in the air...

Stollen proofing

Panettone cooling

Cookie waiting to be boxed

Gerry started on the kringle...

Even though he was only making one kringle for us today, Gerry mixed enough dough for four. He says otherwise the dough tends to climb up the hook and generally drive the baker crazy. It is easy enough to shape and bake two kringles and to store the other half of the dough in the freezer for the next batch. The filling can be made ahead of time and kept in the freezer forever.

Ingredients (for four kringles) For the dough

• 580 g unbleached all-purpose flour
• 232 g water
• 35 g sugar
• 9 g salt
• 87 g eggs
• 10 g instant dry yeast
• 29 g butter

For the lamination

• 450 g butter

For the filling (120 g per kringle x 4)

• 141 g almond paste
• 170 g sugar, granulated
• 141 g butter
• 283 g flour
• 11 g salt
• 23 g vanilla extract
• 160 g raisins, to be sprinkled on the filling (40 g per kringle)

For the topping

• 120 g sliced almonds (30 g per kringle)
• 120 g sparkling white sugar (the shiny type that doesn't melt) (30 g per kringle)

Method (Because of its stiffness, this dough is machine-mixed)

Desired dough temperature: 77 to 80 °F/25 to 27°C

1. Put all the ingredients in the bowl of the mixer (holding back some of the water) and mix for three minutes on first speed until incorporated
2. Mix six to eight minutes on second speed until fully developed
3. Let rest for one hour at room temperature, then place on a lightly floured sheet pan and put in the freezer for at least one hour covered with a plastic
4. Meanwhile laminate the butter to plasticize it and put it in the refrigerator (you want to have the dough and the butter at the same temperature but dough cools down much slower than butter. You want to put it in the freezer to speed up the process. Another method would be to mix the dough ahead of time and freeze it, then take it out the evening before baking, let it thaw in the fridge overnight and proceed with the laminating in the morning. Gerry stresses that anytime you defrost dough, you have to go really slowly,  otherwise the outside ferments while the center remains frozen)
5. Prepare the almond filling: put almond paste in the mixer and gradually add room temperature butter until smooth; then (and only then) add the remaining ingredients and cream until fluffy (the almond filling can be made ahead of time and frozen
6. Roll in the butter and give the dough three 3-way folds (allowing the dough to rest in the fridge for 45 minutes between each fold)
7. Scale the dough at 341 g, roll out to 6 x 32 inches
8. Paint edges of the dough with water
9. Put a long strip of filling in the center (note that the filling needs to be at room temperature when you pipe or spread it. Otherwise the dough will rip)
10. Sprinkle with raisins, fold shut
11. Shape and proof at 85 to 90°F/29 to 32°C for 45 minutes to one hour, depending on how cold the dough was
12. Sprinkle with sliced almonds and sparkling white sugar
13. Bake for 10 minutes at 400°/204°C (no steam) then for 14 minutes at 350°F/177°C
14. Cool on a rack
15. Enjoy!

When I left the bakery with my beautiful kringle, the sky was still light...

But when I got to the ferry, darkness was swallowing up the clouds and the sea was choppy... The crossing is so short though that I barely noticed it.

All I know is that another layer of happy memories was added to the kringle... Thank you, Gerry!

The kringle is going to Wild Yeast for Yeastspotting.

Maison Kayser: Le restaurant du boulanger (The Baker's Restaurant)

Gourmets will tell you that wine and food should complement each other. Restaurants therefore sometimes go to great length to pair different wines with different dishes. In Gaillac (in Southwestern France), we once dined at a restaurant where you could pick either your menu or your wines but not both as the chef was adamant he wasn't going to let his carefully prepared meal be marred by the choice of the wrong wines. It wasn't a fancy place and my very elderly parents (with whom we were traveling) were a bit taken aback: in all his born days, my Dad had never heard of such a display of authority by a restaurant owner. Since he wasn't about to let anybody dictate his choice of wines though (too momentous a decision), he picked one for each of his three courses (he obviously wasn't the designated driver) and ended up quite happy with the dishes that accompanied them (anticipatory curiosity probably had a lot to do with it as I don't recall the cuisine as particularly memorable). We did the opposite and picked the dishes and were equally happy with the mystery wines that were brought with them. Altogether a different kind of dinner and a fun evening...
But have you ever been to a restaurant where food is systematically paired with bread? Well, thanks to Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, author of the compelling Dictionnaire universel du pain (a must-have reference for French-speaking breadophiles) whom I met in Paris last week and who recommended I try Maison Kayser's new restaurant in Bercy Village, I now have and I love the idea. The restaurant is so new that at the time of this writing, it isn't even listed on the Kayser website.  
It is located 47, Cour Saint-Émilion in the 12th arrondissement. Prices are not cheap but considering the location, they aren't outrageous either: a lunch consisting of an appetizer plus an entrée or an entrée plus a dessert (I am not a dessert person so I picked the soup but the Kayser desserts are gorgeous) will set you back €14,90 (about $20) per person, tax and service included.

I took this picture of Kayser pastries at Europain as the Kayser bakeries seem to have a very strict policy against in-store photography. At the restaurant they reluctantly let me photograph what was in the plate in front of me when I told them I would blog about it but they clearly didn't like it. So I kept it to a minimum.

Of course pairing food and bread isn't a revolutionary concept in France. Certain cheeses are best accompanied by specific breads, oysters on the half-shell are traditionally served with thin slices of buttered rye bread and my paternal grandmother wouldn't have dreamed of serving her famous "civet de lièvre" (hare stewed in red wine) without "galettes de sarrazin" (buckwheat crêpes).  But Eric Kayser, the famous Parisian baker whose liquid levain tsunamied through the home-baking web some years ago, went one step further recently by opening a restaurant where each course is served with a different bread.

Among other offerings, the menu pairs "coeur de sucrine" (bib lettuce salad) with pain au levain, foie gras with fig bread (a classic), lamb tagine with olive bread, entrecôte Béarnaise with buckwheat pavé, etc. It doesn't make use of the full array of Kayser breads but I suspect the breads will change with the seasons. What I had was both light, tasty and fresh. Ironically though, the mushroom soup that I picked as an appetizer was supposed to be served with a slice of buckwheat pavé (garnished with slivers of smoked salmon) and it actually came with turmeric bread, the very same bread that also accompanied the main course (poached chicken breast and vegetables with horseradish sauce). I didn't even notice because we were too busy talking and by the time I did, it was too late. So if you go, make sure you get the "right bread" for your dish. It wasn't a big deal (I couldn't see myself  complaining about fragrant turmeric bread studded with almonds, nuts and hazelnuts) but the whole idea was to try a new bread with each course and that didn't work as planned!

Still we had a most pleasant lunch. Of course it doesn't hurt that Maison Kayser is located in picturesque Cour Saint-Émilion, the center of the French wine trade in the 19th century and well into the 20th. The friend we were with had grown up in the Marais and has fond memories of coming to Bercy with her father to pick up small barrels of wine for family consumption (I too grew up in a family where wine was normally bought by the barrel and bottled at home but our barrels usually came straight from the producers and I never visited Bercy when I was a kid). 

The neighborhood has grown on me though and Parc de Bercy has become one of my favorite spots for dreaming in the city. And now that it has a good bakery, I can even dream about living there, cooking my way through my favorite recipes and pairing them off with the whole gamut of Kayser breads...

Meet Solange Couve, Artisan Jam-Maker

Related post: Pear-Chestnut Confit

I don't often write about non-bread magic but I must share with you this visit to Solange Couve, jam-maker extraordinaire who lives with her husband Stéphane (whom we didn't get to meet as he was away visiting his mother), her dog Victor and her two cats, Lulu and Lily, in a remote corner of the Ardèche department in south-central France. From the highway it takes about 45 minutes and hundreds of steep curves on very narrow roads (we were glad to be traveling on a holiday when traffic was sparse) to reach the farm.

New vistas opened up with each turn in the road and if it had been possible to stop more often (alas, opportunities to just get off the road and admire the landscape were few and far between), I could have taken dozens of pictures, all different. It's easy to understand why so many of my French friends rave about vacationing in the Ardèche backcountry.

Like Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, the farm is literally located at the end of the road.

The farmhouse has remained pretty much as it was when Solange and her husband decided to make it their permanent home 27 years ago. The sink has remained the same, the doors and walls were repainted in their original colors and the volumes were not altered.

Solange and Stéphane happened upon the farm one day while traveling in the area and fell in love with it at first sight. It then belonged to two elderly sisters who, as it turned out, were only too glad to sell and move away. The surrounding land had been left idle for 20 years although some of it was being farmed by neighbors. The couple led a busy life in Paris where Stéphane was a dentist with a thriving practice and Solange, who was a real estate agent, spent her week commuting from the capital to central France and to Corsica. In other words, they mostly saw their new house as a destination point for downtime.

After a few years however the pull of the farm became too strong to resist. Stéphane sold his practice and bought a new one in the Rhone valley, about 45 minutes away. As for Solange, she decided to forego real estate and to become a farmer. Now for that dream to become reality, two things needed to happen: the land had to be cleared up (a process which involved an enormous amount of manual labor) and Solange needed to acquire notions of agriculture. Not a woman to be easily deterred, she enrolled in an agricultural studies program in Valence and spent a year learning everything there was to know about trees: how to plant and prune them, how to take care of them, etc. When that was done, she spent another year learning about food-processing to find out all she could about sugar chemistry. An overkill, she soon realized, for someone whose only aspiration was to learn how to make jam properly. But Solange is nothing if not thorough and she forged ahead.

Meanwhile the land had been cleared and planted with close to 4 acres of fruit-trees. Since the Ardèche is raspberry-heaven, Solange also planted 2.5 acres of raspberry bushes as well as red and black currant bushes. For the first 10 years, she produced on average 6 tons of raspberries a year and sold them fresh to the local cooperative. Then the raspberry bushes were hit by some illness and had to be ripped out. She decided to diversify.

Using no other ingredients than fruit (pears, apricots, peaches, quinces, berries, etc.) from her land and sugar, she started producing more than 5 tons of jam a year which she sold mostly to luxury hotels and restaurants and to high-end grocery stores and bakeries as well as to fruit and vegetable markets which offer a small artisanal product section.

Since she had kept the chestnut-trees (the Ardèche is famous for its chestnuts) which were on the property when they bought it, she embarked on a trial-and-error learning process which taught her how to turn her chestnuts into delicious marrons glacés (candied chestnuts), crème de marrons (chestnut spread) and purée de marrons (chestnut purée). She also learned how to make pear-chestnut confit, an exquisite concoction which can be served with a brioche as a light dessert at the end of a holiday meal or poured over fromage blanc (soft curd cheese). As soon as she mentioned it over the phone, I knew I wanted to learn how to make it and report on it on the blog (after all, it could tempt you to make a brioche to go with it!).

Today Solange is semi-retired. She has kept her workshop (located about 2 miles away from the farm) but she only works for a few luxury hotels and restaurants on the Côte d'Azur and in the Alps as well as for family and friends. She still makes marrons glacés and other chestnut delicacies, including the confit, but she no longer sells them (too much work). I wish I could describe in details the lunch and dinner ardéchois she prepared for us and the extraordinary breakfast that awaited us in the morning featuring grape juice from her own grapes, no less (they grow on the vine that shades the big table just outside the kitchen door), but it would be off subject. Suffice it to say that Solange loves to cook and that her imagination is bottomless when it comes to extracting as much flavor as possible from the fruit and vegetables she grows on her land. We were awed!

Pear-Chestnut Confit

Related story: Meet Solange Couve, Artisan Jam-Maker

Chestnuts are abundant in the Ardèche where they are used in a variety of dishes, some sweet and some savory, and even in bread. To make this confit, Solange uses chestnuts from her own chestnut-trees.

She also uses pears from her orchard (she only grows Williams pears). The ones she uses in this particular dish are the last of the season and she has saved them for the demo. 2010 hasn't been a great year for pears: last year the pear-trees yielded a huge crop of very big pears but this year, they struggled to produce fewer and much smaller fruit. Still the pears seem marvelously fragrant and juicy to me.

For this recipe, the pears are first peeled...

... then cooked in syrup until they become translucent.

As for the chestnuts, they are cut horizontally in a circle, then boiled briefly to slightly loosen their two layers of skin. Once peeled, they are cooked in boiling water before being added to the pears. Preserved chestnuts in syrup can also be used, whether home-made or store-bought.

Solange uses a special knife to cut through the chestnuts but as demonstrated in the video below, a regular paring knife can also be used.Previously, when she was processing her chestnuts for commercial purposes, she had them peeled in the village by an artisan who uses a less labor-intensive technique: he places the chestnuts inside a rotating cylinder perforated with many small holes and uses a flame-thrower. The flames lick the outside of the cylinder, burning away most of the skins. The chestnuts are next dipped in water then placed on a rolling mat where the remaining skins are removed by hand. The perfect ones can be used whenever a recipe calls for whole chestnuts whereas the other ones are puréed and used in other recipes.

Solange says that it is best to let fresh chestnuts dry out a little as they are easier to peel if they have shrunk a little. Store-bought ones are usually somewhat dry already, so this step can be skipped. Since the skins are easier to remove when the chestnuts are hot, it is almost guaranteed to be a challenging exercise and caution is de rigueur. If one isn't really partial to burned fingers, it is best to use chestnuts preserved in syrup as a less hazardous alternative.

Ingredients:

1 liter of water

400 g crystallized sugar

10 pears

10 big fat chestnuts (or their equivalent in broken pieces)

1 vanilla bean (from Tahiti if available)

Method:

1. Peel and cook the chestnuts as described above. Solange cautions that the chestnuts need to be peeled while still hot as their skin starts to stick again when they cool down.
2. Heat water in a medium-size wide and shallow pot (to facilitate evaporation) and add the sugar
3. Slice open the vanilla bean and scrape the tiny grains into the syrup, then add the two halves of the vanilla bean to the pan
4. While the syrup is boiling, peel and core the pears and cut them in quarters
5. Plunge them delicately into the boiling syrup and let them simmer. Refrain from handling them as they cook. To avoid breaking them, do not flip them over
6. When the pears are translucent, gently add the chestnuts with some of their cooking water and let the syrup thicken again
7. Pour into jars when done. The confit will keep for a couple of weeks in the fridge. To extend its shelf life, it is imperative to sterilize the jars, a precaution that Solange takes systematically. She places all her jars in a big pot, covers them with cold water, then bring the water to a boil and lets the whole thing boil at 176°F/89°C for 15 minutes. None of her jars has ever spoiled.

Unfortunately my version of iMovie doesn't allow me to add subtitles or I would have done so. But I can at least tell you what Solange is saying in this video clip (and please excuse my use of the French word "translucide" for "translucent" in the spoken dialogue. After two weeks of complete French immersion, I clearly had a hard time switching my aging neurones to English!).

• When adding the pears to the syrup, make sure they are completely immersed and let them simmer
• When preparing the chestnuts for peeling, cut through both skins all around. It is a bit hard to do but but when cut that way, both skins loosen simultaneously in boiling water.
• Using a chestnut knife makes cutting the chestnuts in a circle a bit easier but a regular paring knife can be used as well
• It doesn't matter if the cut penetrates the flesh of the chestnut
• After peeling, the chestnuts need to be cooked before they can be added to the pears
• Add some of the chestnut cooking water to the syrup in the pear pan, so that it can thicken again without caramelizing
• It doesn't matter if the chestnuts crumble when added to the pears. In fact if using preserved chestnuts you probably want to break them a bit at this point.