BAKE!

Empanadas for a Winter Weekend

 Photo by Jessica Randazza

My first empanadas were a recipe from Argentina shared by Ana Rambaldi who never met a recipe she couldn't bake to perfection.  When I was planning recipes for BAKE! I decided to try some empanadas with a Mexican twist for the puff pastry chapter.  Mexican friends gave them the seal of approval and I included it in the book.  The ones pictured were made by my students at a class at ICE last Tuesday evening and I was happy to see how quickly they came together.  And since both the filling and the dough can be made a day or two in advance, they only take a few minutes to assemble.

These empanadas are filled with picadillo, a simmered mixture of ground beef, aromatics, and tomato puree, that's a standard in the Latino food world.  Picado means chopped in Spanish, as all the ingredients are.  Aside from its use as an empanada filling, picadillo is often served with rice and beans, not bad at all either...

 

Baking and Tradition: Galette des Rois

 

Today pastry shop windows in France and most of the rest of Europe are overflowing with galettes or gâteaux des rois, or king cakes, in honor of the Feast of the Three Kings or Epiphany, also know as Twelfth Night, on January 6.  The kings in question were the Magi of Christian religious tradition who followed the gleaming star to Bethlehem with gifts for the newborn Christ child, arriving 12 days after his birth.  In most places the feast is celebrated with a brioche-like cake enriched with candied and/or dried fruit and shaped like a giant doughnut.  Paris pastry shops offer a more tailored version of the cake (recipe follows) similar to a gâteau Pithiviers with a rich almond filling baked between two disks of puff pastry.  The king cake of the New Orleans Mardi Gras also ties into this: there as in many other cities and countries the carnival season that ends with Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, begins on January 6.

Even more traditions are associated with gateau/galette des rois.  Today, when you buy one in a Paris pastry shop you’ll also receive a gold paper crown for the “king” who finds the fève, originally a dried fava bean, in his portion of the cake.  By the middle of the 19th century, the beans were already being replaced by tiny porcelain figurines of a baby; today’s fèves may be anything from a cartoon character (the French love Smurfs which they refer to as Schtroumpfs) to a caricature of a sports hero.  The tiny loaves of bread next to the galette in the photo are fèves.  The king either buys a round of drinks or brings the cake to the next party; in Mexico the king supplies tamales for a celebration on Candelmas Day, February 2.  My favorite and very Parisian observance dictates that although the president of France may enjoy as many galettes des rois as he likes, both fèves and crowns are prohibited since it would be unseemly to select or crown a king in the Elysée Palace…

Here’s the recipe from my book, A Baker’s Tour, published in 2005.  The Quickest Puff Pastry recipe that follows is really quick and easy to prepare, but don’t hesitate to use bought (all butter, please) puff pastry.

GALETTE DES ROIS

Makes one 12-inch round cake

BAKE! on Martha Stewart TV

 

I was thrilled when my old friend and former student Greta Anthony phoned me in mid-August about appearing on a show about teachers with Martha Stewart.  The whole audience, 185 people strong, would be teachers, and each would receive a copy of BAKE!  Another call from Greta closer to the air date let me know that Martha wanted to make the food-processor version of Quick Puff Pastry from the book. 

When the appointed day arrived (last Wednesday) I got to the studio early (some audience members were already lined up at 6:45 am) to go over all the food prep with the kitchen staff.  Thomas Joseph, a several year veteran of the Martha TV kitchen, had prepped everything so perfectly I only had to add a few finishing touches.  Martha has always employed top-notch people, but Thomas stood out as particularly organized and helpful. 

It was Hollywood on the Hudson - private dressing rooms for the guests, friendly and accommodating staff people everywhere, and then just as I was being walked to the set a few minutes before air time, Martha herself, looking radiant.  "Why, I haven't seen you since we made strudel together," Martha said as we fell in together in the corridor.  I reminded her that I had also done a buttercrunch segment and another on molded cookies when her media efforts were housed in a large built-to-order space in Westport, a few miles from her then house. 

Both segments flew by, but I'll let you watch them rather than describe them.  Here are the links: 

Segment 1:  Ox Tongues

Segment 2:  Fig and Raspberry Croustades

The recipes are posted with the video clips on Martha's website.

Walking back to the kitchen after the second segment, Martha presented me with a beautiful wooden bucket filled with apples "from my own trees," she said.  In the taxi on the way home I bit into a shiny MacIntosh, perfectly crisp and just tart enough.  It had been quite a morning.