Baps: The Breakfast Bread of Scotland

In a recent post on Serious Eats, Ed Levine took one for the team and found us a collection of great sandwiches to be found in Manhattan. Even though I am far from that city, I read Ed's posts (and devour his pictures) with glee. One of his sandwiches was served on a bap, which he'd not heard of before.

Being the seriously geeked-out food-trivia maven that I am, I immediately leapt in to let him know that baps are a type of Scottish roll, traditionally eaten at breakfast (you can eat them at lunch and dinner too - they make nice sandwiches after all).

Elizabeth David's extensive volume English Bread and Yeast Cookery provides a quick discussion of baps. The traditional bap is just a yeasted roll: very plain and simple. Baps can be enhanced with potato, onion and/or herbs to liven them up. The addition of potato is a helpful one in that it keeps breads fresh-tasting.

Today I made a batch of traditional baps. The dough is not kneaded, it's just stirred together and left to rise. This dough makes a dense, finely textured bread. The crumb will be a little moist. It reminded me a little of a bagel, without as much chewiness. All the recipes I read recommended that baps be eaten right after baking. "Older" ones should be heated or toasted to refresh them.

Here's a basic recipe for baps from David's book. I strongly recommend you add this volume to your bread baking collection. It's full of great stories and anecdotes, not to mention a thorough discussion of breads (quick and yeasted) . She also provides a lot of detailed information on bread ovens, baking equipment, yeasts and flours. Sure, you've heard of scones, crumpets and muffins, but what about manchets, barmbracks or coburgs?

Basic Baps
Makes 8-10 baps

• 2/3 cup water, warm
• 2/3 cup milk, warm
  
• 1 3/4 teaspoons yeast
• 3 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons salt
• extra milk for brushing the bread
• flour for dusting

Mix together water, milk and yeast.

Put the flour and salt in a large bowl. Stir in the liquids. Stir until the dough until it is well mixed. If the dough is too stiff, add extra milk to loosen it up (it should be doughy, but not solid). Cover the bowl and let the dough rise for 1 1/2 - 2 hours. It will not double in size.

Heat your oven to 425 degrees.

Dump the dough onto a floured counter and the cut it into 8 to 10 equal pieces. Form them into an oval, flattish roll. Place them on a baking sheet. Cover with plastic and let them rest for 30 minutes.

Brush each bap with milk and then dust them with flour. Poke your thumb into the center of each bap to make an indentation. Bake them for about 15 minutes, until light gold (they will stay fairly pale).

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The Milkmaid's Kitchen: Ricotta

Cheesemaking at home sounds scary and/or exotic to many people. I am not going to tell you that it's easy to produce an English farmhouse cheddar in your kitchen (although you could do it if you wanted to), but there are many simple projects that you can tackle without too much (if any) special equipment. This is one of them.

Cheesemaking is a fairly basic process: milk is heated to a specific temperature and a coagulant or starter is added to cause the milk to form curds and whey (remember Little Miss Muffet?). What kind of cheese you end up with depends on the type of milk, the type of starter, the temperature(s) you use and whether you use the curd or whey.

Ricotta was traditionally made as a way to use up the whey that is produced when other cheeses (like mozzarella or parmesan) are made. Cheesemaking is a great way to use up excess milk, but you will end up with more whey than curds. (See the picture below to see how much ricotta I got vs. how much whey I was left with.) A whole group of whey-based cheeses was developed to use up all that whey. Take a look at the supermarket dairy case sometime: any mozzarella manufacturer (Dragone, Polly-O, Sargento, etc.) also produces ricotta. That's not just because they want to be your one-stop-shop for lasagna ingredients.

Now for those of us who are working on a smaller scale, like you and me, ricotta is best made from milk, not whey (because you need a lot of whey to get any useful yield). So, technically, what we are making in this recipe is more like queso fresco or fresh paneer. But, it looks like ricotta, behaves like ricotta, and tastes like ricotta. So there. You wanna call it something else, that's fine with me.

Now, finally, the recipe (totally lifted from Heidi at 101 Cookbooks). To make more, just double, triple, quadruple the recipe - the technique is the same, the only major differences will be the length of time is takes to come up to temp and to drain sufficiently. The only special pieces of equipment you need are a thermometer (deep frying or candy thermometer are fine) and cheesecloth or a very fine-mesh strainer.

Homemade Ricotta Cheese
Yields about 2 cups of ricotta and 6-7 cups of whey

• One-half gallon milk (Use good quality milk - there isn't much else providing flavor to this cheese, so it's worth paying extra for local, fresh milk. I have used both whole milk and 2% milk, you could try skim or 1% if you want, but I can't vouch for the results)
• 2 cups buttermilk
  
• salt to taste

Put the milk and buttermilk in a pot large enough to hold them. Heat over a medium heat. You will see curds start to form. Occasionally, gently stir the pot, making sure the milk isn't scorching on the bottom of the pot.

When the milk reaches 175 degrees (this takes about 15 minutes), you will see the curds floating in the whey (you'll know it when you see it - no worries). Turn off the heat and let the milk sit for a few minutes.

Now you need to drain the ricotta: Moisten your cheesecloth and lay it into a colander or strainer over a bowl (if you want to use the whey - see below) or in the sink (if you don't want to use the whey). Gently ladle the contents of the pot into the cheesecloth lined strainer. Tie the cheesecloth into a bag and let the ricotta drain. Do not squeeze the bag to speed things up. You'll just squeeze your beautiful ricotta through the cloth. If you have a super-fine strainer (the kind that looks like cloth made of metal strands), just ladle the curds directly into it and let them drain.

I like a drier ricotta, so I let mine drain off for at least 30 minutes, although 15 minutes should give you a nice, creamy ricotta. Add salt to taste. Leave it unsalted if you're going to use it for sweet dessert like cheesecake or cannoli.

This whole process, not counting draining time, takes about 20 minutes and most of that is watching your milk. Easy and delicious.

Now, what to do with all that whey?

You can just throw it out (I will confess to doing that myself), but you can also use it in a few ways:

• Use it in place of water in yeasted bread recipes.
• Use it in cold soups (this whey tastes a bit like buttermilk) like a cucumber soup or a vichyssoise.
• Water your patio plants (there's a calcium in there - tomato plants like calcium).
• Use it as a buttermilk replacement for pancakes or quick breads.
  

Farm Fresh Eggs in Your Kitchen

I have been using locally produced, straight-from-the-hen eggs for a while now. I am very fortunate to live near several folks who keep flocks of chickens. My primary egg source has a pretty large flock of layers this year, so I have been enthusiastically reaping the benefits.

A lot of people are trying to find and use local eggs these days, and I strongly encourage you to do so. They are usually similar in price to the "cage free" eggs you can find at you supermarket and the quality is significantly better. In my area, I pay between $2 and $3 for a dozen eggs, which is a significant value considering the "cage-free" eggs I get at the supermarket cost at least $3.99.

Egg-based Dishes
Poached, scrambled or omeletted, truly fresh eggs will behave better than the eggs you're used to. They sit up higher in the pan, the whites are tighter and won't spread through your poaching water. And souffles ... oh ... your souffles will rise higher and will be so much more delicious and golden.

Hardboiled eggs can be a little frustrating (albeit more delicious). HB eggs are easier to peel when they are "older": a pocket of air forms between the shell and the membrane holding the egg itself. The older the egg, the larger this pocket and the easier it can be to peel the egg. That said, a farm-fresh egg held in your fridge for a week before boiling will still be weeks fresher than what you get at the supermarket.

Baking Issues
The major challenge that these eggs have posed for me has been in baking. When you buy eggs at the supermarket, you buy a carton of "large" or "extra large" or "jumbo". Well chickens don't lay only one size egg. So, your farm-fresh carton may contain eggs of many sizes.

These eggs are from the same carton. No problem for scrambled eggs or an omelette, but a significant issue if I want to bake a cake.

If you intend to bake with your eggs, you need one or two pieces of special equipment. Don't worry - you probably have one of these items, and really should own the other.

You need a scale. Don't own one? You should, you really should. Trust me. A relatively inexpensive one is here.

You also need a measuring cup that shows ounces and/or tablespoons. I like this one.

Most baking recipes call for eggs that are graded "large." A large egg weighs 2 ounces in the shell. So you can weigh the eggs from your carton and use the ones that weigh 2 ounces for baking. Easy, sure. But if your eggs are like mine, you seldom have enough 2-ouncers in the carton and therefore you need to measure eggs by volume.

A large egg out of the shell is about 3 tablespoons: 2 tablespoons of white and 1 of yolk. A tablespoon is 1/2 an ounce by volume, therefore 1 large egg = 3 tablespoons = 1.5 ounces. As eggs get larger, the volume of yolk and whites goes up proportionally (in general).

I will say that frequently the yolks in my fresh eggs are much larger than those in a supermarket egg. Some if you need egg whites or yolks for a recipe, make sure you what you need by volume: 1 yolk = 1 tablespoon = .5 ounce and 1 white = 2 tablespoons = 1 ounce.

So when you are ready to bake with your eggs of many sizes, take out your trusty measuring cup and crack your eggs into it.

In this instance, I needed four eggs for my recipe. (Four eggs = 4*3 tablespoons = 12 tablespoons = 6 ounces.) As you can see, three eggs fit the bill. In this case, I used the little bit of extra egg in the recipe, if you need to be super exact, just beat the eggs and pour off the extra.

Happy cooking!