1 
1 Lately we’ve noticed some fabulous ancient grains popping up in the market. Not that we could ever abandon our favorite wheat, but in this chapter we give you some fresh ideas for cooking grains, using the oldest techniques we could muster. As you will see, the extra effort of processing them yourself will pay off in exquisite flavor, and quite possibly health as well, so whenever possible we suggest starting with whole grains.
You can buy excellent bread flour anywhere nowadays. Although grinding it yourself is more difficult, it is infinitely more satisfying. You don’t need a high-tech flour mill, only the most primitive technology, hailing back ten millennia: the stone quern. You can still buy one. It’s a simple mechanism consisting of one large concave stone with a handle on top. It has notches cut into the interior that fit over a fixed bottom stone, which is convex with notches. Grain is poured into a hole in the top, and as the top stone is rotated by hand, the grain is crushed and sprinkles out the sides where the two stones meet. Bigger versions with millstones weighing several tons that were turned by oxen or by huge waterwheels work basically the same way. Modern milling differs by using steel rollers. If you don’t have a quern, you can find other simple grain mills for sale, or better yet, try a huge vertical hollow log and a pounding stick.
It takes a lot of work to mill flour this way, but it’s fun and good exercise. It will take maybe half an hour, milling handful by handful, to get three cups of flour, or enough for a standard loaf of bread. It also helps if you pass the flour through a fine sieve; you’ll see a lot of coarser bits are left behind. Cook these up as you would cream of wheat, or just throw them back into the mill and grind again. The flour can be used as you would any flour, but keep in mind that since it’s whole whole wheat, it will absorb a lot of water, but slowly, and it will take longer to rise if you’re making bread because it has a dense texture. It definitely does work though, and yields a really complex, fresh-tasting earthy crumb, quite unlike other flours.
Wheat is grown right near where I live in Stockton, California. It was the first major crop in this area, the wheat being sent up to the gold mines after 1848. Back then, the water wasn’t diverted by canals and levies, so the land was irrigated by natural flooding, which is why the Caterpillar tractor was invented in these parts. Ben Holt figured out that switching wheels for a rotating metal tread would prevent the tractor from sinking into the muddy soil. There were also huge mills in town, the Sperry Flour Mill building on the canal downtown is just the last of them. Eating local wheat feels like a taste of history, but finding such wheat for sale is very difficult for some of us, and the flour in our local stores is shipped from the other side of the country. Do you know how hard it is to buy plain local wheat? It’s not in the phone book. Call one agricultural agency and they will pass you on to another. A third will charge you $200 for this information. Another says they can give you names but not phone numbers. In the end the nice people at the California Wheat Commission Board said they would send me a sample, especially because it was for educational purposes. It cost $5 just to ship across town. Nonetheless, the wheat was very fresh and delicious.
If you really want to get a sense of the immense labor involved, try growing your own wheat. I happened to be touring an experimental farm in Finland with a group of ethnologists and pocketed a handful of plucked grains, which no one seemed to mind. You, however, can buy whole wheat berries or try a mix of wheat, rye, barley, and oats. Just make sure the berries aren’t hybridized, in which case they won’t bear grains. If you live in a cold climate, start germination once danger of frost is past with spring wheat; in warm places, start in the fall with winter wheat. Sprout the grains in the house in a self-sealing plastic bag with a little water. Place the bag on the windowsill; once the berries have little rootlets, plant them in the ground or even in a big clay pot. They will grow tall and begin to look dry, at which point cut them and get a stick or make a flail to beat out the grains (that’s two sticks connected with a chain—the thing that pharaohs hold along with the shepherd’s crook). Then winnow them in a basket by tossing the contents up in the air; the chaff blows away with the wind. For my handful of planted grain I got just a little over a handful of grain! If you have some space to plant sprouted wheat in the ground with good sun, your yield ratio should be much better than mine. I used the flour made from my harvest for a fresh new bread starter, which turned out ferociously strong.
Absolutely Antiquated Bread
To get started on making bread, begin with a starter. Add 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of untreated, nonchlorinated, spring water to a large bowl and mix well. Add a little more flour and water every day for about 2 weeks. Smells nice and sour? That’s your levain. There is no reason to add commercial yeast to this. Yeast is everywhere, and it’s free. Add about 2 cups of this to 1 cup of water and enough flour to make a moist dough. Add about 1 tablespoon of sea salt. Knead thoroughly for about 15 minutes. Cover in a bowl and let sit about 2 hours, then knock down and form either into a round ball or, if you like, put it in a lightly greased flowerpot-shaped unglazed earthenware vessel. This is how the ancient Egyptians made bread, and the form makes baking a breeze, because you just put the whole thing in the oven. The dough will take anywhere from 8 to 14 hours to rise. Overnight is ideal. When ready to bake, stoke your wood-fired oven for about 1 hour until blazing hot (directions are on page 244) or crank up your conventional oven to 550ºF and splash some water inside to create steam. If you’re baking the bread free form, slash the bread several times on top and transfer to the oven with a peel, sliding carefully onto a baking stone. Bake until brown and crusty. Let cool. If you have used the pot to bake, let it cool thoroughly before you turn the bread out. Devour like a hungry slave. Then build some pyramids.
—K
Effortless Sourdough Bread with Whey or Brine
Just a bit of whey or brine and a long fermentation produce a savory, sour bread when you don’t have immediate access to a sourdough starter. This recipe starts out as a false sourdough (yeasted, rather than made with a starter), but eventually becomes a true one. The loaves are heavy but full of chewy holes and intensely flavorful. I call it effortless because you don’t have to maintain the starter; just save a bit of dough in the fridge for your next batch. This bread makes excellent use of coarsely ground rye or spelt, which means you can avoid the extra trouble of getting the flour nice and fine if you’re grinding it yourself. Of the home-ground slow-rising breads, this has become my quick and sloppy standby. It takes about 24 hours from start to finish and is indeed sloppy enough that it requires loaf pans.
My grain mill holds 11⁄2 pounds of whole rye or wheat berries in its hopper, which conveniently makes one loaf of bread. I told you it was heavy bread. This grain can be very coarsely ground. Some of the grains should be just cracked, rather than ground, but there should be some finer flour in the mix, too. You could approximate this effect with store-bought flour by including some cracked wheat—in any case, use 11⁄2 pounds per loaf.
Put the flour in a large bowl and add 1 tablespoon of salt per loaf. The first time you make this bread, dissolve a tiny pinch of dry yeast in 1⁄4 cup of lukewarm water. No more than 1⁄8 teaspoon yeast per loaf.
You can use whey (not salted) for some or all of the liquid in this recipe, or you can use a little pickle brine and water for the rest of the liquid. Don’t use more than 1⁄4 cup of pickle brine per loaf; if it’s very salty, use less or no salt in the flour. Add the yeast mixture and 1 or 2 cups of the chosen liquid per loaf. Stir well. Continue adding liquid until the dough reaches a thick porridge-like consistency. The coarse grains will slowly absorb the liquid, but even once they do, the dough should be too soft to knead by hand.
Stir it vigorously with a large sturdy spoon for 5 to 10 minutes, until it looks thicker and more ropey. Cover the bowl with a tea towel or plate, making sure there is plenty of room for the dough to rise. Dough this wet will stick terribly to your towel.
Let it rise for about 8 hours at cool room temperature—overnight is fine. Stir it down and let it rise for another 8 hours. Stir the dough down again and scoop out 1⁄2 cup or so of dough. Put it in a covered jar and store it in the refrigerator.
I use 5-by 81⁄2-inch loaf pans for this bread. I wouldn’t use anything smaller, but other shapes and sizes will work so long as the loaf gets adequate support.
Grease your loaf pans well and scoop or pour the dough into the pan. Wet your hand thoroughly and use your palm to smooth the surface of the dough. Whereas you would usually knead your dough to create a taut gluten film on the surface, here the dough is so wet you create a smooth gluten film by caressing it with your hand.
Let the dough rise, again at cool room temperature, until it’s level with the tops of the pans, or a little bit higher. This rising is more of a softening and bubbling—a 15 percent increase, not a big inflation. You want to particularly avoid letting the bread overrise, or it will spill out of the pans when baking and have a loose, crumbly texture. The rising may take 1 to 3 hours or more, depending on room temperature and the mood of the yeast.
Preheat the oven to 425ºF and pop the loaves in. Let them bake for 30 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 375ºF and let them bake another 20 to 30 minutes. They’re done when the bread has pulled away slightly from the edges and is well browned. Let them cool for 15 minutes in the pans, then turn them out on a board to finish cooling. You really must resist cutting into this bread before it’s all the way cool or it might collapse.
The saved dough will stay alive in the fridge for several months between bakings, although using it every few weeks is better. From now on when you bake this bread, don’t use any dry yeast. Instead, add the saved dough when you’re mixing it up. You also don’t have to use whey or brine, as the lactic acid bacteria are already established in the old dough, but you can add some if you have extra that needs to be used up.
—R
Couscous
Don’t get me wrong, on those occasions when we are rushed there is nothing better than instant couscous. A little chicken stock brought to a boil, maybe a few saffron threads if we’re feeling indulgent. In goes the couscous; 10 minutes tops, but it isn’t really couscous. If you want to have fun making couscous, try doing it from scratch. You won’t match the Berber woman whose dexterous hands have perfected the process in the course of a lifetime, but your couscous will still be very good. Begin with about 1 cup of semolina flour, the coarse yellow kind, and 1 cup of bread flour. Put the flours on a large platter and just sprinkle water over. Rub your palms in a circular motion over it, picking some up every now and then and rubbing it between your palms. What you are trying to do is separately coat every single tiny speck of semolina with the bread flour. It should be on the dry side, so add more flour if necessary. Let it dry thoroughly on the platter. Then wrap the couscous in a dishcloth and tie the top with string. Put it in a steamer, or better yet a proper couscousier, set over a pot of simmering spicy meat stew. It’s basically just a steaming chamber set on top of a regular pot. The gentle aromatic steam of whatever you’re cooking below cooks and flavors the semolina granules. When done, fluff the couscous with a fork and serve on the platter with the stewed meat. For full gastronomic effect, use three fingers of the right hand to eat, just as they do in northern Africa.
—K
Croissants
My father was a rather picky eater, but he loved pastry more than most things on earth. I remember driving for hours to buy a big box of sticky buns in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country or waking up early Sunday morning and driving into Freehold, New Jersey, to be the first in line at Freedman’s Bakery for coffee cakes, pound cake, Danish, babka, and pastries of every shape and size. His most impressive trick was immediately upon pulling into a new town, he would hop out of the car and put his nose in the air, sniffing in every direction. Despite never having never set foot in the place, my father could navigate, by smell alone, to the nearest bakery. I saw this many times. Even more intriguing, he would buy one of practically everything behind the counter and systematically break open each one. He’d judge each—“Nope, garbage.” “Too greasy.”—until finally landing on something that satisfied his discerning palate.
Strangely, pastries and cakes are among those things I never cared for much. But there is one irresistible pastry that’s so simple, I can’t imagine why most cookbooks make such an ordeal out of it. Think of the perfect light crispy buttery croissant, with layers that invite manual dissection, leaving shards of flaky dough all over the place. The croissants at the store are just disgusting, soft and laden with shortening. So here’s how to do it yourself.
Make a simple yeast dough: 1 packet of yeast and 3 cups of flour, but instead of water use 1 cup of milk, 1 tablespoon of melted and cooled butter, and a good pinch of salt. Let it rest a while and roll it out flat. Then take two sticks of very cold butter and roll them out between two sheets of plastic wrap until the same size as the dough and as thin as you can get it. It need not be exact, measured, or precise in any dimension. Sorry, Martha. Pull away one layer of plastic wrap and lay the butter sheet over the dough. Then pull away the top sheet of plastic wrap and fold the dough over twice. Throw it in the fridge. Wait a while, roll it out, and then fold it over again. And again. And a fourth time won’t hurt. Make that five. The idea is to get many, many thin layers of butter in between the layers of dough. Finally roll it out one last time and cut into long triangles. Cut a notch at the base, so they’ll curve nicely at the end. Then roll the triangles up starting at the wide base and curve them around into crescents. Let them rise at room temperature until puffy. Brush with egg wash and bake for 30 to 35 minutes at 400ºF. Easy peasy.
Now here’s the really fun part. Inside these you can put whatever you like. Grate some good dark chocolate or spread on cinnamon, sugar, and walnuts. Even jam works fine. If you are feeling really adventurous, throw in ham and cheese or bacon. Anything tastes good baked in a croissant.
—K
Before Prague became a popular tourist spot and good restaurants began to proliferate, there were still some Soviet-era eateries that served solid nourishing stodge for stalwart comrades. These eateries were not simply decorated, mind you. There were flashing lights, mirrors, loud Eurotrash music, and garish decor. If that bothered you, you had to find one of the quiet floors, often underground, where they sent the old folks. Dvořák or Smetana would be playing. Here was Party-approved traditional Czech fare, mostly meat and potatoes and gravy, but made honestly. Unless you have been walking all day in the cold, I would not recommend it. But under such circumstances, a simple dumpling can be a thing of consummate beauty and grace. Not light and fluffy, but leaden, dripping with fat, sodden with gravy, chewy, and potentially deadly if lobbed at your dining partner, who turns out to be an undercover spy. I was served three different dumplings one cold day, one made of rye bread chunks, another of sourdough, and the third of fine crumbs laden with paprika and lard.
Here’s the rule: Never ever throw away stale bread. In fact, leave some bread out just for breadcrumbs or dumplings. I keep a good quarry in a big mortar and use either a grater for a small amount or pound it up into fine crumbs for larger projects. The most interesting dumplings are made from just coarsely bashed-up stale bread and egg. For rye dumplings, I suggest adding in a few handfuls of crumbs, some dill, mustard powder, salt and pepper, and an egg. Have a pot of your best stock boiling. Moisten the mix with a little stock and let it sit, just until you can roll it into balls. You should add a little flour, too, for extra insurance, so they don’t fly apart in the pot. Once you’ve rolled out balls, whatever size you want, drop them into the gently simmering stockpot. You can let them cook just until they float up and then serve as soup, or even better, leave them there to simmer an hour or so. These are not served like matzoh balls in soup, though you surely can do so, but as a side dish. Put them next to some pot roast or a good hunk of braised pork. Dump on the gravy and go to town.
Now for the variations: You can use any kind of bread and embellish the dumplings with any number of flavorings. A dose of chicken fat and paprika is lovely, as is crumbled bacon with a few drizzles of the drippings. In Italy, traditionally, such early forms of gnocchi were made with stale breadcrumbs, flour, and grated cheese. Serve just with some melted butter. You can also mix in ricotta with fine breadcrumbs and egg; these are very delicate. You are also only a few steps away from a French quenelle. Let’s say you have no breadcrumbs: Then feel free to use leftover potatoes mashed up with egg and flour rolled into little balls. Leftover rice works well, too. Imagine you have some exotic kind of flour around, like buckwheat or chestnut. These make some of the most interesting dumplings imaginable. Just add some egg, milk, and seasonings; roll into balls; and toss in the pot.
The dumpling is among those few truly easy, economical, and eminently adaptable foods that for reasons that confound me have gone utterly out of fashion. Try it, especially in the winter, and you may eschew mashed potatoes and pasta for a while.
—K
Related to dumplings are a whole slew of tasty dishes made of pulmentum—or porridge, spread in a baking pan, cut up, and then fried. The original ancient Roman version was made with barley, and of course, corn has taken its place today as polenta. But equally ancient is millet. You probably know it as birdseed. It has an intriguing mucilaginous quality that holds it together. Just cook it in a roughly equal part milk with some butter and salt until thick, pour it out onto a greased baking sheet, and let it cool. Cut into squares or little finger shapes, then fry in a skillet in butter or oil. They put French fries to shame. The exact same thing can be done with chickpea flour, which you can buy in a health food store, an Italian grocery, or even an Indian grocery, where it’s called besan. In France they call these crispy little fingers panisses. If you go into a health food store you can also find some amazingly tasty ancient grains like quinoa and amaranth. Even chia has been showing up lately—the same stuff sprouted Chia Pets are made from, a tiny black seed. All these make fabulous porridge and even better panisses, cooked exactly the same way. Incidentally, you can also deep fry these if you like them super crunchy.
—K
Dosas
Huge Indian crepes, called dosas, are pretty tricky to prepare. You need a really large flat cooking surface; a flattop griddle is ideal. A big skillet works all right, as does a paella pan. Take 1 cup (or more) of urad dahl—these are little black beans in the mung family, but once the outer coating is removed, they’re white and look sort of like lentils or split peas. Soak the urad dahl in plenty of water overnight. Do the same with twice the amount of rice, good fragrant basmati in this case. Drain the grains and put them together in a big mortar and grind into a fine paste. If you must use a machine to grind, go ahead. Add water to this to make a smooth batter, and leave it out for a day until it starts to bubble and smells a little sour.
When you’re ready to cook the dosas, get your pan to medium heat and put in a little ghee or clarified butter. The odd trick here is to sprinkle a little water onto the cooking surface after you’ve added the butter and wipe it off with a paper towel or cloth, so you really have only the barest residue of butter to prevent the dosas from sticking. Pour in a ladleful of batter and quickly swirl it around with the bottom of the ladle until it covers the entire surface. You may need to thin the batter out and you may find that swirling the pan itself is easier. However you do it, these should be paper thin and crisp on the edges. Turn over deftly with a spatula and cook for another 30 seconds or so. You will also want to cool the pan a little between each dosa, again with a sprinkle of water, or the batter will cook too quickly before it spreads. You can just serve dosas as is, maybe with a smudge of yogurt and some diced cucumber or some chutney, or fill them with an elaborate curry. Or best, serve with a nice sour tamarind-spiked sambar, which is basically a spicy vegetable stew with pigeon peas.
This exact same batter can also be steamed to make idli, which are puffy little cakes. In southern India you can find special steamers with inset molds to make delicate disks of dough. You can easily put little shallow condiment bowls or ramekins into a bamboo steamer for a comparable effect. But if you want to try a wild technique, loosely stretch a fine linen dishcloth over the top of a pot of simmering water and secure with a rubber band or string. Then pour some of the batter directly onto the cloth and put a lid on. Make sure not to stretch the cloth too tight or you won’t get a nicely mounded idli.
—K
Crepes
Crepes are charming, sophisticated yet earthy, downright lovable in every way, without being dowdy like their cousin the pancake. I once made several hundred that were rolled into blintzes for a Jewish food festival. Six pans going at once on burners; someone else rotating the pans as I poured and swirled batter. Now that was serious fun. The recipe I usually use is very simple. The batter is made from 11⁄2 cups of flour—preferably pastry flour with a low gluten content—2 eggs, vanilla, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 1 or 2 spoons of sugar, and enough whole milk to make a light, very thin batter. Also add in a few tablespoons of melted butter for unctuousness. Let the batter sit a while. Fry these up in butter in a very hot nonstick pan, as thin as you can. Swirling the pan is the trick for even distribution. No need to turn them over. Just remove from the pan and stack them up as you go. Fill the cooled crepes with a mixture of cream cheese, cottage cheese, sugar, and vanilla. Fold over the lower end, then the two sides, and roll them up neatly. A dab of raspberry jam on top is lovely. Or you can put anything savory in your crepes, such as a slice of ham and cheese. The French put practically anything inside.
Crepes really start becoming interesting when you use different kinds of flour. The classic in Brittany is the buckwheat crepe. Unlike any other grain, you can actually buy whole buckwheat groats and crush them in a mortar or whizz them in a blender easily. They’re actually not a grain but a fruit, from a plant in the rhubarb and sorrel family. Buckwheat has a nutty deep flavor that is incomparable and works with the basic crepe recipe above. Chestnut flour is also excellent. The Italians use it in some very interesting desserts like castagnaccio, a kind of dense cake studded with raisins and pine nuts and sometimes rosemary or fennel. But you can also make chestnut flour crepes; the only difference between these and the thick castagnaccio is the addition of eggs and some butter and pouring the thinned batter into a pan, rather than baking as a cake. With a fruity jam, like apricot or raspberry, these are heavenly.
In this same family are the legion of dishes variously called farinata or socca, made from chickpea flour. All these flours can be bought at an Italian grocery or online. The farinata is a kind of cake made with olive oil, baked in a super-hot oven so it’s crunchy on top and soft in the middle. But a thin pliable crepe version is perfectly viable, and again the basic recipe just given works fine, though there’s no reason to include sugar because chickpeas have a natural sweetness. I’ve eaten magnificent ones from a cart in Nice, plain and succulent.
—K
Of all these sundry variations, the most interesting and ancient, and the most difficult to process, are acorn crepes. The technical term, and one of my favorite words, is balanophagy, from the Greek balanos (acorn) and phagein (to eat). Let us do as the Native Americans of California did for centuries and centuries, to process what was their essential staple. Start by collecting acorns in the fall. The best species on the East Coast is the white oak, which is comparatively sweet, and you can spot it by the rounded lobes on the leaves. Red oak has pointy leaves and a fuzzy coat around the acorn kernel and is relatively bitter. Huge twisty-limbed valley oaks proliferate in California. It’s actually illegal to cut them down; in fact, there’s one in my neighborhood growing in the street. Cork oak, which is exactly where cork comes from, is just okay. From some oaks it is practically impossible to remove the tannic bitterness, and in others they’re nearly sweet right off the tree. There is a tree in the park across from my house that drops acorns that are sweet raw; nibbling on them one day I noticed a squirrel eyeing me with contempt and a few humans staring derisively. For most acorns, apart from tasting, there is only one way to tell: Shell and boil up a few and change the water several times. If they’re still bitter, best to try another tree. Originally, acorns were just buried in mud for several months or soaked and then roasted. I like to think that people learned this trick from birds and squirrels—those they forgot about naturally sprouted and grew into trees. But let’s try the grinding technology.
The acorns need to be thoroughly dry (a low oven for 1 or 2 days is fine, or store them for a few months or up to a year) and they must be without wormholes. If you are adventurous you can build a raised hut out of cedar, called a chuka, and line it with laurel to keep the bugs away. Bash open your dried acorns with a big rock (hitting them on the flat top of the acorn works well), then separate from the shells, or winnow them in a basket. Don’t worry if you’ve broken them in the shelling process. Incidentally, you can use the little caps as a great whistle: With both hands, hold the open side of the cap underneath your parallel thumbs and tilt each thumb slightly outward until you form a little V-shaped opening just below your thumbnails. Put your thumb knuckles up to your lower lip and blow as hard as you can. If you get it right, it is piercingly loud.
After this bit of diversion, go to your grinding rock—this will be a depression in a large stone outside—with a round pestle, and grind the acorns into a fine powder. Next you must leach them of tannins. Dig a shallow depression in sand or find a finely woven basket. Put in your acorn meal and slowly pour over water, which will seep into the sand or through the basket, carrying away the bitterness. You’ll need to do this over and over again until the meal is sweet. I’ve heard of people putting the acorn meal into a bag and setting it in a flowing river. The river near my office, the Calaveras, is pretty well polluted, so I haven’t tried that. Or simply soak and drain the meal wrapped in a cloth set in a pot over and over again, or leave it under a running faucet.
The traditional way of cooking acorns is to fill a watertight basket with acorn meal and water, then heat up some hot volcanic rocks in a fire (the kind that don’t explode, washed quickly by dipping into a bucket of water, once removed from the fire) and drop them right into the basket with the acorn meal and water. This makes a kind of porridge or nupa. It’s stirred with a special stick that is looped at the end, with which you can remove the rocks. It takes about 20 minutes to cook through.
You can also make thick cakes by mixing the nupa into a dough with water and putting little rounds to bake in an earth oven. But if you’ve gone through this whole process, and are still unimpressed, try making crepes. The moist meal should be thoroughly dried into flour if you want to store it. Then proceed with the exact same recipe as on page 15 for wheat flour crepes. Even if you just use eggs, milk, and a little sugar alone, the result is tasty. Baking powder and vanilla seem out of place here, so the crepes will be a little brittle and rolling might be difficult. On the other hand, a drizzle of maple syrup seems perfectly appropriate, even if geographically improbable. The crepes are very dark, nutty, and quite delicious. You can also try making abelskivers from acorn flour, which are little round pancakes cooked in a special pan with hollow depressions. They are perfectly delightful with blackberry jam.
—K
Injera
The mother of all pancakes, and I don’t mean this facetiously at all, is injera, one of the staples of Ethiopian cuisine. It is made of teff flour, a tiny grain that is nutty and really flavorful. Don’t be tempted to use yeast, baking powder, or regular flour here. Just equal parts teff flour and water to start, mixed in a bowl. If you have heavily chlorinated water, use bottled spring water. Let the mixture sit out for a day. You’ll see a dark sour-smelling liquid on top. Pour that off and add in fresh water to make a thin batter and stir. Repeat the next day, and then on the third day you should be ready to go, but don’t pour off the water this time. Add a little salt at this point. Find the largest, flattest pan you have. Heat it and grease very lightly with oil. If you don’t have a cover for this pan make a large tent out of foil by folding the ends of several sheets together so you have one big foil cover. Swirl in the batter with a ladle starting at the outer periphery. It shouldn’t be as thin as a crepe, but not too thick, either. Cover with the foil and let cook—on one side only. You’ll see little holes erupt on the upper surface. Carefully remove the injera, let it cool on a platter and continue with the rest of the batter. Traditionally you serve this on a platter piled with little mounds of stewed spicy chicken, lentil puree, and vegetable dishes. Extra injera is used torn, with the right hand only, to scoop up little parcels, and it is a sign of respect to feed your neighbors by popping these bundles directly into their mouths.
Completely untraditionally, this same lovely pliant chewy bread can be used to wrap other ingredients like a big rolled sandwich. Cold cuts, leftovers, jelly, tuna, dressed salad—all work well. It’s a distant cousin of the blintz, of course. Just cut sections out of the roll, large or small.
—K
Paõ de Queijo
Paõ de queijo is based on tapioca flour (aka manioc or cassava). Actually it’s a starch that can be bought from Brazilian suppliers; almost any Asian shop carries it, too, as it’s used in many kinds of dumpling wrappers. For paõ de queijo boil 1 cup of milk and 4 tablespoons of butter with a pinch of salt. Gradually add 2 cups of the starch, and then add in 2 eggs and a handful of a fresh young cow’s milk cheese. Farmer’s cheese or queso fresco is nice, but so is pepper Jack or Cheddar. Cook briefly until amalgamated and thick. Let this cool, then knead. Coat your hands with starch and roll the dough into balls. You may need to add a little more tapioca. Place on a greased cookie sheet, or better yet in little muffin tins, and bake at 400ºF for 20 to 30 minutes, until they’ve puffed up nicely and are a little browned. Popping them under the broiler works, too. Let them cool thoroughly before you eat them.
—K
Lefse
At the risk of making you dizzy from hopping around the globe, let’s jump over to Norway for a flat potato bread. Start by making mashed potatoes, preferably with big mealy russets. Peel, cut the potatoes into equal-size pieces and boil them until just cooked through. Then pass them through a ricer or mash thoroughly as you please. Add butter and cream and some salt. Let this cool and add enough flour to make a stiff rollable dough. You can actually make gnocchi out of these at this point, too; just roll into little nubbins with your hands and boil. But for lefse you want a rolling pin and a lefse stick, which is a long flat stick. Our friend Paul from Minneapolis sent a beautiful one that replaced the wooden paint stirrer I was using. On a board covered with a well-floured pastry cloth, roll out a fist-size ball of dough into a thin circle. There are neat notched rolling pins that give your lefse an interesting woven pattern, but you can make the breads without one. Then slide your stick underneath the rolled-out dough, which will flop in half as you lift it. Match the edge of the lefse to the edge of a very hot flattop grill or pan, and then gently roll the whole thing over so the lefse and the cooking surface are aligned. No greasing is necessary. If you don’t have a lefse stick, you can lift it with your fingers. When cooked on both sides, stack them, covered, until you’ve finished with all the dough. They can be eaten with butter and sugar, but I think they’re more interesting with things like ham, liverwurst, gravlax, or sausages, for breakfast naturally. In Norway a smaller version made without butter is called lompe, which you can buy on the street wrapped around a hot dog: pølse med lompe.
—K
Whey Polenta
You don’t even have to add cheese to polenta when it’s been cooked in whey. It develops its own remarkably rich cheese flavor.
If you think ahead, soak the polenta in the whey overnight or a few hours ahead of time to speed up the cooking process. Make sure your polenta is very fresh; ground corn of any sort develops nasty bitter flavors when even slightly rancid.
Whisk 1 cup of polenta and some salt into 4 cups of whey in a large heavy-bottomed pot. Bring to a simmer, stirring constantly. Cook until the polenta starts pulling away from the edges of the pot. Pour into a buttered dish and cool until quite firm. Cut in 1⁄2-inch slices and fry in plenty of butter over medium heat until golden on both sides.
If you have to turn away from the stove for a moment and the polenta starts sticking to the bottom of the pot, just turn off the heat and put the lid on it for a few moments. The sticky parts will steam soft. In fact, if you’re busy doing other things, you can cook the polenta this way. Bring it to a boil, cover, and turn off the heat for a few minutes. Repeat two or three times until the polenta is thick and all the grains are soft.
If you don’t have whey, or even if you do, add 1 cup of grated Parmesan at the end of cooking. You can also throw in half a stick of butter or more, especially if you plan to serve it soft and warm like grits rather than fried.
—R