farmers’ market

Impulse Radish, Eventual Black Bread

slice of borodinsky bread with butter, black radish, and salt
~ mary_m ~ 6 Comments

Last Saturday, I impulse bought a black radish. (These things happen in root vegetable season.) Once I had the black radish, I started day-dreaming about Russian Black Bread, slathered with butter, and topped with thin slices of black radish and some coarse salt, which someone once told me was the right and proper way to eat a black radish. The only trouble was I didn’t have any black bread and I didn’t know how to make it. All I had was a radish (well…, and some rye flour).

After a web search or two for black bread recipes, I found myself overwhelmed by options, so I also consulted a couple awesome friends with Eastern European roots. While neither of them had a family recipe handy, one did help me narrow down my choices. I decided to try something like this Borodinsky Bread, because I was hoping for something with 100% rye.

Over the next four days, I built up a rye sourdough starter. I mixed ~25g of rye flour with ~50g of room temp. water and let it sit out on the counter in a loosely capped plastic container, adding another round of flour and water daily. It started bubbling noticeably the second day. I was getting slowly closer to actually eating my radish.

When I had >270g of sourdough starter, I mixed my dough. (After which I realized the directions I was working from had skipped the step where you simply use ~50g of starter and add equal parts flour and water to make the required 270g. Oh well. Here is the much better description of the same recipe, which I found too late.)

Here’s how it went:

  • 270g rye sourdough starter
  • 230g rye flour
  • 5g sea salt
  • 5g toasted caraway seeds, cracked
  • 20g molasses
  • 15g sorghum syrup (original recipe used barley malt, but I happened to have sorghum so I tried it)
  • 90g water
  • butter for the pan
  • 5g toasted coriander, cracked

Combined everything but the coriander and mixed throughly, but not exactly kneaded. Proofed in a cool room (the basement in November) overnight. It, uh, didn’t rise much.

The next morning I buttered a small (1lb) loaf pan and put half the cracked coriander in it, shaking to get coriander on the sides and the bottom. I shaped the very, very sticky dough into an oval, more or less, and plunked it in the pan. Then I  wet my fingers and smoothed the top, then sprinkled it with the remaining coriander. Covered with a towel and let sit in a sunny spot on the kitchen counter for about four hours. It, once again, didn’t rise much. (I either need to work on my starter’s vigor or add yeast or simply decide that 100% rye bread is meant to be really dense.)

Baked at 400ºF for 10 minutes. Reduced heat to 350ºF and baked for 40 minutes more. Immediately flipped it out of the pan and cooled on a rack.

And then I (finally) had a slice with butter, salt, and radish, and it was pretty darn good.

Root Vegetable Pancakes (Which Are Kinda Latkes & Kinda Not)

~ mary_m ~ Leave a comment

Ah, November, when New England thoroughly enters the long, dark time of root vegetable season. We’ve still got Brussels Sprouts at the market, but we’re also seeing more & more radishes, beets, potatoes, parsnips, and turnips and less & less of anything else. (No one except me, in my family, will eat a beet. Parsnips are only slightly more popular.)

So… what’s a a nice person who tries to eat local & seasonal (at least some of the time) to do? Enter the root vegetable pancake, aka these-are-not-really-latkes. They’re tasty! They can count as an entree for Meatless Mondays! Best of all, you can slather them with apple sauce and sour cream.

Basic formula:

~2 lbs shredded root vegetables, such as potatoes, turnips, parsnips, or even beets if you’re not in my house. I generally include some onion, maybe one small onion for every two lbs. of total veg. People who don’t like turnips will be happier if you use at least 1 lb potato and save the weird stuff for the other 1 lb.

1 egg

1/4 cup flour

salt and pepper

chopped herbs if you feel like it

oil for frying

Basic method:

Shred the veggies, then place them in a flour sack dishtowel or piece of cheesecloth and sprinkle with some salt (~1 tsp). Let sit for a minute or two, then squeeze out any possible liquid by twisting the veg. in the towel over the sink or a bowl. Squeeze hard.

Mix the now drier veg. with the egg and flour. Add pepper and chopped herbs to taste.

Fry (in ~1/4 cup rounds) in olive oil (or bacon fat if you’re really not going to call them latkes) over medium heat until both sides are medium brown and crisp. Keep warm in a low oven while frying the rest.

Serve with sour cream and apple sauce. Celebrate that you actually remembered to use your turnips.

For much more thorough directions of almost exactly this same thing, check out Food52’s How to Make Latkes Without a Recipe.

Market Mornings, Roaming Kid

picture of pastries, turnips, salmon and mushroom growing kit
~ mary_m ~ Leave a comment

My 7 year old and I have a new routine. For the past few weeks, we’ve gone to the local Farmers’ Market together, then to the café, every Saturday morning.

I’ve been trying to get my kids to enjoy going to the market with me for years. In California, land of grandmothers*, free samples, and pozole, they go happily. In Massachusetts, where it’s just Mom buying vegetables and occasionally relenting on chocolate or popsicles, it’s not as appealing. I finally discovered the secret formula, however – I get market tokens (which work as cash, but only at the market), hand some over to my kid, and let him roam independently. He finally loves it.

There’s one rule**: no sweets. It is amazing to me how well this works. He has happily come back to our rendezvous point with carrots, mushrooms, eggs, a decorative gourd, discount apples, and more. This week’s haul was a croissant, a ciabatta roll, a mushroom growing kit (specially budgeted for after he found out its price last week), smoked salmon, and two turnips. NB: He won’t actually eat the turnips; those he picked out for me. I am still charmed.

This is, for the record, a kid who is pretty darn choosy and restrictive about what he eats, a kid who has marked reticence regarding talking with strangers and trying new things. He politely waits in line, inquires about prices, and delights in his finds. He also ate smoked salmon for lunch. It’s great.

It may not last long, but I’m appreciating the heck out of it while it works, and tomorrow he said he’d help make potato/turnip pancakes, even if he doesn’t want to actually eat them.

*Two of their grandmothers that is. They also have grandmothers in Indiana and Oregon.

**One rule re: buying things that is, general rules such as do not run people over with your scooter and ask before petting someone’s dog also apply.