I discovered the joys of strata through Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. They are a wonder of the kitchen: utterly flexible, and fairly forgiving. Better yet, a good strata uses stale bread! So long as you’re using some combination of eggs, milk, bread, and vegetables that go together, you’ll end up with something nice. Do tell us what you come up with, yes?

Strata with Sausage and Broccoli

half a loaf of stale bread (good bread makes a better strata)
4 eggs
2 c. milk (2% is fine; richer milk makes a richer strata)
1 lb. loose breakfast sausage
1 head broccoli, cut into large pieces
About 1/4 lb. cheddar, Swiss, or other mild cheese, shredded
Salt and pepper, to taste

1) Brown the sausage.

2) Blanche the broccoil (cook in boiling water only until it changes colors).

3) Cut the bread into enough thin slices to make three layers in a deep baking vessel (I use a 9x9x3 pan). Put the first layer on the bottom. Cover with 1/2 of the sausage, 1/2 of the broccoli, and 1/3 of the cheese. Add another layer of bread, then the other half of the sausage and broccoli and another third of the cheese. Add the third layer of bread, and top with the remaining cheese.

4) Beat the eggs, milk, salt, and pepper. Pour the mixture over the bread. Use a potato masher to push the bread beneath the level of the custard. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour, then bake at 350ºF for about an hour, or until it’s golden and puffy.

Recently the co-conspirator and Doris set out to answer two questions: What is the best ratio of chestnut flour to wheat flour when making homemade pasta? And, which filling or sauce works best with chestnut flour pasta?

To answer these questions we prepared two kinds of dough—50/50 chestnut flour/white flour (which we’ll call heavy chestnut) and 25/75 chestnut flour/white flour (light chestnut)—and two kinds of pasta: ravioli and fettuccine. In both cases we used a standard homemade pasta ratio of 1 egg per cup of flour, with just a few drops of water, if necessary.  We filled both the heavy and the light chestnut ravioli with a mixture of pumpkin and ricotta and served them with a light coating of butter with fresh cut sage and chives.  For the heavy and light chestnut fettuccini, we tried a sauce of fresh chopped tomatoes in pesto.  Two highly qualified tasters, whom we’ll call spouse 1 and spouse 2, were recruited to assist with the evaluation.  Between tastings palettes were cleansed with chilled Prosecco.   Before reporting the results we’ll discuss the difference between the doughs.

The 50/50 was extremely fragrant, redolent of chestnuts and reminding Doris of  prosciutto (from pigs fed on chestnuts) and the co-conspirator of bellota ham (from pigs fed on acorns). It was darker than the 25/75 pasta. In the machine it did not stretch as easily as the 25/75 pasta, perhaps because the chestnut flour is lacking in gluten.  The 25/75 pasta had some aroma, stretched better because of the gluten, but required the addition of more water than the 50/50 pasta.

(An aside from Doris: Can I just say that this was a lot of pasta?)

All four tasters agreed that the 50/50 pasta filled with the pumpkin and ricotta ravioli was superior to the 25/75 pasta.  The pumpkin and chestnuts were a wonderful combination because they both have a “meaty” taste now described as umami.  And, as this would suggest, the sweet tomato pesto sauce clashed with the 50/50 linguine and the four tasters all declared the 25/75 combination the superior choice but felt that traditional pasta would be a better bet for a sweet sauce.  Those who wish to make chestnut flour pasta would be well advised to look for umami sauces and fillings.  Mushroom stroganoff would be a good bet.

(P.S., from Doris. You don’t have to go to Italy to get chestnut flour. In Philadelphia, you can get it at the Italian market, but you can probably either find it or order it at most specialty “gourmet” stores.)

(from Doris to Jilly during a visit to the farm)

(After tasting the egg salad, Jilly responds.)

First of all, there’s nothing wrong with this egg salad. It’s not furry. It’s rubbery. You’ve got two problems. First of all, you undercooked the eggs, so the texture’s not right for egg salad. But dude! You need to eat this right away, because those yolks are going to turn green from the oxidation.

(Doris protests. No!  They weren’t undercooked! They looked perfect! Still bright yellow in the center of the yolk, cooked everywhere else!)

No, Doris, you need to cook them more. A hard boiled egg that’s perfect to eat isn’t cooked long enough for egg salad. An egg for egg salad should be silky, not rubbery. And really, your eggs will turn green. That happened to me once when I was catering. You don’t want green eggs in your salad. You want eggs like this:

Boiled Eggs for Egg Salad

1) Bring a pot of water to boil.
2) Add your eggs and return the pot to a boil.
3) Boil them exactly 11 minutes, then cool.

Bonus Ask the Goats!

There’s also a trick to peeling them. The old saying that you can’t peel a new egg isn’t true. You can peel a boiled egg of any age if you cool it properly. Crack the egg shells while they’re still hot and cover them in cold water. Get it really cold, like, with ice. The cold water gets under the shell and separates the membrane from the egg, and voila! You’ve got a perfectly cooked egg.

Now that I feel all virtuous in the sourcing, there is a guilty confession. This recipe was adapted from Sharon Lebewohl and Rena Bulkin’s The 2nd Ave Deli Cookbook. This is a decidely Jewish cookbook—and my use of pork makes it decidedly treif. What can I say? I like my pork. Let’s think of it as an “eastern European” recipe and move on. My apologies to my in-laws. Aside from the pork, the only other change is the use of the pressure cooker rather than the nearly two hours their version needs to cook on the stove.

Stuffed Cabbage in the Pressure Cooker

For the stuffing:
1 lb ground meat (preferably beef or lamb, or, if you’re obsessive, pork)
3/4 c. uncooked rice
1 c. chopped onion
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 c. water
2 cloves garlic, pressed
2 t. salt
1/2 t. pepper
some thyme

For the cabbage:
1 large cabbage, cored

For the sauce:

2 c. tomato sauce
1 1/2 c. chopped onions
1/2 lemon, chopped into large pieces
1 c. white or brown sugar
1/2 c. white or cider vinegar
1 c. water

What to do:

1) Core the cabbage by making a series of cuts with a long, sharp knife:

2) Bring a very large pot of water to boil. Plop the cabbage in. Boil it for a few minutes, remove, and carefully peel off as many outer layers as you can and set the leaves aside. Repeat until you have at least 12 whole cabbage leaves. Then set the rest of the cabbage aside.

3) Meanwhile, while you’re bringing the water to a boil, combine all of your stuffing ingredients in a large bowl. Combine the sauce ingredients in a separate bowl.

4) Cut out the hard part of the central spine from a leaf of cabbage and place 1/4 of stuffing in the middle. Roll it up:

5) Place your cabbage rolls in your pressure cooker:

6) Chop up the remaining cabbage, add it to the sauce mixture, and pour over the cabbages.

7) Close and lock the lid. Cook at 15 lbs of pressure for 10 minutes. (For a refresher on pressure cooker basics, see this post.) Let the pressure drop of its own accord.

You’ll be eating it for days. It’s shockingly filling but utterly delicious.

This post has the potential to be very long, I’m just going to link to the recipes to the chocolate babka and the cinnamon rolls. Let’s focus on the big picture:

chocolate babka = wet dough, with 2 eggs, 1 extra egg yolk, a lot of milk, and 10 T butter

cinnamon rolls = sturdy dough, with 4 eggs, less milk/water compared to the flour, and 1/2 c sour cream

blini = really wet, more of a batter, really, with separate eggs and whites, milk, and just a smidgeon of flour and corn meal

The blini were delicious, but for the purpose of the experiment let’s focus on the real yeast breads. I promise I’ll post more info on the blini tomorrow.

The Doughs

The co-conspirator and I mixed everything in a KitchenAid stand mixer—no hand kneading for us.

Both mixed beautifully. The babka dough (above) stayed fairly wet, but, honestly, the doughs didn’t look that different when we set them out to rise.

The top two bowls have the babka dough; the bottom two have the cinnamon rolls dough. You can sort of see that the cinnamon roll dough keeps its shape better, but the real difference was in the leavening. The cinnamon roll dough rose a lot faster, both because it had so many eggs, and because the sour cream resulted in a lighter dough. In other words, the two eggs and the yeast in the babka dough had to work very hard to lift up all that butter and the extra yolk. It was sort of cold, so it took a good two to three hours for them to double…

…after which we punched it down. Now you’re looking at the cinnamon roll dough. See how nice and firm it is? This is important, because in both doughs, you have to roll them out. Compare:

Notice how the cinnamon roll dough keeps its shape? It’s easy to work with, and a cinch to roll up. With the babka dough, on the other hand, it’s like you’re working with sand. Very sticky, gooey, sand. I probably put too much flour on the counter because I didn’t have the patience for it. We put sugar and soaked currants on the cinnamon rolls and rolled them up like croissants. With the babka, you brush the dough with butter, coat the edge with an egg wash, and cover the whole thing like chocolate.

The babka instructions are a hair confusing, so I remembered to take pictures for those of you who, like me, lack imagination:

First, we divided each recipe’s worth of dough in half (we were making a double batch, so for us, that made 4 parts). After you roll out the dough and sprinkle it with chocolate, you roll it up, then join it into a loop, then twist it into a figure 8. Then, you put two coils into a bread pan lined with parchment paper. Got it? As you can see,the dough is thin and fragile, and the chocolate sometimes broke through. That’s OK.

The cinnamon rolls are more straightforward. Just roll them up and set them on a baking sheet:

Again, note the firm texture. No cracking, and because the dough was so firm to begin with, no temptation to add extra flour.

The Breads

So, was it worth it?

Let’s start with the rolls. They looked great, as you can see. But the taste? Disappointing. I found the dough heavy and the rolls hard within half an hour of coming out of the oven. I thought I had simply overcooked them, but my co-conspirator confirmed: there’s something not quite right about this recipe. We think it’s a couple of things. The ratio of flour to liquid is almost certainly too high, but we’re also suspicious of sprinkling the cinnamon/sugar mixture directly on the dough without brushing it with butter. Without the butter, the sugar sinks into the dough, and everything just gets hard, rather than delicious. My co-conspirator thought it also needed a lot more cinnamon, but I was pretty happy with the spiciness. Frosting would probably help.

But the babka! Granted, it’s hard to go wrong with that much butter and chocolate, but I couldn’t believe how light and flaky this was. Major deliciousness. Let’s go to the close-up:

Can you see the lovely crumb on this guy? It just melts in your mouth. It’s now been three days since I baked mine, and it’s still moist and wonderful. My co-conspirator managed to get even more flavor out of hers by finishing with a slow final rise overnight, but I was impatient and baked my babka Saturday afternoon. I have no regrets.

What’d We Learn?

Butter is a miracle product.

Wet doughs are worth the effort.

Sugar without butter is not so great.