This is how I remember the spelling in many of the Czech bakeries along Cermak Road. There, kolaches were usually round and puffy, made from a yeast dough instead of a short crust. The ingredients are:
12 ounces (1 1/2) cups warm milk
3 ounces (6 tablespoons) melted butter
2 egg yolks
2.5 ounces (generous 1/3 cup) cup sugar
17.5 ounces (3 1/2 cups) flour
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg or mace
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast
These cookie-like kolaczki — which in my understanding are a Polish version — are some of the easiest of the breed: essentially a cream cheese pie crust tube full of jam. Make yours by combining the butter and cream cheese in a large bowl or in the bowl of a mixer.
READ ONYou know how yesterday I was having fun picking up wood? Today not so much. Regarding that huge tree limb — off my neighbor’s tree — that fell in the street in front of my house. Workers from the City came out with a small backhoe, dumped the whole thing in my yard, and told […]
READ ONReader Gerhard from Vienna submits this interesting email:
I think if you leave your homeland for another continent, you’ll hold on to anything that evokes the feeling of home. So why fresh pasta once a week if you can bring in Italy every day? Still you have to get accustomed to the new environment.
A fascinating thought for me as an European, btw. All our roots can be traced to some other place… but living in America, almost everybody’s roots have been unearthed just a very short time ago… a couple of hundred years ago or less… which makes me wonder if people do hold on to the things, the food, the traditions of their origin.
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The answers to my day-today problems don’t typically fall right out of the sky, but this weekend they did. I’ve been fretting about brick oven fuel supplies for a while now, since I’ve been lazy about acquiring a load of green (i.e. “fresh”) wood to start curing for next year’s baking. My problems were solved […]
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Didn’t expect this, did you? Well I happened to receive a quantity of figs yesterday. They were very small and ripe, so action was called for. Fig jam is incredibly easy to make since you don’t have to worry about gelling like you do with most fruit jams. Figs are plenty thick and sugary in their natural state. The only issue you have with figs is — depending on how large they are — softening their thick skins. These were small and ripe so they didn’t need much softening. I had just 1 1/2 pounds.
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I recently received a press release about this new product from Rumford (really Clabber Girl, which now owns the Rumford brand). I was interested by it since I get regular requests for low-sodium recipes, and the good folks at Clabber Girl were happy to send along a sample for me to try. Though I have yet to test it comprehensively, I did use it for biscuits (American biscuits) last night. Biscuits are an excellent proving ground in our household because I make them once a week on average. Mrs. Pastry and the girls pick out deviations from the norm with spectrographic sensitivity.
READ ONThe immigrant groups that have historically gotten the most attention in Chicago are the Italians and the Irish. Italians because of Al Capone, and the Irish because, well, they’re everywhere there. This is not to take anything away from Chicago-Irish notables like Mrs. O’Leary (whose cow supposedly started the Chicago fire) and bartender Mickey Finn, who was so notorious for drugging and robbing his customers that he became the basis for the idiom “slip a Mickey.”
READ ONLovers of Continental breads and pastries constantly wonder why there are so many more bakeries in France than in the United States. The simplest answer is that the French outsource more of their baking than we do. Historically we Americans have done most of our baking ourselves. The more you bake at home, the less you need bakeries. That’s the general rule.
Yet the old Central European neighborhoods to the West of Chicago didn’t abide by that rule. The Polish and Czech kids I knew in high school came from the some of the baking-est families I ever saw. Their grandmas made cookies, pies and buns by the dozens during the week…yet they and their parents still went shopping at the Cermak Road bakeries on Saturday mornings.
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