Bread

This is my version of a recipe that’s been bouncing around my family for years. It’s more Italian than barbecue, but who cares? It’s definitely a crowd pleaser. We get our fresh bread dough from the Columbus Bakery, a legendary family-run bakery in Syracuse.

Every summer, my sister Beth fills her freezer with blueberries her family has picked. They eat as many as they can while the berries are in season, share some with friends and family, and then freeze the rest. This quick bread is good made with fresh or frozen blueberries, and Beth uses lemons from her own lemon tree, right in her backyard! (I’m jealous!)

This is great bread for any meal, but one of my favorite ways to eat it is crumbled up in a big bowl with really cold milk. Mmmm! Beth likes it cold with buttermilk. Now that’s just wrong!

My sister hates bananas. Imagine all of the yummy recipes that eliminates for her! Nonetheless, when my niece Ashley makes this banana bread, it’s so good, even Beth will eat it. Maybe it has something to do with all that butter.

This was Daddy’s “I quit smoking” bread. When I was in high school, he stopped smoking for good. Being a man who was never still, he started looking for ways to occupy his hands other than smoking. He bought some of the first bread flour ever to hit the shelves in Monticello, Georgia, and started experimenting. He became known around town for his homemade bread, and often made loaves for bake sales and church suppers.

You can’t have fried catfish (page 106) without hushpuppies! Sometimes I add a few more jalapeños to the mixture for a little extra jolt. There are several stories about how hushpuppies got their name. My favorite is the one where an old southern cook was frying them one day and heard her dog howling nearby, so she gave him a plateful and said, “Hush, puppy!” It might just be folklore, but I like it.

Pretzels are probably the best snack to enjoy with beer, and if you’re a fan of stout, these pretzels are an especially winning partner. The Pennsylvania Dutch brought their love of pretzels to Penn Yan, where Birkett Mills still turns out the dark, gritty buckwheat flour that gives handrolled pretzels a distinctive, nutty flavor. Since these pretzels don’t require yeast or rising time they can be made very quickly, so start this recipe when hunger strikes. Caution: Baskets of these pretzels served with a peppy horseradish mustard will make you drink more than you may have bargained for.

To accompany the fine and fancy food at Holloway House, there has always been Sally Lunn bread. The recipe dates back to Colonial America, although history tells us there was actually no one named Sally. The words may be a corruption of sol et lune, French for sun and moon, probably used by French immigrants to describe the round shape of the buns, similar to brioche. Sunday suppers in Bloomfield wouldn’t be the same without it.

Our good friends Dyan Solomon and Éric Girard own Olive + Gourmando, a perfect luncheonette on Saint Paul West in Montreal’s Old Port. Their little shop is what we expect the coffee shop in the afterlife to be like: they’re detail fanatics and it’s no contest the best place for lunch in the city. When they first opened, they were bakers, and the place was a bakery with a few seats. They still make bread, but mostly to use in delicious sandwiches. The front counter is displayed with brioches, croissants, brownies, and fruit pastries, and they’re all killer. We thought they were insane when they decided to open in Old Port a decade ago. It was a barren ghost town of bombed-out buildings, seedy bars, and grow-ops. There were no people, much less hotels and tourist shops selling maple-sugar products and “raccoon” Daniel Boone hats actually made from Chinese skunks. Like us, Éric and Dyan don’t take anything too seriously (Dyan can tell you many stories of Fred’s practical jokes when they used to work together: her showing up at 6:00 A.M. to a fake “dead man” at the bottom of the stairs; Fred putting a scraped lamb shank in his shirt, saying he may have hurt his hand. . . .) They’re Montreal classics and were kind enough to hand over one of their most beloved recipes.

You know those cheap dinner rolls you eat at your grandma’s house on Sunday nights? The supersoft, semiattached kind you buy in plastic bags? These are those dinner rolls. The base of the recipe is mashed potato, so it’s important to start this recipe as soon as you’ve just finished making mashed potatoes. These are perfect to serve with a pulled pork sandwich or on porchetta.

This all-purpose bread makes great sandwiches and toast and is the basis for the Apple Caramel Monkey Bread . It was inspired out of necessity, for who among us doesn't need a great sandwich bread? This is a staple in my kitchen.

This pull-apart bread, also called bubble bread, was inspired by a photo of Apple Cinnamon Monkey Bread in the King Arthur Flour's Baker's Catalogue. This bread looks just like the KAF version and tastes outrageous—not too sweet with a pleasing amount of caramel.

This challah has so many things going for it: the dough is very easy to work with, the braids are gorgeous, and the fine-crumbed texture is to die for. There’s just a little sugar in this egg-rich dough, which means it works just as well for sandwiches as well as for bread pudding. My favorite use is in French toast! You might want to save this recipe for a weekend, because the first step requires an overnight rest in the refrigerator—it takes a little longer but gives the bread a more complex flavor.

Narsai David, a San Francisco Bay Area radio personality and former restaurateur, joined us at the Workshop for many years as a sort of camp counselor. He would lead the chefs in their brainstorming sessions, and while the chefs worked feverishly on their courses, he would co-opt one quiet corner of the kitchen to make bread. Narsai surprised us every year with imaginative loaves that almost always incorporated whole grains, like the brown rice from California’s Lundberg Family Farms, or this three-seeded bread that he devised after sampling a similar bread in Australia.

As its name implies, this savory Southern side dish is so soft it should be served—and eaten—with a spoon. You could serve the spoon bread as an alternative to cornbread with the barbecued ribs on page 202 or with the turkey chili on page 173.

THIS LONGTIME PASTA & CO FAVORITE crosses a pretzel with a breadstick. (The word brezel is German for “breadstick.”) Flagship and Just Jack cheeses give the breadsticks a creamy flavor, but you can substitute Gruyère, Cheddar, or Parmesan. Don’t let the thought of making dough intimidate you; it’s easy to get the hang of and worth the effort. You can, however, use pre-made pizza dough; 2 pounds of dough will make 10 breadsticks.

A technique for making cornbread with an extra crispy crust is to bake it in a preheated cast-iron skillet. When fresh corn is in season, try adding juicy kernels to the batter.

A crusty yeast-raised bread requires time and planning, but not necessarily more work, as Jim Lahey’s recipe proves. Long, slow rising (fermentation) is the secret to this flavorful loaf of country-style bread.

Making your own bread is immensely satisfying. At the Green Kitchen, we had demonstrations of two very quick ways to put bread on your table: Darina’s traditional Irish soda bread and Scott Peacock’s buttermilk biscuits (page 33). Neither of these recipes requires the dough to sit for hours while it rises, because neither of them relies on yeast. Instead they are lightened by the chemical reaction that occurs between the buttermilk and the baking soda (or baking powder) when the dough goes into the oven. For this book, I’ve added a third recipe, this one for Jim Lahey’s yeast bread (page 35). Jim, proprietor of the Sullivan Street Bakery in New York, has a brilliant method of making a country loaf that develops flavor in a long, slow rise, but which, like Darina’s soda bread, requires no kneading at all. None of these three recipes is complicated. Darina’s soda bread is something I make at home all the time. From start to finish, you can have fresh bread in less than an hour.