This is one of the three appetizers we plan on serving for Thanksgiving. The secret is to use freshly-made ingredients, and so we made our own pesto and used Super Sweet 100 tomatoes from our backyard garden. We used goat cheese, which blends very nicely with the tomato and pesto. For bread, we stuck to a baguette.
Continue reading Appetizer: Goat Cheese and Pesto Bruschetta with Cherry Tomatoes
During a recent weekend getaway to San Francisco, we ran into the very nice Cowgirl Creamery, which is an actual real cheese shop. These are a rarity these days, as the business of cheese has been largely delegated to supermarkets, and somehow the rather bland cheddar has been the victim of a marketing blitz turning it in to the star of California cheeses. Not that we don’t enjoy a good cheddar, but there are soooo many more fantastic cheeses that the general populous are missing out on. At the Cowgirl Creamery, we found the Red Hawk, “… a triple-cream, washed-rind, fully-flavored cheese made from organic cow’s milk from the Straus Family Dairy. Aged six weeks and washed with a brine solution that promotes the growth of a bacteria that tints the rind a sunset red-orange…” Indeed, this little gem is very tasty, and forms the base of the taste experience with this simple sandwich. A warm gently toasted baguette, Tuscan bean paste, Red Hawk and Genoa salami. That’s it.
Continue reading Italian Genoa Salami Sandwich with Red Hawk Cheese and Tuscan Bean Paste
The story of this sandwich is as much a tale of the bread as it is the sandwich. Although we are somewhat ‘accomplished novices’ in making sourdough breads, this was our first attempt at making a baguette. This deceptively simple bread was anything but. Several things went wrong: after the final rise the baguettes looked amazing, big and puffy and we were congratulating ourselves on being such good students of Peter Reinhart. However, we had not done the final proofing on the baking sheet and, in transferring them, ended up loosing about 30 percent of their size. As a result, they are very solid inside, and not soft and airy like real baguettes. We also managed to somehow get the crust too crunchy. It should be mentioned that our oven is terribly old and very unreliable, which turns all our baking into exercises in patience and surprises. The taste was decent however, and although not the stuff of Boulangerie Pierre & Patisserie legend, the baguettes performed creditably in a number of sandwiches, such as this one with salami and cheese.
