melissa makes bread

Prune & Armagnac Bread Pudding

My obsession and interest in combining prunes and armagnac together persists in this bread pudding. It's sweetened with honey which compliments the richness of the prunes. The prunes were soaked in armagnac for about a month before adding them to the pudding. And additional armagnac was added to the custard base before baking.

The bread is a pugliese loaf from Sullivan Street Bakery.

Mirabelle Plum Tarts

Always on the lookout for mirabelle plums, I found jars of sugar preserved plums, imported from Germany, at the local cheese shop. Once home, I removed the pits and placed the plums in an almond batter. The batter was used to fill tarts with tops. I like tops on tarts. There is more flakey goodness to go around. The recipe comes from Jane Grigson's Fruit Book, a sweet and informative read.

Breakfast Bread Pudding

While at the Greenmarket yesterday I picked up what looked to be one of the last baskets of prune plums for the season.  I added them to a breakfast bread pudding using ingredients from some of my favorite sources - eggs from Flying Pig Farm, milk and cream from Ronnybrook and bread from Sullivan St Bakery.  Bread pudding is perfect for breakfast - think 'deconstructed French toast' with crunch from oats and nuts and layered with fruit. 

Plum Crumble Tartelettes

Plums have most definitely arrived at the Greenmarket, and I picked up some Santa Rosas to make these tarts.  The tart dough was made with a high ratio of butter and no eggs, which means that its buttery, rich, and quite delicate.  You need a spatula to pick up the tarts. 

The crumbly topping is the same topping I used to make the blueberry buckle.  And it's fairly quick to put together:  First, in a medium bowl, mix together all of the dry ingredients: 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1/4 cup demerarra sugar, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon sea salt.  Then cube 6 tablespoons cool, unsalted butter and cut the cubes with a pastry blender or fork into the dough (you could also use your fingers).  Once the butter is blended into the dry ingredients, use your finger tips to smoosh the mixture together to create large clumps. 

The plums were a bit tart and I used a little more sugar than I normally would for the filling and a touch of flour for thickening.  I baked them for thirty minutes until the filling was bubbly and the shells were golden. 

Mirabelle Plum Danishes

These Mirabelle plum danishes are inspired from similar danishes at Ceci-Cela Patisserie on Spring Street in Manhattan.  For the dough, I made a half recipe of croissant dough.  Croissant and danish doughs are actually nearly identical.  They both originated in Vienna and are both laminated, yeasted doughs.  Danish dough contains ground cardamom, whereas croissant dough traditionally contains no added spices. 

I filled each with a large dollop of pastry cream and with the Mirabelle plums that I found in early fall at the Greenmarket.  I've tried a variety of different pastry creams, and I prefer this one because it contains a combination of whole eggs and egg yolks and it contains no butter.  Both of which make for a lighter cream. 

Pastry cream is an interesting thing.  It's a custard, as is creme anglaise, flan and ice cream.  Pastry cream contains a thickener, usually cornstarch, and is cooked on a stovetop.  As it cooks, it must be whisked vigorously to smooth out the lumps that develop as the starch absorbs water, swells and the mixture thickens.  Pastry cream can be used 101 different ways, and it's a classical ingredient in French pastry making.  It can be baked in tarts and pastries without any degradation.  It can be whipped and enriched with softened butter to make mousselline to fill cakes or pastries. 

To make the danishes, I rolled the croissant dough out so that it was 3/8th inch thick.  Then I cut it into 3 1/2 -inch squares.  I filled a pastry bag with the pastry cream and piped about a tablespoon of the cream into the center of each square.  Then I placed several poached Mirabelles (absolutely my favorite plum) on top of the pastry cream.  I let the pastries proof for two hours at room temperature, uncovered.  The danishes were baked in a 450 degree oven for 30 minutes. 

Green Gage Plum Jam

Green Gage plums are small, green plums the size of apricots. They are an heirloom variety of the European plum, and they date back to the reign of Francois I in 16th century France. Originally known as Reine Claude plums, their name changed when they were shipped as rootstock to Sir Thomas Gage in England in the 18th century.

Green Gage plums make luscious jam. They have a lovely balance between sweet honey flavor and light acidity. They have a moderate level of pectin, and so adding additional pectin is not required to set the jam.

Green Gage Plum Jam

A scant 2 pounds Green Gage plums

¼ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice, strained (about 2 lemons)

¼ cup water

2 cups granulated sugar

2 tablespoons honey

Begin by cutting each plum in half along its natural indentation. Twist each half to separate them. Green Gages are clingstone and so the pit will remain intact on one of the sides. Remove the pits with your fingers or with the tip of a paring knife.

Place the plum halves, lemon juice and water in a medium-sized saucepan. Heat over medium heat until the mixture begins to simmer. Maintain the simmer for five minutes to soften the plums and draw out their water. Stir frequently and gently. Then add 2 cups of sugar to the saucepan and stir to dissolve the sugar. Let the fruit and sugar come back to a boil, and continue to boil until the jam sets, approximately 15 to 20 minutes.

To test that the jam has set, place two small saucers in your freezer while the jam is cooking. When the jam has thickened and measures 220 degrees. Remove a saucer and spoon a dollop of jam onto it. Place it back into the freezer for one to two minutes. Then remove it, and push it with your finger. It should wrinkle a bit, and not slide around on the saucer. If it is very liquid, continue to cook the jam, and test every two or three minutes.

When the jam is done cooking, ladle it into prepared jam jars and process.

Yellow Egg Plums

These Yellow Egg Plums are among the last of the plums at the Greenmarket, and I picked some up just before leaving for Pennsylvania for a trip home. Without much time, I decided to poach them and then use the poached plums later this fall. A few things I learned about these pretty plums ~ they are clingstone and their pits do not remove easily. They also break down quickly, which means that they probably make wonderful jam. When I made these, I made a simple syrup of 3 parts sugar to 2 parts water, and brought it to a strong boil. I halved and pitted the plums and placed them at once into the syrup. I brought the syrup back up to a simmer and carefully watched the plums cook. They were nicely cooked as soon as the syrup reached the simmer. I removed them from the syrup and let them cool. When the syrup had also cooled I combined the syrup and plums back into a jar for keeping.

Long John Plum Crisp

Plum season is peaking at the market with European plums in full swing. European plums include Italian prune plums, Empress and Long John plum varieties. Also included are Green Gage, Reine Claude and La Petite D'Agen varieties. La Petite D'Agen is a relative of the French Pruneau D'Agen, and this plum makes up the majority of California prune production. European plums are higher in sugar and lower in water content than the more familiar Japanese varieties.

I found beautiful Long John plums at the Locust Grove Farm's stand at the Greenmarket. These plums are oblong in shape have a beautiful purplish blue skin, and a lime green interior.  With these plums I made wonderful plum crisp. A crisp is a bottom layer of baked fruit with a steusel baked on top.

Long John Plum Crisp

2 pounds Long John plums (or other European plum)

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/4 cup packed light brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

4 ounces cold, unsalted butter (one stick), cubed into 1/2-inch pieces

3 tablespoons buttermilk (crème fraîche or sourcream can be substituted)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Slice each plum in half following the natural indentation on the plum. Then, slice each plum half into thirds. Place the slices in a medium-sized bowl and toss with the granulated sugar. Let the plums rest and the sugar draw moisture from the plums while you prepare the topping.

Combine the flour, brown sugar, salt and cinnamon in the bowl of a mixer and mix on low speed to combine. Add the butter and continue to mix on the lowest speed until only small butter pieces, the size of lentils remain. Add the buttermilk a tablespoon at a time, and stop mixing while the the mixture is still crumbly .

Place the plums in the bottom of a baking dish (1.5 quarts in size). Place the streusel on top of the plums gently without packing it down. Bake for 45 minutes or until the juices from the plums are bubbling and the streusel is golden brown. Remove from the oven and let cool.

Poaching Mirabelle Plums

I discovered Mirabelle plums on a trip to France in the fall several years ago. It was quite by accident. We stopped at a side cafe for some coffee and small bit to eat for breakfast, and had a slice of a tart with the small fruits on top. They were lovely and unusual to me, and I asked what they were. Later in the week I noticed jars of Mirabelle plum jam, and brought one home with me.

Mirabelles are not the sweetest plums, though they are not so sour that you could not eat them by themselves. But, they do benefit from a sweet preparation, whether it be in jam or poaching in sugar syrup.

Mirabelle plums are primarily grown in the Lorraine region of France, where they are made into jam, fermented to brandy, or preserved in sugar syrup. They are small in size, slightly larger than a large bing cherry.

Finding fresh Mirabelle plums in the US is a difficult near impossible task. Yet last Saturday one of the purveyor's at the Union Square Greenmarket had a small box filled with them. I felt pretty lucky, since I've been looking for them for quite some time. And apparently others are looking for them too, as a local pastry chef purchased half of the supply before I arrived.

I poached the Mirabelles I purchased to preserve them for future pasty making. I began by preparing simple syrup. I put three pounds of sugar and two pounds of water into a pot, and stirred the mixture well to wet the sugar so no dry patches remained. I brought the pot to a boil and then turned off the heat. Meanwhile, I pitted the plums using a cherry pitter. I placed the plums and a vanilla bean into the sugar syrup, and then I made a round parchment paper cover with center hole that I pressed against the top surface.

The parchment cover works similarly to a lid, except that the benefit is that it rests against the surface. This helps keep the fruit from boiling around rapidly during the poaching, which would damage the fruit and cause it to break up. The parchment also directs steam out from the center.

I turned the heat to medium low and brought the mixture to a very gently simmer. The purpose of poaching is to very gently replace the water in the fruit with sugar without breaking down the cell walls of the fruit.

Once the liquid was simmering, I kept an eye on it, and continued poaching until the fruit turned translucent, about 30 minutes.

The fruit was removed to a parchment lined baking sheet to cool, and the poaching syrup was allowed to cool.

Santa Rosa Plum Galette

Santa Rosa plums have wonderful yellow flesh and bright yellow and red skin. They are sweet, but not terribly so, and they are clingstone, which means the flesh clings to the pit. (The opposite is freestone.) The Santa Rosas I found at the market on Saturday were absolutely beautiful, and they measured about an inch and a half in diameter. This is small compared to the plums one usually finds at the local grocery store.

This type of plum is perfect in a fruit tart or galette. It also would make a beautiful fruit crisp or crumble. In the following recipe, the plums are gently sweetened with raw clover honey and granulated sugar and placed in the center of a rustic dough that was rolled out to an eigth of an inch thick. The dough was gathered around the plums to make a free-form tart.

Santa Rosa Plum Galette

1 recipe galette dough (recipe follows)

1 pound Santa Rosa plums

2 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons granulated sugar, plus additional sugar for sprinkling

1 egg for the egg wash

Make the galette dough at least two hours before you need it, so that it has time to chill and firm up. After the dough has chilled, remove it from the refrigerator and roll it out on a lightly floured surface so that it is 1/8-inch thick. Once the dough is rolled out, place it on a parchment lined baking sheet, and then place the baking sheet in the refrigerator so that the dough will relax and chill while you prepare the plums.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Since Santa Rosas are clingstone, removing the flesh from the pit without damaging the fruit can be challenging, especially if the fruit is very ripe. For these plums, take a small paring knife and slice the plum in half along one side of the pit. Repeat and slice down the other side, essentially forming two halves. Repeat with the remaining plums. Place the plums in a bowl and gently stir in the honey and sugar.

Remove the galette dough from the refrigerator and mound the plums in the center. Fold the dough up and over the plums, leaving the center open to form a rustic round-shaped tart. Beat the egg in a small bowl with a fork, just to break the egg up and then lightly brush the egg over the top of the folded galette. Sprinkle with sugar and place in the center of the preheated oven. Bake for approximately 50 minutes or until the pastry is nicely browned. Remove from the oven and let cool at least 15 minutes before serving.

Galette Dough

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/4 cup cornmeal

1 teaspoon granulated sugar

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

4 ounces (8 tablespoons) cold, unsalted butter

3 tablespoons buttermilk

Combine the dry ingredients in the bowl of a mixer and with a paddle attachment mix on low speed to combine. Cut the butter into 1/2-inch pieces and add to the mixer. On low speed continue to mix until the butter is worked into the dry ingredients and is worked down to the size of lentils. Slowly add the buttermilk to the dough and continue to mix just until the dough comes together. Remove the dough from the mixer, gently pat into a circle, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least two hours.