January 23

2020 took a few preparations to an iconic level - dalgona coffee, babka, focaccia bread, popscicles, yoghurt cups, galette and many more such dishes which was erstwhile limited to the kitchens of specific regions, now was being made across the households globally, especially India. Homechefs brought restaurant home. I was always late to jump on the bandwagon of the food trends and thus I think when I am posting this galette recipe, half of the globe is already far more expert in making the same. Nonetheless still I feel like sharing this with you as its not the usual sweet filling galette, but a savory one.

Galette is a flat round cake of pastry often topped with fruit. Pie and Galette are both  baked desserts, wrapped in crust and filled with sweetness. A pie is a sweet or savory dish with a crust and a filling. Now, the term galette is used primarily to refer to rather rustic, free-form tarts-made with a single crust of pastry or bread dough, like a pizza and filled with fruit that is baked on a baking sheet. Galettes usually offer a better ratio of crust to filling than pie. Galette are probably the happy go lucky French cousin of the American pie. 

The trend for 2020 has been all about sweet filled galettes like - blueberry, apple etc. But with a savoury filling inside the galettes can also be had for a light supper dish. Since I am not much of a sweet lover, so when I wanted to make a galette it had to be a savory one. The one I made was with chicken and seasonal vegetables like corn and broccoli. If you want to make a vegetarian version of it, just skip the chicken and rest remains same. You can even substitute chicken with things like Paneer or more vegetables. Filling options for savory galettes are just about endless.

Personally I liked a galette better than the pizza, because its so flaky, buttery, smooth in texture and with much more filling inside to enjoy than a standard pizza. I am a filling loving person, so I don't like to go frugal with the filling. Hence a galette is always a good choice. Check out the recipe below, I am sure this would be a welcome change to all the pizza lovers.

 

January 21

Till last year, Baking anything was like an uphill task for me. I am not much fond of sweet dishes and baking 95% of the times would mean, something involving sweet. Apart from that, I always felt a little shaky about working with precise amounts of Ingredients. Now this might sound a little strange to people who are like my mother and prefer to measure out the ingredients exactly as they cook. Not me. You can call me an intuitive cook, I have been this way from the time I started cooking all by myself. At times I measure a few dry ingredients when it is a technical recipe like this Toum (Lebanese Garlic sauce) which I made recently. But most of the times I work on my gut feelings and keep on adding or removing ingredients as the cooking goes on. Even salt and sugar I don't measure, it all depends on the recipe or the portion I am making.

So when it came to baking I kept giving myself new excuses to wriggle out of it. Bake a cake? Nah just lets get one from the nearest baker. Baking cookies? Isn't that too much work? Making fluffy pastries? Don't even think you can create those beautiful fluffy layers and so on. The excuses were endless and I could never really push myself to overcome my fears of Baking. 

Lockdown threw us in dire situations. You didn't have options to avail from outside. So home was where the hearth was for everything you needed. While other general recipes were easily taken cake of. But baking posed a very big problem to me. After a lot of trepidation I baked my first banana bread with a hand blender. My hands were sore at the end of the task but the bread made me super happy. As the first try I couldn't be more happy with the outcome. That made me a little courageous and I made a few more batches of Banana Bread which was appreciated even by my neighbors - some of whom went to the extent of saying that it was one of the best they tasted *blush* *blush*. Now if this kind of compliment doesn't boost your morale nothing will. And it did work for me.

I made a plethora of baked dishes and realized since I was more inclined towards savory stuffs, there were a lot many things I could explore with baking in the world of savory dishes. That was the turning point actually. 

With baking I realized one thing, the more you bake the more confident you grow about handling the measured ingredients. Though I have not yet reached the point where I can work on my gut even on baking, but there were a couple of recipes where I might have felt a little more flour, or butter or sugar would give  a better texture and when I did that, it was a success. Hence if a person like me can bake successfully then any one can - Just like Ratatouille used to say!

Now coming to todays recipe - Southern style Buttermilk Biscuits. We in India are always tuned to the fact that biscuits are something which are hard, flat, and unleavened and what Americans call as cookies. But in America, Biscuits typically a soft, leavened quick bread best had warm right out of the oven. So when I was randomly searching for some good savory bakes I wanted to do, I stumbled upon a Southern style Biscuit recipe which sounded so delicious and simple! Remember simple being the key here. I am still apprehensive of bakes which need like a ton of complicated elements together. 

Biscuits are widely considered to be the house bread of choice in South America. Savory or sweet, recipes are handed down generations after generations with each one having a particular secret recipe or tips to make them the best ones.  Southern buttermilk biscuit recipes typically use White Lily flour, a low-protein brand mainly available in the southern American states that makes for ultra-tender, melt-in-your-mouth biscuits. But since you would not find them in India, I used a good quality organic flour and they came out very nice. When I was in US, one of my colleagues was from the South and she once brought a box of flaky biscuits for a pot luck party and that buttery taste lingers on my senses till date.

Nothing beats a warm biscuit slathered with butter and strawberry jam. But I bettered it, I made a batch of Strawberry Butter and slathered a delicious amount of the yummy pink hued butter on the warm biscuits. Believe me they tasted just out of the world! I would be adding the recipe of the Strawberry butter in the coming blogs.

I went through a lot of recipes and considerations for making the perfect Buttermilk recipe. I wanted to make a small batch of biscuits because there biscuits are best when they are just out of the oven, warm, flaky, ah-mazing! The recipe that I am giving below is one of my favorite - flaky, but not dry; chewy, but not tough; crisp in just the right spots.

I will also mention the points to keep in mind when you are making this recipe. Remember biscuits need all the ingredients super cold! That is one of the main key! Don't compromise on the cold factor else you might not have the amazing flakiness to it.

Biscuits come in many flavors, but this basic buttermilk biscuit recipe is probably the one that people most often make and enjoy and one that will never go out of style. This is the first bake of 2021 and it turned out so amazing. I am ready to take baking heads on this year! Also I can check off another thing in my quest to learn new things this year. 

Tips for Making Perfect Biscuits 

1. Keyword is COLD. Everything should be super cold preferably! Right from your mixing bowl to each of your ingredients. Biscuit dough demands to be super cold when it goes for baking to yield best flaky biscuits
2. DO NOT and please do not twist the biscuit cutter! Just cut straight down and lift up. Don't turn it even though how much tempted you are! Twisting the cutter will make two layers stick and the biscuits wont rise.
3.  Make sure all the ingredients are fresh
4. Do not add extra flour even if the dough seems sticky, as you work the layers it will come together properly
5. Work fast and chill the dough if you feel the butter is melting.

 

January 18

It doesn't feel like winter anymore. While I type, the blinds are drawn in the room, the fan is running on its maximum and I am wearing my summer pajamas, not to mention sipping on chilled lime juice as well. And on days like this, I miss the old 'gulabi thandi' days of Pune. January never felt this way before.

And I think it is due to this kind of weird winters we are having this time I do not feel like having the usual mach-bhat (fish - rice) fare on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I am an avid lover of Bengali food and nothing is more dear to me than a good Bengali meal. Still now a days I feel like trying out something light and quick. Not to mention cook something which gets my creative juices flowing especially in the Kitchen.  

I had a collaboration dish to prepare this week and I had some gorgeous Basa fillets from Fresh2Home sitting in my pantry which I was waiting to make into something unique. I grabbed this opportunity and decided to do some quick baking. Yes, once a non-baker, I am finding a lot of solace in baking these days. The anticipation of waiting to see how the dish turns out after it comes out from the oven is very exciting for me. And anyways even in Bengali cuisine we already are used to make a lot of steamed dishes, so nothing new for me, just the technique is a little different.

The dish I am going to talk about today is Baked Basa in Butter garlic and Lemon Sauce. Delicate Basa fish fillets are baked to perfection in a lemony butter sauce flavored with garlic and Rosemary. Its an under 30 minutes dish which is perfect for your date nights when you want to stir up something gourmet or even for your usual weekday lunch or dinner to just add a bit of pizzaz to the menu.

Now a dish which heavily depends on a butter sauce, needs to have a good quality butter to make the right texture for the sauce. By chance I came to know that President Butter which is a higher-end French butter that's widely available at American supermarkets is also available in India now on Amazon or BigBasket. If you are staying in US or even travelling to US, most of the times you will see the hotels, B&Bs would serve small chiplets of President Butter with the breakfast. And I was so used to it while I was staying there. After coming to India I had kind of not expected to find them there. And finally when I did , I was super surprised. President Butter reached out to me for a collaboration post and I think I can say this was one of my most memorable collaboration. Where even after the collaboration was over, I kept using the rest of the butter in various sweets and savoury dishes and I am in love with its beautiful flavour and texture. It's a solid beautiful butter with a nice mellow aftertaste. This is a lovely creamy smooth, cow’s milk butter with a nice light flavour, which compliments whatever I added it to. Also this butter comes in a foil wrapper and an outer box which helps in keeping the butter airtight and fresh for longer period.  I am absolutely in love with this butter! Checkout the pictures to get an idea how lovely even the color of the butter is.