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.

 

14 January

Happy Makar Sankranti and Pongal to all my readers.

It is an auspicious day today across India, where harvest festival is celebrated today. The harvest festival celebrated across India - Lohri in Punjab, Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Bhogali Bihu in Assam and Poush Parbon in Bengal are all harvest festival that marks the significant shift in season that happens around this time when the sun enters Capricorn (Makar in Hindi and Sanskrit) and starts on its Northward journey, a transition called Uttarayan in Sanskrit. 

Makar Sankranti has a host of signature delicacies from across the regions prepared exclusively to celebrate the auspicious festival. During Poush Sankranti or Poush Parbon in Bengal it is customary to prepare Pithe - Puli - Payesh. All the earthen molds come out of the pantry and the kitchen is heavy with the sweet smell of the famous Bengali Nolen Gud being incorporated in all of these traditional recipes by the mothers and grandmothers of the house. 

It wouldn't be really unfair to say, that the prime focus of the festival is food and it should be so, after all that is what Harvest festival should be about - celebration of good food from the beautiful produce of the land. As a kid there is one image that is vividly etched in my memory is that of my dida in front of the mud unun (hearth) on a very cold foggy morning molding the rice pancakes or pithas. We did have gas and all the modern facilities in the house during that time. But since that was a one off occasion when all the mashis ( aunts or grandma's daughters) with their families were present at my Grandparents home. And my Grandpa being an avid traditionalist and food lover had urged dida to setup the hearth in our big courtyard and make pithe in earthen molds. It was terribly chilly that day and foggy too. We kids were very small and huddled in our respective sweaters and shawls and tupis. While our dad's were fully armed with Monkey caps, thick sweaters and mojas. We all sat around dida, in a half circle, while our noses were red with cold. So when the hearth was lighted we kind of snuggled closer to it just to be a little warm. And to keep the elders warm - several rounds of fragrant ginger- cardamom chai made their rounds. Soon the smell of the steamed pithe (rice pancakes) started coming form the molds and the anticipation rose considerably. We kids have never experienced a pithe in such a traditional setup. The first steaming pithes were soon served to us and the impatience of having them made us pop those things right into our mouths only to realize how hot they were! But the moment we tasted the molted jaggery inside the rice coating, all the other senses numbed and it was sheer ecstasy. That was my most favorite Poush Parbon ever, and it was sadly never recreated because later on all of the families would never get vacation time at the same time.

I relocated to Mumbai and later to Pune due to work. And now I am a resident of this state. My association has been somewhat that of around 15 plus years now with the Marathi manus. So it is obvious that I had started to take fancy for many of the regional delicacies Marathis have. Like Puran Poli or Gul Poli (Jaggery flatbread) which they typically prepare at this time of the year and have it with sweet milk. Also the tradition here says to have Til and Gud together. That is considered as a auspicious combination during this festival and also they are two of the most winter-perfect foods that helps to keep the body warm and also increases the immunity at the same time . Til, gud ghya ni god god bola', is a common expression used to greet family and guests in Marathi households during Sankranti celebrations. The expression literally means "Have til and gur and talk sweetly".

Keeping up with the "trying new things" this year, I decided to make a few things from both my worlds and then tweak it a little. So instead of Gul poli, it was a Til Gud Paratha today where the chunks of jaggery kneaded with wheat flour , generously sprinkled with roasted sesame and fried on slow flame with ghee. It reminded me of all those time when mom used to make sugar parathas for me as a kid. Just that this is way more fragrant because I used nolen gud in this case. Check out the recipe below: