Baking

The Clafouti is essentially a fruit-laden baked pancake. I love this Americanized version, which is crunchy and sweet.

In place of apples, you can use pears here or a mixture. In fact, this is a universal crisp recipe and will work with just about any fruit. Almost needless to say, it’s great with vanilla ice cream.

You need not use your best olive oil for these cookies, but extra virgin olive oil will make them more interesting than “pure” or “light” olive oil.

Cookies are always easy to make, but even they can use streamlining. One solution is to whip up a single dough in a food processor and finish it in different ways. This basic dough is great plain (with white sugar or brown or even molasses), but it can be varied with ginger or a mix of spices, chocolate chips, or orange. Or with one batch of dough you can make four different types of cookies—add lemon juice and zest to one-fourth of it, for example, chopped walnuts to the second, raisins to the third, and coconut to the fourth. Finally, it can produce rolled-out, cut, and decorated cookies; just chill it first to make it easier to handle. You might call this “the mother of all butter cookies.” Make these with more flour and they’re cakey; use more butter and they’re delicate, with better flavor; here, I go for the second option.

Look for Large Pears, just about ripe; their “shoulders” should yield to gentle pressure, but they should not be mushy. Serve these, if you like, with a dollop of sweetened whipped cream, or ice cream, or sour cream.

Corn Bread is a quick bread—that is, risen with baking powder, not yeast—and the most useful one of all. Everyone loves it, too.

I won’t claim that this is the best bread you’ve ever eaten, but it’s the fastest yeast bread imaginable, and it’s better than anything you can buy at many supermarkets. It requires little effort, less attention, and rounds out most simple dishes into filling meals.

In Verona, Italy, you can buy bags of I baci di Romeo e Giulietta—chocolate and almond cookies honoring Shakespeare's mythical, star-crossed lovers. I prefer to sandwich these two types of cookies together by sealing the "sighs" and "kisses" with a sweet filling. You will need two sets of mixer bowls and paddle attachments for this recipe.

Chef Grunert shares another inventive cookie recipe that utilizes interesting ingredients, such as red fife flour, a hard wheat grain that imparts a nutty flavor. Buttery, lemony, and sweet, these cookies are easy to prepare. Makes about 80 small cookies.

Ginger, my mother, never liked a bunch of kids in her house. Even as a young girl, I could feel her angst when too many neighborhood kids were around. Her clever solution was to bake a plate of my favorite Bacon Banana Cookies and leave them on the front porch, locking the door behind her. I never minded being sequestered outside with my food loot in the summer because the porch concrete cooled my skin. The winter—that was a different story. When I bake these cookies now for my son, Anthony, I'm secretly baking them for myself. I wonder if my mom did the same thing? I'll be sure to ask her...as soon as she unlocks the front door.

A pastry suitable for any pie, though for desserts I would go with the Sweet Tart Pastry on page 654. Here you can use olive oil in place of butter, with quite good results. The keys to easy success: use a food processor and chill the dough before rolling it out.

Spanakopita is among the best-known Greek dishes in the States, though the leaden, soggy versions you often encounter here are wildly different from the cheese and spinach pies served in Greece. The key to making a light spanakopita is to use a relatively small amount of strongly flavored fillings, butter every layer of phyllo—which helps the pastry stay flaky, light, and crisp—and start with good feta. As always, when working with phyllo dough (page 629), make sure you keep the pieces that you are not working with covered with a damp towel; see Baklava (page 628) for more details.

Traditionally, these were made as small pies and rolled up after baking (the dough is not cooked crisp but left soft like a pita); you might make twelve or even more from this recipe. Now, to make them look more familiar to visitors from other parts of the world, lahmacun are often made as large pizzas, which you can do if you prefer.

I love aggressively seasoned vegetables (see Broccoli or Cauliflower with Garlic and Lemon, Two Ways, page 452, specifically the second way, with the optional anchovies and dried chile added), and piadine are one of the best ways of justifying a meal centered around them. Piadine are griddle-cooked flatbreads from southern Italy that are sometimes folded and stuffed like calones. But it’s equally authentic, more convivial, and certainly easier to put a pile of piping hot piadine in the middle of the table surrounded by bowls of wilted kale and plates of grilled sausages or prosciutto. Have plenty of red wine on hand and let everybody help themselves.

A better-keeping bread than the standard baguette or boule, largely because it contains olive oil, and an easy one to fancify, with the addition of olives and rosemary.

Also called pide or pitta, the now-familiar flatbread of the Middle East—pocket and all—is easy to make at home. As with French or Italian Bread (page 570), you can speed up or slow down the time it takes to make these. It’s best to equip your oven with a baking (pizza) stone, but they can also be baked successfully on cookie sheets. Even better is to use a heavy skillet.

A quick street snack found in Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, and other parts of the Middle East. Great hot or at room temperature.

The basic European bread, which requires more patience than work. It’s eminently flexible, because at any time you can refrigerate the dough and retard the process for hours, even overnight. Many people, in fact, believe that the slower you go with bread, the better. So it’s not only acceptable but preferable to make the dough at night, leave it in a cool place to rise for 8 or 10 hours, then proceed with the recipe, taking all day—if you like—to finish it. So, this recipe is written as if you will proceed from start to finish, but you don’t have to do so.

In southern Italy, where the flatbread called pizza originated, it was traditionally kept very, very simple, topped with as little as salt, olive oil, and rosemary or a few tomato slices and a bit of fresh mozzarella. Now, of course, you see American-style pizzas on the streets of Rome. The recipes here, then, are a bit of a throwback—very simple and very real. Even simpler if you use a food processor; you can knead the dough by hand, of course, if that’s your preference, but the machine is far easier and more efficient and, in fact, does a better job, at least for most of us. Be sure to see the recipes for Pissaladière (page 45) and Tarte Flambé (page 44), both of which are based on this dough.

In many southern Italian homes, this is daily bread, the closest thing to the prototypical pizza. I vividly remember the first time I tasted it (in Rome)—it blew my mind. Please try it. Not only is it delicious, but it’s the launching pad for making any other pizza you like (see the variations for a couple of ideas). For this to be most successful, your oven should be equipped with a pizza stone, and you should make the dough directly on a peel. However, it’s almost as good on a baking sheet, and I give directions for both.