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Brett Braley-Palko 7/28/16 Brett Braley-Palko 7/28/16

Wild Berry Shortcake: In Partnership with Nordic Ware

My sister was supposed to swim today. She’s 6 months pregnant and hot all the time. To stretch, lay out, relax, she said it would be heaven to her. Instead, it rained, so she fell asleep on the couch, curled up in an old blanket a great-aunt made. The room is dark and the light through the lace curtains is grey. Summer is fickle and sometimes you can only lie down for an hour and wait out the storm.

This morning we talked about two uncles we had. One died in a war, the other died from smoking a pack a day. I don’t miss either anymore, really, but we live in the shadows of their totems: tan lines from mowing Tanglewood Baptist Church’s cemetery, a gold ring one wore on his pinky finger, the distrust of feminine men and women who don’t put wear makeup. We live in these totems and don’t talk of them much. My dad keeps a used shell from his brother’s 21-gun salute. My mother had a bumper sticker on her Nissan for the longest time: “All gave some, some gave all” for her brother, too.

They were uncles with nothing to do with one another, but we visited both in one day. One July in Indiana, a few days in the Midwest so we could visit our family there. We played basketball with John and picked blackberries with Mike. I remember the clouds were as curt and monosyllabic as their names. The sun was hot, no shade out in farm country. We rode our bikes to Dairy Queen and John sang “Sex and Candy” under his breath the whole way there. I remember it because later, on the way to my uncle’s to pick berries, I said her brother said a curse word.

It stormed when we got to Mike’s. Summer is fickle and so we made dessert. He kept an old ice cream bucket in his fridge that was full of bruised berries, smashed and crammed to close the lid. We stayed there for two hours, my mother made a yellow cake. We ate it with ice cream and those bruised and bleeding berries. I remember it all so vividly, a world I was only acquainted with. One July when the summer was still fickle, too.

Wild Berry Shortcake

Inspired by my summers in Indiana and Nordic Ware's Shortcake Basket Pan. Makes 6 shortcakes or 2 8-inch square cakes.

Ingredients for Shortcakes

1 ¼ cup AP flour
½ cup corn flour or a fine-ground cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch of salt
¼ cup half ‘n half
1 TB pure vanilla extract
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup white sugar
5 egg

Directions for Shortcakes

Preheat oven to 350*F
Prepare your NordicWare shortcake pan with vegetable shortening and flour, as recommended by the care instructions
Sift together flours, baking powder, and salt four times until very airy and light. Set aside
Whisk together half ‘n half, vanilla, and lemon until well-mixed. Set aside.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy
Add eggs, one at a time. Make sure you turn off mixer once in a while to scrape the edges and bottom with a rubber spatula. Mixture will look curdled, but it is just fine
With your rubber spatula (not with the stand mixer), lightly fold in flour mixture, a half-cup or so at a time
When all flour is incorporated, your mixture will be pretty thick. Thin it out with your milk mixture and beat for fifteen seconds with the stand mixer on medium-high to aerate slightly
Split batter between your 6 prepared shortcake cups
Bake for 24-28 minutes or until tops of cakes are golden and slightly puffed (while this is baking, make your whipped cream)
Allow to cool completely before removing from pan and assembling your desser

Ingredients for Cream

1 cup heavy whipping cream, cold
½ cup confectioner’s sugar
1 TB pure vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
¼ cup crème fraiche (or Greek yogurt)

Directions for Cream

While cakes are baking and cooling, work on your cream
In the bowl of your stand mixer, now fitted with the whisk attachment, whip your cream until soft peaks form
Add your vanilla and continue beating on medium
Slowly add your confectioner’s sugar and your pinch of salt
Turn mixer off
Gently fold in your crème fraiche or yogurt. The whipped cream will deflate slightly, but the added dairy will thicken the mixture to a nice, heavy consistency
Set aside until ready to assemble cake

Assembly: When cakes are cooled, top each with a couple tablespoons of your cream mixture and a few wild berries (as I did in this recipe) or blackberries (really, though, any berry will work). Sift a little more confectioner’s sugar for good measure and enjoy!

A special thanks to Nordic Ware for sponsoring this post. Nordic Ware has been producing quality kitchenware products in their 70 years and are now one of America's most beloved and iconic brands. For more information or products, check out their website!

Brett Braley-Palko 6/1/16 Brett Braley-Palko 6/1/16

Rye-Cornmeal Boule: An homage to my Indiana home

It doesn’t happen often, for me to get excited about seeing family. But I have baby showers to plan now. Christmases that aren’t spent with beer and my headphones in. Family is a term that gets lost on me. Somewhere between my sternum and my vocal chords, I’ve forgotten how to properly say the words right. I think they’re still there; in fact, I know they are. I couldn’t be pining for flat farmland and the broad shoulders and hairy knuckles of my family if I didn’t want it all back.

Somewhere between the sternum and the vocal chords, where I’ve forgotten how to breathe. To say I’m sorry. Where I sigh a little relief when my sister answers the phone and doesn’t ignore my call. Where it tightened a bit when my grandfather called me the wrong name after five years of not calling at all.

I see them all again soon, my Indiana family. The ones with the big laughs and pasts that still remain a mystery to me. Stories that are illuminated like zoetropes, anecdotes that don’t paint the full picture but flash in odd shapes, repeated until they’re true. I’ll never know why my cousin with diabetes ran away to Florida, or my grandfather married six women. How many men my uncle killed in the war. Where the only grandmother I can remember is buried or why no one visits her grave. These are family matters and I’ve never mattered enough to get a straight answer.

But I’m not looking for one this time. This reunion is for moving forward. Bringing new life in. Baby showers, days at the beach. Relaxing. Card games. My mother wants to learn beer pong. They bought a second home in North Carolina and we might as well use it, damnit. I’ll see my family again soon, and I made this bread in anticipation. Rye for Germany, cornmeal for Indiana. It blends who we are and I’ll make it for them in a week or two. Offer it to them. I’m excited to—and that excitement sits just north of my sternum; just south of my vocal chords.

Rye-Cornmeal Boule

An easy bread that will fill your house with a sweet earthiness from the rye and cornmeal. Makes one large boule or can be adapted to fit two loaf pans. Must be done in portions, as directed below, for the marbling.

For the Rye portion

Ingredients:

1 cup water, warm to the touch
1 cup whole milk, warm to the touch
5teaspoon active dry yeast (of course, I use my trusted Red Star Yeast)
1 ½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoon molasses
1 tablespoon sugar
2 cup dark rye flour
3 cups AP flour + more for kneadin

Directions:

In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, combine water, milk, yeast, salt, molasses, and sugar. Mix with a fork and allow to set for 5 minutes or until the surface is covered with bubbles
While yeast is setting, sift together rye and AP flour in a medium bowl
Turn mixer on medium speed, begin adding flour mixture, one cup at a time, allowing for each cup to be incorporated before adding the next
When last of flour is mixed in, switch to the hook attachment and knead in the mixer on medium for 5 minutes
(During this time, start your cornmeal bread portion—see below)
When dough is elastic and not sticking to the bowl of the stand mixer, turn out onto a floured work surface and knead for a minute or two
Place in a well-oiled bowl, turning over once
Allow to rest, covered, for one hour or until double in size

For the Cornmeal portion

Ingredients:

1 cup water, warm to the touch
1 cup whole milk, warm to the touch
5 teaspoon active dry yeast
3 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 ½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ cup cornmeal
3 ½ cup AP flour +more for kneadin

Directions:

While rye dough is resting, work on the cornmeal dough
You should have already started the yeast bloom for the cornmeal dough. This would include mixing together the water, milk, yeast, sugar, syrup, and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer and allowing for bubbles to form (after approx. 5 minutes)
In a medium bowl, sift together the cornmeal and AP flour
With the mixer on and the paddle attachment fitted, begin adding the flour to the yeast mixture, one cup at a time allowing for each cup to be incorporated before adding the next
When last of flour is mixed in, switch to the hook attachment and knead in the mixer on medium for 5 minutes
When dough is elastic and not sticking to the bowl of the stand mixer, turn out onto a floured work surface and knead for a minute or two
Place in a well-oiled bowl, turning over once
Allow to rest, covered, for one hour or until double in siz

Directions for rye-cornmeal bread:

When both doughs have risen to double their size, lay them both out onto a floured work surface
Gently pat and roll out each out into a rectangle that is approximately 16 inches long by four inches wide (don’t be afraid of the flour here)
Place one dough directly on top of the other dough, making sure the edges approximately line up
Now, take one end of the stacked doughs and roll into itself, making a tight curl
When you have exhausted all dough for this curl, tuck the end under the round and pat into a circular loaf
Dust a little with flour and place a tea towel over the loaf to continue to rise for 20 minutes
While dough is rising, preheat oven to 450*F and prepare either a cast iron skillet or dutch oven for baking
When dough is ready, it will be puffed and stretchy
Again, tuck edges of the dough towards the center dough to shape into a round
Place into your prepared baking vessel
Bake for 35-45 minutes, checking at the 35-minute mark for the edges to be golden
Allow to cool slightly on a rack before serving with butter and sea salt

Thank you so much to Lodge Cast Iron for sponsoring this post with your amazing products. We have used cast iron in our family for generations and I am proud to work alongside Lodge in creating this post. All opinions, recipes, and photos are my own. For this post, I used their 11” rust resistant cast iron skillet. For more information about Lodge, please visit their website, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Brett Braley-Palko 12/18/15 Brett Braley-Palko 12/18/15

Traditions and Tahini Gingerbread Men (in collaboration with West Elm SD)

We are cookie makers and pie bakers. Stepsons and second marriages. We grew into these roles through years of calloused hands that held the hands of distracted women in the back rows of church. You can trace my family back to the 17th Century and they’ve always held the same thing close to heart: tradition for tradition’s sake, tradition to anchor themselves to some higher meaning than the myopic, the provincial. The utterly human qualities of my family that are somehow inescapable in our genome. My family is built on a tradition of never valuing what they have.

We are cookie makers and pie bakers. Bread bakers, too. I had a grandfather who drove trucks and brought home a crate of oranges that fell off a truck once. He said he liked being on the road, how it gave him an obligation to run away every week. He said he only came home to get his paychecks; he didn’t care much for his family then. My other grandfather was a farmer and described how to properly collect eggs one Christmas when I was rolling out some dough. He told me how to keep the hens from getting restless. Sometimes he played them music and sometimes he whistled to them. He said he wish he knew how to keep himself from getting restless, so he kept the radio on at night.

My uncles were called the Tanglewood Pretenders when they got it in their heads that they were descended from a lord in England. They were named so after the Baptist church on their grandfather’s farm. They told people in their town they were kings to some degree. They rode horses to help their own grandfather with his store in town and one fought in a war instead of being crowned. Now he’s married and works a desk job and the other hasn’t been seen for almost six years.

Tradition. How we all grew up in the same chain link lots as our parents before us. Tradition when the fruit salad falls out of the fridge and the turkey is a little too dry. Tradition when the cake is eaten before the meal. Tradition is when we fight over scorekeeping during card games. Tradition so engrained in us that we can never seem to escape it. And we want to escape so bad sometimes.

This will be the first time I’m going home in four years to celebrate Christmas. The first time I’ll wake up to presents again. The first time I’ll see a tree decorated with the papier-mâché angel on top. The first time in four years that I’ll appreciate the tradition for what it is, for who we are, for what it all means to come from a long line of men who put food on the table and women who wanted to run away from it all. There is comfort in that inescapable reality and I’m facing it head-on next week. I’m ready. I’m waiting.

I wish I knew how to keep myself from getting so restless. So I’m trying to keep my home as enticing as possible. I’ve been baking cookies this week to keep busy, to keep distracted, to stay inside and not feel the need to run away. I created a hearth. I baked in that hearth. I made gingerbread cookies. Painted faces with crooked smiles from my shaky and unsure hand. I made a home this week, attempted to bring some holiday cheer while I think of all the traditions I didn’t value when I was younger.

I kept busy by making this cold bungalow in California feel like home. I needed some help from West Elm. And while I’m still waiting for Christmas to get here, they’ve made the wait a little easier. I’m a little less restless. I’m a little more comforted by the traditions that I didn’t understand before.

Tahini Gingerbread Men (makes 36 cookies)

Ingredients:

3 cups AP flour, sifted twice
1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
Pinch of salt
Pinch of pepper
6 tablespoons butter, softened
1/4 cup shortening, softened
1/2 cup dark brown sugar, tightly packed
2/3 cup molasses
1/3 cup tahini
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 large egg + 1 yolk
1/4 cup candied ginger, finely chopped
Royal Icing (I added a little orange blossom water to mine)

Directions:

Sift together flour, soda, and all spices in a large bowl and set aside
In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, mix butter, shortening, and sugar on medium-high until light and fully incorporated (will be lighter in color)
Add molasses, tahini, egg and yolk, and vanilla to the butter-sugar mixture. Beat for a minute
With motor running on low, gradually add dry ingredients in thirds. Allow one third to fully incorporate before adding the next. Dough should be a homogenous browned color
Turn out onto a floured work station and shape into a round disc. Cut into quarters and shape into discs again. Wrap and refrigerate for half an hour
While dough is chilling, make royal icing, preheat oven to 350*F, and prepare a couple baking sheets with parchment paper
When dough is finished chilling, take one disc at a time from the fridge and unwrap. Roll out onto a floured work surface into a rectangle (helps with sizing and spacing) to be about 1/4". Cut into desired shape and place on parchment-lined sheets, about 1 inch apart from one another. If making gingerbread men, you may want to use a spatula. Repeat for remaining/desired dough
Bake for 12 minutes or until browned and crisp around the edges. Allow to cool before decorating.

Brett Braley-Palko 10/3/15 Brett Braley-Palko 10/3/15

Fig+Bleu Elsewhere: Baking Society

It has been a hot summer, a suffocating heat. I did my best to escape it and I think it broke sometime this week. I went to Denver and Los Angeles, Dallas and Seattle. Today was my birthday, and I want to celebrate the year how I did for my 23rd: by continuing to do what I love and remember those who have loved me.

I haven't been baking much, even something as precious as creation has its limits in 110* heat. It doesn't mean I'm not creating. I am writing, I am growing, developing and connecting. I was given the opportunity to work on a series of posts for Baked on their blog, Baking Society. It's a series focusing on Midwest baking, Heartland recipes. I share the story with you below, but you can find the rest of the recipe here.

New England Corn Cake

There is a pulse in the Midwest on American cooking that beats like nowhere else. It’s called the Heartland for this reason. Food piled high on the fold out tables of church basements and on the worn farm tables, as smooth as river rock. I remember it from my childhood, from when I visited my relatives in small towns that followed creek beds, where a pale blue water tower stood like the Colossus of Rhodes. Where my great-grandmother’s house was bulldozed and we picked up stones from the rubble like souvenirs. Where the roads stretched out like promises, but you only ever went as far as the Dairy Queen down the street.

I come from a town of Versailles, Indiana and it’s pronounced, plainly and unapologetically, how it’s spelled. My mother lived humbly and her father was a truck driver. My dad’s family were farmers, decades of farming that formed callouses on their lifelines. My dad often describes the golden light of the sunsets on the farm. He also describes how he nearly drowned in a creek one summer. His mother never cooked vegetables, so they never ate vegetables. He left and joined the military when he graduated high school.

He had a brother that stayed behind and we’d visit his house on the farm in the summer. Blackberries twisted around the porch lattice and stained the white fence purple. A sun-bleached two-liter soda bottle was filled with water and you’d wash the juices off your hands before dinner with it. We’d pick the blackberries and make baskets from our shirts. My siblings and I grew up in Pennsylvania, on a plot of land covered with shale. All that grew were twisted peach trees, rotten on the ground, the pits crunching beneath our feet. We weren’t used to foraging, to fresh fruit. We were greedy and the bleeding juices dripped off our teeth when we smiled. We would go home that night, asleep in the backseat while our parents counted the mile markers instead of talking to one another. We were covered in mosquito bites and thorns stuck in our hair.

The Midwest to me has that sort of dichotomy. It’s a foil to itself. A place of dreamers who speak in idioms. A place where your teeth ache from sweet cakes at a church potluck and your feet ache from running as fast as you can in a race with your cousins. A place where the light hits every acre of your family’s farm except the plot called Tanglewood, where the Baptist church was. The church that buried women with heirloom names—Bernice, Eunice, and Ruth. The church that produced a cookbook one summer to highlight the women of the community that surrounded my family’s farm.

Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing recipes from this cookbook. Recipes that follow the seasons and are classically American, unapologetically Midwestern. Some are written by relatives, some are written by strangers, but all are a part of me. They tell a story that I cannot tell; creating an autobiography of a town that has 2,000 people and a lot of heart. They map a genealogy of those who baked before me and explain the reason I cook my cornbread in cast iron and understand that the thorns are worth the reward. I am excited to share my personal portrait of American baking with you, and I start with what this little cookbook of mine calls a “New England Corn Cake”, which I topped with a sour cream icing and blackberries.

Find the recipe here.

Brett Braley-Palko 8/15/15 Brett Braley-Palko 8/15/15

The Hoosier in Me

There is a toothache in my soul and I've lassoed string around it, tied the rest to a doorknob. I'm afraid the door of my past will slam shut soon. I'm tugged, pulled to the flatlands of my childhood. To the cornfields we'd drive through and the outlet malls we'd stop at on the way to visit relatives. For a funeral, for a birthday. I can still smell the plastic of the Happy Meal toy. I can still see the flowers that were stepped on the last time we visited my grandmother's grave.

I come from the Heartland and if you feel it closely, my pulse still beats there. Somewhere on the Ohio-Indiana border, where they put spaghetti in their chili and can hold a grudge for 20 years. Houses that sit on cinder blocks and gas stations where you can buy jerky from tupperware. My pulse still beats somewhere between 1991 and 1995, the last remnants of my childhood. When the porch swing creaked, when the hot tub leaked, when my sister hit her head and my uncle swore he could see her brains falling out.

Small-town hyperbole. Myths that become repeated and we become disreputable. We fulfill our own prophecies and then don't speak for 20 years. i thought about all of the snowstorms, all of the feet that crunched the ice beneath them. All of the cups of coffee that sat going stale, acidic and boiling in the pot. How no one bothered to pick up the phone and how my pulse would still beat, however faint and arrhythmic, to pull at the umbilicus of the Heartland.

Food has a culture in the Midwest. the economy of it all. Where I come from, meat is sometimes bought at the Dollar Store and when everyone drink black coffee, there's always extra half 'n half. You get creative, you cut corners. You can eat from the land and farm stands that line the roads, signs written in cardboard, others on wood. Sometimes your mother feeds you a peach slice when you walk into the room, saying it's the best peach she's ever eaten. And sometimes you have cereal for dinner when the electricity goes out and you hide under a mattress. Other times you try to recreate the desserts from spiral-bound cookbooks with scratches in the margins, from your childhood, before you forgot where you came from.

And it is a world that's bookended in coasts and often forgotten. A frontier that's explored, tilled, left to its own devices. Between plateau and plain, there is the Midwest. Between the mountains and the ocean, there is the Midwest. Between promise and pilgrimage, there is the Midwest. The Great Lakes extend and the fingertips bleed into the backdrop of my bloodline. And I am Midwestern in all ways but location. I taste the salt of the earth when I bite my tongue.

Mini Hoosier Pie

A basic sugar and cream pie, eponymous of my home state's nickname. The pie makes either 6 mini-tartlets or one 10-inch pie, using Ina Garten's pie crust (recipe cut in half).

Ingredients:

One 10-inch pie crust (see link above, made in advance)
1/4 cup white sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
3 tablespoon flour
2 cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400*F
Roll out pie dough on a heavily-floured surface and fit into one 10-inch pie plate or ~6 small tartlet pans. Poke holes with a fork and weigh with pie weights
Bake for 15 minutes or until slightly crisp. Allow to cool while you prepare filling.
In a medium bowl, measure all remaining ingredients and whisk vigorously until well combined
Sift ingredients into a measuring cup (for easier pouring) to create a smooth batter
Pour filling into prepared pie crusts and bake again for 30 minutes or until thickened and browned. (note: watch the small tartlets. If browning or burning at such a high temperature, fit loosely with aluminum foil
Allow to cool, garnish with confectioner's sugar before serving