Stand Mixer

Orange butter enhances the flavor of many dishes, from pancakes, waffles, and quick breads to savory roasted chicken, pork, or fish. It takes minutes to make this compound butter, but plan to make it at least thirty minutes in advance so the orange juice reduction has time to cool. Be sure your butter is still a little firm, but not so firm that it won’t whip in the mixer. To accomplish this, let the butter sit out at room temperature for a half hour to an hour.

Use this sweet spiced butter for the most amazing cinnamon toast. After you toast the bread of your choice, spread on some cinnamon butter and stick it under the broiler for a few seconds to melt. Store the cinnamon sugar butter in the refrigerator for a week or freeze it for several weeks.

Use grade A maple syrup to make this delicious butter, which is wonderful on toast or pancakes. You can prepare it ahead of time and store it in the refrigerator for three to four days.

A beautiful pink, intensely flavored butter, this can be made with either fresh or frozen, thawed berries. The butter should be a little cooler than room temperature when you whip it. Take the butter out of the refrigerator a half hour to an hour before you plan to use it, so it can soften.

This butter is delicious with eggs, seared fish, steaks, pork chops, chicken, or to spread on savory muffins or scones. When making it, it is important that the butter is still a little firm, but not so cold that it won’t whip in the mixer. Take the butter out of the refrigerator a half hour to an hour before making the compound. For best results, don’t freeze this butter.

If you didn’t think waffles could taste good and be good for you at the same time, these will change your mind. Besides the taste of fresh applesauce, the addition of flaxseed meal, wheat germ, and whole wheat pastry flour imparts a wholesome flavor. If you choose to buy applesauce rather than making it from scratch, the waffles will still be very good, but nothing compares with homemade applesauce made with crisp autumn apples.

Thin, buttery, and delicate, these fall somewhere between crêpes and American pancakes. It’s traditional to eat Swedish pancakes topped with lingonberries (or lingonberry jam) or another tart berry, a slice of lemon to squeeze on the pancake, and confectioners’ sugar. These pancakes cook quickly because they’re so thin. In fact, they’re so thin that most guests will want three or four. Serve with your choice of herrings (page 196) or Smoked Salmon (page 191).

Homemade raisin challah bread is a real treat. Slice this light, egg-rich loaf thick for toast or use it to make a memorable French toast. This bread can be frozen for up to two weeks.

Soft, slightly sweet rolls are an American dinnertime tradition, but they certainly have their rightful place at the brunch table, too. From this basic recipe, you can shape many rolls, including round rolls, cloverleaf rolls, and twists.

When our neighbors made this recipe on Saturday mornings when we were growing up, the entire neighborhood smelled like cinnamon heaven. These frosted cinnamon rolls are a little more complicated to make than scones or muffins, but they are definitely worth the effort. The cream cheese makes the dough flakier than that of many cinnamon rolls, and the filling is rich and delicious. You can prepare these the night before and let them rise for an hour before baking them in the morning. The uncooked cinnamon rolls also freeze very well for a couple of weeks.

An hour after leaving Dijon, I was lost. A tangle of lanes, endless vineyards, and a low mist left me confused and desperately looking for a farm at which to ask for directions. It wasn’t the most poetic of farmyards, but there was dry mud and clean straw underfoot and tight bales of hay on which were perched a hundred or more fat, round pumpkins soaking up the late-afternoon sun like a group of ladies in a Beryl Cook painting. I whistled and called without reply; not even a dog barked. As I waited, the pumpkins seemed to be watching me, growing faintly malevolent in the fading golden light. I felt like a lost child in a haunting fairy tale. Whether it was the watching fruits or the deserted farm that spooked me, I got back in the car and left as fast as I could. Thirty years on, I think of them in an altogether friendlier light, but they are still what I want at Halloween and on Guy Fawkes’ Night. I came up with this modern take on the classic sausage and mash a year or two ago in an attempt to pacify a herd of boisterous and hungry kids that descended on me one October. It worked.

The affinity between potatoes and parsley is usually demonstrated by tossing new potatoes in butter and the chopped herb. I like to take it one step further and put the parsley in a soft, almost sloppy purée of potatoes. It excels as a side dish for white fish.

I love buttery, cloudlike mash but sometimes I want something softer. I use a floury-textured winter potato beaten with butter and hot milk to produce a snow-white mash suited to mopping up the juices of winter recipes. The quantity of milk will depend on the level of starch present in the potatoes, so I simply stop adding the warm milk when I have the texture I like.

You could measure my life in health-food shops. It is to them I turn for the bulk of my pantry shopping, from parchment-colored figs and organic almonds to sea salt and cubes of fresh yeast. Their shelves are a constant source of inspiration and reassurance. It is also where I first came across organic vegetables, long before the supermarkets saw them as a moneymaker or the organic-box schemes would turn up at your door. It was these pine-clad shops, with their lingering scent of patchouli, that introduced me to the joys of the organic rutabaga. To this day I wouldn’t go anywhere else for my lentils and beans, though I can live without the crystals and self-help manuals. There is something endlessly reassuring about their rows of cellophane-encased dates and haricot beans, their dried nuggets of cranberry, and jars of organic peanut butter. And where else can you get a incense stick when you need one? Health-food shops rarely used to be without a carrot cake on the salad counter, usually next to the black-currant cheesecake and the deep whole-wheat quiche. Good they were, too, with thick cream cheese icing and shot through with walnuts. I never scorned them the way others did, finding much pleasure in the deep, soggy layers of cake and frosting. This was first published in The Observer five or six years ago, and rarely does a week go by without an email asking for a copy to replace one that has fallen apart or stuck to the bottom of a pan. Few things make a cook happier than someone asking for one of your recipes.

This tastes no more of beets than a carrot cake tastes of carrots, yet it has a similar warm earthiness to it. It is less sugary than most cakes, and the scented icing I drizzle over it is purely optional. The first time I made it, I used half sunflower and half Brazil nut oil, but only because the Brazil nut oil was new and I wanted to try it. Very successful it was too, not to mention boosting everyone’s zinc levels.

There are many ways to make a starter, some more effective than others. You’ll find numerous systems online, along with loads of information, misinformation, and folklore. Many people obsess over their starters, coddling them like newborn infants, keeping them on a regular feeding cycle, and fretting when the starter doesn’t bubble up the way they think it should. Because there are many ways to create a starter, let’s start by focusing on what a starter is and how it works. The most common misperception about wild yeast or sourdough starters is that the wild yeast is what causes the sour flavor. Within the dough, there’s an interesting microbial drama taking place. Wild yeast is living side by side with various strains of bacteria, and it’s the bacteria that cause the sour flavors as they metabolize sugars and convert them into lactic acid or acetic acid. Different strains of bacteria create different flavors and aromas, which explains why breads made in different parts of the world may have different flavors even if they’re made using the same formula. From a functional standpoint, the role of the yeast is to leaven and slightly acidify the bread by producing carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol, while the role of the bacteria is to acidify and flavor the dough and, to a lesser degree, create some carbon dioxide. This can be viewed as a symbiotic relationship, since the organisms harmoniously share the same environment and food source, and each supplements the work of the other. In a best-case scenario, the acidifying work of the bacteria lowers the pH of the dough sufficiently to create an ideal environment for the growth of the desired strains of wild yeast. Of all the mysteries of bread making, this symbiotic relationship is perhaps the most fascinating. As the pH lowers to more acidic levels, commercial yeast doesn’t survive, but wild yeast does. It all gets very complex, but fortunately this complexity manifests itself in the final flavor, as it also does in great cheeses and fine wines. If you feel intimidated by making or using a sourdough starter, realize that it’s simply a medium in which the microorganisms can live and grow in order to create their important by-products: alcohol, carbon dioxide, and acids. The job of the baker is to build the starter to a size that’s capable of raising the dough. Combining the delayed fermentation method used in this book with the complexity that a wild yeast starter brings to the dough allows us to create extremely tasty dough with many layers of flavor—or, as one of my students calls it, “Bread to the max!” First Stage: The Seed Culture, This starter comes together in two stages: first, you’ll create the seed culture, then you’ll convert it to a mother starter. In the first stage, you aren’t making the starter that actually goes into your dough; you’re making a starter (the seed) that makes another starter (the mother), from which you’ll make your final dough. There are many ways to make a seed culture. The simplest is with just flour and water. This does work, but not always on a predictable schedule. I’ve seen methods on the Internet calling for onion skins, wine grapes, plums, potatoes, milk, buttermilk, and yogurt. These can all serve as fuel for the microorganisms, and all of them also work for making a seed culture. But ultimately, a starter (and bread itself) is really about fermented flour. So in this book the goal is to create the conditions in which the appropriate organisms can grow and thrive so that they can create great-tasting bread. The following method produces a versatile starter that can be used to make 100 percent sourdough breads as well as mixed-method breads (breads leavened with a combination of wild yeast starter and commercial yeast). However, if you already have a starter or used a different method to make a starter, feel free to use it. The starter...