Tag: baking

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

From Scratch: Sara Embrey Bakes Sweet Treats Down on the Farm

CREDIT: Paul Embrey

It takes a lot for a new dish to break into that clique of traditional holiday favorites at the dinner table.

But Sara Embrey’s mini coconut cream pies did just that this past Thanksgiving at our small outdoor family gathering.

Maybe not this Christmas, but in future holiday functions with the family, those little pies everyone was gobbling up will be there with the pumpkin pie, sweet potato and green bean casseroles, and turkey with cornbread dressing.

I asked Ruth McClallen Thompson, who brings the pies, where she gets them. She told me Sara Embrey in Coldwater, Mississippi, bakes them.

So I gave Embrey a call.

Paul Embrey

Sara Embrey with some homemade sweets

“Oh, gosh. My story is not exciting,” Embrey says. “I couldn’t cook when I got married. I didn’t have a clue. My sweet husband cooked the first year. Thank goodness my mother taught me to read. So I know how to read a recipe.

“The first thing I ever cooked was spaghetti. And it was a package, a Lawry’s packaged seasoning. It just told you to add water, and I succeeded.”

Not all of Embrey’s efforts were successful. “I’d put it in the garbage can before my husband got home.”

She took a cake decorating class after they moved to Jackson, Mississippi. Students had to bake a cake before they decorated it. “I would come home with the cake and my husband would very quickly take it to work the next day. He’s all about, ‘Let’s make a dollar here.’

“My family got sick of birthday cakes real quick, so we became pie people — or cobblers or something like that — for birthdays. And you learn to stick candles in that.”

After they moved back to Tate County 30 years ago, Embrey began baking petit fours, which she learned how to make in another class in Jackson, and selling them at little league baseball games and church functions. People began ordering them for their children’s birthday parties.

Embrey branched out to baking other things, including the coconut cream pies. “I kind of put three recipes together on those.”

One recipe was for the filling and another for the topping. “But the bottom part is such a simple thing,” she says. “All the crust is that store-bought cookie dough in those rolls that you cut. Just that with some flour added. You mix that up and put that in your tins and mash it around and make a pie crust.”

Embrey is particularly proud of her lemon-filled cupcakes. “It’s very similar to a lemon icebox pie, [with] that thick custard. I have a certain decorating tip you put down in there and you shoot that stuff down in the cupcake. The topping is some Cool Whip with the filling.”

The Embreys live on a farm, where they have 30 head of cattle. “We moved out to the family farm about six or seven years ago. And listen to me, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m feeding a calf right now.”

Embrey, who doesn’t even have a name for her business, does all her baking in her kitchen. “I have to keep my eye on the Mississippi Cottage Law to make sure I’m okay.”

She bakes everything except wedding cakes, which make her too nervous. “If somebody calls me for a birthday cake or anything, I’ll say, ‘Let me have a picture of what you’re thinking.’ And, I’m going to be very honest. If I feel I can’t do it justice, I’m not going to embarrass you or me.

“This is not going to pay my house note, so I can say, ‘No.’ It’s not something I’m trying to make a living doing, but I have enjoyed doing it. There are some weeks where I may do 400 petit fours. But, as we say at my house, it’s either feast or famine, where [the orders are] massive and then weeks when we’re not doing anything. And that’s the week where you go fish.”

To order, call Embrey at (662) 560-3379 or email sissyembrey@icloud.com.

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Brittney Adu Turns Unemployment Into Opportunity With Furloaved Breads + Bakery

Photos courtesy Brittney Adu

Furloaved’s Challah bread

When Brittney Adu was furloughed in May due to the COVID-19 pandemic, sitting around was never an option.

To deal with the stress, she turned to one of her favorite pastimes: baking. After churning out several loaves of bread, she joked to her friend that she might start her own bakery. Fast forward several months, and Adu has her no-contact bakery, Furloaved Breads + Bakery, in full swing.

“I’m more of a doer, as opposed to someone who sits and wallows,” says Adu. “So, I had this idea and I pulled it together.”

With a background in public relations, it was no problem for her to create a logo and get the word out about her new business. Next came deciding on a menu. To start, she turned to her fiancé and future mother-in-law for inspiration.

“They’re Jewish, and I think Jewish food and traditions are just amazing, so I thought it would be a good time to try out Challah bread since I’ve been eating it for so many years,” she said.

She spoke extensively with her mother-in-law on techniques, and immersed herself in videos from Jewish bakers.

“I really wanted to learn from those who have made it as a part of their culture for years,” she said.

For her second item, Adu looked to mix things up. Rather than go with a conventional muffin option, she experimented with various ingredients to create a healthy alternative. The result? Avocado blueberry muffins.

“A lot of my friends and acquaintances on social media had just been complaining about gaining pounds during quarantine,” Adulting said. “So, I thought about playing around with different types of healthy fats and using avocados as a replacement for butter. Besides the novelty of opening one up and seeing that it’s green inside, people have really taken to the taste.”

Brittney Adu

Every Monday, interested customers can place an order starting at 9 am through a form she provides on her Instagram and Facebook pages. But be quick! Hungry Memphians have flocked to Adu’s baked goods, which frequently sell out within 15 minutes.

For now, she utilizes Church Health’s community kitchen to prepare her orders.  Adu bakes all day on Thursdays, while she’ll email customers a pick-up location for either Friday or Saturday. 

“Since I was a kid, it’s been a dream to own a bakery,” says Adu, “I just thought it would happen later in life.”

Looking forward, she plans to stick with Furloaved and see what she can grow the idea into. While menu additions are certain, the original items are here to stay.

“No matter what the business grows into, I can’t get rid of the Challah and muffins,” Adulting said. “That’s what I started with, and they’re sentimental to me.”

But as she works on new recipes, Adu is keeping those with dietary restrictions in mind.

“I definitely want to add in some more things for people who have some special dietary needs,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to miss out on having something special just because they can’t eat those ingredients.  So, I’m really working hard to figure out some good recipes with perhaps alternatives to flour, or other substitutes, so everyone can feel included.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Torte Report

CREDIT: agencyby | dreamstime.com

I like the improvisation of cooking and the precision of baking,” said the bearded man in the Jurassic Park T-shirt. He swept the straight edge of a plastic scraper across the rim of a stainless-steel measuring cup, trimming it down to exactly one cup of flour (unbleached, all-purpose).

“You can cook a piece of chicken, but it will still be just a piece of chicken,” he added. “I prefer the alchemy of baking.”

“Alchemy?” I asked. “Isn’t that the practice of transforming, uh, stuff, into … ”

“Gold,” he said.

He would know, being Greg Patent, a prolific food writer whose first book on baking, Baking in America, won a James Beard award in 2003. A Baker’s Odyssey, his second book on baking — and 10th book overall — is due out this December.

Patent should have won another award for the column he wrote for the local daily in Missoula, Montana, wherein he recounted a special recipe he got from New York Times food columnist Marian Burros (who was given the recipe soon after her wedding).

This recipe, for a torte made with Italian prune plums, became, literally, the talk of the town. Folks were gushing about the torte at the bank, waxing about it around the barbecue, recounting their pleasures, glaze-eyed, at the check-out line as they shopped for more baking supplies for more tortes!

When I asked Patent if I could watch him make this torte, he agreed. “Just bring a pound of Italian prune plums (12 to 16 plums),” he said. “I’ve got the rest.”

A note on prunes and plums: They are distinct categories of tree, both of whose fruits are called plums. Prune plums are smaller, denser, drier, very tasty, and longer-storing. Italian prune plums, those lovely purple oblong spheroids, are the most common prunes in the West.

For me, unlike Patent, baking is too exact a science on most days, and this day was no exception. My only task was to bring prune plums, and I failed.

At the time, the prune plums weren’t quite ripe, so I stopped at the store, where my only choice was black plums (a round, juicy variety) from California. I bought a pound, thinking inexactly and improvisationally, unlike a baker, that they’d work. Had I known how important this exact choice of fruit is, I would have pursued those prune plums with relentless fervor — even to Wal-Mart if I had to.

Patent’s eyebrows rose when he saw my black plums, but he was cool — perhaps in part because he had a torte from last year thawed and ready to warm in the oven. This was to verify Patent’s incredible claims about how well this torte tolerates and recovers from prolonged freezing.

But first, we forged ahead with a fresh, wrong-fruit torte, just to see what would happen.

He transferred two eggs from the fridge to a cup of warm water. Cold eggs can curdle when they’re mixed into the batter, he explains.

He washed, halved, and sliced my wrong fruits and removed the pits, which disappeared through a sliding trapdoor in his cutting board. (If you have the correct fruit, halve the plums and lay them cut-side down.)

In a medium bowl, he whisked that exact cup of flour together with 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon Rumford brand baking powder.

In another bowl, he beat a stick of room-temperature butter until smooth, added 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 1/4 cup of sugar, and continued beating until the butter was ready to accept more sugar. Beating constantly, he gradually added another 3/4 cup sugar. When smooth and creamy — creamed, as it were — he beat in the warm eggs, one at a time, disappearing the shells through the sliding trapdoor in his cutting board.

He added the flour/salt/powder mixture (“dry ingredients”) to the egg/butter/sugar (“wet ingredients”), and worked it all into a batter with a wooden spoon, then scraped the batter into a buttered 9-inch springform pan. He arranged the halved plums on top and squeezed a teaspoon of fresh lemon over it, followed by a sprinkled mixture of 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.

While the torte baked (one hour, center of the oven that was pre-heated to 350 degrees), we sat down and tasted last year’s model — which had been frozen wrapped in foil. (To reheat, let the torte thaw to room temperature, preheat oven to 300 degrees, and heat for 10 minutes.)

As claimed, the torte was still fabulous at one year old!

After this year’s torte had cooled on a wire rack, Patent went around the edge with a knife to ensure nothing stuck to the side of the pan, then unclamped and removed the springform side.

The wrong-fruit torte was … well … it was good. But it wasn’t the same.

For confirmation, I brought both tortes to a friend known for his sharp sense of taste.

Without telling this friend, whom I’ll call Old Tasteful, anything about these two tortes, I let him try last year’s model.

“Oh, I like it very much,” Old Tasteful said. “Except I want more oven-fresh crisp on top.”

Next, he tried this year’s model, which of course did have that fresh-out-of-the-oven crisp.

“This one is less satisfactory,” Old Tasteful said. “Something’s wrong with the fruit.”

Ari LeVaux is a writer for The Missoula Independent, where this article first appeared.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Pour a Beer on It

Sir Isaac Newton, it is said, discovered gravity by chance when an apple fell from a tree and bonked him on the noggin. My recent decision to Google the words “beer” and “bread” was prompted by a similar, if far more painful, encounter. Not once, not twice, but thrice, a jumbo-sized container of Louisiana Hot Sauce fell out of an upper kitchen cabinet, bonking me on the head, rattling my teeth, and nearly knocking me unconscious. Eventually, I decided it might be a good time to clean out the overstuffed cupboard, throw away all the things I don’t use, and make a little room for the hot stuff that was about to give me brain damage.

The cabinet purge revealed wonders. There were all kinds of fancy commercial rubs and marinades given to me as gifts by well-meaning friends who don’t seem to understand that I make my own and don’t trust anything trussed-up in raffia. There were strange boxes of exotic flavored gelatins that must have been tempting at the time but which now sounded vile. There were baggies full of bread crumbs and lost sticks of shortening. And then there were all the bread pans that I never use because breadmaking is far too time-consuming. I was on the verge of putting them in a pile to go to the thrift store when I noticed a brown, raffia-adorned sack marked “Jiffy Bread” or “Miracle Bread” or some such nonsense. It was halfway into the garbage can by the time I noticed the instructions reading, “Just pour a warm beer on it, stir, and bake.” It sounded easy enough, and I had a beer.

After settling into a warm yeasty loaf of Sam Adams bread, I went straight to the computer to find out where I might order more of this magnificent creation. But, unable to locate a vendor, I simply typed in the words “beer” and “bread.” The summary of the first result read, “The easiest bread you’ll ever make.” Looking down at the $4 price tag on my empty bag of mix, I was already beginning to feel a little bamboozled.

The basic beer-bread recipe was incredibly simple: Three cups of white self-rising flour and three tablespoons of granulated sugar. Pour a room-temperature beer on it, mix, and bake at 375 degrees until the outside is crusty and golden. There was a note informing bakers who might want to use healthier whole-grain flours to add three teaspoons of baking powder to the mix. It really was that easy.

It’s a scam, I thought. The whole breadmaking business would go out of business if the general public caught on to this little trick. “I need a cooking show on Spike TV,” I told my wife. How can you go wrong with the catchphrase “Just pour a beer on it”? Like the unknown manufacturers who thought they would become rich and famous wrapping up flour and sugar in a bunch of raffia and selling it for four bucks, I had stars in my eyes.

Handfuls of cheese were added to the recipe to see what would happen. It resulted in perfect cheesy bread. Herbs livened up the flavor. A blob of butter added to the flour mixture gave loaves a cakey texture. Budweiser worked well enough but added very little flavor to the bread. Pabst Blue Ribbon, alas, produced bread that smelled and tasted like PBR, which is good for beer but bad for bread. The most flavorful loaves were produced using a variety of hoppy microbrews.

When a bunch of bananas started turning brown, I cut them up and added them to the basic bread mixture along with a handful of chopped nuts, a cup of molasses, and a bottle of Guinness stout. It didn’t really taste like banana nut bread, but it wasn’t half bad either.

Inside of a week I’d made loaves from every kind of brew on the supermarket shelves. Most were acceptable, and many were excellent. I had cakey fruitbreads made with fruity beers, fluffy white bread made with wheat beer, and dense whole wheat made with barley wine. I had herb muffins and a crumbly variation on focaccia, both made with Moretti, and lots of drop rolls made with Rolling Rock.

This bit of baking advice comes with a stern warning: Baking beer bread is addictive. I became so obsessed with mixing beers and flour that my friends started treating me like some guy walking down the middle of the street talking to himself. Every time I excitedly called for my wife to “come taste,” she answered with mock excitement. “Do you mean to tell me you just pour a beer on it?” she’d ask, feigning airheaded amazement. “You really need your own cooking show on TV, so you can teach guys how to trick women into sleeping with them by making them fresh bread.”

It was almost as humiliating as being smacked on the head with a jar of Louisiana Hot Sauce. Repeatedly.