Hello from NL 38. This is Bake Sense, the somewhat ordered record of ramblings that concern the world of baking, from championing flavour and wholesome ingredients to questioning where those ingredients come from and how we can make the most of them. Along the way, you’ll find recipes and insights from life in and out of the professional bakery and plenty of fruitful chat.
When food is the lens through which you decipher the world around you, the culinary tourism of travel becomes inevitable. Whether or not you choose your destination to sample the cuisine specifically or whether you wind up immersed in it as you naturally navigate a region, the interruption to your normal day-to-day eating is a welcome one. It is a means by which you ‘travel’ further, actual distance aside, embracing the local food, the quirks of regionality enhance the experience, lend insight, provoke thoughts and shift assumptions.
You return to your reality with a new perspective; experiences change your pattern of thoughts, and sensory experiences, in particular, are hard to shake.
I’d spent the past week on the island of Mallorca and returned feeling inspired and ready to take on the final few months of the year, the busiest for any bakery.
As with all regions of Spain, Mallorca has a rich tradition and history when it comes to food, formed by layers of political, military and cultural events; its geographic location allows for the climate to range from one extreme to another: mountains, fertile land, extensive coastline, all make for an environment rich in native edibles. Invasion and colonisation brought non-native ingredients and techniques, further enriching a landscape and influencing ever-evolving foodways.
Nowhere is it more evident than in the traditional pastelería and repostería and the range of dulces that come from them. I naturally gravitate to such places; how can you not? They are, to me, the most fascinating things, a place to view and consume an edible history and culture of a place—a modern museum showcasing the well-documented techniques and recetas of a nation.
They tell you a lot about a place and its inhabitants. I like to observe how the bakers work, identify the most popular items and watch the ritual exchanges between the regular customers and the staff who genuinely enjoy being of service to them.
But the retail of sweet baked goods extends beyond the commercial businesses that have been there for generations to Christian convents, several of which still produce biscuits, cakes and even ice cream. Monastic orders were shrewd in their moves to link much-loved sweets to religious occasions, hoping to gain allegiance within a country that had large Muslim and Jewish populations. Indeed, the very products they made were based on ingredients brought by Moorish and Sephardic communities: sugar, spice and the like, appropriation in action! This level of religious zeal, coupled with the conservative and inward life, maintained the accurate documentation of this part of culinary history. The sweets often bear names relating to Saints, are shaped to evoke bones, stars or other iconography of significance and are commonly flavoured with ingredients such as orange, anise and almond.
Unlike the open bakeries, you are unlikely to glimpse a view of the baking Nun at work. They remain cloistered, hidden from view, often along with the goods. To procure the treats, ring the bell next to a small wooden door and make your request from the menu; before your eyes, a wooden turnstile known as a Torno is set in motion and your order is dispensed. You take your bag of goodies, replacing it with cash, which then is returned to the nun on the other side. This is a most ingenious device that I quite fancy implementing at the bakery for the days when being customer-facing is too much to handle.
Back home, the kitchen is always the first place I want to be. It’s my centre, and after experiencing the quiet, calm, polite exchange by the Torno, I considered it akin to a convent. A place to convene, to gather and collect myself, my thoughts and the ingredients that allow me to work. Ingredients I know I wouldn’t have access to were it not for the conquests and colonisations of the past, which naturally made me think with sadness and conflict about the current regimes forcing conquest and oppression on others.
Thankful to have a place of safety and calm to return to, I set about making sense of the world the only way I know how, with butter, sugar, eggs and flour, the ritual mixing, rolling and cutting, the sacred act of baking.
Anise & Lemon Lunes
Long before I began baking and my fascination with spice and Spain, I had a taste for aniseed everything, along with its flavour facsimile, liquorice. From ballbearing like aniseed sweets, Nipits or Imps to soft and chewy black liquorice in all its forms, colour-coated torpedoes to Pontefract Cakes, they genuinely were my sweets of choice by the ounce.
In its purest form, the natural Anise Seed is sweet with a warmth kept in check by fresh, green notes that whisper a little citrus. It will now and forever be married to thoughts of Spain; we use it often at the bakery, alongside sesame, orange and honey, where it reminds my Spanish sister Ana of her native home.
It has a more delicate depth than you will have been led to believe, but if you feel that it’s not the spice for you, then you could play around with fennel seeds or cardamom in its place.
Surprisingly enough, I am not in possession of a moon-shaped cookie cutter, so I improvised with an egg-shaped one to cut the crescents. The shape left behind was suitably lemon-like and saved umpteen re-rollings.
These biscuits are tender with a softness reminiscent of Polvorones (introduced to Spain by The Moors) and Mantecados, the famous biscuits of Estepa. They are often made with lard, which contributes a delicate, crumbly texture, the word ‘polvo’ meaning dust or powder in Spanish.
Ingredients
Makes many moons and lots of lemons.
For the biscuits
180g unsalted butter
40g egg yolk (approx 2 yolks)
100g caster sugar
zest of 1 lemon
1/2tsp finely ground anise seed
1/4-1/2tsp whole anise seed (I like the texture of them under tooth; add the higher or lower amount to your liking)
300g soft wheat flour (high extraction flour or a wholemeal pastry flour)
1/4tsp (generous) fine sea salt
1tbsp whole milk
For the glaze
I left some unglazed, better for enjoying with morning coffee and decked some out in glacé for fancy. The ratios I used were -
60g icing sugar
3 tsp lemon juice
pinch fine sea salt
Method
Place the butter in a bowl of a stand mixer, beat to soften, add the egg yolks and beat again to smooth out the lumps and bumps.
In a separate bowl, combine the caster sugar with both the ground and whole anise seed, along with the lemon zest. Rub together between fingertips to bruise and infuse.
Add the infused sugar to the butter and yolks and beat to combine.
Weigh the flour and salt in a bowl and mix to distribute the salt; add half of the dry ingredients to the butter, yolks and sugar and pulse gently to incorporate; follow with the second half of the dries and pulse again briefly. Finally, add the whole milk, and with a few more pulses, you should have a dough that will easily finish coming together by hand.
Turn the crumbly mixture out onto the counter and gently corral into a consistent dough. Roll between two sheets of parchment to half a centimetre. Rest the dough in the fridge until firm enough to cut.
Cut the dough and place the shapes onto a lined baking tray. Freezing them for 20 minutes will help keep any details crisp.
When you’re ready to bake, heat the oven to 170-175°C. Bake each tray of biscuits for 5 minutes, rotate and bake for a further 5 minutes or until the edges of the biscuits take on a golden colour.
Remove from the oven, allow to cool and glaze away.