California Mincemeat Recipe

Obligatory Rambling About this Recipe

Last year, I wanted to try making mincemeat pies. I’m not entirely sure why. The only time I’d eaten these before was when my grandparents’ neighbor brought some to their Christmas parties when I was younger. Those were made with jarred filling. I don’t remember what they tasted like or even if I liked them. But whatever. Let’s blame the Great British Baking Show.

I looked at a bunch of recipes and realized I didn’t have some of the ingredients they called for, so like every home cook researching on the internet, I started substituting things I had on hand, which was fruit that grows well in a northern California backyard and a random collection of dried fruit that desperately needed to get used. This could have gone very wrong, but it was exactly the opposite. The pies were amazing. I made the recipe again from my notes and it came out just as good this year, so I though it was time to share. I did make a mistake this year and put in much more pomegranate juice than I did last year, but it came out fine. So if you have 2 cups, great. If you’ve got more because you misread the recipe and peeled way too many pomegranates, go ahead and add that in. It’s pretty forgiving. You’re gonna reduce it anyway.

What does it taste like? The filling is rich (thanks, butter!), sweet, and tangy. It’s a bit citrusy (is that a word?) and bright. It doesn’t taste like any of the individual ingredients. I hate raisins but you don’t taste them. If you really don’t like a particular dried fruit, just leave it out and add more of something else.

This recipe makes enough for many dozen muffin tin pies. Probably 6 dozen? About 6 cups of filling. Seriously, cut the recipe in half unless you have a lot of people who want to eat tiny pies. But they keep well, so maybe just make the whole thing.

Ingredients:

2-3 cups pomegranate juice

1 cup brown sugar

1.5 quarts (6 cups) of fruit:

• 4 Fuyu persimmons, diced, skin on
• Dried fruit, diced (raisins, craisins, apricots, prunes)

1 inch of fresh ginger finely diced or grated

1 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. nutmeg

1/4 tsp. ground cloves

Zest of 1 tangerine

Zest + juice of one lemon

1/2 stick butter

1/3 cup rum

Procedure:

1. In a medium sauce pan, simmer the pomegranate juice with the sugar to reduce it a little while you prepare the fruit.
2. Chop the big fruit to make even sized pieces.
3. Add the rest of the ingredients (except the rum) to the pan and simmer until thickened, stirring as needed to keep it from burning.
4. Cool the mixture.
5. Stir in the rum and refrigerate until needed. It’s better if it ages a bit in the fridge. I left mine a week or so.

Making Pies?

1. Make your favorite pie crust dough (or buy some… whatever… it really doesn’t matter). I like the double crust recipe in the New Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (i.e. the Betty Crocker, even though it’s not by or from Better Crocker… it’s a long story) made with butter. You’ll need more than one batch to use all the filling.
2. Roll it out pretty thin.
3. Cut out circles big enough to fit in your muffing tins and place them in the cups. You’ll need to fiddle with them to get them to sit down inside the cups.
4. Add the filling. DO NOT OVERFILL. If you put too much, it will leak over the edges when it starts to bubble and the pies will glue themselves to the bottom of the tin. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
5. Top the pie with another pie crust cutout that that is about the same size at the top of your pies. I used a star that conveniently had the same diameter as my muffin tin openings, but any shape (or none at all) will do.
6. Bake them at 375° (?… whatever you normally bake your pies at) until they’re visibly brown and the filling is bubbly. When in doubt, go a little longer. You don’t want a soggy bottom.

Challah Conchas

I’ll spare everyone the traditional recipe blog post story that rambles along and often involves major TMI, and just say that a friend posted on a social media that a bakery in LA makes conchas with Challah as the dough for the bun. That sounded AMAZING! But I’m not in LA. I immediately tried to find recipes, but struck out. So I made my own. It’s my family’s go-to Challah with a conchas topping that I adapted from another recipe. Is it worth it? It’s so very worth the time and effort.

Photos of the Process

Divide the dough.

Divide each piece of dough into two and make snakes.

Twist the snakes together.

Curl your twist up like a snail shell and tuck the end under. This looks so much more complicated than it is.

So shiny.

Shape the topping into discs.

Score the top and bake.

The final product! I didn’t cut all the way through the topping and the cracks are a little chaotic. But if they aren’t perfect, it’s easier to eat them!

Recipe

Challah Ingredients

• 1 1/4 tsp. instant or rapid rise yeast
• 1/2 cup warm water
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 1/4 tsp. salt (table salt)
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• About 2 cups of flour

Challah Instructions

1. Mix the yeast, water, and sugar in a large bowl. Let it rest 5 minutes or so, until the yeast is active and bubbling.
2. Mix in the salt, oil, and egg.
3. Add a cup of flour and mix vigorously to make a batter.
4. Continue mixing in flour until a workable dough forms.
5. Turn the dough out into a floured counter and kneed until you have a smooth dough. Add more flour if it gets sticky.
6. Put the dough into an oiled bowl to rise until doubled in bulk, about an hour and a half.
7. Once it’s risen, turn it out into the counter. It’s an oily dough so I usually don’t need flour to keep it from sticking at this point. Divide the dough into 16 pieces.
8. Shape each piece. Balls work fine. I cut mine in two, formed snakes, twisted the snakes together and then coiled up the twists, tucking in the ends. Or braid them. It really doesn’t matter. Just do the same thing to all of them so they cook at the same time.
9. Place the shaped rolls onto a pan. I use a silpat liner, but parchment would also work to make sure they don’t stick.
10. Let the rolls rise until they’re puffy and visibly larger.
11. While you wait, make the topping and preheat the oven to 350°.

Topping Ingredients

• 1/4 cup butter or shortening
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 4 drops of red liquid food coloring (optional)
• 1/2 cup flour

Topping Instructions

1. Mix the butter and sugars together well.
2. Add the vanilla and food coloring and mix again.
3. Mix in the flour.
4. Divide the dough into 16 even portions. I rolled it into a fat snake and cut it.
5. Shape each portion into a disc about as big as the top of the challah rolls.

Assemble & Bake

1. Top each roll with a pink topping disc.
2. Score the topping with a sharp knife, cutting through the disc all the way. You don’t need to cut the bread roll.
3. Bake the conchas in a 350° oven for 20 minutes, until the bottoms just start to turn golden. Check them often. Rolls burn fast.
4. Cool on a wire rack.

Thanksgiving rolls… Challah!

When I started photographing the process of making Challah rolls for Thanksgiving dinner, I thought it was going to be a simple tale of happy little clover dinner rolls.  And it is… sort of.

To prepare, my first thought was to look in the Challah book that my boyfriend’s mom gave us to get some ideas.  We lost the printed recipe we used last time and I thought the book might have a good one.  The recipe in the book didn’t call for any eggs, which is odd for an egg bread, so we decided to search for his sister-in-law’s recipe instead.  The book though had a great idea to make clover dinner rolls in a cupcake pan.  Super simple – you just bake three little dough balls in each cup of a cupcake pan and you’ve got dinner rolls!  Easy right?  Yes, until the end.  I baked up half the dough as clover rolls, but when I turned them out of the pan, disaster!  The rolls all (but 5) split into three pieces!  Oh well.  They still taste good.

I had planned on using this half of the batch as the rolls for our Thanksgiving dinner, and the other half was just going to get baked up as something (I wasn’t sure what) that we’d eat for breakfast.  That was until I had an idea…

While the clover roll dough was rising in the cupcake pans before baking, I contemplated what to do with the other half of the dough.  Since the first half of the dough divided nicely into 12 pieces (tips for that below), I figured I’d just make another dozen rolls but bake them on a flat sheet since we only have one cupcake pan.  After dividing the dough, I decided to try making little braided rolls, like miniatures of the Finnish pulla (or nissua) my family makes for Christmas.  It’s the same deal as the clover rolls to start – divide the dough into 12 pieces, then divide each piece into 3.  From there, I rolled each third into a snake, then braided them together and tucked the ends under to make them pretty.  Easy enough.  Then they rose and got baked like the other rolls.  These ones didn’t fall apart though when they were done and they are adorable!

So now the batch that was the “whatever” batch is getting saved for Thanksgiving and the “special” ones are getting eaten “so no one knows it ever happened”, as my boyfriend says.

 

Tips for Dividing Dough Evenly Into 12 Pieces

I can’t cut 12 pieces off a hunk of dough and get them all the same size without some help, can you?  Here’s how to get them pretty evenly sized:

1. Cut the dough ball in half.  That’s easy.  Now you have 2 pieces.
2. Cut the two halves in half.  Now you have 4 pieces.
3. Cut each of the resulting hunks into 3 pieces each.  Now you have 12.  One tip for dividing dough into thirds is to cut the middle third skinnier than the ends.  Why?  The ends are usually tapered, so if you cut them all the same width, the middle one ends up being substantially thicker.  So, cut that middle section thinner and it evens out.

Tips for Braiding Dough

My great-grandmother used to make Finnish pulla (it’s a sweet white bread flavored with cardamom… she called it biscuit, though we’re not sure why) for breakfast and when my sister and I would visit as kids, we loved it.  Like Challah, pulla is a dough that can be easily shaped including into braids, although there are numerous shapes for both.  Anyway, here are some tips for braiding dough, whether it’s pulla or Challah:

1.   Start in the middle and braid one side.  Then, turn the dough around and braid the other side.  This prevents the ends from stretching out so you have an even braid.
2. Tuck the ends under.  The ends always look a little rough, so hide them.  Also, sometimes when the loaf is rising, the ends will unbraid themselves if they aren’t tucked in.
3. If the dough is being uncooperative and keeps springing back when you stretch it, let it rest for 10 minutes and it will play more nicely.
4. So you still ended up with a goofy looking braid?  Eat it first, then no one will know you ever had an odd one.  Also, they all taste the same, so don’t worry about it.

Too Cold for Dough to Rise?

Get out the heating pad.  Wrap a clean dish towel around it, and you’ve got a dough rising station.  Be careful not to turn it up too high or you could end up cooking the bottom of your dough in the rising bowl (I speak from experience).