It's been a looong time since I made homemade bagels, but I have a new book coming out titled Breakfast Breads and Sweet Treats (coming in September from Reedy Press) and my publisher insisted that bagels had to be in it. But I've never been entirely satisfied with my bagel recipe and technique, so I did a lot more research and experimentation to create the recipe that follows. A few important points If you want chewy, dense bagels, bread flour is best, which has a higher protein content than all-purpose flour. Be careful not to allow the balls of dough to over-rise before the shaping ..read more

I explored Danish pastry dough for the first time in Season Three of Breaking Bread with Father Dominic (20 years ago!) and I'm embarrassed to say that I have done very little with it ever since. But since I have a new book coming out in August titled Breakfast Breads and Sweet Treats, I figured it was time to renew my friendship with this sweet laminated dough. My original recipe made a HUGE amount of dough, enough for dozens of almond bear claws, so I decided to re-work the recipe into a half batch. This change has the added benefit of making the technique more manageable, so you don't ..read more

The Stage Rats and I are partnering with the Saint Bede Academy wrestling team for a fundraiser later this month, a gourmet pizza party and wine pairing. This event will be not just your usual high school dinner or fried chicken and spaghetti. We're serving only 40 guests, but tickets were $100 each, and we sold out in 3 days! I'll post a menu and wine pairing soon, but right now we've been hard at work on decorations for the tables. Late in the summer we build some trays with handles and assembled candle holders from scrap wood. After a careful paint job, several weeks of collecting silk ..read more

Pizza is one of my favorite foods to eat and to make, and if you've been following my blog or my Facebook posts over the years you'll know that I have a LOT of pizza recipes. (Comes from teaching high school and living with bachelors, I guess!)  I have a pizza cookbook called Thursday Night Pizza which was out of print for awhile because we lost our remaining copies in a warehouse fire. But it's been reprinted and is now available again on our monastery's retail website Monks' Market. I hope you will consider supporting my abbey by buying a copy. The new edition is spiral bound so i ..read more

When I first started working on Breaking Bread with Father Dominic for PBS, I thought I had a fairly wide repertoire of bread recipes, but when we started looking at ideas for a second season, I realized that there were some serious gaps in my culinary education. Glaring example: I had no idea what a scone was. Since then I have expanded my recipe collection in any number of directions and am delighted to have the acquaintance of a great many scone recipes along the way. (My monastic brethren and fellow teachers are happy with this development as well!) Some people say they don't like ..read more

With the restrictions of Covid I have been unable to do much in the way of live demonstrations. But I discovered. almost by accident, that public libraries are eager to do enrichment programs via Zoom or Facebook live, so I've been doing quite a few narrated PowerPoints lately. My first was on baking for the Holidays, then for Valentime's Day I presented how to make puff pastry treats from scratch. They were, according to the officials at these libraries, quite successful, and evidently they spread the word, because I'm getting one or two more requests every week! Here's one of the recipes I ..read more

Baps are a traditional breakfast bread in Scotland, where they are sliced lengthwise and filled with a fried egg and a couple of strips of bacon, or used for a sausage sandwich.  In the Scottish countryside, it was common to wrap such a sandwich in waxed paper and tuck it in a jacket pocket to enjoy on the morning walk in the hills with your dog.  Commuters would (and still do) grab one on the way out the door for breakfast on the train.  For a slightly less messy sandwich, chop the bacon and use it for filling for a one-egg omelet---just the right size for this bun. This is a ..read more

Store-bought puff pastry is over-rated, in my opinion. It's flaky, but without much flavor or character, so I thought that it was time for me to learn how to make puff pastry from scratch. Numerous Pinterest posts told me how easy it was, so I decided to find out for myself.  They were right. It IS easy. If you can roll out dough for sugar cookies, pie crust or cinnamon rolls, you can manage puff pastry. So here's the recipe I settled on, after a brief period of research and experimentation. ​ Homemade Puff Pastry 1 scant cup of flour (one cup minus 2 tablespoons) ¼ tsp. salt 1 s ..read more

Some of these donut cutters look like they might be used for bagels, but I've never seen a "cut-out" bagel recipe! As regular readers of my blog have figured out by now, I really love donuts. They constitute an entire category in this blog (look at the list to the right) and I often dedicate a day off or part of my vacation to exploring the donut shops of a particular city or region. I also have an extensive collection of donut cutters---the hand turned cherry wood one in the bottom right was inherited from my mother and is a special treasure.  Plain glazed donut . . . mmmmm! I love yeast ..read more

Recently my fellow monks and I have been doing more of our own cooking, in part because the pandemic has reduced our need for outside kitchen help---no students, no faculty, fewer support staff, etc. Most evenings our meal is prepared for us and all we have to do is warm it up and put it out on the hot cart, but three nights a week one of the brethren cooks a meal of his own choosing, depending upon his level of kitchen experience and how much prep time he might have. For nearly four weeks I have been somewhat laid up with a herniated disk in my back, which made standing or walking for any am ..read more