Nichole Accettola Transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi peeps, you are listening to She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast from The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and cookbook author, and my fourth book is coming out this fall. Each Saturday, I'm hanging out with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes.
Today's guest is Nichole Accettola. Nichole is the chef and owner of Kantine, a Scandinavian-inspired cafe and bakery in San Francisco, and she's also the author of the 2023 baking book, “Scandinavian From Scratch.” Before settling in the Bay Area, Nichole worked in fine dining and spent over a decade in Copenhagen where she fell in love with Danish culture and Scandinavian cuisines. Nichole takes me through her culinary journey and we go over her recipe for cardamom morning buns from her book, including her favorite type of cardamom, as well as her tips and tricks for making Danish dough such as locking in the butter and letter folds. Don't forget to visit cherrybombe.com for today's recipe. Stay tuned for my chat with Nichole.
Thank you to Plugra Premium European-Style Butter for supporting today's show. As some of you know, I've been a big fan of Plugra for some time now and was introduced to it at my very first bakery job when I was just a newbie baker. Fast forward to today, I'm a professional Baker cookbook author and recipe developer, and I continue to rely on Plugra for all my baking needs. My fridge is always stocked with Plugra sticks and solids. I especially love that Plugra contains 82% butterfat. The higher butterfat content means less moisture and more fat, and as bakers know, fat equals flavor. Plugra butter is also slow-churned, making it more pliable and easy to work with. I do a lot of baking this time of year for work and for myself and my family. Comfy bakes like my pistachio chocolate anytime buns and cinnamon sugar buttermilk doughnut holes, and I always reach for Plugra unsalted butter. I've also been making a lot of yeasted breads lately, and I love the buttery flavor Plugra adds to my dough. Plugra Premium European-Style Butter is the perfect choice from professional kitchens to your home kitchen. Ask for Plugra at your favorite grocery store or visit Plugra.com for a store locator and recipes.
Peeps, the new Icons issue of Cherry Bombe's print magazine is here and it features three culinary icons on the covers. Indian food superstar Madhur Jaffrey, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, and the Chinatown champion Grace Young. Inside you'll find stories on more incredible women in the world of food plus recipes like Marcella Hazan's iconic tomato sauce. You can snag a copy or subscribe at cherrybombe.com or pick up a copy at a retailer near you like Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York City, Now Serving in L.A, Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, and Bold Fork Books in Washington, D.C. Check out cherrybombe.com for our complete list of retailers.
Let's check in with today's guest. Nichole, so excited to have you on She's My Cherry Pie and to talk cardamom morning buns with you and so much more.
Nichole Accettola:
I'm so thrilled to be here, you have no idea.
Jessie Sheehan:
You grew up in rural Ohio and I know that an early either sweet memory or just something that you grew up eating were those, dare I say, delicious Danish cookies from the blue metal tin, which I also just adored when I was little, and you also watched Julia Child on TV with your mom. Were you and your mom baking and cooking together alongside the eating of those cookies from the tin and the watching of Julia?
Nichole Accettola:
Absolutely all the time. My mom spent many, many hours in the kitchen each day. She was a stay-at-home mom. I have two siblings and she put a lot of effort into every meal, especially dinnertime. Nearby, we had a forest area where there were some blackberries and there were some blueberry bushes as well, and we would go on berry runs as we call them, and come back with lots of berries. So we did a lot of pies, not so much cakes. I remember actually one of the first cakes that I made was a cake that I made on my own when my mom wasn't around and I didn't understand what the word fold or the technique of fold the egg whites in. I didn't know what that meant, so I beat them in really hard and then I ended up having a very flat cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
After high school graduation, you went to Denmark for the summer. You had met an exchange student who had been at your high school from Denmark and you went to be with her and then straight after that summer, was it that you went to the CIA?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, yeah. I basically had that summer in Denmark, came right back, packed up my bags in Ohio and headed off within a week to the CIA.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'm very impressed with how focused you were as a 17, 18-year-old kid that you just knew cooking was for you and that you were going to work in food.
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah. It feels like it's always been a part of me. I really have never questioned it. I don't know, it could be something that my mom instilled in me as a child, but it just seemed like the path I had to go on. Yeah, I loved it.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then when you were in Denmark that summer as a 17, 18-year-old, did you think I got to get back here?
Nichole Accettola:
I knew that it was something completely different than what I had grown up in Ohio, just that freedom that I had being there. Growing up in rural Ohio, we had to drive everywhere just to even get into town to buy milk or anything like that. Everything was quite close where I was living outside of Copenhagen and we would bike everywhere and it was just this freedom of also my friend's mother was much more free about the rules and so forth. So as a 17 or 18-year-old, I found it really refreshing and we just bonded over those three months. Initially I would like to say I was only supposed to be there for three weeks, but then I was having such a good time that we extended it to the maximum I could be there as a tourist. So the three months was what it ended up being like to the day.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that because it shows a spontaneity. I am the opposite of that. I am such a rigid and planned person.
Nichole Accettola:
That also has it's benefits.
Jessie Sheehan:
So after the CIA, you worked in fine dining on the savory side of the kitchen in Boston and I'm from Boston, so I just have to ask, which restaurants?
Nichole Accettola:
So I started out working to get my foot in the door at Figs, which was a pizzeria down on Charles Street.
Jessie Sheehan:
I went to Figs all the time. I think Olives was first and then came Figs?
Nichole Accettola:
Yes, and I wanted to ultimately work at Olives. They weren't hiring at Olives, so I said, well, I'm going to get into the company this way and start doing pizzas, which was really fun. Looking back on it now, it was like a very high hydration dough that it was completely different than what I had learned in school about pizza. I worked there just for a very small short period of time and then ended up being hired to move over to Olives and worked there for quite a while. Worked also at Providence with Paul O'Connell and was at the Blue Room with Steve Johnson over in Cambridge and then opened up Number Nine Park with Barbara Lynch.
Jessie Sheehan:
So after working in Boston, you ended up moving to Denmark and you got married and you started a family and then you came back to the U.S. and started baking Danish rye bread to sell at farmer's markets and you worked on the recipe I think for a year. Tell us about that bread. I read somewhere perhaps you said this, a sprouted rye bread as a cure for homesickness.
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, that's what it was about. At the time, I couldn't find anything that was close to what I was used to eating, and it wasn't just an occasional thing that we would eat in Denmark. We would eat each and every day, every day for lunch. It might sound a little monotonous, but it's so versatile because it can go both savory and sweet. You can put honey and butter on it, you can put a fried egg on it, you could toast it, you can not. And so I just really wanted to find something that was going to cure that homesickness. Now it was a new home.
Jessie Sheehan:
You started making it and you started selling it at the farmer's market and it was wildly successful. People went crazy for it. And was it even the selling of that bread that inspired you to open the casual modern Scandinavian restaurant cafe that is Kantine?
Nichole Accettola:
Well, when we first moved to San Francisco, the plan was that we were only supposed to be away from Copenhagen for about six months, and I was completely convinced when we moved that I was going to be back in Copenhagen and back in our house in six months, and so we didn't take many things with us. San Francisco is really a wonderful city and it's a shame that it has such a negative narrative now in the media, but it really has so much to offer. And so three months into those six months we realized six months is not long enough. And that kind of just brought on some bigger discussions in our house about, well, when do we head back and when is long enough? If we say to our kids, we have three kids and they were quite young at the time, what if we tell them one year and then we're not ready in one year?
So we just said, let's keep this open-ended and how we went from that to let's open a restaurant, I have no idea. But we started talking about big dreams and life goals and I had taken some time away from the restaurant industry. I'd been working with food the whole while. I had taken some time away from restaurants while starting a family and everything and just felt like that was too short and wanted to do it on my own terms, having something daytime and not gourmet.
Jessie Sheehan:
Can you tell us about Kantine for those of us that have never been?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, sure. Sometimes I call it a restaurant, sometimes I call it a daytime cafe, sometimes I call it a bakery. It's kind of all those things. The name Kantine comes from wanting to create something that's like a gathering place for locals for the community to be in. That was my number one thing that I wanted to instill in a place of my own. Luckily we have such a great local community that shows up and we have everything from pastries to porridges to hot smoked trout bowl. We love local fish, it's Scandavian inspired but there's a little bit of a twist there with California produce and so forth.
And we have fun with the concept as well where we do some fun one-offs where we do Danish hot dog night and stuff like that. It's fun to have a daytime place where we also have the nights occasionally once in a while to play with things that we think are fun to do that don't really fit into that daytime. All in all, it's just highlighting things that we think are fun at the moment. A lot of these things come about from conversations that we have in the kitchen or just experimenting with seasonal produce or things like that.
Jessie Sheehan:
And it was in fact the restaurant that led you to write your first book, “Scandinavian From Scratch,” which came out in October of 2023. And you've said that the book is a love letter. Can you tell us who the letter is for and why.
Nichole Accettola:
Without getting teary? So over the course of the years now, Kantine has been open for six years almost. We've compiled a whole binders full of pastry recipes and dessert pastries, bakery recipes among the other binders that we have for the Savory kitchen. And I feel like there's this unsatiated desire to bring some of that culture, the food culture from Scandinavia and of course just the items themselves to San Francisco. And I also feel that there's a lot of people that have either Scandinavian roots or they have traveled to Scandinavia where they want to eat that way again. And so it's just an ode to that region of part of the world that I'm so fond of. I feel like I'm Scandinavian, but I'm not.
Jessie Sheehan:
In the book, you share your recipes and tricks that you've gathered while living in Scandinavia and prove that it was possible for readers or for customers of Kantine that they could actually make the things that they love to eat by using this book. I want to talk about your cardamom morning buns. So first things first with the cardamom morning bun is we're going to make Danish dough and I was hoping that you could tell us what Danish dough is. I know that it's similar to croissant dough, but it has eggs, requires lamination. What can you tell us about Danish dough?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, so it's just a version. Funny enough, the word for it in Danish is actually dough from Vienna. A Danish dough is in its end product, a very flaky dough just like croissant dough or puff pastry can be. And there's some small variations between those three different dough, but the one that reigns in Scandinavia is for sure Danish dough and it has eggs in it. You make a basic dough that's sturdy and a little tacky and you roll that out and then you layer it up with a block of butter over time. It is a bit of a project to get it put together, but once you've done it, it all makes sense and the results are amazing.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I know you've said that you think that lamination has a bit of a bad rap and that actually with a smidge of patience, anyone can do it and we are going to prove that true right now. So in the bowl of a stand mixer with a hand whisk, and I wondered, is there a type or a brand of whisk that you like best, balloon versus a skinny one or any shape?
Nichole Accettola:
I think a balloon shape shape would work out just fine. We just need to get them all mixed up and broken into small pieces.
Jessie Sheehan:
So in the bowl of a stand mixer with a whisk by hand, we're going to whisk together some whole milk, some eggs, some granulated sugar, just a little bit at this point, some active dry yeast. And I wondered, how do you feel about instant? I'm a big instant fan.
Nichole Accettola:
I like instant a lot. Yeah, I do. That's what we bake with, but active dry will also work. It goes into the wets directly. That's what I love about it. It's just ready to go.
Jessie Sheehan:
Me too. And then we're going to add some bread flour and I wondered if there's a brand that you like and also could one substitute all purpose or do you really like bread here?
Nichole Accettola:
So there's a little section in the front of the book where I talk about different flours and the amount of gluten or protein that they should have in it as a guide for the recipes in the book. To be honest, we do use half all purpose and half bread flour at the restaurant, but I would say I'd rather have your dough turn out and be strong or maybe your end result could be a little tougher. I'd rather have that happen than the opposite if you don't have enough gluten to hold together your dough as you need. So I would say you can adjust from there, but I would definitely not say to go completely over to all purpose. It just doesn't have enough strength.
Jessie Sheehan:
And when you say that the strength is necessary because of the book that we're going to be making when we fill our dough with that butter block, it needs to be strong because of that?
Nichole Accettola:
It needs to hold on to all that butter and create those layers of butter and alternating butter and dough. And if there isn't that gluten or glue basically to hold it together, you won't have good layering.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're going to add some bread flour and to kosher salt to the bowl and mix that using the dough hook attachment. We're going to be on the lowest speed just about two minutes. At this point the dough will look kind of dry and shaggy, but it's going to come together eventually and you're going to increase the speed to medium and continue mixing for about four minutes until a firm dough forms. We're going to turn it onto our work surface. And I wondered, are we flouring our work surface at this point?
Nichole Accettola:
No. The dough will be quite stiff and maybe just slightly tacky. It's not going to stick to your table, I don't think. It's not necessary to flour it. You do want to have some friction against the tabletop so that you can get it into a nice smooth ball.
Jessie Sheehan:
And so we're going to knead it a little bit to bring it together into a smooth ball and then we're going to cover the surface of the ball. Actually, I read this recently, but this idea that sometimes over flouring is not a great idea when you're working with yeasted dough because you're trying to get sort of that ball-bearing experience underneath the dough to help mold it into the ball.
Nichole Accettola:
I like the ball-bearing. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
I learned that from Claire.
Nichole Accettola:
That's smart. I love that.
Jessie Sheehan:
Isn't that great way of thinking about it?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well maybe it's because of pie dough, but everyone thinks, oh my God, I need a flour of my work surface. But you actually sometimes you're better off without.
Nichole Accettola:
No, and I think especially for this dough later on as we move in the steps when we go to roll out and where we need to get butter and then we need to put parts together, it's best that you just use as little flour as possible because you have to think you have this slightly tacky dough and if you put flour on it, those parts aren't going to stick together as they should and we don't want to start moistening with water or anything like that. So just yeah, minimal flour.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now we're going to cover the surface of our ball with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel. I wondered if you had a preference.
Nichole Accettola:
I mean, at the restaurant we do so many of them that it's easiest for us to do the film, but I would say at home, absolutely. I go for the towel
Jessie Sheehan:
And then we're going to let it rest on the counter for about an hour or in the refrigerator for a maximum of four. After the dough rests, we're going to remove some butter from the refrigerator and let it come to room temperature while we roll out the dough. So I thought this was interesting. We don't want to just let that butter sit. Often when you're making a recipe and you need softened butter, you would take it out, I mean, I've been known to take it out the night before, but you're at the very least taking it out when you begin the recipe. But here, because the temperature of that butter block is going to be so important, you don't want us to take it out till now. So it's just softened a bit before we actually start using it. Is that correct?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah. I think it's easier to work from cold butter to getting it to be pliable and flexible like it needs to be before you put it into the dough. I think it's easier to work that way as opposed to trying to take something that's too soft, it can be too soft or too warm and then if you're going back and forth, you might get it too cold and then you're back. And I think it's easier a lot of times process wise, you can take the butter and you'll work it even more as if you were creaming something in a bowl. The more you work it, the more there's friction, the easier it is to work with afterwards.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now we're going to roll out the dough. We're going to lightly dust a standard baking sheet and I wondered if there's a brand or a type, I'm assuming you like one with a lip around the edges. Is that what we're-
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, I just recently received some from Williams Sonoma, these gold-
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, those the gold touch. Oh my gosh. They're incredible.
Nichole Accettola:
It's just like heavy and sturdy and yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
The nine by 13s are great. The eight by eights are great. I love those sharp corners-
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jessie Sheehan:
... that you get on the baking pans.
Nichole Accettola:
I agree.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, I love them too. And they're nonstick until I probably scratch them, which I always do, but until I scratch them, they're not.
Nichole Accettola:
Right.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we've lightly floured our baking sheet and now our work surface, yes?
Nichole Accettola:
Mm-hmm.
Jessie Sheehan:
And is it a teeny bit of the bread flour or?
Nichole Accettola:
It doesn't really matter, it's just so it doesn't stick.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now we're going to roll and I wondered if there's a type of rolling pin that you love, a brand of rolling pin that you love?
Nichole Accettola:
A lot of times when I'm doing the big rollout to get it before I transfer onto the tray, I like to use a straight handled one, but once I transfer it onto the tray, if I see that it isn't quite coming into the corners as I want it to, I usually switch over, we have a short one that's probably about six inches long or so. That helps where you can roll on a diagonal to get the dough to scoot out into the corners. Because you do want it to have that rectangular shape.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're rolling the dough into a 10 by 15 inch rectangle. Does that mean that our cookie sheet or our baking sheet should be like a jelly roll pan size so that we can use the size of the pan to help us figure out how big the dough needs to be?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, that would work out fine.
Jessie Sheehan:
Or alternatively, I guess you would have a ruler, which we're going to need anyway for this recipe. And I wondered, I think I've read that people love to use metal rulers in the kitchen because they're easy to clean as opposed to those with cork on the back or anything like that.
Nichole Accettola:
The metal is the way that we go. Yes, for sure. Though we have had some long ones where you have to make sure that the numbers are engraved into it because we had one at one point where the numbers, every time it got washed, the numbers disappeared and it was like, we can't use this for anything.
Jessie Sheehan:
I've had that with candy thermometers where I'm like, I can't define softball because it doesn't exist anymore. So we're gently tucking at the corners when making the shape, placing it on the prepared baking sheet and putting it in the refrigerator. Now we're going to prepare the butter. At this point, what's our ideal temperature? Is it like do we press and should the imprint of our fingers should kind of stay?
Nichole Accettola:
For the butter.
Jessie Sheehan:
Can still feel kind of cold?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, you don't want it to get sticky on your finger at all. You want it to be like clay, so you push down it depresses, but there's no real resistance. It's just kind of firm to the touch.
Jessie Sheehan:
I think I read that you described it as clay or Play-Doh. For those of us that-
Nichole Accettola:
More towards clay than Play-Doh, I think.
Jessie Sheehan:
More towards clay than Play-Doh.
Nichole Accettola:
Well of course it depends if the kids have left the lid off the container or not.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're going to place a piece of parchment paper on our work surface. This is interesting. If the butter is in stick form, then we're going to cut it into 20 tablespoon size portions and position them in a rectangular grid on the parchment, five pieces by four pieces all touching. But if it's from a block, then you're just going to roughly cut uniform thick slices to create basically a six by seven inch slab of butter. Does this mean you would recommend a stick? Is that just slightly easier for people?
Nichole Accettola:
I think this book is written for the home baker, so if you have sticks, then go with that. That's okay. We were just trying to make it easy for people to conceptualize what am I doing here? I thought it was cute that we could make a grid out of it. But basically what you're going to do is the most important thing is that you have the right amount of butter and then you have the right dimensions and a uniform thickness regardless of how you get there from point A to point B, that's what you're looking for.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're going to cover the butter with a second sheet of parchment and we're going to roll over it gently with our rolling pin. Then we're going to remove the top piece of parchment, and I loved this. We're going to take a bench scraper or an offset spatula, and I wondered, is there a particular brand or type of either that you like?
Nichole Accettola:
Oh, Williams Sonoma, I have to call out. They have this soft handled one that's extremely sharp. It's almost like a weapon, but it's so great. I love a good scraper that's going to get everything.
Jessie Sheehan:
A bench scraper might be my favorite tool.
Nichole Accettola:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it so much.
Nichole Accettola:
Me too.
Jessie Sheehan:
So with a bench scraper or an offset spatula, we're going to very gently or very lightly scrape the butter block so that it has this kind of smooth uniform thickness and now it should measure approximately like six by nine inches.
Nichole Accettola:
Of course, by you rolling it out and you're figuring out your temperature of your butter and everything, you may have that it gets a little thinner and then you have to backtrack and get it back to that size again. You can use your bench scraper to cut off the edges, get it back to that size again, and then just spread the excess on top of that layer. Again, just try and get it as uniform in thickness as possible.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to place the butter in the refrigerator for 10 minutes to firm up. After that 10 minutes, when you press your fingertip on top of the butter, it should take a little bit of effort to make a depression. And this is where the clay or the clay dough texture comes in. This I thought was very helpful. You want the butter to basically be the same softness and probably temperature-ish as the refrigerated dough, soft but not melty cold, but not icy and still very workable.
Nichole Accettola:
A lot of people have asked, "Well, so what the temperature need to be or?" It really is just a feeling thing. And that's I think by trying the recipe multiple times, you'll be able to see that as well. You'll be able to gauge that a little bit better.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now I love this, but now we're going to lock in the butter. So we're going to lightly dust our work surface with flour. We're going to position our 10 by 15 inch piece of dough rectangle so that the long end is closest to us or parallel to the edge of our work surface. And we're going to place the butter rectangle in the middle of the dough so that the short end of the butter is parallel to the edge of our work surface or the long side of the dough. So it's almost like one rectangle is going in one direction and then the butter is almost perpendicular.
Nichole Accettola:
Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love, love, love, love. Now the long ends of the butter rectangle should come close to meeting the short ends of the dough rectangle. And I wrote-
Nichole Accettola:
I'm sorry. I just think it just reminds me of when we were actually writing these.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, it's so hard.
Nichole Accettola:
It was just the short and the long and what are we saying?
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, peeps, listen, I promise it's easy, even though it's going to sound confusing. So now there should be about three inches of bare dough on either side of our kind of perpendicular rectangle of butter, and we're going to fold these three inch flaps of dough snugly over the butter, enclosing it, pinching our center seam at the top and the bottom so that the butter is completely sealed inside the dough. And we have a packet which is about seven by nine inches, and we have essentially at this point, locked in the butter.
Nichole Accettola:
So exciting.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I'm so proud of us.
Nichole Accettola:
And then from the rest, the next steps are just about rolling it out and so forth. So this is very important. As long as you have those textures of the butter and the dough in, you're golden now at this point.
Jessie Sheehan:
And as long as you understand horizontal or lengthwise, rectangle of dough and more like a perpendicular rectangle that's standing up on one of its short ends on top, I found that once I could visualize that, it all made sense to me.
Nichole Accettola:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to begin our letter folds, which is just a traditional, I mean, I do them when I make pie dough, I sometimes do them when I make biscuit dough or scone dough.
Nichole Accettola:
I know. We just actually heard that Claire Saffitz was talking to you about doing a... And I had never tried that.
Jessie Sheehan:
Exactly. I was so inspired by that. So we're going to gently roll our dough packet out lengthwise until the long side basically until it's about nine inches by 18 inches. So at this point we're trying to make it longer, but not necessarily wider. Is that correct?
Nichole Accettola:
Right. Yeah. Whenever I start that process of rolling out the first time, I'm like, is it really going to be able to get that far, but just go slow and low and just a little bit at a time and it will get there, but just don't be rough with it.
Jessie Sheehan:
When rolling, as you say, don't push too hard or you risk tearing the dough or squeezing out the butter and you say to try to roll in strokes rather than by exerting pressure. I think I know what that means, but can you unpack for us what a stroke of the rolling pin would look like?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah. A stroke is covering the whole surface, so you're not putting too much pressure on any one particular part of the dough packet. And so whether it be from starting from the middle and working outward and then starting from the middle and going downward, that's one way of going about it. Or you can take the whole surface in one fell swoop and just alternate which direction you're going in. You want to do it nice and even. It's all about creating those nice layers.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now, once the dough measures about 9 1/2 by 18 inches, we're going to fold it into thirds as you want a letter, the top third folds down over the middle, and then the bottom third folds up over the middle and the top cover the dough and plastic wrap put back on our baking tray, and we're just going to let it chill for about 30 minutes. This is for peeps who get scared about wasting plastic. I loved this note. You can continue to use that same piece of plastic wrap throughout this entire recipe so you don't have to keep getting out new pieces of plastic.
But after the 30 minutes, we remove the dough from the refrigerator, remove the plastic, lightly dust our work surface. Now we're positioning the dough again with the short and closest to us, parallel to our work surface. And we're rolling out vertically or lengthwise again, another letter fold covered with plastic return to baking sheet. And we do this one more time. So it's three letter folds total, although that second rest in the fridge is a teeny bit longer after the second fold. We're at 45 minutes. Do our final letter fold. And now I'm so proud we have made a laminated slab of dough called a book, which I love because I love books and I love pastries.
Nichole Accettola:
It kind of looks like a book too.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, I can totally picture that. So we wrap our book in plastic and let it rest in the fridge for at least an hour before we begin to shape it. And while it's resting, we're going to make our cardamom filling. So in the bowl of our stand mixer with our paddle attachment, we'll beat some room-temperature butter, some sugar, some salt, kosher salt. Do you always use kosher when you make?
Nichole Accettola:
I always use kosher.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, so do I. And cardamom, we're going to use decorticated cardamom, which is fascinating. I did not know what it was and now I know. So you buy it, the seeds are already taken out of the pods, but they haven't been ground.
Nichole Accettola:
Correct, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is that what makes it decorticated?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah. It's as if you took a bunch of the pods, the cardamom pods and open them up yourself? That would be pretty tedious work, but inside those pods, there are these little black seeds.
Jessie Sheehan:
I think that's brilliant. I don't think I knew that you could buy cardamom that way. I think I thought it was pod or already ground.
Nichole Accettola:
I'm seeing it so many places. I think I saw it in Whole Foods the other day, like in a little spice jar where I thought, wow, way to go. It's really getting out there now.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. And then when you grind them at home, would we do it in a coffee grinder, let's say?
Nichole Accettola:
You could. It might flavor your coffee-
Jessie Sheehan:
Mortar and pestle?
Nichole Accettola:
Mortar, yeah, I do it that way. At the restaurant we do it in the spice grinder, but we're also working with different quantities there.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you say it's a worthy splurge. I had a note about where would I find it, but it sounds like you could find it at Whole Foods, which is great.
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, you can find it at Whole Foods. You can also buy it online. That's where we typically buy our cardamom there, but it's not cheap, but a little goes a long way much longer than what you would get if you bought it pre-ground.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is there a brand online that you love for the cardamom?
Nichole Accettola:
Penzeys has-
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh yeah.
Nichole Accettola:
Love their stuff. Burlap and Barrel is also amazing.
Jessie Sheehan:
I also love theirs.
So again, in our stand mixer, we've got our butter, our sugar, our salt, our cardamom. We're going to beat on medium for one to two minutes just until it's well incorporated and smooth and creamy. But we don't actually want to incorporate air. We just want almost like a flavored butter, like a compound butter. But it's cardamom that's soft and spreadable. And then we can just leave this aside on the counter. We don't have to do anything special with it. So now we're going to prep our pan and assemble our buns. We're going to generously butter a 2-cup muffin tin. And are we talking standard size or could you make this in a jumbo tin?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, so for the home baker, I figured that was what most people had was just a standard size, but you could definitely do some larger ones if you had an oversized.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, I love those because sadly, jumbo is my favorite. I want everything to be jumbo. I know I should like delicate little bites of things, but instead I'm always like, can I have the biggest cookie? Can I have the biggest muffin? We're going to generously butter our 12-cup muffin tin, and you love the tin for this reason., And maybe it's also just traditional, but the tin will keep kind of the shape of these buns really neat and tidy, which I love. Is there a brand of tin that you love or are you kind of using a restaurant supply one?
Nichole Accettola:
We usually use Nordic Ware. They have great stuff too.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I love this note, we're going to apply the butter onto the surface of the tin as well as in the cups, just so if the buns as they proof and then as they bake, they won't stick to the top of the tin. We're going to lightly dust our work surface with flour. We're going to place our book on our work surface with the short and closest to us, parallel to the edge of the work surface. And now we're going to roll the dough out. Again, it's vertically, it's like an up and down motion because again, we don't want it much wider than it is, but we want it longer than it is. Is that correct?
Nichole Accettola:
I want to say in between using your rolling pin, you can also tug a little bit gently, of course, tug it to kind of, if you can see that corners aren't being developed or something, just gently try and push it in the right direction.
Jessie Sheehan:
Manipulate it.
Nichole Accettola:
Pull it in the right direction.
Jessie Sheehan:
Our goal is this 13 by 18 inch rectangle. Then we're going to spread our cardamom filling using an offset spatula evenly and cross the entire surface of the dough from one end to the other. I feel like for some reason I have always made filled buns. I've always had a border around my dough. I have no idea why I was always having a border. And now every recipe that I'm talking to people about on the podcast or just life, I'm like, why was I not putting the filling on every little speck of that dough? So I'm just here to say rah, rah to no borders.
So we spread the cardamom filling all over the dough, and then we roll the dough up width-wise, like a jelly roll as tightly as possible, trying to keep the whole length of the dough at about 13 inches. And I feel like the length, well, it's important anytime, but particularly with these muffin tins, you want the same amount of dough or the same sized bun in every tin. Then we're going to use our chef's knife. Is there a particular brand or knife that you would shout out or just any sharp chef's knife?
Nichole Accettola:
To be honest, those bench scrapers from Williams Sonoma are so sharp. I would probably, if I had that at home in the drawer, I'd probably use that. But otherwise, any chef's knife will do.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're going to make 12 shallow cuts at one-inch intervals. The rolls need to fit inside the muffin tin because they expand while they proof, so it should be about one inch wide. And then using those marks, we're going to cut the roll into slices.
Nichole Accettola:
I just kind of plan it out before you commit.
Jessie Sheehan:
I was just going to ask you why. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sort of that just allows you to maybe move a line around if you realize, yeah, that's really smart. I'm the person who doesn't do that and then's the end, I have either one baby cinnamon roll or one humongous one.
Nichole Accettola:
There's your big one.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's for me. That's my jumbo. Now we're going to cut along the marks that we just made and place each piece into the buttered cup of the tin with one of the cut sides down. We're going to proof the buns. We'll cover the muffin tin with the kitchen towel, set in a warm draft-free area until noticeably puffier. Still a little dry looking, but the impression of a fingerprint is slow to fill in after you press one to two hours. You have a speedier method that you write about in your book for oven proofing dough. Can you share the speedier method? Because sometimes some of us, I won't mention any names except it's me, are so impatient that we hate the idea of waiting for two hours. Can you tell us about other-
Nichole Accettola:
It's a long time when you've got this beautiful project going on in the kitchen. Yes, if your house is a little chillier, drafty, can also be that it takes longer than two hours. One way that we actually we're proofing our pastries, to be honest, probably for about the first four years at Kantine was we would boil a pot of water. Let's say we're at home, it would probably be a two to three quart saucepan, and you fill it maybe a quarter of the way, just a few inches on the bottom of the pot, put some water in there, boil the water, and then you put that in the back corner of your oven and then you can put your pastries in there on their sheet trays lined with baking paper. But in this case, they're in their tins.
I always like to have a tray underneath just in case something oozes out. It's not going to be in the bottom of your oven, but you can put your morning buns in there and close the door. Of course the oven's off, but it's draft free. It creates a nice, warm, humid atmosphere for the yeast to just have a party in there.
Jessie Sheehan:
I think I missed that. So it's different than some people's oven, the speedy oven proofing method. Often when I've done it, I've turned my oven on, then I've turned my oven off, and then I've put just the warmth of the slightly preheated oven. But here it's basically you're using the oven as just a closed draft-free box, and it's the steam of the water.
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, and the residual heat from the pan itself.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, that's great. That's great.
Nichole Accettola:
I haven't had a lot of luck using those proofing programs either on ovens and I know, but if you have that, that might be a way to go as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
And just so I understand, I think you said that if you have your pot of water in your oven, you don't want to actually put your baking sheet on top of that. You want to move it to the other side of the oven just so it doesn't get too warm from that simmering or hot water.
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, it'll be a little too much for a nice laminated dough like this. It can also go over and be too warm so that the butter actually starts melting out and you don't want that to happen. So if you see any kind of leakage, you need to pull out. But if it's getting nice and fluffy and shiny, you're on the right path.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to bake the bun. While they're proofing, we'll heat the oven to three-seventy-five. We'll place the muffin tin on a baking sheet, just as you said, because butter can ooze over the sides of the pan when they bake. And then we're going to bake for 25 to 30 minutes until the pastry looks a dark golden brown. Now there's no egg wash because we're going to be covering them in the cardamom sugar. So we don't need that sort of extra color and shine that egg wash brings.
Nichole Accettola:
That's right. If I may just mention, it's completely fine if you fully proof your pastries, your morning buns in the oven, and then you take them out so that you can turn on your oven to preheat it so it's not like a soufflé that you pull them out of the oven and then you've lost that opportunity. It's okay that it can be at room temperature while you preheat your oven, if you only have one oven.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. Perfect.
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, no egg wash. It's not necessary. We're going to have the pretty sugar on the outside.
Jessie Sheehan:
Do you ever use a probe thermometer to see when the bun or it's just a visual feel?
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, it's a visual. They'll have a nice uniform golden color. I think the last part to be nice and golden is the center. So as long as they aren't pale on the top in the center, you're good to go.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now we're going to make our cardamom sugar. We're going to combine granulated sugar and our decorticated cardamom that we have now ground in a small bowl and we whisk that together maybe with a fork or a little whisk.
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah, I mean stirrer is fine.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then we're going to let the buns cool for two to three minutes, and then we're going to tip the muffin tin onto one side and use our offset to gently pry each bun loose, but we don't want them to uncoil. And we're going to roll the surface of the morning bun top down in the sugar, giving it a good toss, so the cardamom sugar sticks. So does that, we're only coating the top of the bun or are we coating-
Nichole Accettola:
That's a good question. Yeah. I usually put them face down or top down into the sugar and then kind of throw sugar around it so that I'm not also handling it too much, especially if they're warm, I don't want them to start falling apart.
Jessie Sheehan:
And do you do kind of one bun at a time?
Nichole Accettola:
I usually unmold them all and put them onto the tray just to get them out of the muffin tin and then toss them one at a time.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'm imagining something jumbo because that's my fantasy, they're small-ish enough that you can use a small medium-sized bowl with your sugar. You don't need anything huge at this point.
Nichole Accettola:
Medium bowl would probably work well.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. I loved this in terms of reheating, in case you had any leftover, that the added bonus to the extra effort of making a Danish dough is that pastries made from laminated dough tend to reheat really well compared to those made from a simpler brioche dough. And that one can do so by reheating them for five to 10 minutes in a pre... I loved that because it was like, if people are overwhelmed, you can just say, "Well, here's the thing. When you finish doing this, anything you make can be just as delicious as the next day."
Nichole Accettola:
Yeah. What I love about this recipe also is that there are different points where you can stop and stop production, and then you can actually pick it up again. So if it seems too overwhelming or you don't have time enough to do it all at once, I would say the book from start to finish should be in the same day. But once you have the finished book that's had the final fold, you can put that in the freezer for a few days, no problem, and let it thaw and then continue on with the recipe.
Or once you've shaped the morning buns and they've been cut before putting them into the muffin tin, you could just put them on a tray and cover it with plastic wrap and then freeze them so that they also just need to thaw and then be put directly into the muffin tin. Or you could finish baking them and before you toss them with sugar, just cover them or put them in an airtight container, and then you can reheat them and then toss them with sugar right before. So there's lots of different ways of making this, taking in increments.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's nice to have all those choices. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today, Nichole. And I just want to say that you are my cherry pie.
Nichole Accettola:
Oh, thank you so much. It's been such fun.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Plugra Premium European-Style Butter for supporting today's show. Don't forget to subscribe to She's My Cherry Pie on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and tell your pals about us. She's My Cherry Pie is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network and is recorded at CityVox Studio in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond, Catherine Baker, and Elizabeth Vogt. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our content operations manager is Londyn Crenshaw. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie, and happy baking.