Rollin' into 2012

Eeny meeny mighty minis!

Life with a new infant (and a toddler on school vacation) did not allow much time for me to make -- and sell -- holiday knishes. But I was able to knock out some miniatures that seemed to be a big hit at the season's social gatherings (where I was inevitably asked: "So, how's the knish business coming along?" Sigh). At this point, even if I don't have the time to produce mass amounts of my product I still have to keep my knishnaut helmet on. Thus:

1. I made my first batch of mini-knishis;
2. I tried out the rolling method of assembly;
3. I reformulated the chocolate hazelnut knish.

Why? Because:

1. Two- to three-bite appetizer knishes are low-commitment kings at potlucks and multi-food family gatherings;
2. Rolling is how knishes are made in large quantities quickly in professional settings;
3. While the chocolate hazelnut knish easily got the largest, happiest raves at the Knishening, I want to eliminate Nutella from the recipe, a very lazy ingredient.

In culinary school, it was impressed upon us why appetizers are so expensive: despite the smaller quantity of food per serving, it's literally multiple times the amount of labor. So to make minis, some labor-saving techniques were called for. And if you do any amount of knish research, you'll find that the description "hand-rolled" is mentioned multiple times by those trying to hype their wares...even if hand-rolled says cigars and bagels to me. Hmmm.

Until now I've been cutting squares of dough, plopping a measure of filling in the middle, then folding it up, shumai-style. But if the same quantity of food that yields twelve knishes could do more than FORTY, why do three times the amount of labor? Hence:

Obligatory nikkit knish shot, perves!

Instead of 80+ tiny squares, we got three big ones with a carefully laid log o' potato-onion filling...

Circumknishen.

Then, once rolling it all up, I chopped it into 1-inch pieces. Surprisingly, the chopping action opened and spread the end that was just done...and sort of sealed the end being currently chopped. Thus, only a small amount of handling was required to seal the bottom and get the top to a nice symmetric look.

I came at the chocolate hazelnut cheese knish with the same rolling technique, but these were not to be mini -- perhaps smaller than what you get at Schimmels or what you got at Stahls, but the same form factor: a wedge of rolled knish, with two open ends.

The World's Largest Chocolate Cigar

My current chocolate hazelnut recipe tasted pretty good (so they say) but it's been rubbing me the wrong way, what with the from-a-jar Nutella. Knowing I could do better, I tinkered with a combination of dutch cocoa, hazelnut paste, and shortening. Then I sprinkled sugar on the crust after applying the egg wash, baked it and...

Knishloaf

From here, some slicing and dicing and...

Voila: The look is right, far superior and less handwork than using a cupcake tray. However, the taste was all off, not sweet enough, too dry, hazelnutty in the wrong way. It left me some clues how to come correct next time, though.

Next up, in a couple of weeks: Off to a kosher kitchen for my first stab at 100% kosher knishing! Hopefully you'll all be pestered by a Kickstarter campaign coming soon, too...

Addendum 1:
My KitchenAid mixer died a loud and clanky death while making this round of knishes (I had to make the sweet knish dough by hand -- a shanda). Now I'm onto my third stand-mixer in less than five years. Why? One: I use them a lot. The other reason: Bagel dough.

Kneading bagel dough in a standard KitchenAid mixer will kill the motor if you walk away and let it knead the dough as much a you need it to. After spending a few years working with pizza in a professional setting, one becomes surprised that a 5-quart stand mixer just won't quite have the same torque and raw power at a 100-quart floor mixer. Oops. Due to common sense and a slumping economy, I was able to snag a 6-quart lift model (twice the wattage) for about the same price of the lower-level tilt head model.


Addendum 2: 
I ate an empanada recently. Send a knish to South America, have him marry a local, and their baby will be kinda like an empanada. Anyway. The actual shop is kind of what I envision a first iteration of a modern knish shop, minus, y'know, the pork sausage, the salsa, and the yeast dough. Metro Empanadas have a quality product, if you're into that kinda thing.

Knishnaut: One is Not Like the Other

Left: Old & Busted. Right: Like Will Smith in MIB, it makes this style look good.

Knishes are baked...unless they are fried. Among the pizzaratti, there is something called the "Pizza Cognition Theory." It states that:

The first slice of pizza a child sees and tastes (and somehow appreciates on something more than a childlike, mmmgoood, thanks-mom level), becomes, for him, pizza. He relegates all subsequent slices, if they are different in some manner from that first triangle of dough and cheese and tomato and oil and herbs and spices, to a status that we can characterize as not pizza.

Now take out the word pizza, and insert the word knish. For the average New Yorker, the defining knish is not Mrs. Stahls, the same way most pizza-heads can't really claim Di Fara's as their ur-slice. For many (particularly non-Jewish) people, if they have an early, formative experience with a knish from the days before foodies and artisanal mayonnaise, it would be... this:

Deep fried squares, usually sold from a cart along side hot dogs, an echo of the time of knish-carts from the time of our grandparents. These are Gabila's knishes, a.k.a. Coney Island–style knishes, and while I may take time at a later point to delve into this history, only three things are of import here:

1. They are not too available on carts anymore due to DOH & Giuliani, but are still widely available in supermarkets.
2. They are fully enclosed in dough.
3. They are deep fried, not baked.

So a few days ago, in an attempt to eat healthier after eating way too much crap for the week before and few weeks after my son Lil' Knyshy was born, I decided to make some spinach knishes, strictly for home use. With some left over dough and some plain potato filling, I strapped on my knishnaut helmet and I went to work on exploring the outer reaches of what my knishtchen could produce....

Mandatory nudie knish pic, you pervert.

Well, it's square--so, square I made it. Well, rectangular, anyway. It's hip to be a square, and it's post modern to be a rectangle.

For ODB, as he likes his knishes raw.

Then I folded it up, used a bench scraper to seal the edges and then....

Little did he know that it was not a Jacuzzi...

In culinary school, we spent weeks on each method of cooking -- sautéeing & pan frying, roasting & baking, poaching & braising, curing & smoking & more. Only one method got a single solitary day: deep frying. In the lecture part of the class, the chef explained that if you have your time and temp right in deep fry, you are pretty much guaranteed to come out delicious -- and that's why the combination of fancy egg-timer-technology and non-trained high school drop outs can make perfect french fries at McDonalds for 50+ years all over the globe.

But a handmade knish does not come with time and temp instructions, so I had to wing it. Using a quart of peanut oil (peanut, because it has a high smoke point) that I zapped up really hot -- 500 degrees (french fries go good at around 450), I decided to just eyeball the frying until it looked about right. Unlike fried chicken, I would not have to worry about pre-cooked innards being raw, and a higher fry temp would prevent much oil from being absorbed by my knish.

Boil, boil, toil & trouble.

The knish started looking pretty golden at about 30 seconds, and I let it go for another 15 to get some nice mahogany spots all over the crust, guaranteeing some nice brown flavor. I cut it open, and it was nice and hot on the inside.

I am an American. If you deep fry it, I've been trained to automatically like it. When I went to try this knish, I was thinking, "Well, I didn't make any consideration for this method -- I'm using the same dough and the same filling as a baked knish, so let's pay attention to how this needs to be adjusted." After taking a bite, my only thought was, "Oh my. I need to take another bite." And my second thought was, "If my grandma was from Mumbai instead of Israel, this would be her very oniony, very underspiced samosa." And my third thought was, "Oh shut up, stop thinking so much, this is kinda good." I have a few ideas for improvements, but this was a very auspicious Coney-style knish v 1.0.

I had a few Gabila's knishes lying around (because if you are a Knishman, Rule 38.3 of the Lifestyle Code dictates you must always have a few Gabilas lying around) so I put them down, head to head.

Two generations.

Which one would you like to eat?

ADDENDUM: I was hoping to do a round of holiday knishes for special order for Hanukkah/Xmas/New Years ever for special order, like I did for Thanksgiving. While making this recent round of knishes, I took responsibility for caring for Lil Knyshy:

Lil' Knishy rides a bouncy table full o' Spinach Knishes

Caring for an infant while making 72+ knishes is like working with one hand tied behind your back. It took me a little longer, but all the knishes came out to my satisfaction, and in the evening I got into mad-scientist mode with the boiling oil after everyone went to sleep.

However, the preschool my toddler attends was put on emergency hiatus (another story for a non-food-blog post) and for the next two weeks I will have two arms and one leg tied up plus a rope around my waist tying me to a cranky radiator. So I will be forced to skip this holiday season and focus on some winter holidays -- please check out the poll on this blog as well as our Facebook page.

Thanks to everyone for their support!

Knishnaut: Peanut Butter Chocolate

Person 1: "Hey! You got PB& chocolate in my knish!" Person 2: "Hey! You got knish in my PB & chocolate!"

 Having fully recovered from the Knishening this past weekend, the main thing on the to-do list was....make more knishes. A full quart of left over potato filling needed attending to, and with the help of a bag o' the green stuff, I popped out a couple dozen potato and spinach/roasted garlic samples to get off to various people who might be able to help KNYC in the spring. However, there was the vexing question of enough filling for 24 knishes but enough dough for 25....

They're so innocent and full of potential when they're young.

I'm not about to cook a whole batch of some filling prevent the waste of one little scrap of dough, so I go hunting - bubbe style: I search for left overs. The mac n' cheese made from scratch on Wednesday have already been devoured by certain unnamed members of my family, so I was gonna have to go deeper. I did have a handful of chocolate chips.... but not enough to fill a knish.

Peanut butter goes well with chocolate, and when I have limited amounts of chocolate, PB is a good extender. I took out a work bowl, threw down one heaping table spoon of natural peanut butter. To it, a teaspoon of shortening, a teaspoon of sugar, one egg yolk, a pinch of salt, and a double pinch of flour. Tossed in the chips, rolled it into a ball, wrapped it in knish dough like it wasn't an unwelcome guest to the party, and into the oven after the egg wash.

That's the way this knish crumbles.

 The ingredients I laid down, in different proportions, could be three things: peanut butter chocolate pie, peanut butter chocolate cookie, or peanut butter chocolate fudge. What came out was somewhere between pie and cookie -- surprisingly light, moist, delicate, rich but not overwhelming. The glutenous potato-based dough wasn't a great match for it, but the flakier sweet knish dough I use would probably work fine. But it got me thinking:

I'm not a huge fan of fudge, its most common occurrence is in poor quality at tourist traps. But fresh fudge made with the right ingredients can be delightful, except for its form factor: it comes in ungainly cubical blocks that have to be held with paper, or fudgy shmears are guaranteed on your fingers. If said fudge were contained on 2 or 3 sides by a nice thin sweet knish dough....now THAT could be like Mr. Nathan introducing hot dog to bun! Well, maybe not, but a knishman can dream....

Fruity Cheesy Knishy Experiments

At some point you have to stop tweaking and go into production, but not today. Today was my last chance to experiment with some knish making. Dessert-centric cheese knishes could be an afterthought, which is good in two ways -- no one expects much, and the definition of what a 'sweet cheese' knish must be isn't as codified as the savory potato.

I was not that thrilled with the apple-cheese knishes from last week, so for inspiration (and to dispose of 12+ lbs of CSA apples) over the weekend, I baked off 5 apple pies & crumbles. The essence of the pie is the flavorful liquid of the fruit that cooks out and becomes a thick, sweet jam-like substance. How that happens is simple -- the fruit is tossed in with flour, sugar, and a little salt, and between the gluten of the flour and the pectin of the fruit, when the juices cook out it becomes that wonderful goo. I don't want to make pocket pies, but I want some of the wonderful goo in my fruit-cheese knishes.

So I scavenged around the kitchen and got myself a line up o' fruit. For the fresh team, we had

• banana
• apple
• pear

for the frozen team:

• blueberries
• cherries
• mangoes

I did up a mise-bowl of equal parts flour, sugar, and salt, and dredged the fruit handful by handful before inserting them into the open mouths of plain and chocolate knishes. Everything except bananas I paired with the plain sweet cheese, threw the bananas into the chocolate.

I tweaked the recipes as I went. The main change was doubling the sugar in the plain cheese, as it just wasn't sweet enough before. This made the batter noticeably looser, which reminded me of what I was taught in c-school: sugar is always considered a wet ingredient, not a dry. Now I appreciate that more -- it dissolves or gets slushy in the presence of wet, adding to wet's mass and gluten-developing powers.

Upon baking, it came clear that for the wetter fruit (everything but the banana), the fruit sweated enough to make a slight to large amount of gooey goodness on top of the cheese layer. As for the banana layer, the jury is still out, it may need some more thought.

Another thought is that the chocolate-hazelnut is not hazelnutty enough. I'm depending on nutella, but amping it with dutch cocoa powder. I may go full on cocoa powder and hazelnut butter for production....