Claire Saffitz Makes Aunt Rose's Mondel Bread | Dessert Person

the coffee is kicking in it's 11 45 that's okay we got a lead start today all right hey everyone i'm claire staffords we are at my cabin i will prove to you that you don't need cabinets to bake you don't need appliances that are newer than 30 years old or i think i think it's still on two by fours so all you need is a working oven and a little work space and you can make model bread which you're going to make today [Music] this is a recipe called mondo bread and this is a family recipe in my family we spell it m-o-n-d-e-l and then bread but that's i don't know what to call it like a transliteration but uh it is a transliteration of mandelbrot which is german for almond bread i liken it to jewish biscotti it's a very crunchy not too sweet but really incredibly textured and delicious cookie and this is a recipe that's been in my family for generations and everyone loves it and it's so much better than you think it's going to be based on the ingredients so i'm going to show you how to make it [Music] i'm going to make it in a stand mixer in terms of special equipment but there's no reason why you couldn't make this by hand and i've done that before i just have my stand mixer out you can also make it with a hand mixer and that's really it as far as special equipment we bake these in loaves that you form free form on the on a baking sheet so you don't need like a pan or anything ingredients they're very straightforward so i have really this star ingredient which are slivered almonds slivered almonds have these kind of like right angles i actually really like baking with slivered almonds they're very easy to find and they i love the texture that they create so there's a lot of almonds in this recipe because that is the main flavor all-purpose flour three large eggs cup and a half of granulated sugar a cup plus a tablespoon vegetable oil some kind of neutral oil avocado grape cedar fine baking powder cinnamon and vanilla oh and salt [Music] let me give you a little background on this recipe so as i said it's a family recipe we call it aunt rose's mondal bread because my mother's aunt rose it's not i don't know if it's her recipe but like that was who made it in her family she was known for it although recently my mom has been in touch with her cousin and there's actually there's no slight dispute about recipe ownership maybe it's aunt tilly point is the family recipe and my mom has made this my whole life my aunt makes it and i learned while my mom and i are making this recipe together because i wanted to make it with her so she could show me how she does it that my great-grandfather so my aunt rose's father was a baker before emigrating to the u.s from what's now ukraine i had never heard that before it was 33 before i learned that so i love making it because i feel very connected to sort of my heritage so it was actually very important to me that i didn't change anything about this recipe that is basically like verbatim the recipe that was handed down to my mom of course they made like one or two really tiny little changes but for the most part it is very faithful to the original so that said this recipe gets flavor from two main sources one is almonds and that is really the principal flavor but the other is a very generous amount of very concentrated cinnamon sugar so i'm gonna start by making that and making it mixing it for the entire recipe i have one and a half cups of granulated sugar i'm going to take a half cup of that and mix it with the cinnamon and this makes a very cinnamony cinnamon sugar generally this is why i kind of said before like i would never make this recipe like there's things about it that seemed not wrong but like i wouldn't do them but it's perfect and i wouldn't change a thing so there's like some lesson in there so i'm just going to mix this together so you can see it's pretty dark so it has a lot of cinnamon flavor and just mix it until everything is a uniform color okay and then set that aside so the next thing is toasting your almonds it's two cups of slivered almonds just lay them out on your baking sheet now the recipe as the recipe says first we're going to coat the almonds in a little bit of oil again if i were doing this i'd be like almonds have plenty of fat in them i wouldn't put oil on it but this is what anne rose's recipe says so this is what we do my mom has a thing of like she has one pan that is like a rimless baking sheet that is looks like something that was dug up but like an archaeological site but to her she it's like her mono bread pan it's like she can't make it unless she makes it on that pan all right so i'm just going to stir this up and the oven just beeped so it's on 350. although this oven is really on 375 because it's a little bit slow into the oven and this will go for like five to eight minutes and i'll just check halfway through and toss them and you want to go pretty dark on the almonds like very deep golden brown because again that is prime the primary flavor of the cookie [Music] baking powder two teaspoons half teaspoon okay so here i have four cups of all-purpose flour so two teaspoons baking powder not soda powder and then a half teaspoon of salt so this is actually one of the changes the original recipe does not have salt in it but i just cannot i could not help myself it had to have salt added just to enhance all the flavors that are already in there stir that up that's it [Music] now what i'm going to do is separate from the four cups of flour that i had i have one tablespoon of flour here that i'm just going to sprinkle over the nuts what does that do and stir them around to coat this is just part of the recipe it doesn't seem necessary to me i actually really like the idea of like we make it this way because this is how we make it kind of refreshing especially as a recipe developer where i'm always trying to like tweak and fix and it's great to have something that is never changing okay so i'm gonna let those cool and i'm gonna start to mix the batter i'm going to start with my eggs i have three eggs i'm going to add my remaining sugar which is one cup and then one cup of neutral oil it's very uncommon to see an oil-based cookie but because this is a jewish recipe is what's called parv so it's not has no dairy so that makes it like compatible with any meal with milk or meat or fish according to kosher rules i'm not i've never kept kosher but i just that's what i'm told so you could use like an olive oil i actually did test it with olive oil because i was like maybe i'll do like an olive oil version but you don't really taste it so to me don't waste your really nice fancy olive oil on it just use a neutral oil i'm going to turn it on low so once everything is smooth and homogeneous so it's like you don't have any oil that's sitting on top or any unincorporated sugar or anything it should look smooth and thickened that's when you can add your vanilla so one teaspoon and then i'm going to add my almonds which are mostly cooled at this point so the almonds go right into the mixer and the paddle can kind of break them up a little bit but that's fine again like to me this is a weird order to be adding the ingredients but this is this is how we how we do it so while it's mixing on low i'm gonna add the flour mixture gradually but there's not really a high risk of over mixing at all so take you can take your time on the flour just make sure it's all really even okay so once all the flour is in keep mixing until you have a pretty homogenous dough i always do the last little mix by hand not because i'm trying to avoid over mixing but because this is just a thick batter so it's easier to kind of get down into the bottom and sides of the bowl with a spatula paddle's kind of done what the petal can do so you just want to make sure that everything is very evenly mixed and you don't have any pockets of flour or any kind of wetter areas where the flour didn't incorporate before we bake it the recipe is very specific about chilling the dough uncovered for four hours now i really pressed my mom about this because it just kind of didn't make sense like the dough is easy to handle why does it need to be chilled uncovered why does it need to be exactly four hours but that's just what the recipe says my mom swears that if you don't do that they won't turn out that the lows will fall apart i'm not convinced that that's true but in the spirit of the recipe we're just gonna do what it says so i'm just gonna actually set this off to the side and then bring in the dough that i already made and it's chilled [Music] i'm gonna make three loaves so you can weigh it and be exact and the recipe has weights for like what exactly a third would be but i'm just gonna do it by sight now an oil-based dough tends to be less sticky than a butter based one so this dough is really easy to handle it doesn't stick so much it's also very thick okay so three portions and i'm just going to form each one into really at this point it's more of a log shape because they spread out quite a bit as they bake you're gonna pat each portion into this kind of loaf shape measuring about eight inches long and three inches wide and this is just approximate i would say the most important thing is actually that they're just all kind of similar and again that you're taking into account that they will spread out we do a process of turning the loaves and coating in the sugar so that does mean like trying to turn a hot sort of fragile like large wide piece which i think like takes a little bit of practice my mom still kind of on her one pan that she makes model bread with she uses her like the one special spatula to do it and she insists that the reason for chilling is to prevent the loaves from breaking as you turn them so you just want to be gentle but it's not really that big of a deal but just make sure that you pat them firmly so that you don't have like any areas where the dough is not sticking to itself here's another step in the recipe that doesn't make sense to me but we do it because that's what we do so we're going to score the loaves i actually think that this might help with steam release if i had to guess of like why this is an important step but we take a serrated knife a bread knife and you're going to cut sort of half inch deep score marks into the loaves crosswise you're going to space them about three quarters of an inch apart because that is going to be the width of of each cookie of each slice so i'm sort of eyeballing it only really cutting maybe approximately a half inch down into the dough and only on the one side now that we've scored the loaves the last thing before we put in the oven is to sprinkle the tops with about a third of the cinnamon sugar mixture so you can eyeball that part as well the idea is like full coverage and it kind of bakes into the surface of the cookie which is really nice and it's a lot of cement sugar you really kind of like layer it on there so my great-grandparents were like we think this recipe originated or that they brought over only spoke yiddish and so my mom like her grandparents same you know only spoke yiddish so every now and then she'll bust out with a yiddish word where it's like i've never heard that before but like yiddish is an amazing language for complaining it's just like so many words for complaining in yiddish a particular word that both my mom and my grandma my mom uses that my grandma used a lot which is version which means like broken down or like rotten or no good that's a great word i just put it in and it's going to go for 30 minutes so the whole thing makes for one hour total but 30 minutes on the first side then we do a flip more cinnamon sugar then we do another flip after 15 cinnamon sugar it finishes the bake so we're looking at one hour total [Music] the timer just went off it's been 30 minutes on that first side so i'm going to pull it out i'm going to show you what i think is the best technique for flipping the loaves without breaking them smells very good and cinnamony in here this has historically been the tricky part of this recipe so you want to use a nice wide broad thin spatula a fish spatula is a great tool for this this is also a great tool this is a bench scraper it's just a big flat kind of thing you can use for lifting and turning you can see the loaves spread out a little bit so i'm going to start just on one side and all you want to do is get a spatula underneath and then i use one to turn and then one to kind of cushion and support and you just go like that it's not really that big of a deal you just want to be careful about it just like that okay then half of the remaining cinnamon sugar which is a third of the total so you can see the rest of this will go on when i flip them after 15 minutes so this goes back into the oven because it bakes for so long you don't have to make them like biscotti where you have to slice them and then bake them again but the cookie itself has that same texture of really crunchy kind of crumbly in a good way so back in at 350. so they're less fragile now because they've dried out a little bit so final flip so you end up inevitably like losing a little bit of cinnamon sugar on the baking sheet but for the most part it adheres so then the final sprinkle okay these are basically almost done just another trip to the oven for 15 minutes and then we'll just rest them briefly before we slice [Music] they're very toasty smelling i'll let them rest for maybe 10 minutes and then i'll transfer them to the cutting board and then we slice hello hi hi claire um i just took the mono bread out of the oven it looks great good um i made the dough last night have you ever made the dough the night before i usually try to stick pretty much to the four hours it held the marks more after it rested so long in the fridge you know you know the score marks so it rested in the fridge what did you rested in the fridge no like i like i chilled in the fridge overnight because i made the dough last night okay i got it so i'm about to slice it but i have a question so this is aunt rose's model bread but like what is the what is the possible disagreement about maybe it's antilles recipe or is it just everyone's recipe and everyone made it my mother told me that it was aunt rose's mondo bread and i at one time i don't think i do anymore had it had had the recipe in my mother's handwriting and it was called aunt rose's mandelbrot a couple weeks ago when i was talking to my cousin beverly who was aunt tilly's daughter she said to me it's not really rose's it was aunt bread and it should be called antilles oh no so what should we do i don't really have any idea whose mantle bread it is my mother told me it was rogue and roses yeah maybe they developed it together and it was aunt rose i don't want to start any fights in the family all right well i'm going to slice them and see how they turned out but so far so good i told everyone about the one pan that you have for mono bread otherwise it won't turn out that looks like it was like an artifact from like an ancient civilization that i think asian civilization is called 45 years of making bundle i'll send you a picture of how it turns out and i'll call you later great thanks okay all right thanks mom all right bye bye okay so these have cooled long enough i'm gonna transfer them to my cutting board actually i do remember my mom doing this she would kind of like scrape the baked on cinnamon sugar off and kind of sprinkle it on top so time to slice and actually i can still use the guides that i made so i'm just going to follow those score marks i think using a serrated knife is important because you got to cut through the almonds and you do want to do this while they're still hot don't let it cool completely because i think that they will crumble quite a bit as you try to slice and you want the slices to stay intact so it kind of needs to be cool enough to handle but not so cold that they just fall apart and then in our house like the little end piece which is the most done but also has the most cinnamon sugar that was kind of a prized cookie it's a really nice profile you see all the little pieces of almond and i like when you cut through them and you get this really clean flat surface and so at this point it's still hot and it's a little bit cakey and soft but as it cools it will get completely crunchy all the way through which is the texture you want i think i got like 10 to 12 cookies per loaf so all of a sudden you have three dozen cookies so it's like a really high yield and it's an hour of baking but it's really hands off and it is just an incredibly delicious cookie it's sort of humble looking doesn't look like much but is so satisfying to eat and i love the kind of caked on cinnamon sugar and it's a really fun experience to eat because the sugar kind of falls all over you and it's perfect with a cup of coffee so it's really like a anytime wonderful little snack and something that is very near and dear to my family so i hope you give it a try so thanks for watching and like and subscribe [Music] delicious i really do love these and i forget how good they are it's so good with coffee or tea not too sweet the right amount of crumbly the right amount of crunchy much better than biscotti i think [Music] you

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 301,420

Keywords: claire saffitz, claire saffitz dessert person, claire saffitz makes, mandel bread, mandel bread recipe, easy mandel bread recipe, mondel bread, jewish, mandel bread cookies, cookies, mandel, mondel, bon appetit, gourmet makes, how to make mandel bread, baking, bread, homemade mandel bread, easy mandel bread recipes, dessert, dessert person, jewish food, mandelbrot, almond, baked goods, how to bake, kosher food, biscotti, biscotti recipe, claire makes, claire bon appetit, recipe, diy

Id: PWKCid9UBMs

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022