Pane alla parmigiana: Bread for dinner

I try to be scrupulous about giving credit for recipes – even, when possible, for ideas for recipes. But I cannot for the life of me think where our dinner this evening came from. I know I didn’t make it up. It could have been Bastianich. Or Batali. Or Hazan. Or some regional Italian cookbook. I tried googling, which I’m usually quite good at, but I couldn't find the dish anywhere.

So I apologize. To someone.

This great dinner was bread alla parmigiana: I cut excellent bread (baguette from New York’s Tom Cat Bakery), crust and all, into slices nearly 3/4 inch (2cm) thick, brushed them with olive oil and put them into a 375 degree F (190 C) oven for ten minutes to dry out and get a little toasty. I then used them as I would have used eggplant/aubergine slices for melanzane alla parmigiana: tomato sauce on the bottom of the baking dish; a layer of bread; sauce; mozzarella (not too much); a sprinkling of parmesan; more bread; more sauce. Et cetera, ending with mozzarella. If it had been summer, I’d have added basil.

Thirty-five minutes in that 375 oven, covered; another 10 or 12 minutes uncovered; 10 minutes more out of the oven to cool a little and to come together.

The bread soaks up liquid from the tomatoes and mozzarella and becomes bread-pudding-like – almost soufflé-like, in fact. It is much lighter than eggplant parmigiana, since bread is mostly air and eggplant is mostly eggplant (water, actually, but so is nearly all food).

The amount that half a baguette, half a quart/liter of sauce and half a mozzarella made was perfect as a one-dish supper for Jackie and me. It would have made six or more appetizer portions, and believe me, at some future dinner party it will.

Doublethink and Hot Dog Buns

George Orwell could have coined the word “doublethink” just for me. Holding two conflicting ideas in my mind is one of my special talents.

Take today’s dinner. The oven is set to 325 F (160 C) so that I can slowly braise a beef brisket for tomorrow evening, when company is coming. I know that the meat is going to be in there until about 7 p.m., yet I simultaneously decide that this would be a good night for pizza; I’ve even bought a nice fresh mozzarella. This, of course, means (since we tend to eat early) that I need to put the oven up to its maximum at around five-thirty, which would spoil the brisket.

So there’s this ball of pizza dough a-rising and there’s this 325-degree oven. I can’t save the dough for tomorrow to make some sort of first course for our dinner party, because I’ve already done the preparation for a totally different dish. And I suspect we’ll be eating leftover brisket for several days to come, so pizza is not in the offing. I could freeze the dough, but then I’d have to plan well in advance to defrost and use it.

When I bought the brisket (at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market) I also bought a pack of their hot dogs, which Jackie and I had never tried. Hot dogs are nice when eaten in buns, and it occurred to me that a low oven would be a good place to bake such buns, which don’t need to have a crusty exterior – quite the contrary. So, I divided the pizza dough (which I’d luckily made with some olive oil, giving it a particularly nice flavor and texture) into circa-2.5-ounce (70g) balls and formed hot-dog-bun-like shapes.

I let them rise a good 45 minutes and baked them for 35 minutes, checking their internal temperature to make sure they were cooked through: at this temperature they didn’t brown much so it was hard to judge visually (I could have glazed them, but why?). Some would say that breads are done at an internal temperature of 195 degrees F (91 C), but that doesn’t work for me, as breads at that temperature can be clammy and doughy when cool. I prefer them to be at least 10 Fahrenheit degrees (18 C degrees if I’ve got my calculation right) hotter than that at their core.

I left them to cool under a cloth (so the outside would remain soft), simmered and griddled the hot dogs and rang the dinner bell.

To my mild surprise, they worked perfectly. They were tasty; they were cooked through and didn’t compress to dough balls as we ate our hot dogs, as lots of commercial buns do; they were soft, but sufficiently substantial.

I’ll do this again, perhaps for hamburger buns – and even if there isn’t something already braising in the oven.