Join baker, MasterClass instructor, and cookbook author Apollonia Poilâne on a sensorial journey—destination: roasted root vegetables under a breadcrumb blanket.
Join baker, MasterClass instructor, and cookbook author Apollonia Poilâne on a sensorial journey—destination: roasted root vegetables under a breadcrumb blanket.
On Play Me a Recipe, your favorite cooks will walk you through their most treasured recipes, offering all the insider tips, stories, and tricks you won't get from a written recipe—and you'll be right alongside them, every step of the way. Feel free to pause, jump back, or navigate the steps via the podcast chapters.
If you're cooking along, here's the recipe we're making today. Go ahead and grab the ingredients below (Apollonia starts listing them at 2:38) before starting the episode.
Serves 4 as a main course, 6 as a side
Winter Vegetable Crumble with Citrus Bread Crumbs is excerpted from POILÂNE:The Secrets of the World-Famous Bread Bakery © 2019 by Apollonia Poilâne. Photography © 2019 by Philippe Vaurès Santamaria. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
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Lobby Time Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Apollonia Poilâne: And you'll hear it make a symphony.
Apollonia: Bonjour. Welcome to Play Me A Recipe. I'm Apollonia Poilâne, third generation baker, master class instructor, and CEO of my family's eponymous bakery, Poilâne, based in Paris, France. Today, we're going to bake a recipe from my bread cooking collection. It's a winter vegetable crumble. Winter root vegetables--think parsnips, carrots, onions, fennel--baked tender together to warm up the coldest months of the year under a blanket of citrusy breadcrumbs. This recipe is linked to the show notes if you need to refer to it, but otherwise, we'll be gathering ingredients, slicing, dicing, sautéeing, baking, everything, alongside each other. Feel free to pause, to jump through the podcast chapters if you need a little more time.
I love working with sensations. They're our interface with the world we live in. Smell, touch, sight, hearing, taste. We call it sensorial, because they are just that. Our sensors to the world, our firsthand information giving us feedback about our environment. It's what I try to transmit in my cookbooks and in my master class. The recipe I'm sharing with you today is one of my go-to recipes at home. It's a recipe that doesn't require any great technical tricks or tools. You can more than likely make it with ingredients you already have in your kitchen, which for me is always seasonal vegetables, and for sure, some bread. And that is not always the freshest loaf. That's okay. In fact, I see it as an opportunity to use the bread as an ingredient instead of as an accompaniment to a meal. It can be an essential ingredient in a dish, like it is here, to add texture. So while some people might throw away stale bread, I turn it into breadcrumb to add sensation to roasted vegetables. In my bakery, we are guided by our senses. We don't have thermometers in our ovens, or timers to tell us when things are done, or any buttons to calibrate settings. We use and train our bodies, our senses, and our intuition to guide us. That's why I'm excited to not only walk you through this recipe today, but talk to you, talk you through this recipe as we sensitize ourselves to sounds of this recipe.
Apollonia: For this recipe, you will need extra virgin olive oil, a whole bunch of root vegetables. I've picked the ones from my weekly vegetable basket. They come from a producer just outside of Paris. And I have two large onions, three large carrots, two large parsnips, one fennel bulb, two small turnips and two medium beets. Feel free to substitute some root vegetables for others as long as they're about the same weight and volume. Root vegetables are the vegetables of choice here because they are seasonal. They're readily available, and they are hard until they're cooked tender. Two key aromatics are garlic cloves, four to be exact, and citrus fruit. I'm using orange zest today, but feel free to use whatever you have. Citrus fruit opens up or brightens the hardiness of the root vegetables. It really contrasts with the earthiness of a carrot or beet, a turnip, and complements fennel. And lastly, bread and cheese. If you don't have any wheat or rye sourdough breads on hand, you can use any dense, flavorful breads you can have access to. This may even include breads with dried fruits or nuts inclusions. But be aware of the pairing with the vegetables.
Apollonia: As for the equipment, nothing fancy: a large skillet for sautéeing our vegetables and a nine inch square baking dish. If you are making the breadcrumb, you will need a food processor or blender. And we're all set to go.
(musical interlude)
Apollonia: Okay, we're gonna start the prep with preheating the oven to 400° Fahrenheit. And let's get started with chopping the vegetables. A major tip is to give a little bit of vegetable love. I choose a different style of chopping for each vegetable. So, for example, for the carrots, you can brush them or peel them, depending on the quality of your carrots, and I like to put them in chunks. Giving each vegetable a different shape is not only pleasing visually, but it gives different textures and tastes that are just really sensational in your mouth. I like to have pieces that are about two or three centimetres in length, and I will cut the largest parts of the carrots in two or four pieces. And another cutting that you can do for this, parsnips, since they're about the same volume and size, is to cut them into rondelles. So just chopping them up horizontally. You can always keep the vegetable trimmings for a broth at a later time.
I put all of these vegetables in a large bowl so that I can then use my hands to mix in the olive oil. And that's a tip that will really make a whole difference, as you're getting a feel and sense of what they're like. (chopping sounds) Trying to not chop up my fingers in the process.
(musical interlude)
Apollonia: Finishing up the carrots and parsnips, and attacking the fennel bulb. So in the fennel, you have this big side that you could put on your cutting board, and then you have a few little chimneys, or if you will, little sticks, and you're going to cut that part off right at the root of it before you chop off the main part of the bulb. Keep the top part for its fronds. We'll get back to that later. So to make my life a little easier, I tend to cut it vertically down. And I cut through pieces that are about pinky finger in width.
Next, our beets. I tend to peel beets, but you can always brush them if their skin is tender. Cut off the top part--the part of the beet that grows outside of the earth. This one I'm gonna dice into thick chunks. I'm peeling my second beet. Beets tend to have this very earthy flavor to it. It is a flavor that works very nicely with orange. So one other great thing with this recipe is that you can prepare these vegetables a little ahead of time and do the final baking the next day.
I'm turning to the turnips. Those tend to have a little tail that I'm gonna chop off. I'm also going to chop off the parts from which sprouts the greens, and this one--you just want to brush and chop up like the beets, but maybe in smaller chunks so that they can have a different shape, or another option is to do little quarters.
Et voilà. We're done with the vegetables. I'm just gonna start cutting the onions. Open it up in two. That might even make the more rebellious skins a little easier. And then I'm going to chop it up. I don't want them to be too thin. These are nice big onions. I chose a red one and a yellow one, just because I have the two in my vegetable basket. Don't you love the sound of them? Just like, when you cut through onions, there's a satisfaction to it.
All the vegetables are ready. Let's move on to the garlic. Working through the little garlic cloves. Cut them in half so that you can de-germ them, and then chop, chop, chop. There we go. Chop them as thin as you possibly can. Possibly a great way to exercise your skills. We have been improving over time, my ability to make garlic go in disguised and unnoticed. And you're going to put the onions and garlic that I finished to the side because those will be used at a different moment.
I've brought all of my root vegetables into the bowl. That's the fennel, the carrots, the parsnips, the beets, and the turnips. I'm going to add the olive oil, the two tablespoons. I'm gonna season it with salt and pepper. Freshly milled pepper really gives another dimension. And then comes the funnest part, digging your hands into this mix of vegetables to coat every single piece with olive oil, and you'll hear it make a symphony, which makes it all the more relevant to have different sizes of vegetables, different cuts, so that they can each contribute as an instrument to its symphony. It's not only pleasant for sound, but it's also just fantastic to touch, to feel the different vegetables, to decluster anyone that's trying to stay together with another, and then also see all of the color combination of your different vegetables come together. There we go.
Apollonia: So we're gonna leave those aside, and we're gonna move to aromatics. Using our large skillet, we're going to add a quarter cup of olive oil, and start warming up over medium heat. And we're going to start cooking the onions, and then after five minutes, once they're tender, we'll add the garlic. As the onion cooks, you start hearing a little bit of the sound, and that really is remindful for me of the sound of the oven, when you're in the bakehouse, and that as we fire up the next batch of breads and we heat up the oven, you start hearing the wood that picks up the heat and sets on fire. Using my wooden spoon to move around the onions and making sure that they're all coated in the olive oil. They should be tender, see-through. And that's the good visual tip to add in the garlic. Just listen to the sound, this sizzling. It's just wonderful. And the fragrance, of course, is phenomenal. Onion flavors without the tears.
And in the background, I'm still hearing the oven that's heating up to soon greet our vegetables. So here, we're bringing these onions to become tender, and they'll be the base of our baking dish, slowly seeing each little piece become translucent. You might be tempted here to use another type of oil, but it's cold outside, it's maybe gray where you guys are around. I mean, olive oil echoes the south of France. These olive trees, the warmth, maybe even cicadas in the background. And even though I absolutely adore salted butter, I don't want my onions to brown. So I am using olive oil instead.
After your onion rings have become translucent, then you can start adding the garlic. Keep the medium heat and slide those little flavor boosts into your pan and let them melt along and blend along with the onions. Ooh! That smell is quite the little nose teaser. Alrighty.
Apollonia: My onions are still sizzling, and I'm going to transfer them into the bottom of my baking sheets, and that ends the symphony. I'm putting the onions and garlic on the bottom of the dish so that they can flavor upwards the root vegetables. I grabbed my bowl of vegetables and I'm topping up my onions with all the vegetables and because they've been adequately mixed, you will have this just beautiful puzzle medley salad. Yum, yum, yum. Spread them out evenly so that they can bake evenly. And I just have this composition of my root vegetables in my pan. It's gorgeous. You see different sizes. Different, uh, colors, different shapes. Let's go ahead and bake it. I'm putting my addition to the oven, sliding it in for 15 minutes at 400° Fahrenheit. There you go.
This brief stint in the oven is important to create a crust to the vegetables. It's a great time to prepare the topping. Start cleaning up your production and you might even have the time for a fresh cup of tea. Let's meet back here after the break.
Apollonia: And we're back. I'm Apollonia Poilâne, baker, master class instructor, and author. Today we're cooking with breads, my beloved bread cooking, making a winter vegetable crumble. Winter root vegetables, parsnips, carrots, fennel, turnips, beets, baked tender together to warm up the coldest months of the year under a blanket of citrusy breadcrumbs. The recipe is linked to the show notes if you need to refer to it. But otherwise, we've been gathering ingredients, slicing, dicing, sautéeing and baking everything alongside each other. Feel free to pause or jump through the podcast chapters if you need a little more time. We're coming back to the point where we've slid the crumble into the oven, and it's time to reduce the heat. It's been about 15 minutes, so let's drop the oven temperature 350° Fahrenheit. Let's keep baking for another 45 minutes by lowering the temperature. The vegetables stay more tender, almost smooth, and we don't risk them drying out or becoming crispy.
Apollonia: Next, let's go ahead and make the breadcrumb topping. For this, I'm going to use my wheat sourdough loaf. It smells sweet, acidic, and it's got a thick crust and dense crumb. Depending on the breads you use, you will also have different flavors of breadcrumbs, so don't be afraid of trying different breads or even combining them together. I know that it's stale when I can take a slice and knock it on my table. If it's sliced, you should be able to rip it off into smaller pieces by hand. I'm just breaking it into different chunks and putting it into my blender.
I really feel there's four stages of freshness when it comes to bread. There's breads when it's ultra fresh, out of the oven. It's very elastic, very sticky. Then, after a day or two, it becomes fresh. Then it becomes dry, and at that point you're gonna have to start toasting it because it's not so pleasant to be eaten on its own. And then you have the bread when it's stale, when you can knock it on your table and it sounds like you're knocking on wood.
If you're blending it and there's a few rebellious big chunks, then just remove the finer grains and then carry on processing the bigger pieces that have remained uncut. My breadcrumb is ready, and I can tell because I have this sandy texture. There's no big chunks. So I'm going to pour them into the smaller bowl, and then I'm going to chop the fennel fronds. If you have a pair of scissors, you can just top them up. Or if you only have a knife, then use your cutting board to chop up the fennel fronds. If you don't have enough fronds, then use fresh herbs of your choice. And last but not least, the citrus zests. So I'm using a microplane, and the sound here is really great. Turn around your orange, so that's the entirety of it is stripped from its zest. And that's when you get all these whiffs of the essential oils. If you have a few extra peels, you can add those into a bowl of salt and flavor it. It's really wonderful. It preserves the citrus fruit as well as it just flavors the salt. I'll probably use the rest of my orange just as a little snack. Almost there.
The final ingredients to this topping are olive oil and cheese. They're here to bind textures, whereas the citrus and fennel fronds give flavor, and the breadcrumb mainly brings texture. So I'm using my microplane to grate my cheese. A good cheese for this recipe is Parmesan, but you can really use a goat's cheese or any type of cheese that you can grate and melt. The idea here is that blended with the breadcrumb, citrus fruit, topped with the olive oil and the fennel fronds, it will all combine itself to create a blanket, this warm and flavorful blanket to our root vegetables. If you don't want to use cheese, make the recipe vegan friendly, then probably top up a little bit of the olive oil content and you can do without it.
I have all these toppings in a bowl, and I'm going to hand mix them together. It helps us really feel, and our hands have so many little sensory captors. It really gives our brain some very useful information. But here, what I'm mainly looking for is blending all of these ingredients together just before I top them off with the olive oil.
Alright, and then here, just for just for the final whiff of it, put your nose over this bowl of breadcrumbs. Capture the smell of the cheese, the fennel, the orange zest, all brought together with breadcrumb.
Apollonia: Onto the final bake. Let's take a peek at our crumble. I'm taking it out of the oven, and you can hear it sizzle a little bit, can't you? It really smells--the turnips are what, are the vegetable that comes out the most here. What's fascinating with this recipe is that the vegetables, no matter how big the volume was initially, now have reduced about 20% in size. You know that they have not reduced too much, as long as they don't look dry. They'll be shiny, but not as shiny as they previously were. They'll have changed a little bit in color, but that's the baking, after all. And that's when you top them up with your warm winter blanket of breadcrumb, cheese, citrus, and fennel. And at that point, use your hands so that you can spread out evenly the breadcrumb. There's something quite wonderful of spreading out, a little bit like when you're planting seeds, or maybe snowing on those winter vegetables, snowing, breadcrumb.
And as I'm doing it, I'm having the smell of the citrus that's coming up, probably woken up by the warmth of that 45 minutes of baking, and I'm putting it back into the oven for final 15 minutes. It smells so good that I just can't wait to put my fork right through these vegetables. Ah, before I forget, one last cue. If you're not sure if your vegetables are well done at this point, take a fork and just dig into one or two vegetables and see that they're tender.
(musical interlude)
Apollonia: I don't know for you guys, but my kitchen smells of citrus, of the cheese, and the little hint of those root vegetables. Our bake is ready. I'm gonna take it out of the oven, turn it off. That's always nice for the ears. Also, because this way we can hear the nice and shining of these little root vegetables. Now, the dish is still steaming hot. Wait until it's warm, at least 15, 20 minutes before you dig in.
And I'm just gonna push a few of those breadcrumbs aside to taste the vegetables. Quality testing, of course. Now you have the tenderness of the vegetables. I've just bit into a piece of carrot, and I have the crunch of the breadcrumb that coats it, as if it was, um--in French we would say enpanné, as if it was a croquette. Only, it's just this fresh vegetable that's boosted by all of the aromatics.
This is a dish that really lends itself to be eaten alone as a main for about four people, or it can be a side with some eggs, some fish, some meat. It's pretty versatile. I really love this recipe in the winter because it's warm, it's hearty. It's got a lot of the feeling of when you go to the oven in the bakehouse, rather, um, at the bakery, and you have this warmth that just surrounds you, and it's just wonderful.
Apollonia: How did yours turn out? Did your recipe warm up your heart as much as it did mine? Again, you can find the recipe in the show notes and on Food52.com. If you enjoy today's recipe, my recently released MasterClass really allows me to demonstrate and engage your senses for baking and bread cooking experience. Merci. Thank you for joining me, Apollonia Poilâne, on Play Me A Recipe today.