Cambio di Stagione ...
... or how to embrace spring in your homemade cakes and desserts. Plus my March round-up and a recipe for individual Nespole (Loquat) Galettes with a Sour Cream Flaky Dough
Hello, and welcome to Newsletter No 23 here on Substack! Thank you for stopping by. If you are already subscribed, thank you for supporting my work, it means the world to me! If not, grab a seat if you are interested in recipes as well as tips and tricks to make the most of our increasingly eclectic pantries and a good dose of my at times random musings about all things food - and make sure you hit that subscribe button if you don’t want to miss any future posts!
In a previous life I spent a lot of time in Italy. Even before I lived in Rome for close to 2 years, I spent years travelling back and forth between the UK and Italy and lots of time travelling all around Italy. Inevitably, and more so as my Italian continued to improve, I tried to absorb everything there was to know about Italian food and culture, including important rituals like the Cambio di Stagione.
Literally the “change of season”, Cambio di Stagione refers to the change from your autumn/winter wardrobe to your spring/summer wardrobe (and vice versa). Italians take this rather seriously so this is often a multi-day job: wintercoats and warm jumpers have to be dry-cleaned or washed, ironed, folded and packed away to make space for spring’s and summer’s lighter clothing. And when you think about it, this makes sense if you live somewhere like Italy, i.e. a country where the seasons are fairly reliable - unlike Belgium where you can easily cycle through 3 or 4 seasons in a single week (so you would be a fool to pack away your raincoats and warmer jumpers just because the calendar says it is now summer).
Spring officially started a week ago and with this weekend’s time change and warmer temperatures it does feel like spring is truly on its way. And that has me thinking about what is in season right now (or will shortly be in season) and what to bake and what desserts to make over the coming weeks and months (and before temperatures get too hot for me to want to switch my oven on!). And as much as I am a fan of using treacly brown sugar, warming spices, and toasty, nutty browned butter, I am looking forward to lighter flavours and simpler cakes and desserts, for example:
Cheesecakes (both baked and set), made with all kinds of dairy - cream cheese, but also ricotta or labneh;
Simple mousses (including those made without gelatine);
Panna cotta (including lighter variants like buttermilk panna cotta); and
Fruit filled galettes and clafoutis.
I am also looking forward to all the delicious things you can make with all the fresh fruit that will soon be appearing at the farmer’s markets: starting with tart and juicy Nespole (I had my first handful of Nespole just this weekend), the season’s first strawberries, followed by sharp yet sweet gooseberries, lipstaining raspberries, blueberries, and billberries, slender (and often not so slender) crimson stalks of rhubarb etc. before the arrival of summer and with it stone fruit season. I cannot wait to:
Roast some rhubarb to top my morning bowl of porridge or thick Greek yoghurt for a simple weeknight dessert. (And I will use any leftover roasting syrup for gin cocktails and suggest you try the same);
Macerating raspberries with sugar and rose water - delicious folded into lightly whipped cream and piped into choux buns; equally delicious as a basis for a fruity twist on Tiramisu;
Pairing strawberries with chamomile - e.g. in a Victoria sponge cake made with a chamomile flavoured sponge and filled with whipped cream and fresh strawberries;
Macerating mixed berries with sugar and sumac - to serve alongside panna cotta or a white chocolate mousse for example;
Sweetening a mixed berry fruit salad with Jasmine tea syrup.
Many of us of course also associate Spring with Spring Cleaning. So here is a friendly reminder that your baking supplies would probably benefit from some Spring cleaning as well - i.e. taking stock of what you have; what, unfortunately, may need to be thrown out, and what should be used up rather soon. For example, it’s probably a good idea to try and use up any leftover nuts from your 2023 Christmas baking in the next few weeks / couple of months. You will probably not feel like turning the oven on once Summer arrives and you can make a simple frangipane with all kinds of nuts and, together with fresh seasonal fruits like rhubarb or berries, prepare some delicious Frangipane Tarts or Bostocks! As for what to bake and what sort of desserts to make now that spring is here, below are some ideas to get you started:
Victoria Sponge Cake with Roasted Rhubarb and Tonka Bean Whipped Cream
Buttermilk Panna Cotta with a Gooseberry and Elderflower Compote
Pinenut Frangipane Bakewell Tarts with Lemon Curd
Burnt Honey Floating Islands with Cardamom Caramelised Almond Slivers
Pound Cake with Chamomile Poached Pears and a Chamomile Creme Anglaise
Set Cheesecake with Fresh Goat’s Cheese and a Blueberry Thyme Compote
Fresh Raspberry and Rose Tiramisu-ish with Labneh and Cardamom
And here is another idea (and a recipe for) Individual Galettes with Nespole (Loquats) and a Sour Cream Flaky Dough. As a kid I wasn’t particularly excited about Nespole. Sure, they were juicy, but juicy did not always equal sweet. Plus it was almost impossible to find blemish-free Nespole. And I did not find them particularly fun to eat either: there was that almost leathery outer skin which I struggled to peel off and then there were the papery membranes surrounding the stones, and the stones so slippery it was practically impossible to remove them without at least one of them slipping from your hands and landing on the floor. Fast forward many years and none of that bothers me anymore. In fact, I now adore Nespole. They signal that Winter is truly over and Spring and Summer are on their way. They also tend to be at their best when it’s still a bit early for other fruits like strawberries and raspberries or stone fruits like apricots, peaches, nectarines etc. so they are nice way to bridge the seasons.
What are Nespole? Nespole, also known as Loquats, are originally from China. Today there are over 800 different varieties of Nespole, some of which can be found in Southern Europe as well – the mild climate suits Nespole. Nespole tend to be the size of a small apricot but are more oval in shape with a skin that is both a bit waxy like a nectarine but also a little bit downy like an apricot or a peach.
What do Nespole taste like? While some compare their flavour to apricots, I think Nespole have an unusual flavour that is only theirs – quite sharp, a little tropical but also with a musky sweetness. I find they pair well with bitter almond flavours (think Amaretto but also Mahleb) and vanilla (so also Tonka bean). Cooked, their sharpness mellows and they start tasting a bit like apple so spices like cinnamon and cloves work well with Nespole as well.
How can I use Nespole? I like to treat Nespole like other stone fruits such as apricots, peaches or plums: I like them poached in syrup, roasted with a little sugar or cut into eighths and piled up high for a galette like here. Since Nespole are high in sugar, acid and pectin they also lend themselves well to making jams, jellies and chutneys.
March Round-Up
Before we get to the recipe, here are some things I have been enjoying in March - and maybe you might enjoy some of these things as well:
Reading: I recently recalled how much I used to enjoy the annual Best American Food Writing anthologies - perfect little books showcasing a huge variety of food writing from across the States on a plethora of topics. Somehow during the pandemic I fell out of the habit of ordering the most recent editions. But I just rectified that by ordering the 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 editions. I started with the 2020 edition and reading the intro and the first few chapters feels a bit like opening a time capsule - it feels so strange to read about the pandemic. It already feels hard to remember how much the pandemic (temporarily) changed our lives and yet, being reminded of the impact the pandemic had on the hospitality sector, how in the early days businesses had to shut down completely (and some never managed to reopen) and how ithe pandemic, and the unpredictable food shortages that accompanied it, plus the whole suddenly being forced to prepare all your meals yourself affected our own cooking at home.
Baking: Thanks to a nasty stomach bug I haven’t spent as much time in the kitchen these past few weeks as I would have liked. So the only baking I got up to in March was some homemade pizza (I feel like I finally nailed my homemade foccaccia recipe and I’m now tweaking it to hopefully nail my homemade pizza recipe as well) and multiple rounds of testing a recipe for a Belgian Craquelin (a type of brioche) made with a Tahini enriched dough and studded with Halva and chocolate chips and which will hopefully be ready to share here soon.
Cooking / Eating: Me and my son took a spontaneous trip to see my parents in Essen (Germany) over Easter and were lucky enough to enjoy plenty of my parents’ incredible cooking, including this Ottolenghi Spiced Easter Lamb with Marmalade Glaze. At home, I really enjoyed making these Sticky Gochujang Mushrooms from Hetty McKinnon’s Substack and which we used for a Bo Ssam of sorts alongside sticky rice, ginger scallion sauce, kimchi and some salad leaves for making little bite-sized parcels. I’m also doing some research on different French regional Brioche varieties and got to try two this month which I thoroughly enjoyed: there was a beautifully rich Fougasse d’Aigues-Mortes drenched in orange blossom water and dusted with a thick layer of sugar and ground pistachios from new patisserie Julien Othomene in Brussels and a slightly more austere Bressane (a sort of tarte au sucre from the Bresse region in France) from Aube in Brussels.
What have you been enjoying Reading / Cooking / Baking / Eating lately? Let me know in the comments!
Nespole Galettes with a Sour Cream Flaky Dough
Notes: The recipe produces a beautifully flaky pastry. As the pastry is unsweetened it will work both for sweet and savoury galettes (so you may want to double the quantities and put half of the dough in the freezer). A word of warning though, the pastry is not the easiest to work with and you will worry that the shaggy and crumbly mass on your kitchen counter will never turn into a cohesive pastry. But persevere, because eventually it will. And it will be worth it.
Pastry recipe adapted from Tartine No 3
Makes 6 individual galettes or one large galette (if making a large galette, increase the baking time to around 50 minutes)
Ingredients
225g butter
125g sour cream
350g all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
600g Nespole, the pit and inner membrane removed and cut into thin strips lengthwise
30ml milk, 2 tbsp demerara sugar
To serve: whipped cold sour cream or your favourite dairy or non-dairy topping for cakes (whipped cream or whipped creme fraiche would be as nice here as whipped coconut cream given the tropical notes of Nespole)
Directions
Start by making the pastry. Cut the butter into cubes and place in the freezer for 10 minutes together with, in a separate bowl, the sour cream.
Spread the flour into a rough rectangle on your kitchen counter. Sprinkle the salt over the flour and add the cubed butter. Sprinkle some flour over the butter so each cube of butter is covered with a thin dusting of flour. Using a rolling pin start to flatten the cubes of butter into long thin strands, while trying to keep the shape of your original rectangle (using a large kitchen knife or a pastry cutter to do this). Once there are no more cubes of butter left, add the sour cream.
With your pastry cutter or a large kitchen knife, and using a chopping motion, cut the sour cream into the flour and butter mix. Once the sour cream seems well distributed and there are no more obvious wet spots, shape your shaggy mass of flour, salt, butter and sour cream into a rectangle roughly an inch thick. Using your rolling pin, flatten the pastry until double its original length. Using your pastry cutter or your kitchen knife fold the top half of the pastry over the bottom half and flatten the pastry once more until double its original length. Repeat this process until the pastry comes together into a cohesive mass. Shape the pastry into a disk, wrap in cling film and place in the fridge for at least one hour.
Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees and line a sheet pan with parchment paper.
Take the pastry out of the fridge. Divide the pastry into 6 pieces, and, on a lightly floured kitchen counter, roll each piece out into a rough circle about 3-4 mm thick. While rolling out the pastry continue rotating it and adding a little extra flour if necessary so that the pastry does not stick to your counter top.
Place 2-3 tablespoons of the Nespole in the middle of each round of pastry, leaving a border of about an inch. Fold the border of the pastry so that the Nespole are partially covered, being careful not to tear the pastry while also trying to avoid creating any valleys where juices from the Nespole might leak out.
Brush each pastry with a little bit of milk and scatter 1 tsp of demerara sugar over each pastry. Place the galettes in the fridge for 10 minutes so the pastry can firm up.
Bake the galettes for 40-45 minutes or until the pastries are crisp and golden brown.
Serve with cold sour cream (ideally still warm from the oven).
