Yeast

My dear friend Matt Michel caters pizza parties from his wood-oven pizza truck, Rolling in Dough. Who better to help me perfect my pizza dough than the man behind the wheel? Nasturtium petals are unexpected in pizza crust, but their peppery essence works so well. I like mine served sauceless with lots of toppings, but to each his own.

1 slice per serving This recipe makes two loaves of a basic bread that gets its hearty, chewy texture from bulgur. The bread is great for both sandwiches and toast. If you don't want to bake both loaves at once, you can freeze half of the unbaked dough to use another time.

These light and airy biscuits owe their texture to three leavenings: yeast, baking soda, and baking powder.

1 pretzel per serving Most pretzels are high in sodium because salt is not only on the outside but in the dough as well. With this recipe for one dough and two topping options, you can easily please all soft-pretzel lovers. Choose sesame, poppy, and caraway seeds for savory pretzels; if you're more in the mood for something sweet, go with the cinnamon-sugar topping.

I know deep-fried doughnuts don't strictly count as baking, but I've included them here because they start with a dough, and they taste too good to leave out, especially made with a chocolate ganache filling instead of the ususal jam.

Nick Malgieri, the director of baking and pastry programs at The Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, created this recipe exclusively for Epicurious. The enriched yeast dough is a snap to make and even easier to shape into decadent, delicious cinnamon rolls. Best of all, the rolls can be baked ahead and reheated for a fresh-from-the-oven breakfast treat. For more on cinnamon rolls, including tips from Malgieri, see Classic Recipes: Cinnamon Rolls.

Cookbook author and food photographer Lara Ferroni created this classic doughnut recipe exclusively for Epicurious. For Ferroni's doughnut-making tips and more recipes, see our complete guide to homemade doughnuts. We've included two glaze options, sugar and chocolate, but these doughnuts are terrific on their own or simply dusted with confectioners' sugar. If your kitchen is on the cold side, an easy way to create a warm place for the dough to rise is to turn the oven on to 250°F, and set the bowl of dough or the baking sheet of doughnuts on top.

Brioche is a special bread because of its delicate crumb, richness and flavor. The traditional fat used is butter, but other cultures use lard. I propose one very good reason for using schmaltz instead of either: flavor! This is a delicious savory bread that makes superb dinner rolls to serve with chicken or turkey, a simple salad, chicken soup, or anything, really. As far as I'm concerned, this version is out of the park (my assistant Emilia started it, I finished it, Marlene tested it and confirmed). You need to make it the day before you bake it, but it's a really simple preparation. It can be baked free-form, in individual ramekins, or in a loaf or terrine mold. Marlene made nifty "bubble top" rolls by filling muffin cups with three 1-ounce/30-gram balls, a technique she picked up from Dorie Greenspan's excellent book Around My French Table. I had my first bite while it was still warm from the oven, with a little extra schmaltz and a sprinkling of Maldon sea salt. Heavenly. If you bake it in a rectangular mold, slice it and toast it, delicious. This from Marlene: "OK, I want to say I was skeptical of this at the beginning. The dough smelled chickeny, not only while it was rising but also while it was baking. However, these totally rocked. There was no hint of chicken in the taste or the smell in the final product. The crust is the best I've ever produced. It was crisp, almost flaky, like biscuits. The crumb was delicate and soft."

The eight days of Hanukkah, the Jewish celebration of lights, honor the sacred lamp in the Holy Temple, which burned for eight days even though it only contained enough oil for one. Traditionally, many Hanukkah foods celebrate the oil in addition to the light. One of the most common is the jelly doughnut, known as sufganiyah. The word derives from the Hebrew word for "sponge," an apt description for the texture of the doughnuts. I think they are more accurately "pillowy."

Meaning "snails" in German, schnecken are pecan-cinnamon buns drizzled with gooey pecan caramel.

For my first two months in the army I was based outside Toul. In the town was a pâtisserie that made the best brioche with pastry cream. I would go to the shop whenever I could. The baker spread pastry cream over the dough, and then rolled it up like a biscuit rolé (jelly roll). My father made a brioche-and-pastrycream roll, too, but shaped it like a bretzel. Chantal still remembers them from the first time I brought her home to meet my parents—to do that you had to be serious. When I told my father I planned to put them in this book, he was so pleased.

This recipe is part of the Epicurious Online Cooking School, in being made, and to learn how to make other Mediterranean classics, check out the video classes.

Editor's note: This Plain French Bread (or Pain Français) recipe accompanies an excerpt from Bob Spitz's book Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child, published on Epicurious on the occasion of Julia Child's Centennial. Count on a minimum of 6 1/2 to 7 hours from the time you start the dough to the time it is ready for the oven, and half an hour for baking. While you cannot take less time, you may take as much more time as you wish by using the delayed-action techniques described at the end of the recipe.

This recipe is part of the Epicurious Online Cooking School, in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America. To watch it being made, and to learn how to make other Italian classics, check out the videos.

Although Americans chow down on plenty of crisp pretzels, there's something irresistible about the soft variety that makes them just as addictive, if not more so, than the crunchy version. When formed into bite-size nuggets, not only do they pop easily into your mouth, but they are also small enough to eliminate the temptation to double-dip in the Cheddar sauce. You can also offer up a bowl of mustard, or divide your Cheddar dip into three bowls, flavoring one with mustard and the other with caraway seeds.
You may suspect that the large amount of baking soda to cook the pretzels is a typo; it's not. Believe us, it's the secret to the chestnut-brown color they develop during baking. Without it, the pretzels would look anemic. Editor's Note: This recipe is part of Gourmet's Modern Menu for A Father's Day Feast. Menu also includes Grilled Rib Pork Chops with Sweet and Tangy Peach Relish and The Ultimate Brownie Sundae.

{sauceless} When we found out our dear friends Katie and Parker got engaged, we packed up our pizza dough and big bag of greens from our garden and headed to their place for an impromptu celebration that's become a tradition in both our homes. Though the best pizza dough takes a little preparation {it gets more supple as it sits overnight}, a pizza topped with little more than fresh farmers' market finds can be thrown together on the fly like a grand game of Twister, with everyone's arms cutting, slicing, patting, and rolling in a tangle that is soon to become a very good dinner. Sip: Snappy and crisp Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand

These golden, crunchy croissants that we permit ourselves to enjoy without the slightest remorse on Sunday mornings are not as French as you might think. These pastries, known in French as viennoiserie, indeed originated from seventeenth-century Vienna. In 1683, the inhabitants of the Austrian capital suffered an attack led by the forces of the Ottoman Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa. After months of a terrible siege, they were liberated by Charles V of Lorraine and Jan Sobieski, King of Poland. This victory enabled the Hapsburgs to recover their territories of Hungary and Croatia, and the bakers made a commemorative pastry in the form of a crescent moon, the symbol of the Ottoman Empire. Folk history even accords the bakers a crucial role in reversing the battle situation. As they worked during the night, they heard the sound of the Turkish soldiers preparing a new assault and sounded the alarm. Their version of the croissant was nevertheless closer to the brioche than the croissant that we know today. A century later, Marie-Antoinette is said to have brought this delicacy from her native city to introduce it to the French court. Giles MacDonogh, however, author of a biography of Brillat-Savarin, offers a version that corresponds more closely with the dates when the croissant appeared in France (around 1900). He mentions the arrival in Paris, in 1838, of an Austrian named Auguste Zang, who opened a Viennese bakery at 92 rue Richelieu, only a few numbers away from the Brillat-Savarin building. "The business took off slowly," he explains, but eventually his kipferl cookies began to sell, literally "like hot cakes." The croissant was born. All of his croissants came out of a brand-new steam oven, above which the inscription was written La main de l'homme n'y a pas touché. (No human hand has touched them.) In those days, industrial processes inspired trust! Nowadays, any croissant untouched by human hand is suspect. The dough needs to be kneaded gently, then vigorously, until it can be detached from marble, and pieces of it shaped into a ball. The surface of each ball is then dried with a sprinkling of flour and covered with a damp cloth. Then the waiting begins. The dough is mixed with worked butter, punched down, then folded, turned, and set to rise again. This craftsmanship is becoming rarer, and the challenge is to live up to the legend, to match the taste of these handmade croissants, with their melting, silky layers of pastry.

The King's Cake (galette des rois), in whatever form it took, with a "bean" baked into it, has been the king of desserts on Twelfth Night, also known as the Feast of Kings or Epiphany in France, since the Middle Ages. In those days, the French King's Cake took different forms depending on the region. It was a brioche topped with candied fruits in Provence, a flat galette with cream in the North, a dry cake in Lorraine, a puff pastry round with an almond flavored filling in Lyon. À Paris, it was a gorenflot, a sort of enriched bread raised with baker's yeast, something like a Polish brioche. The ritual of this shared cake is symbolic of the day of the Epiphany, commemorating the presentation of Jesus to the Magi on the sixth of January, but it is also redolent of other pagan traditions linked to the cult of fertility that was so popular with the Romans. The "bean" hidden inside the cake was originally an actual lima bean, a symbol of renewal and fecundity, before it was replaced by a tiny porcelain figure representing the Christ child, then by a host of trinkets. Today, the marzipan-filled, puff pastry round has gained supremacy almost everywhere. And for good reason—few pastries can give such extended pleasure. How delicious when, under its fine butter coating, the many-layered pastry (milles-feuilles), still warm, encounters the silky, fondant marzipan on the palate—a perfect combination of the puff pastry and grainy, ground almonds. No one knows exactly when this so-called "Parisian" cake was born. The invention of marzipan dates from the sixteenth century. The history should be treated with caution, but it is sufficiently delicious to have been inscribed indelibly in the memory of gourmets. In 1588, an Italian marquis named Murio Frangipani marketed gloves perfumed with almonds. There is nothing surprising about this because perfumers were originally glove makers. The essence of Italian frangipani, about which Catherine de' Medici was passionate, inspired the pastry cooks of the French court to create frangipane cream, an equal mixture of pastry cream and almond cream. King's Cake, whether flavored with fruits or almond cream, is a dessert with a history. Certain Epiphanies have been retained in the annals. For instance, on January 6, 1650, at the Louvre Palace, Anne of Austria and her son Louis XIV indulged in the cake, leaving on the table, as was the custom, a share for the poor, in this case the very part that contained the bean. The next morning, there was "no other king than that of the bean," the king having fled Paris to escape the uprising known as the Fronde. Is it because of this unpleasant memory that the tradition of naming the person who finds the bean as "king" for the day was outlawed during Louis XIV's reign, the custom being officially judged to be too pagan? In 1770, Diderot recounted this anecdote in his Encyclopédie, summarizing it with this amusing aphorism: "Signe Denis, sans terre ni château. Roi par the grâce du gâteau." (The sign of Denis [patron saint of Paris] without land or château, King by the grace of a gâteau.) The joy of eating the crown is all part of the pleasure of enjoying King's Cake once a year, and more....

All ingredients except the milk and water should be at room temperature. This bread can be stored in a resealable plastic bag at room temperature for up to 2 days.