Julie Hyzy - Hail to the Chef

Meanwhile, working quickly, sift flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar together into a large mixing bowl. Cut in the butter until the butter is blended in. Add buttermilk and eggs all at once, and stir just until ingredients are barely blended. A few lumps are fine; this batter gets tough if you overwork it. Add the cheese, chives, and bacon, stirring only until the ingredients are roughly mixed in.

Pull hot muffin tin from oven. Drop batter into the muffin cups, filling each roughly three-quarters full. The hot oil should make the batter bubble and brown on the sides. Place pan into oven and cook until muffins are done and golden, roughly 20-25 minutes.

I like to serve them hot, but they’re great at room temperature, too.

I have to make an admission here: When it comes to bread making, I cheat. The pastry chefs at the White House do most of the baking, so it isn’t a problem at work. But at home, I use a bread machine. I set it on the dough setting and let the machine handle the kneading. Then I shape the dough by hand and let it do a final rise in the pan or pans of my choice. I actually like kneading bread by hand, but I’m busy, so I sacrifice the fun of kneading for the time I save by letting the machine handle it. The instructions here are for any standard bread machine.

2½ tablespoons (1 standard packet) granulated dry yeast

4-4½ cups bread flour

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

¼ cup nonfat dried milk

1 egg, beaten

1-1½ cups lukewarm water

⅓ cup olive oil

Set your bread machine to the dough setting. Add the yeast, 4 cups flour, sugar, salt, milk, egg, 1 cup water, and the oil to the bread machine vessel. Turn on bread machine. After 4 minutes, look at the dough. If it’s too floury, add water a few drops at a time, until the dough looks right. If it’s too runny, add flour 1 tablespoon at a time, until the dough looks right. The dough should look smooth and have a texture that feels roughly like the lobe of your ear when you pinch it-yielding but resilient. Balance the flour and water additions until you reach that middle point where the dough comes together nicely in a ball without being too watery or too stiff. Then walk away and let the machine do its thing. Most machines take around 1 hour and 20 minutes to 1½ hours to run the dough cycle. The machine will usually beep when it’s finished.

When the dough is done, unplug the machine. Grease the wells of two standard muffin tins with a spray-on like Pam or Baker’s Choice, or rub with shortening. Pinch off balls of dough roughly the size of golf balls, and place a ball in each muffin-tin well. When manipulating the dough, it makes the resulting bread prettier if you stretch the pinched dough ends to the back of the ball, and put that side bottom down in the tin, leaving a smooth, rounded surface at the top of each roll.

Cover the tins with a damp dish towel and set aside to let rise until doubled in size. This time can vary enormously, depending on the temperature of the site where you are resting the dough. The warmer it is, the faster the dough will rise. In a busy commercial kitchen, where the temperature often hovers around the 100° mark, it generally takes about 30 minutes-but if it gets much hotter than that, the yeast will start to die and the bread will start to cook, so don’t let the air temperature get over 100°. In a 70° home kitchen, it can take as long as two hours. A long, slow rise time often imparts more flavor to the bread. I find that putting the tins in a cool oven over a pan filled with hot water is just about perfect. The heat from the water warms the space, and the steam keeps the dough from drying out.

Preheat oven to 350° F.

Place the muffin tins in oven. Bake until rolls are golden, roughly 15-20 minutes.

Remove from oven. Let stand until rolls are cool enough to handle-usually about 5 minutes-then pluck them out of the muffin tins.

Serve warm.

For all you purists, if you prefer working this dough by hand, feel free to do it. The only thing that’s different is that you’ll need to proof the yeast-that is, dissolve it in the warm water along with the sugar, and let it get bubbly-before you mix the ingredients. Then knead until smooth, let it rise, punch it down, let it rise again, punch it down again, put it in the pans, and continue as the recipe indicates.

Ham is the ultimate convenience food when you’re feeding a large group. It arrives in the kitchen fully cooked, seasoned, and sometimes even spiral sliced-though I much prefer slicing my own. All a cook has to do is warm it through and cut it up to serve it. Naturally, most chefs feel the need to put a more personal stamp on a ham, so there are thousands of recipes for glazes, garnishes, and rubs to augment the flavor of a purchased ham. Any of these will work, but I tend to go with pure simplicity: I like the flavor of a sugar-cured ham. And I find that a thin coating of plain old molasses augments the flavor perfectly. But if you don’t like molasses, feel free to glaze your ham any way you see fit. (I’ve got a friend who swears by dumping a can of ginger ale on the ham when he puts it in the oven. I’ve tried it. Surprisingly, it’s good.) The most important thing when serving this dish is to pick a good ham to begin with.

1 good-quality sugar-cured ham, sized to fit the crowd of people you’re feeding (I generally go with 3- 5 pounds for home use, but any size will do.)

1 cup molasses

Preheat oven to 300° F. (Ham needs a slow cooking process to keep it from drying out and the sugar glaze from burning.)

Wash ham well in cold water. Place ham, fat side up, in a roasting pan on a rack, and place in oven. Cook 15-20 minutes per pound. Pull ham out of oven and carve off any excess fat, leaving about ¼-inch fat layer on the meat. Carve into the remaining fat with any decorative pattern desired-I usually go with 1-inch crosshatches. Brush ham with molasses. Put back into oven for 20 minutes, until glaze begins to bubble and brown.

Remove from oven. Place on serving platter. Slice into serving-size portions. Serve warm with White-Wine Honey Mustard on the side, and rolls and corn muffins handy, in case any guest feels like making a sandwich. Most of them will-you can trust me on this.

1 cup good Dijon mustard

2 tablespoons white wine

2 tablespoons honey

Mix ingredients and chill. Serve with ham.

This is an old-fashioned Texas crowd pleaser. In Texas, this is traditionally done with round steak, but here at the White House we upgrade to tenderloin. Feel free to use round steak, if you prefer.

Canola oil, for frying

2 pounds (roughly) beef tenderloin, cut crosswise into ½-inch steaks

1½ cups flour

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon onion powder

1 teaspoon salt

Fresh cracked pepper, to taste (I use about ½ teaspoon.)

2 cups buttermilk

3 small onions, cleaned and sliced into thin rings, rings teased apart

2 tablespoons flour

2 cups milk

Salt and fresh cracked pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 200° F.

This is a stovetop recipe, and you’ll need a big, sturdy skillet, preferably cast iron, though any heavy-bottomed metal pan will do. Place about ½ inch canola oil in the pan, and set over medium heat. The oil should be at about 300º, or hot enough to make a drop of water dropped in it dance and sizzle, to fry the steaks.