Photo: Kristin/The Kitchen Sink Blog

One of life's few certainties is this: the smell of baking bread is a good thing. But the smell of baking cinnamon bread? That's something outside of the realm of certainty, residing instead in the sphere of sublime, irrevocable and universal truths.

This loaf, baked by Kristin at the Kitchen Sink Blog, appears to encapsulate all of the virtues of cinnamon bread. Chief among them: the Milky Way-like whorl at its center and the plentiful nooks and crannies that would make ideal receptacles for rapidly melting butter. The shallow pool of melted cinnamon and sugar in the bread's bottom left corner could inspire the beginnings of new civilization. Kristin writes that this bread was "a childhood favorite," but really, this looks more like a favorite to sustain an entire lifetime.

[Via The Kitchen Sink Blog]

If the hubbub around the bready beast was any indication, New York bagels would seem to be the only ones out there -- chewy behemoths with small holes and lots of room for toppings. Gotham has a competitor in the Montreal-style bagel, however. These tasty rounds are distinguished by larger holes, flatter, denser bodies and a slightly sweet flavor (from a dash of malt and a quick boil in honey-sweetened water).

Above is the first video in a 3-part series detailing how to make Montreal-style bagels. Some say there should be no salt in these babies, but many recipes call for it, so it's your choice. (It's worth noting fellow makes his bagels plumper than the usual slim version, so the fluffiness quotient is also up to you.)

Tip: An easy way to add sesame or poppy seeds to bagels is to pour seeds on to a plate or in a bowl and dip the bagel in post-boil. Sprinkling them on also works, but more coverage can be snagged via a quick roll.

Hot cross buns are everywhere these days, tempting us with sweet flavors like cinnamon, currant, and lemon striped with creamy white frosting.

Rumors run rampant for the historical basic of the buns -- from Babylonians honoring Ishtar to the ashy remains in Pompeii. Traditions also extend beyond the realms of worship: Are the buns a Celtic symbol of male and female unity or should we believe the superstition that friends should break the treat while saying, "Half for you and half for me. Between us two shall goodwill be."

Before we get wrapped up in history, let us introduce you to yet another concept you might not have yet encountered: Savory hot cross buns. Adding cheese, meats and veggies to the classic yeasty dough is like wrapping a rich sandwich in a bun and taking it "to go." A stellar addition to the brunch table, these would also make a great match for soup or salad.

We realize we may seem a little holiday-fixated around here. But one Easter has yet to come: Orthodox Easter, which falls on this coming Sunday, April 19. The use of two calendars often results in different timing in Western Easter's and Orthodox Easter's arrivals, which makes the day truly a movable feast.

Why is this worth a certain amount of hoopla? Well, look at the hunger pang-inducing bread shown above. One of the centerpieces of the Greek Orthodox Easter table, tsoureki paschalino (tsoo-REH-kee pahs-khah-lee-NO), or Greek Easter bread, is typically baked on Holy Thursday and traditionally shaped in a braid around an Easter egg. (The deep red dye symbolizes the crucifixion.) Tsoureki, a light yeast bread sometimes sweetened with a light touch of orange or almonds, has an airy, eggy texture similar to challah. A similar bread known as pinza is a mainstay on Italian Easter tables.

Within the Greek Orthodox church, Easter is considered by many to be the holiest day of the year. For many celebrants the period of Lent is one of self-discipline and self-purification during which one might refrain from treats or certain animal products. Additionally, on some days (traditionally Wednesdays and Fridays during the first weeks of Lent and every day during Holy Week) both wine and olive oil are also forbidden. The first post-Lenten meal is served after midnight Mass on Holy Saturday, where the traditional meal consists of mayeritsa (a soup made from the internal organs of the Easter lamb) and the deep maroon-dyed eggs that are part of the tsoureki.

Tsoureki is available in Greek bakeries; try this one, which ships its tsoureki.

Eating pork buns (cha siu baau) is an excellent way to get a taste of New York's Chinatown. These warm buns -- either steamed or baked -- are full of savory barbecue meats, sometimes with scallions.

Last weekend, a friend and I decided we would eat our way through Chinatown by trying pork buns at various bakeries. And, what started out as a "pork bun journey" turned into an exploration of both savory and sweet buns, ranging from pork to red bean.

Fay Da Bakery, at 83 Mott St., has a variety of buns that you can select yourself with tongs when you enter the shop. While being underwhelmed by their pork buns, we were blown away with their sweet topping red-bean bun. The outside of the red-bean bun is coated in a flaky layer of sugar that balances marvelously with the doughy bun and the creamy red-bean paste.

Head directly to the Golden Fung Wong Bakery, at 41 Mott St., to try some of the best pork buns in Manhattan's Chinatown. Chunks of pork are flavored with a delicious mix of soy and oyster sauce. This bakery also sells an assortment of rice cakes and melon cakes that are worth trying.

Like it or not, a little math can be handy, whether you need to resize those embedded videos (cross-multiplying!), or bake a loaf of bread.

Last month, a Year in Bread posted a mathematical formula for cold fermentation that was located in the comments section of The Fresh Loaf. Specifically, determining how much yeast you should use when adapting from warm to cold.

Why use cold fermentation when you can throw those little yeasties into some warm water and get started pronto? As Year points out, cold fermentation is a longer and slowing process that allows flavors to fully develop. Beth described in an earlier post: "Normally, with bread rising at room temperature or warmer, these sugars [from broken enzymes in the dough] are gobbled up by the yeast so you only get a hint of those flavors in the resulting bread." With cold fermentation, they don't eat, and the flavors remain in-tact.

To figure out how much yeast your cold fermentation needs, you figure out how long you want to ferment the yeast, and divide that number into the original amount of yeast called for in the recipe multiplied by the original fermentation time. Yes, the fermentation takes extra time, but when you can plan how much time and when it's ready, it's not any more difficult than immediate satisfaction.

Next time you are bringing lunch to work, you can bring along this amazing portable hand-held toaster. Just this Wednesday, the Telegraph had an article explaining that the device is in its preliminary stages and should be available in shops in Britain at the end of the year. The concept was created by Korean designer Kim Been.

What appears to be a ceramic cake slice, is actually a device that spreads heat created thanks to nanotechnology. You know when the bread is toasted because heat-sensitive illustrations of vines and butterflies appear and multiply as the bread becomes browner. It takes two to three minutes to toast the bread. The only setback is that only one side can be toasted at a time.

This portable ceramic bread iron will be perfect for campers. As Daily Mail states, "You need never burn your toast in the office canteen again thanks to the invention of the world's first portable toaster." This portable device actually contains highly-durable CarbonNano tubes that will not over-heat and will protect users from any skin burns. The cost of this device has not been announced. Depending on when it comes out, this could be a great gift for the holiday season.

I'm quite happy to have some Scottish ancestry. It's led me to the dry and delicious world of scones, the simplicity of shortbread, the warm and satisfying bite of Scotch, and the utter tastiness of haggis. Now, it's led me to warm and tasty baps.

Scottish baps are simply bread rolls made with yeast. They must be kneaded and allowed to rise a few times before being flattened, left to raise again, and then pinched to keep them from rounding out while baking. They only need to be baked for 20-30 minutes, and they're the perfect sort of bread for beginner bakers. The recipe is incredibly easy, it familiarizes you with kneading and rising, and it is hard to mess up. The flavor of a bap is simple, yet rewarding. It tastes much like a freshly made biscuit while having the texture of a well-worked piece of bread. The outside is wonderfully crisp while the inside is soft, airy, and just waiting for a slab of butter.

There's really no limit to the foods that can be slid inside a bap, and Wise Geek notes that regional favorites include bacon batties (bacon, butter, and a brown sauce), baps served alongside Lincolnshire sausages, and fritter rolls that pile potato fritters inside.

Bap recipe after the jump.

Kat Kinsman inspired me to take a dab into the biscuit world, even though these are a little less traditional. Biscuits come in all different shapes and sizes. The perfect example of this are these funky Buttermilk Fantails from Gourmet Magazine's latest issue. The shape alone caught my attention and I instantly decided that these were going to be my weekend project. Luckily, they were much easier to put together than I imagined.

Light and airy, these fantails are composed of the simplest ingredients and if you plan on spending the day at home, easy to make. From start to finish (including rising time) they took a total of 5 hours, with only 45 minutes of active time. All you'll need is a muffin tin and thin, sharp knife.

Word to the wise, make sure you don't use old yeast. The first step of this recipe requires you to see foam, if you don't, start over. I used old yeast and while I saw what I thought resembled foam, it wasn't enough and my biscuits didn't rise to their full potential. While the texture and taste was on target, I would have preferred them to be fuller and fill the entire muffin tin. I shall try again this weekend.

Check out this recipe and more ultimate comfort foods in this gallery.

I've made breadcrumbs a handful of times in the past, but never on a regular basis. However, I've had many missed breadcrumb opportunities as I've thrown away more crusts of bread than I'd like to admit. In an attempt to stop tossing perfectly good food, I've been trying to reinvent ingredients and last night, I made meatballs as a way to avoid waste.

The meatballs became dinner because I had a pound of local, grass-fed ground beef in the freezer and a big hunk of two week old bread (really good bread from Philly's Metropolitan Bakery) that needed to be used up. I also managed to salvage some aging green onions and the last two inches of a log of goat cheese in the process.

I always forget how easy it is to make breadcrumbs and how homemade ones enhance any food you pair them with. They gave the meatballs an appealing lightness while also allowing the exteriors to get nicely crunchy, creating a fantastic textural pairing. They're also wonderfully simple to make. My instructions are after the jump and the step-by-step pictures are in the gallery below.

Last week, after posting about Eudora Welty's description of champagne as a folk medicine, I started thinking more about the medicinal power of food and drink. We foodies talk a lot about comfort food, which connotes more of a psychological palliative, hangover cures and foods that contribute to life-long health. But what about the quick fixes we seek to alleviate colds, coughs, fevers, and flus?

I bet each one of you can think of a couple foods or drinks that you reach for when you're under the weather. For many, it might be the old standby of chicken soup -- but I'm interested in that special, personal twist on the soup that you believe makes all the difference. To me, it's the side dish that always accompanied the soup when I was home from school with some ailment: one slice of soft sandwich bread, un-toasted, generously buttered and folded in half. Couldn't be more simple or more welcome. The beverage of choice was orange juice with plenty of ice (I normally drank apple juice with no ice), and dessert, invariably, was red Jell-O.

My guess is that many of you, like me, imported your food cures from childhood. Then again, maybe some of you have discovered new remedies. Do tell!

Despite the fact that I love cookbooks and continue to acquire them at an alarming pace, I don't actually use them much (beyond the pleasure of leafing through them). More often than not, when I'm looking for a recipe, I turn to the internet. After I've found three or four serviceable recipes, I'll cobble together something that most closely approximates the thing I've got in my head.

It's a method that works, but sometimes, I find myself longing for the pre-internet days, when people kept a couple core cookbooks and continually tweaked the recipes, noting their changes in the margins. I fear that the days of much-loved cookbooks (like my mom's Joy of Cooking that is pictured above) are nearly gone and the cooks of my generation won't have a tangible reference at the end of their cooking days.

I especially regret this change because of the pleasure that can be gotten from consulting a trusted cookbook. When it came time to make the cornbread stuffing for Christmas dinner this year, I used the Quick Cornbread recipe from the book above. After the stuffing was completed and dinner was a pleasant memory, I returned to the cookbook to make a note that for the future, the cornbread could use some additional salt if it was going to be part of stuffing (I also added a little herbs? to remind myself that adding some chopped rosemary or sage to the batter would also be a nice thing). It's a comforting thing to know that I've left all who consult that Joy a little helpful cornbread stuffing info.

How do the rest of you document your cooking successes and recipe adaptations?

Panettone is one of the many holiday sweets I look forward to every year. Its balance between the moist, soft, fluffy inside and crunchy nut exterior is precious. Apparently the aroma of this bread permeates villages throughout northern Italy this time of the year. Ah, I yearn to be there at this very moment!

As a result of my panettone obsession, I tend to buy a lot more than I can eat before it goes stale. Fortunately, there are several ways to cooking panettone even after it loses its delicious soft texture. For example, it makes a distinctive fruity french toast and bread pudding.

Below are 8 ways to use stale panettone:

1. Panettone Bread Pudding
   
2. Cardamom and Orange Panettone Toast
3. Panettone French Toast
4. Arugula and Roasted Fruit Salad with Panettone Croutons
5. Panettone Stuffing
6. Panettone Panzanella with Pancetta and Brussels Sprouts
7. Eggnog-Panettone Bread Pudding
8. Grilled Panettone with Strawberry Ice Cream and Almonds

Where are some other ways you cook stale panettone?

There's one food preference that I could not understand -- dedication to all things crustless. It just never made sense to me -- how could anyone give up the flavorful crust, whether it be crunchy with fresh bread, or brown and thin on that ol' soft white bread?

While other kids requested crustless sandwiches, I would insist that they stay on -- not only that, but I'd prefer my sandwiches be made with the crusty ends, or with baguettes that would give me a whole sandwich of brown crunch. Perhaps this is because my family had a thing for bread beyond that preservative-laden soft stuff. Perhaps it's due my father's love of all things crisp and crunchy. Whatever the case, to this day, I'll grab the end piece off every loaf of bread I buy, to enjoy it at its freshest. It's that good.

And it's not just breads. No matter how many times I see it, I can't believe it when people indulge in pizzas and leave the crust. The thought of one of those center pieces of crustless, square pizza ... it's such a waste and just not the same. But what say you? Weigh in below!

Writing in Slate, Jewish food maven Joan Nathan ponders the bagel, that thick steering wheel of boiled dough that's such a cultural touchstone for American Jews. Now, a new book, The Bagel: A Cultural History delves into the subject, sussing out the bagel's ancient roots and exposing amusing details of the bagel's role in 20th century life.

Apparently, breads with holes have been around for centuries. Italians had hard crackers called taralli, Romans had something called buccellatum and the Chinese something called girde. Egyptians, Nathan adds, had their own - you can see the doughnut-shaped rolls in hieroglyphic displays at the Louvre. Polish Jews may have invented the modern bagel, when the Polish king first allowed Jews to begin commercial baking (they had previously been banned) and a baker made a round bread in his honor. Bagels found their way to the Lower East Side by the 19th century, and they burst into the non-Jewish American consciousness in the 1950s, when Lender's frozen bagels were invented. Today you can get them in Dunkin' Donuts stores from Albuquerque to Bangor.