We are lucky and grateful to belong to such an inspired and supportive community of foodies, farmers, friends, culinary phenoms, and philanthropists! Our team at Gracie’s and Ellie’s is truly thankful for the ability to continue putting our dreams into practice, day-after-day, because of the amazing people we work with!
This year our Holiday Collection is inspired by some of our favorite heritage recipes! The holidays are a time to come together, to gather with friends and loved ones and give thanks to the people who touch us, and the lessons they teach us. Our heritage collection is all about time-honored family inspired recipes, handed down by tradition and made with love.
Heritage is a warm term that can be used to reference ;
– History, as in contextualizing events or processes that have meaning in group memory.
– Culture, as in legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group: man-made heritage.
– Nature, as in an inheritance of fauna and flora, geology, landscape and other natural resources in a geographical area.
– or Heredity, as in the biological inheritance of physical characteristics
and/or Kinship.
And so we are building our heritage every day!
Our roots are here in Rhode Island, and we are beyond grateful to call a state that has so many cool community project spaces, home. We have recently begun production, at one such place, Hope & Main! Hope & Main provides space and tools for local business looking to ramp up production. It’s a wonderful service for our community and economy, but for us it really means an opportunity to laminate and proof more dough!
We are thrilled to work with and at Hope & Main, and to be able to introduce more labor intensive pastries, like Kuogin Amman!
Kouign-amann (QUEEN-ah-mahn) are made of laminated dough—croissant dough—that’s about 50% butter and 50% yeasted dough. They’re dusted with sugar and salt right before baking, so they develop a thick, caramelized crust outside. These sweet salty, buttery pastries hail from the coastal region of Brittany, in the northwest corner of France. The region is best-known for its salt flats where they harvest the coveted finishing salt, fleur de sel.
We’re gonna be honest: they’re hard to make, but so worth it! The Breton specialty isn’t new or singularly contrived; it’s lodged firmly in the patisserie tradition of northwestern France.
At first glance, you might mistake kouign amann for a crusty golden muffin. Look a little closer and you’ll see that the little bronzed cake wears a crown with four points, or a four-leaf clover design. When you tear into one, there are layers upon layers of buttery dough.
Kouign amann, from the words cake (kouign) and butter (amann), look innocent enough, but one bite is all it takes to fall unabashedly in love with the pastry’s crispy, caramelized sugar coating and soft, buttery dough.
Kouign amann is made with a yeasted laminated dough, lamination being the process of incorporating a slab of butter into dough, with successive rolling, folding, and rotating (the three-step process is called a “turn”) to create dozens of layers. This is what gives croissants, puff pastry, and some Danish pastries their characteristic flaky texture. With the Breton specialty, the final two turns include a generous sprinkling of sugar. These small, individual cakes are sometimes called kouignettes. Traditional Breton kouign amann are cake-size disks, cut into wedges and typically served with fruit.
We are thrilled to bring back Kouign amann now that we are working with Hope & Main! It’s one of our favorite heritage recipes, and a lovely treat year-round. Heritage is a twist on ‘knowing where your food comes from’, so whether you’re ordering your special holiday treats from us, making them at home with trusted family recipes, or ordering pizza (because that’s your personal tradition), celebrate the ‘why’ this season! This Holiday season we wish you and yours the chance to celebrate your roots, reconnect with tradition, and maybe even start a new one!
