Keepwell Vinegar and White Rose Miso are Central Pennsylvania businesses specializing in small batch vinegars and miso. Founders and Makers Sarah Conezio and Isaiah Billington started fermenting only a few years ago and have added creative, delicious products to their line every year.
Quite simply, every one of their products is extraordinary. I love the vinegars for so much more than salad — they’re ideal for finishing dishes with a bright liveliness, especially roast vegetables. The vinegars make a more nuanced pan sauce than I thought I was capable of creating! Finally, ohmygod are they delicious for drinking. Yes, drinking vinegar.
We use more miso than vinegar in this house. I started with the white miso, flavorful in ways that grocery store miso is not. And once I become nimble using it, I began to experiment with their Benne Seed, Black Walnut, and Sunchoke-based misos. The chocolatey base to the benne seed miso was mind-bending. The tang and fruity flavor in the sunchoke miso was ideal as a soup base. The possibilities were endless, particularly as I explore more vegan cooking. This miso brings the umami. (Don’t miss the Sweet Potato Hoisin and the Gochuchang, if you’re shopping!)
I use miso regularly for fish and vegetables, for soup, to add oomph to stews and braises, but had never even contemplated its use for baking. Following the Instagram adventures of Sarah and Isaiah led me to add a little vinegar and a little miso to baking projects. They are adventurous and creative with these products in ways that I’ve never seen before. The results are so fabulous, I asked to publish one of their recipes here. Hello there, Strawberry Black Walnut Frangipane Jalousie. It is vegan and it is true pastry. And it is sensational.
Not gonna lie – this is a project. And it’s a little tricky. I recommend using the specific Keepwell products, available by mail order and at several shops. You can substitute standard white miso and apple cider vinegar with similar (but far less nuanced) results. Start with the pastry and make the frangipane in the dough-chilling interstices. Slice the strawberries at the last minute to make them easier to work with. The pastry never gets hard-chilled like an all-butter pastry, so work quickly and keep refrigerating between steps.
Makes one Jalousie, 10 servings
For the Rough Puff Pastry (Vegan)
300 g all purpose flour
20 g granulated sugar
5 g kosher salt
226 Earth Balance or other plant based “butter”, cubed and cold
100 g ice water
20 g Keepwell Vinegar Honey Vinegar
For the Black Walnut Frangipane
1 cup (100 g) walnuts, toasted
2/3 cup (85 g) all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
6 tablespoons (100 g) Earth Balance or other plant based “butter”
1/2 cup (50 g) light brown sugar
3/4 cup (75 g) granulated sugar
2 tablespoons (36 g) White Rose Miso Black Walnut miso
1 tablespoon (20 g) Keepwell Vinegar Honey Vinegar
6 tablespoons (78 ml) plant based “eggs”
For the fruit
1 pint (300 g) beautiful ripe strawberries, stemmed and halved or sliced, depending on size
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
For finishing
1 tablespoon plant-based egg whisked with 1 tablespoon water
Swedish Pearl Sugar or Sparkling Sugar
Make the pastry.
In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, and salt together. Use your fingers to smoosh each individual cube of butter leaving the pieces large. If the butter begins to get too soft, a quick 10 minutes in the refrigerator will chill the butter enough to continue working. Add the cold liquids and bring the dough together with your hands.
Scrape the dough on to a large piece of plastic wrap. Work quickly to form a rectangular shape of sorts, gathering the dry ingredients and pressing them into the dough. Wrap tightly and chill about 2 hours until firm.
Generously flour the work surface and rolling pin. Roll the dough to 9- by 15-inches. Square the edges. Book fold the dough (like a business letter) to 9- by 5-inches. Wrap and chill for about 2 hours until firm.
Make the frangipane
Add the walnuts, flour, baking powder, and salt to the bowl of a food processor. Blitz until the consistency of sand.
In a large bowl, use a stiff spatula to beat together the butter, brown and granulated sugars, miso and vinegar until creamy. Beat in the eggs, then add the flour mixture, stirring until smooth. Set aside. (This will make twice what is needed for the pastry. Freeze the leftovers. It makes a great base for a fruit tart or galette.)
Prepare the fruit.
In a small bowl, gently combine the strawberries with the flour.
Assemble the jalousie.
A jalousie is a “braided” pastry. The braids are not precise like a challah, but laid over one another without any latticing. Don’t overthink it.
Flour the work surface and rolling pin. Roll the dough to 9- by 15-inches. Trim the edges so they are crisply square. Make faint indentations to mark the dough into three sections each 3- by 15- inches. Use your bench scraper to chop off the corners of the dough, removing four 3-inch triangles. (Set these pieces aside and make something out of them with extra filling, fruit, frangipane, or cheese. bake alongside the jalousie.) Transfer the dough to a parchment lined baking sheet.
Now, keeping the angle true to the one made when you chopped off the triangles, use the bench scraper to make 1-inch-wide angled strips on both the left and right sections of the dough. There should be 9 strips on each side. (For a visual, see the photo on Keepwell’s IG Highlight page – More Recipes.) Chill the dough for 20 minutes.
Use an offset spatula to spread the frangipane thickly down the center segment of the jalousie. Place the strawberries one at a time, points down and slightly overlapping to cover the frangipane.
Starting at the top of the jalousie, fold about 2 inches of the center portion up and over the berries. To create the “braid”, bring the strip on the left and the strip on the right into the center, closing the pastry over the berries. Overlap the strips, with left over right, and continue this pattern to the bottom of the jalousie using all the strips. Bring the bottom of the center portion up and over the berries as the last strips are braided. Chill the filled jalousie for at least 20 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 450°F with the rack in the center of the oven.
Gently brush the egg wash over the pastry and sprinkle generously with the pearl sugar. Bake for 30 minutes, reduce the oven heat to 400•F and turn the baking sheet to ensure even baking. Bake until deeply browned, about 20 to 30 minutes more. Let the pastry get quite brown to ensure it is cooked all the way through.
Cool briefly. It’s amazing served warm or at room temperature.
Keeps, covered, for 2 days. We put leftover slices into the toaster oven (on toast) and loved the result.
