Name: Mogador Cafe
Address: Gasthuisstraat 48, Haarlem, 2011 XP, NL
Price range: €€
Rating: 4.3

Netherlands

Haarlem

Mogador Cafe

Banana bread is an American quick bread: a dense, moist loaf leavened with baking soda rather than yeast, built on mashed overripe bananas, sugar, egg, butter or oil and flour, baked in a rectangular tin and eaten in slices at breakfast or with coffee. It belongs to the family of soda-leavened loaves that appeared once chemical leaveners became cheap in the nineteenth century, and the banana version became a household standard in the 1930s, when the fruit was plentiful, the Depression made throwing away black bananas unthinkable, and baking-powder companies printed the recipe in their booklets. It is a bread in name only; by sugar and fat content it is a cake, and it is the thing most people bake first. Walnuts or pecans and chocolate chips are the standard additions, and café versions add a crumb topping, a cream-cheese swirl or a sliced banana laid along the top.

The bananas are the whole flavour and they have to be far past the eating stage: skins black or heavily spotted, flesh soft and smelling strongly, which gives sugar, moisture and the taste. Three or four are mashed with a fork, leaving some texture, and mixed with melted butter, sugar, often brown sugar for a deeper note, an egg and vanilla; the dry ingredients, flour, baking soda, salt and sometimes cinnamon, are folded in with as few strokes as possible, because overmixing develops gluten and gives a tough, tunnelled loaf. The batter goes into a buttered loaf tin and bakes at around 175°C for fifty to sixty-five minutes, longer than most cakes, until a skewer in the centre comes out clean and the top has cracked along its length; the long bake is why underdone centres are the most common fault. It rests in the tin for ten minutes before turning out and is better the next day.

A good slice is moist, tender and heavy for its size, evenly brown with a darker, slightly crisp crust and a crack along the top, and it tastes clearly of banana with the sugar and butter behind it. The crumb should be close and soft with no gummy or wet band near the bottom and no large tunnels. Mark down a loaf that is dry and crumbly, which means too much flour or too long in the oven, one that is dense and wet at the base from underbaking or too much banana, a pale, bland loaf made with yellow bananas, a loaf that tastes mainly of cinnamon or sugar, and a café slice that has been toasted and buttered to hide staleness. Nuts and chocolate are legitimate additions; a cream-cheese frosting turns it into a cake and should be judged as one.

Banana Bread

Australia

A cruffin is croissant dough baked in a muffin tin: a strip of laminated, butter-layered pastry rolled into a tight spiral, stood upright in a deep cup and baked so it rises into a tall cylinder with a flaky, ridged exterior and an open, pull-apart centre, then rolled in sugar and usually filled from the top with pastry cream, curd, jam or ganache. The name is a straightforward blend of croissant and muffin and the pastry is a child of the 2010s: Kate Reid's Lune Croissanterie in Melbourne is widely credited with the first ones around 2013, and Mr. Holmes Bakehouse in San Francisco made the word famous, trademarked it in the United States and built queues around it a year later. It belongs with the cronut and the crookie in the family of hybrid viennoiserie that bakeries use to sell croissant dough at a higher margin, and like them it is only as good as the dough underneath the idea.

The dough is standard croissant dough, a yeasted détrempe with a butter block folded in through three or four turns to give several dozen alternating layers. Instead of being cut into triangles it is rolled out into a long rectangle, often brushed with butter or sugar, cut into strips eight to ten centimetres wide and rolled up along the long edge so the layers spiral; the roll goes into a tall muffin or popover tin, proofs until it fills the cup, and bakes at around 190°C for twenty-five minutes, longer than a croissant because of its depth. It comes out, is tossed in granulated or cinnamon sugar while warm so it sticks, and once cool a piping tip goes down through the top to fill the hollow core; the filling changes with the season and the shop. Some bakeries make a smaller, unfilled version as a plain cruffin and a few sell them split and toasted.

Judge it by pulling it apart before you bite. The outside should be deep gold, crisp and clearly layered in a spiral, the sugar coating thin and even rather than a crust, and the inside should separate into distinct, soft, buttery sheets with visible air between them, not a dense bread crumb. It should taste of butter first and the filling should be in the core, not pooled on top or missing from the lower half. Mark down a pale or greasy cruffin, which means the dough was under-proofed or the butter leaked, a heavy centre that did not open, a sugar coating so thick it crunches like a doughnut, a filling that is mostly in the first bite, and a day-old one sold as fresh, which shows as a soft, bendable exterior. A cruffin is a morning pastry and does not keep past the afternoon.

Cruffin

The raspberry and vanilla cruffin was really tasty and fresh! They are one of the best coffee makers in Haarlem!

Banana bread was fresh and tasty, not too much sugar just in limit, coffee is great as always! Well spent sunny day in Haarlem:)

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