Why We Love Savory Monkey Bread from Chef Chris Pandel
It took only three words for Chicago chef Chris Pandel to pique our interest: dill monkey bread. It helps that we're admirers of Pandel's cooking, at both The Bristol, where the monkey bread originated, and Balena, the chef's Italian-inspired restaurant in Lincoln Park. Five years after the Bristol's opening, says Pandel, "people still love the monkey bread." This is the world's least surprising fact. Look at this picture: a sticky, caramel-ly, pull-apart Bundt cake of puffy delicious dough. Now mash that together in your brain with the idea of something savory, salty, and dill-flecked, and how could you not order that?
The idea for the dill monkey bread grew out of Pandel's desire to serve fresh bread, baked in house, at his restaurant. "Why not make it personal, and do it the right way?" Pandel recalls thinking. So the chef combined aspects of Parker House and Hawaiian rolls, then added dill: "Dill has a natural enzyme that makes you crave more food," Pandel says, making it a fitting start to a meal. Though much of the Bristol's menu changes nightly, the monkey bread is at no risk of retirement.
"We can't change it," says Pandel, "and we don't want to."
1/12Chef Chris Pandel, of Chicago's Balena and the Bristol, stopped by the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen to bake dill monkey bread.
2/12Flour, milk, yeast: How can ingredients so simple become something so delicious?
3/12Pandel adds the magic ingredient: dill.
4/12Oh yes, there's another magic ingredient, and it's known as butter.
5/12When the dough cleans itself off the bottom of the bowl, that signifies it's ready to proof.
6/12The difference between tacky and sticky? You have to touch the dough to find out.
7/12Pandel divides the dough into golf ball–sized pieces.
8/12"This is the only part where actual knowledge of bread-making comes into play," says Pandel as he rolls the dough in his palm.
9/12Pandel brushes the baking pan with butter before adding the dough.
10/12The smell of fresh bread, butter, dill wafted from the test kitchen. The culprit: savory monkey bread.
11/12The monkey bread will get one more chance to increase in size before it's popped in the oven.
12/12"We're not reinventing the wheel," says Pandel. But he is taking monkey bread to a very special place.
