I've been nurturing a sourdough culture for the past few months (I've named her Hedwig) and today tried to make a sourdough rustic loaf. Perhaps I borrowed trouble by mixing recipes. The one that come with the sourdough starter from which Hedwig was born seemed too simplistic. So I consulted my Bread book. The Bread book is still over my head but I dove into the middle of it and found a sourdough pain au levain that sounded promising and followed those instructions with the ingredients of the simpler recipe. I even threw in the stand mixer to do the kneading for me which I'd never tried before.
What I ended up with was a soft, sticky, gooey dough that spread out over the entire pan threatening to be a pizza. It's now compost.
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Sourdough Failure #1
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Addicted to... Oatmeal?
I have apparently never had real oatmeal. Sure, I've had the little flavored packets I add water to. I was once partial to the cinnamon or maple flavors. But no more!
This weekend, I was too lazy to head out to a brunch place and I didn't want to have 2 pancake breakfasts in a row. So I tried the old-fashioned oatmeal recipe - the kind that takes half an hour to make. Nothing instant about it. I had oats (for granola) and milk (for yogurt) lying around and of course some butter and salt. I let things simmer, waited about half and hour and voila! The fluffiest, creamiest, toothsome oatmeal I have ever tasted. I sprinkled brown sugar over the first bowl. And when I went back for seconds, I tried honey drizzled over it. I would have tried maple syrup next, but my stomach ran out of room. It even reheats well in the microwave.
Guess what I'm having for breakfast this week?
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
America's Test Kitchen Bread Rescue
Having gotten a good start on bread weapons, I thought it would be nice to learn how to make edible bread so I know what NOT to do for bread weapons making.
I turned to The New Best Recipe cookbook for some help. Otherwise known as the "engineer's cookbook", The New Best Recipe is made by the folks at America's Test Kitchen who also edit Cook's Illustrated magazine. Luckily for me they had a section on making baguettes.
I knew I had bitten off more than I can chew at first when the opening paragraph of the baguette section included, "Where we parted ways was on the question of whether you could actually create an outstanding baguette at home in a regular oven." Uh oh.
I spent a weekday evening reading through their thorough research. From visual cues how to tell that the sponge was ready, to when the dough is kneaded enough all the way to when the bread is done baking, they outlined it all. They had some nice pictures of the aforementioned sponge (the sponge is the first mixture of yeast, flour and water, I call it yeast appetizer, before the rest of the flour is added) which I found very helpful as an end condition to watch for. My sponge actually wasn't ready in the cookbook's estimated duration of 8 hours, but took the rest of the night into the next morning.
I already knew that I enjoy the kneading process - it's very relaxing squishing around a ball over and over again - but the new process made it even more fun. The reason I didn't reach the windowpane condition of the dough the last time was because I was adding the wrong ingredient to address the issue: flour instead of water. Adding water on top of the dough only made it feel slippery and hard to grip, but by "crashing" the dough, picking it up and throwing it down on the work surface repeatedly, it would not only splash bits of water at the counter, but incorporate the water into the dough. Best of all, when I pinched off a tiny bit of dough and stretched it, it didn't break and became translucent - the elusive, yet promised windowpane.
The baking process was also fun and much more active. I used my pizza stone to bake on rather than a regular cookie sheet. But on the rack beneath the pizza stone was a pan of water to keep the humidity of the oven air up as the bread baked and prevent the crust from drying out, hardening and preventing the bread from expanding. The bread was done when the inside reached a temperature of 205-210F, so I was having to spear hot bread with my thermometer through the blazing heat of the oven to see if it was done.
Then it was time to see the results. Before the taste test, I was able to actually cut the bread with a bread knife. The crust was slightly crunchy and the crumb inside looked relatively uniform. It tasted like bread! I thought it was on the chewy side, but not the kind of chewy I remember store bought baguettes being like. But it tasted like bread! Victory dance!
Next up, sourdough.
PS: Believe it or not, the photo in this post is actually my bread.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Bread Weapon Making 101
Start with a clean slate - know nothing about making bread. It might be even better if you don't even like bread and wish for nothing better than inflicting bread upon your unsuspecting enemies. Next, find a cookbook with lots of pictures. Peruse the instructions to see if it goes into enough detail to seem helpful - you don't know how to make bread, how do you know what's actually helpful? Page through the bread recipes to find a type of bread that seems suitable for a weapon. I decided on baguettes due to their elongated shape - that way there's a handhold and still plenty of surface for bludgeoning. Perhaps a batard could be used as a projectile from a very high place, but I thought I'd start simple.
Now gather your ingredients, making sure you have the oldest ingredients possible. If it's aged, it has withstood the test of time and is worthy of being a part of a bread weapon. It's very important to read the instructions carefully. Make sure to keep the instructions handy at all times as you prepare your bread weapon so that you can cross-reference at will. This is a tricky process that requires careful calculation, patience only up to a point and endurance.
Another key trick is to only follow some of the durations in the instructions. If it says to knead the dough for 5-7 minutes, do it for as long as physically possible. 2 or 3 days should do it. And when it says to let it rise for 1.5 to 2 hours, do exactly that. Even though it tells you that the dough should double in bulk. They really mean that any change that you sorta, maybe notice is good enough.
Oh, and don't slash the bread right before baking. It becomes a weak point in the final product. Best to keep it an unbroken surface. Your weapon is done when your sharpest bread knife, cleaver, axe, won't even ding the surface of the bread. Take it from me.
Granola, Now With Yogurt!
Apparently the problem with the yogurt wasn't that I messed up the heating/cooling/bacteria growing process. It was just that I didn't wait long enough. The instructions said 3-4 hours to set. Other internet sources said that the longer I let it sit, the more tart it gets and that depending on the number of live cultures in the starter, it might take 6 hours.
I started the incubation around 4:30pm. I checked it at 7:30. Milk. Well okay, that was only 3 hours. I'll check it again later. I fought some zombies on the PS3, so I didn't check again until 10:30 (total elapsed time: 6 hours). Still milk. Not even a hint of thicker milk. Just milk. I give up, figure I have another failure on my hands, swaddle up the jar again and shove it back into the dark turned-off oven and decide to deal with it in the morning.
I remember and pull it out the following morning at about 9:30. Lo and behold: Not Milk! (total elapsed time 17 hours) I shove it into the fridge, let it cool down for an hour and ask Lee to taste test. When he didn't immediately spit it back out, I tried it myself. It was thick, close to the consistency of Greek yogurt and not even that tart, just yogurty goodness.
Success!
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Granola Living
I read an article about saving money by making your own grocery staples a few weeks ago. It evaluated the cost-saving, efficiency, and taste of making bagels, jam, yogurt, crackers, granola, and cream cheese at home.
We'd previously experimented with this idea when we got Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" cookbook several years ago. We learned that we're happier making our own pasta sauce than buying - it's amazingly simple and we can customize the spices. (I find most store bought pasta sauces too sweet). We also learned that store bought pancake mix is much better than any concoction we could make. Our homemade pancake mix tended towards heavy, frisbee-like texture and taste. We never did figure out just what was different.
This time, I was intrigued by the prospect of homemade granola and yogurt. Lee is a big fan. Me, not so much. And I even spent several weeks eating it for breakfast in an effort to acquire a taste for it. I'm also intrigued by the bagels, but I haven't had a chance to try that yet.
So last weekend, I gave granola and yogurt manufacturing a try. Yogurt requires milk and a starter yogurt culture with live bacteria in it. Granola needs rolled oats, maple syrup, brown sugar, vegetable oil and other stuff you want in it, which in our case ended up being dried cranberries and slivered almonds. I used Alton Brown's recipe for the granola. For the yogurt, I referenced a recent New York Times article for what sounded like relatively straightforward instructions.
The granola was a clear win. It took a few minutes to mix the ingredients together, and an hour and 15 minutes to bake in the oven. The result was a crunchy, tasty granola that Lee was very happy with. I've even willingly had it for breakfast twice this week. Next time, I'll put a little less brown sugar and add another kind of nut, perhaps cashew, to the mix.
The yogurt experiment did not live up to expectation. It was relatively simple, but I got paranoid over the directive of sterile instruments about halfway through the process. I felt a little rushed with the waiting times (waiting for the milk to heat to the right temperature, then waiting for it to cool) because we wanted to start a fish dinner about the same time and I held dinner off with the idea that preparing both at the same time would impart a fishy taste to the yogurt. By the next morning, I ended up with yogurt-tasting milk. I think there were some miniscule globules at the bottom of the jar that may have actually been the right consistency of yogurt.
My internet research tells me that maybe the milk I used came from cows fed antibiotics that would kill the yogurt producing bacteria. Perhaps the yogurt starter I used didn't actually have the advertised live cultures in it. But the milk did indeed taste yogurty, so I'm not sure about that hypothesis. I might give this another try with different yogurt and milk brands.
My day with kitchen experimentation didn't end up a complete disaster. We've gone through half the batch of granola already and I'm looking forward to the next batch. I'm not sure when I'm trying the yogurt again. Maybe I'll switch to trying bagels next and come back to that.
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