Category: Baking

February 4, 2011

Slow & Bready Wins The Race

Some bakers delight in churning out dozens of different kinds of bread from multiple cookbooks, ranging far and wide in their study and pursuit of great bread. I am not one of those bakers. I began with the recipe and wild starter that Andrew gave me, and have slowly been changing it and making it my own based on lots and lots of attempts and modifications (and accidents, the importance of which to any creative process can not be overstated). And I’m now at the point where I’ve got my master recipe, which I can adapt into many different shapes and flavors without altering the basics much at all.

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January 19, 2011

Homestyle

Lately I’ve been baking bread in a loaf pan for variety and also pragmatic reasons. Kid’s lunches are more easily made with rectangular slices of bread, and when the kid himself suggests it, it’s always a good idea to listen. The semi-random fluctuations of flour types in the pantry have made for some interesting variations lately: a wheat/spelt/triticale mixture, and more recently a whole wheat/rye blend where the only white flour came from the starter. Both were very good eating; the spelt has a nice nutty flavor, and triticale is subtle, combining aspects of its parents wheat and rye. The whole wheat and rye loaf is a thing of fragrant beauty–it tastes amazing–though really more of the inner beauty variety. These rectangular loaves are practical, yes, but they lack the compellingly oblate topography of a boule.

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December 30, 2010

¡Sabor!

OK, those Cuban sandwiches. First off, I should say that I used to go to Miami all the time; as an art shipper/handler I was there once or twice a winter, even before Basel got started. I’ve had three solo shows in two galleries (at three locations) in Miami, and generally know and like it well. And I think it’s finding its way as a culinary town; the tropical ingredients, great ethnic diversity and a huge influx of money are producing a real food scene. Last time I was there I ate wonderfully, thanks to my hosts (who read this: Hi B & T). They recently sent me mangoes from the tree next to the gallery.

The Cuban sandwich makes a lot of sense. Two kinds of pork, Swiss cheese, pickles, mustard, pressed until melty: what’s not to like? It’s a toasted ham and Swiss with pickles. I don’t eat too many of them when I’m there, though, because I try hard not to eat meat when I don’t know where it comes from. And Cuban bread is white and spongy and I must say I don’t find it very interesting. Pressing it on the grill helps, but I like bread with a bit more character. Solution? Local pastured pork, homemade rosemary rolls, extra sharp Vermont cheddar, and homemade red cabbage-carrot pickles.

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December 6, 2010

Try This At Home

I accidentally found another use for my now all-purpose bread recipe; besides baking loaves of various shapes and sizes (including the little rolls for Thanksgiving) it turns out that it makes perfect pitas as well. Now I’ve cooked bread dough in the skillet (and on the grill) before, sometimes on purpose, and sometimes because it hadn’t fully risen. This time it was intentional, but I was thinking more in terms of the fluffy naan sort of things I’ve made before, where I cooked flat rounds of dough in butter until they got charred and puffy. But I was in for a pleasant surprise.

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November 20, 2010

Where Has All The Flour Gone?

Bread season is in full effect. There’s nothing that warms up a kitchen (and by extension a house) like a loaf of bread baking in a hot oven. The smell quickly fills the house, and makes one grab butter from the fridge in anticipation.

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October 26, 2010

Where The Hearth Is

Apart from the off-centering impact of too much away food, something else I noticed about traveling is the effect it had on some domestic rhythms, especially baking. The live sourdough starter does best when it’s getting fed twice or thrice weekly, and during my time away it got sad and neglected. A quick feed brought it back, and I’ll bake tomorrow, but it took me a few days to get to it; even the short interruption made the habitual task of feeding and then mixing/kneading/rising/baking seem kind of daunting so that I put it off all weekend. Establishing these sorts of habits takes some practice, and they remain vulnerable to the distractions that constantly conspire to interrupt my progress on so many fronts.

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October 3, 2010

Yeast Of Eden

After three days of torrential rain (over four days) which we needed badly, it’s perfect again. The stream rose so high it actually displaced a few of the garden beds, requiring some work today to get things back in place. Besides shifting the 2×10 frames, the water moved some soil around, and strewed freshly-planted garlic cloves in the paths nearby. I got it all back together in short order, and topped up a couple of beds with compost for good measure. The combination of copious water followed by copious sun is having a highly salutary effect on the late plantings; turnips and winter greens are fattening right up. The carrots are great, and the burdock leaves are attaining prehistoric size. It’s been great bread weather.

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September 30, 2010

Muffaletta-esque

I’ve always been a fan of viewing mistakes as an integral part of creativity. Sometimes they just plain ruin the thing, but often they’re like positive mutations in the DNA of the process, allowing us insights or improvements that would have otherwise never come. I was making bread the other day–now that it’s cooler, I’m back to making 2-3 loaves a week–and as I mixed the wet into the dry, the dough came together into a much tighter, dryer ball than normal. I scratched my head for a second, and then figured out what happened: I used a plastic container for the flours and a metal bowl for the water and starter, and didn’t zero the scale when I switched. The metal bowl weighs 125 grams more than the plastic tub, so the scale read 600 grams of water when I had only poured in 475. Rather than add in the missing water and make a no-knead loaf in the Dutch oven, instead I dumped out the dough and gave it a good hard knead on the counter and then put it in an oiled bowl to rise.

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July 12, 2010

The Inverse Correlation Of Convenience And Flavor

It finally rained, and then cooled down a bit to the point where the mere idea of turning on the oven wasn’t suicide-inducing. I had planned to grill pizza, but figured out too late that we were out of charcoal. So on went the oven. I also turned on the attic fan, which pulled in cooler air from outside and sucked all the oven heat out through the top of the house. It’s a brilliant…

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June 10, 2010

Variations On A Theme

This all began with a High School friend posting on Facebook that she was smoking a pork butt as a precursor to making pulled pork for dinner. “Hmmm,” I said, “I have some pulled pork in the freezer, already smoked, braised, de-fatted, and pulled–ready to go, in other words.” So I defroze it, and made corn muffins, using the very same local coarse polenta that I used to dredge the quail. This polenta is going places; I had the chance to chat wth Don, who mills it, yesterday at the farmers’ market, and he told me some exciting news that is going to bode well for this region and the farmers thereof.

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