Christmas Bread

Barley Bread

Christmas is my favorite holiday because I have a quiet morning with family followed but a large dinner with family and friends. In the middle, there is a lot of cooking, cleaning, and moving. This year, for that middle period, I decided I was in charge of morale. It's a bit job getting everything in order, but it's still Christmas so we should have a little fun: a lovely picnic.

Pretty much everyone in the family gets a bit hypoglycemic; if we don't eat, we get tired, cranky, panicky, and, if things get really bad, trembley. So, food at lunch time was in order. There was some nice cheese for later so I stole a bit of that and combined it with one of the five loaves of bread I made and some carrots and brought a plate to each person in various places around the house. That loaf of bread was eaten so quickly that I didn't manage to get a picture of it, but you can see the rest below.

Whole Wheat Boule

Whole Wheat Batard

I made three kinds of bread (five loaves total) for two reasons. One, so that we could have plenty of delicious bread left over for the next few days. Two, something seems to always go wrong if you're making bread for an event, so it's always better to have extra. This time, the whole wheat and the Barley bread (my experimental loaf) turned out marvelously, but the country loaf was the tiniest bit underproofed and, as a consequence, it retained more of the water during the baking process and was denser because it had less oven spring. It looked beautiful, but it was best enjoyed toasted (as underproofed breads usually are).

Country Loaf Ear

Country Loaf

The bread was delicious. The barley bread, specifically, was a revelation. I often use barley to sweeten the crust and add depth of flavor, but this was something entirely new to me. I will post the recipe in the next few days.

Whole Wheat and Country Loaf, used for decoration and eaten over the next few days

Ultimately, Chirstmas, both bread and everything was a great success thanks to lovely friends and the amazing team effort of my family. It just shows that bread, cheese, and carrots are the perfect combination.

Back Again, I Hope

So I just finished my applications to graduate school. It proved to be a more troubling process than I had originally expected, but I'm done and now I just have to wait. I do still have school and classes to keep me distracted, but I thought I would do an update on some general things while I'm slightly less busy.

A Thank You

King Arthur Flours, picture credit: Servia

A friend of the family and fellow food aficionado (actually, she makes much fancier food than I do), and her family gave me a generous gift certificate to King Arthur Flour. This is what I got.

• Diastatic malt powder-- I've been hankering to try some of this for a while but it's just so expensive. Diastatic malt power is made from barley, my new favorite grain. It is a sweetener, but it's a sweetener made from sprouted grains, so it's actually good for you. It specifically uses the enzymes in the sprouted grain to convert the starches in the bread dough into their component sugars. I got a bunch of barley and I'm planning on making my own using this recipe (although I will use barley in place of wheat) if it turns out that I like it. It's often used in whole wheat breads that tend to be slightly bitter in order to help promote the process of starch conversion.It also helps improve the rise of the bread.
• Non-diastatic malt powder-- this is the distinctive sweetener in bagels. It doesn't have the same enzymes as diastatic malt powder, but it does also give a sweetness to the dough. It can be used as a replacement for sugar or honey in bread, although I don't know how the proportions work.
• Durum Flour (extra fancy)-- I absolutely love durum flour and I've noticed that the extra fancy tends to perform better in bread and pizza then the semolina. Some of my most beautiful breads have been made with substituting some of the white flour for durum (see the two pictures at the very bottom of my Bread Lesson II post).
• Sir Lancelot High- Gluten flour-- I bought this flour for two reasons. The first is that I'm desperate to make another attempt at Bread Cetera's Multigrain Bread. This looks phenomenal, and I misread the directions last time so I ended up making a mistake. It tasted fine, but it looked really silly so I didn't even post it. This time I will not be foiled! I also plan to make an attempt at bagels again. Maybe with a group of people (because it's a lot of work for very little yield).
• European Style flour-- Last year my family got me a book called English Bread and Yeast Cookery, in which Elizabeth David claims that soft flour has more flavor and so while the American breads rise higher, the European breads are more flavorful. While this is not actual flour from Europe, King Arthur Flour claims it is a good imitation so I want to see if it really is better.
• Pumpernickel Flour--Servia is a big fan of Pumpernickel bread. I have never tried to make it, but at Christmas dinner she and two friends decided to do a Pumpernickel day. Since on of the friends is responsible for getting me this flour, I decided I'd get a bag so we can make some proper pumpernickel.

So anyway, thanks to my friends who gave me this gift card. It will allow me to bake and blog for the next few months at least.

Testing...

A friend of the family gave me the lovely gift of one of the baby (7") Kindle Fires for Christmas. It is a lovely gift and I' m really enjoying it-- especially because I don' t have a smartphone so only now am I able to use my sparkpeople app.  I am checking whether I am able to post from the Fire. Happy belated Christmas everyone and happy New Year!

Updates: Reading and Teaching

Tomorrow I am hoping to finish and post my next blogpost on pedagogy. The current class I am teaching has demonstrated to me the importance of understanding classroom dynamics and how to foster an atmosphere of curiosity.

Part of the reason that I have been sidetracked from my blog recently is that I have been spending a lot of time reading while I haven't been feeling particularly well. I am particularly enthralled with The Family, which I received for Christmas. I also spent a lot of time with one of my best friends with whom I hope to learn Sanskrit.

 

Christmas Traditions of the Servii, Part 4

Ever since I was about eight years old, we have always put out the Christmas mice. The mice are fairly subtle; the family sits in a wreath given to us by my grandmother and the angel mouse tops our tree. So why the mice?

When I was seven or so, my mom caught the end of a Christmas special called "On Christmas Eve." The special is a silent, animated, short film with beautiful drawings and music that depicts a fairy's quest to bring Santa to the house of a chimneyless girl. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but it is so sweet. In one of the side plots, the fairy awakens a family of stuffed mice (who look exactly like our Christmas mice) to help her in her quest to bring Santa's slay to the little girl. We bought a copy on VHS many years ago, but we have never been able to find a DVD copy.

Recently, someone posted a poor quality version on youtube in three pars: 1, 2, 3. Enjoy!

Family of Chrismas mice.

Angel mouse in the tree.

Updates

I am going to spend a little bit of time updating old cooking posts with pictures, changes, and more information. Also, I will be trying to finish up posts on the Christmas traditions. For now, check out my updated pictures and the recipe on the Almond Thumbprint blogpost.

Update 12/28/10: I just added a picture of the soup to my blog "Traditions of the Servii, Part 3."

Update 12/29/10: I just added a series of hints about dough refrigeration to "Holiday Challah."

Holiday Challah

The smaller of my two braided loaves.

 I made some Challah for Christmas dinner. I was not planning on making any bread at all because I have not yet had a successful loaf that I have made since I graduated from college, but my mother sweetly encouraged and convinced me to make an easy bread recipe. My favorite no-hassle bread recipe is a Challah recipe from a blog I stumbled across called Tupper Cooks.

Until I ran across this recipe, I had never trusted no-kneed recipes. The first few that I tried produced thick, heavy bread and I decided that "no-kneed" was an altogether bad idea. However, I really wanted to make Challah for some friends for the end of passover, so I decided to try it out. It was perfect! It also made a great impression at Christmas dinner. My braiding is not very practiced, so my loaves are kind of misshapen, but they taste good.

In the oven, on my baking stone.

A picture of the crumb.

The larger loaf.

The smaller loaf.

This afternoon, I had a snack of toasted challah with left-over double-creme brie. Yum!

Note: you may notice, looking at Tupper's recipe, that this bread requires a much lower heat (350 degrees Fahrenheit instead of a more usually 450 degrees Fahrenheit). This, according Wild Bread, is because enriched breads (that include fats-- like eggs and oils-- and/or sugars-- like honey) brown faster and must be cooked at a lower temperature (Rayner 104). I thought that was pretty cool.

Update 12/29/10: I put half of the recipe in the refrigerator to make later (this challah can be toasted to heat it up, but it is much better fresh) . The recipe said that it could be refrigerated fro up to 5 days. I made the second half of it today. It turned out great but there are a couple of notes. First, I braided it right out of the refrigerator. After an hours, the bread had hardly risen at all, so I let it rise for another hour (for a total of 2 hours rising time). It did not rise very much-- only to about half the size of the original loaves. However, when I put it in the oven it had lots of oven spring (i.e. it puffed up a lot in the oven) and was about the same size as the original loaves. It tastes just as good. I highly recommend it!

Christmas Traditions of the Servii, Part 3

Happy Boxing Day! Boxing Day is a British tradition (I think from the middle ages) during which Lords would box up their old stuff that they were going to get rid of and give it to their serfs. Our Boxing Day traditions are slightly different, and most of them come from festivities from the previous day.

The Servii throw a large Christmas Day dinner for friends and family who are in town. The preparation (and cooking) begins directly after presents are opened. It is quite a feat to get it all together (especially because of some eccentric food preferences and allergies), but we all pitch in and make it work. This year we got a little behind because of all the baking, but the party was fabulous and all of the food turned out magnificently.

Turkey Soup and Turkey Quesadillas

I never used to like Turkey. As a kid I hated holiday meals because they involved turkey and green beans, neither dish of which I was particularly fond. In my sophomore year in college, a friend of mine hosted a Thanksgiving Dinner (during which, I think, I was very little help). I had one bite of her Turkey and thought "this is what turkey should taste like." I was hooked. As it turned out, she had used an old family recipe to brine the turkey, which ensured that it came out juicy and tender. So, for that Christmas, I took the recipe and did my own. Every year since, we have made the same the same turkey. I will post the brining recipe in a subsequent post.

One really exciting thing about this year's turkey is that I carved it myself-- or at least I carved half of it myself. I wanted to apply the principles in the video I watched after Thanksgiving (see my blogpost) to carving the Turkey. It was not quite as easy as it looked in the video so I thought I was doing it wrong, at first, and I called on the person who had carved the turkey at Thanksgiving Dinner. He came to my rescue by teaching me how to break the bones so I could separate the wings from the turkey, and beautifully sliced the meat from the bones and cut up the breasts as I carved gigantic chunks out of the turkey (as shown in the video). Amazingly, we got much more meat off the turkey than usual and it seems like an enormous amount of the 15lb pound turkey was left after 13 people had eaten it (three of the guests were vegetarians). Everyone said they loved the turkey, and I certainly love it and will enjoy using the leftovers in quesadillas, sandwiches, and enchiladas.

For now, the turkey carcass is in our big soup-pot, being made into broth with some left over vegetables (mostly carrots and celery).

A bowl of our soup. Yum!

The rest of the left-over turkey will be made into quesadillas. We make them very simply:

Ingredients

• Cheese mixture, shredded, approximately 0.8-1oz, depending upon the size of the tortilla (we usually combine some left-over sharp cheddar from the appetizer at Christmas Dinner with some jalapeno or habanero jack cheese)
• Green onions, minced
• Turkey breast meat, sliced about 1/8 of an inch thick or so (we use the left-over brined turkey)

Directions

1. Very lightly oil a pan with grape-seed or vegetable oil and heat the pan to medium.
2. Warm the tortilla for about 30 seconds on each side
3. Sprinkle the cheese over.
4. Sprinklethe green onions over the cheese.
5. When the cheese begins to melt, put the turkey on top.
6. Fold the tortilla in half with a spatula.
7. When the outside of the tortilla begins to crisp, flip it over to the other side.
8. When the whole tortilla is slightly crisp, cut and serve.

The Clean-up

The cleaning process is usually a fairly high-spirited affair, although dinner did not finish until 11:45pm this year (well...dessert and conversation did not finish until then), so we were all pretty tired. However, as usual, we made cups of  tea and talked over the evening by the fire before the actual cleaning process. This is a tradition that I really enjoy because we get to exchange anecdotes from the evening and relax in the warm glow.

Happy Boxing Day!

Happy Holidays!

To all those who celebrate Christmas, have a very merry one!

The Disaster that Wasn't: Almond and Chocolate Ganache Thumbprints

I remember as a kid going to the grocery store and begging for a "thumbprint" cookie. These cookies were shortbread thumbprints with chocolate ganache, and they were amazing. However, no piece of shortbread was ever quite like those from the thumbprints.

Recently I discovered in Joy of Cooking Christmas Cookies that they have a thumbprint recipe and the secret is: it's almond shortbread. The recipe in Joy of Cooking Christmas Cookies is a lowfat version (supposedly), but it still tastes great!

There is one problem with the Joy of Cooking Christmas Cookies recipe: it does not hold its shape. Although they looked good when they went into the oven...

Make them into balls and then make a deep knuckle-print in them.

They don't come out looking right unless, about 6 minutes in, you re-print them with a small spoon. When I noticed, I totally freaked out, but they turned out fine.

Baking complete. Now for Ganache!

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups (7.5 oz) all purpose flour
• 1/3 cup (1.5 oz) cornstarch
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3 1.2 tablespoons (1.75 oz) unsalted butter, softened
• 3 tablespoons canola oil
• 1 tablespoon light corn syrop
• 1/2 cup (3.5 oz) sugar
• 1 large egg
• 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 3/4 teaspoon almond extract

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Stir together flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, and salt with a fork or wire whisk
3. Beat together with a fork (or an electric mixer) butter, canola oil, corn syrup, sugar, egg, vanilla extract, and almond extract.
4. Combine wet and try indgredients and beat until smooth.
5. Slightly oil hands and pull of chestnut-sized bits of dough and roll them into balls. Place the balls on a non-stick cookie sheet.
6. Using your thumb or a knuckle, create a deep well in the center of each ball.
7. Bake for 5-6 minutes.
8. Take the cookie sheet out of the oven and redo the indents with a small spoon or similar device.
9. Replace the cookie sheet into the oven until cookies are just barely tinged with brown around the edges.
10. Take out the baking sheet. Let it sit for 1-2 minutes and then transfer the cookies to a baking sheet to cool.

Then Servia made chocolate ganache. The recipe is easy. The ganache will harden-- don't worry. It took much longer than the recipe suggested, but we let them sit overnight and they were great.

Ganache in process: Step 4.

Ingredients

• 6 oz semisweet baking chocolate
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 tablespoon light corn syrop
• 2 tablespoons heavy whipping cream

Directions

1. Take two saucepans (one which will fit inside the other) or a saucepan and a heat-proof bowl. Fill the larger saucepan with water and bring the water to a slow simmer
2. Put the smaller saucepan (or bowl) into the larger one (face up) so that it heats up in the water.
3. Melt the chocolate in the inner saucepan.
4. Add the butter, corn syrop, and whipping cream.
5. Stir until the ingredients until they create a silky smooth ganach.
6. Using a spoon, fill each thumbprint with 1 teaspoon of ganache.
7. Let sit to to dry until the ganache is hard to the touch-- at least 1.5 hours, but may take more.

These cookies are amazing. Don't eat too many!

Updates 12/27/10: some pictures of the final stages of the cookies.

Servia fills the indentation with chocolate ganache.

A perfect thumbprint.

The Cookies.

The cookies were lovely, and we gave them away as gifts at Christmas.

Wrapped and ready.

Christmas Traditions of the Servii, Part 2

For the second part installment on my family's Christmas traditions, I thought I would talk about greenery.

The Christmas Tree

As long as I can remember, my family has bought a live tree. By "live" I am not just distinguishing it from a fake tree, but also from a cut tree: our Christmas trees have roots and come in a pot. We then plant them in our front yard and have quite a wonderful thicket of Christmas trees from various years. Some of them are now well over 20 feet high.

Redwoods, of course, are always preferable as trees. However, with a live tree, one has to be concerned with how early one buys the tree, how long can it survive in the pot, how successfully will it be able to hang ornaments, etc. There is usually a small selection of live Christmas trees; it cannot hold a candle to the selection for cut trees. For this reason, the Servii have come to love our trees in all shapes and sizes. We have had scrawny, sparse, short, and bent Christmas trees over the years. One year, the trees were so small that we had a copse of three trees together. This year we got a reasonably-sized tree, but it was a ceder rather than a more traditional redwood. It seems pretty happy inside. Once the holidays are over, we will put it on the porch and plant it in the spring.

The Ceder

Decorative Greens

My family loves the look of greenery and the smell of pine. We always have lots of greenery around the house: real pine on the table and around the front door, lighted fake greens on the stairs, a wreath or two (one being the traditional seat of the Christmas mice, which I will explain in the next installment), and sometimes other greenery in various places.

Every year, there is some kind of problem with the real pine that comes for around the door. Even switching companies each year, there is always some kind of mix up. In past years it has been delivered to the wrong house, not shown up at all, been delivered a few weeks early, arrived on Christmas eve (leaving almost no time to put it up), etc, etc. This year, we changed companies again. The first set arrived only five days after we ordered it-- well over a month early-- even though there was a specific request for delay on the order (as to keep the greens fresh). After a long fight with the company, we resorted to ordering the next batch from a new company. They arrived on time (yesterday), but put up the "delivered" notice a hour before they actually came, making us think that they had, once again, been delivered to the wrong house. After a long exchange with FedEx, the package arrived and all was well.

I realize that the greenery saga is not as funny in writing as it if one experiences it year-after-year. My apologies. Anyway, we are going to (hopefully) put the boughs around the door tonight. Wish us luck!

 Lighted fake greens on the stairs.

Real greens above the fireplace [1].

 Endnotes

1. There are only three of us, but we thought that it looked better with four stockings so we took a pretty one I was given a few years back and put it up as decoration.

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Picture Updates for the Holiday Recipes (and Reviews), Part III

The Gỏi Cuốn rolls were a smash hit at the Christmas party last night! I made them correctly with white rice and cilantro and cut them in half so they were finger-food size. A number of people asked me for the recipe. I felt pretty awesome.

The bed of spinach and rice on the rice wrapper.

Add the cilantro and the carrots.

Add the cucumber, fold in the edges, and roll.

The first few rolls on the platter.

Fairly easy to make and an absolute hit. I highly recommend them.

I also made vanilla shortbread the other night, which we are going to dip in chocolate. It's a very simple recipe. We got real vanilla beans-- my favorite-- from Costco. When I was a little kid, I always shied away from things with vanilla bean in them because I thought the little black specs looked like-- and possibly were-- bugs legs. In reality, vanilla bean lends a wonderful, strong vanilla flavor, and makes your dishes look very fancy. Here is the recipe:

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 cup cornstarch
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 vanilla bean

Directions

1. Cream sugar and butter together. Mix until fluffy.

3. Add flour and cornstarch. Mix until it becomes a smooth dough.

4. Add vanilla extract. Slice open the vanilla bean and scrape out the black granuals from within and add them to the dough. Mix until they are distributed through.

A vanilla bean. Slice open and scrape.

5. Either make into a log and wrap in wax paper to put in the refrigerator or make into walnut-sized drops and bake for 20-23 minutes at 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

Update 12/23/10: No idea why I said 450 degrees-- the cookies should actually be baked at 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, I made them today so I took some pictures:

I only made half the log because I might want to make some more later, so I cut half into just under 1/4 inch cookies, and rolled the rest in wax paper and put it back in the refrigerator. 

Half the log returns to the fridge.

I put these in for almost 28 minutes. The edges should change slightly in color, but the color of the cookie will not change very much.

Shortbread, just out of the oven

As a good omen for the holidays, after several days of rain, there was a beautiful double rainbow yesterday.

Christmas Traditions of the Servii, Part 1

For these posts, I will be referring to my family as the Servii (given that I have taken the name Sulpicia, daughter of Servius). I will also give my mother the name Servia. I realize that this is incorrect in the practice of Roman naming [1], but it is an easy convention.

There are a multitude of family traditions among the Servii. I thought I would highlight a few of them as they come to mind. We are not religious-- not at all-- so the holiday is more about celebrating our friends and family and the quirky traditions that have evolved.

Christmas Tags

When I was a child, my family wrote normal Christmas tags likes everyone else. Things were from my parents, my grandparents, Santa, etc. Gifts to friends were from the family or individual members of the family. We have a few Jewish friends who come over for Christmas dinner, so my dad started making their gifts "from Santa" as a mild joke. But one Christmas, the tags took a stranger turn.

There was a woman writer, whom I will call Julia, who worked with my father for many years and spent a lot of time with our family. As with many stories or descriptions from my youth, I am not entirely sure whether it has been influenced by stray bits from the passage of time that seem like they have become part of the memory, or whether this is exaggerated, but I will describe her to the best of my ability. As I remember Julia, she was a tall Southern vixen; she was long and thin with a mane of curly hair dyed an artificial red. She wore all black: a black top, skinny black jeans, and high-healed black boots which she accented with a royal attitude, a sharp wit, and a partiality for the more melancholy of philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I always really liked her. For all of her airs, she was very sweet to me, but even from my skewed perspective I could tell she was an eccentric.

On Christmas when I was eight, Julia came over for dinner, as usual. I remember that my father tagged her gift "From Jesus Christ Himself," in order to amuse her. From then on, as I recall, tags got stranger and stranger. Now, most of my gifts come from absurd images such as "Reindeer nose icicles" and "Russian-leg handbag cream." I have, in past years, tried to outdo my father, but I shy away from gross or disturbing thoughts more than he does so I cannot entirely compete. Most of mine make a little to much sense as well, such as my mom is receiving a very large, poorly wrapped gift from "the drunken elves who wrapped it."

Happy holidays, everyone!

Endnotes

1. In traditional Patrician Roman naming, a male is endowed with three names: a praenoman (which is one of about 20 common names such as Marcus or Gaius), a gentilicium (the name of the gens-- much like a modern last name), and the cognomen which specified the part of the gens. My favorite cognomen is Cicero, which means "chickpea" and was bestowed upon this part of the gens because their noses supposedly resembled chickpeas. Women, even patrician women, only had two names. They had the female version of gentilicium and this was followed by the genitive (and sometimes diminutive) of their father's (and later their husband's) cognomen. For more Roman naming practices, see the wikipedia page on the subject.

Picture Updates for Holiday Recipes (and Reviews), Part II

I tried the Gỏi Cuốn tonight that I talked about in "Touch at Your Own Risk" and updated in the first installment of "Picture Updates for Holiday Recipes (and Reviews)". We are bringing some to a party tomorrow. Here is the review:

They are great! I love salad rolls, so I actually like them plain (we made them with brown rice instead of white rice, so they taste a little more interesting, but I totally forgot the cilantro when I made them). I highly highly recommend them. Also, the peanut sauce is fabulous. I am including the recipe below. I did not really like the spicy sauce, which is funny because I love spice. It's not too hot, it's just not interesting enough. The peanut sauce had a fuller body and more interesting flavors.

Sweet Peanut Sauce from MYOTG. Amazing.

Ingredients

4 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons peanut butter (smooth or crunchy)
1 tablespoon molasses
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
2 teaspoons sesame oil
20 drops hot sauce, habenero
1/8 teaspoon black pepper.

Directions

Whisk together all the ingredients until a relatively homogeneous mixture (with the exception of the peanut pieces if you are using crunchy peanut butter).

I also made the dough for another batch of Icebox Cookies (the cookies I talked about in "Holiday Spirit is all about Cookies").
After Step 3:

Wet ingredients, beaten fluffy by hand.

 After Step 5:

The dough, ready for refrigeration.

 After Step 6:

Ready to go into the freezer.

I will be making these cookies at some point during the Christmas holidays. It's nice to know that I have something I can have ready in 30 minutes.

Picture Updates for Holiday Recipes (and Reviews)

Tonight I made the two sauces for the Gỏi Cuốn (from "Touch at Your Own Risk") and the blond brownies (from "How Early is Too Early for Holiday Cheer").

First, the Gỏi Cuốn:
The Spicy Sauce, with red chillies:

Spicy Sauce with seeds left in for extra heat.

The Sweet Peanut Sauce (using chunky peanut butter):

Peanut Sauce may look funny, but tastes great!

Then, the blond brownies:
Also, update, the blond brownies are excellent! They are very rich and much as I remember them as a child. Note: I used semi-sweet chocolate chips. This is great for dark chocolate and traditional chocolate chip cookie lovers. However, for those with a serious sweet tooth, substitute milk chocolate chips.

After Step 5:

The "wet" ingredients.

After Step 10:

Into the pan, hoping the aluminum foil works!

After Step 13:

Once it came out, cooked through.

After Step 13:

The foil pealed off easily once they cooled.

More Coming Soon!