In Our Yard...

Mushroom Cloud

We have a small little strip of yard at the back of the house, not more than a few feet wide. It had been raining, which is fairly unusual for this area. We ended up, for the first time ever, with a strange congregation of mushrooms in one small space. I wanted to know what they were, but I don't know much about mushrooms. I assume they were poisonous.

Mushrooms Close-Up

Also, a few weeks ago I read a really interesting article in the New York Times about global warming affecting truffles.

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!

Holiday Cookies

One of my favorite things about the holidays is holiday baking. I get the excuse to make a lot of things that I don't need to eat in order to give them to friends and family (i.e. I can make things with lots of calories without feeling nearly as guilty).

Here are some pictures of my newest batch of cookies. Servia decorated them. I will post a recipe soon.

 I hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. I know that mine has been pretty hectic, but also a lot of fun. I just need to get my work done on top of all this...

 

Sourdough Crumpets

So have you ever wondered what to do with your left over sourdough starter? If you're like me, you hate throwing out a whole bunch of sourdough starter every time you feed it. Also, I have trouble getting rid of starter to refresh my starter if it's sat for too many days (and therefore is overly sour [1]). However, this starter is not always the best for bread and it will make waffles or pancakes taste like vinegar. So, make crumpets.

I used very sour starter when I made these and they tasted great. This recipe is slightly modified from the recipe on Chocolate & Zucchini.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Crumpet

Sourdough Crumpets:

• 270g sourdough starter (I used whole wheat, but you can use white or a mix)
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• vegetable oil for greasing pan and rings

Note: you don't have to use crumpet rings, but I tried this and the crumpets really don't look much like crumpets. I don't have crumpet rings, I have some kind of egg rings for making breakfast sandwiches or something. They seem to work fine. When I made yeasted crumpets in college I used a can with both the top and bottom cut off of it. This works too.

• Grease the pan and the rings and then heat them to medium. Be very careful with temperature. It is easy to burn the bottom of the crumpets if you're not careful, so be ready to regulate.
• When hot, fill each ring with batter so that you can see half a centimeter of ring over the top. They will puff up.
• Then, wait until they bubble. When you see that the edges are cooked, extract them from the rings and flip them over.

Mixture bubbling

Mixture bubbling with cooked edges

• Wait until they finished cooking (there should be some brown among the bubble as shown in the picture at the top), take them off, and repeat the process with the rest of the dough.
• Crumpets can be eaten hot plain or with butter or jam. After fully cooled, they can be saved in an airtight container for a few days and toasted or frozen in an airtight container (preferably a baggie) and then toasted.

These are delicious. They have that wonderful honey-wheat flavor. They're only very slightly sour, even when using very sour starter.

This post is a prelude to my post on English Muffins which will be coming soon. I plan on making sourdough English Muffins with a friend of the family who is going to make a version with commercial yeast so we can compare and contrast.

NOTES:

1. Keep in mind that sourdough that smells really weird or is crusty or moldy should be discarded. Unless it's molded all the way through, you don't need to discard the whole thing. Just make sure you carefully discard anything around/under/touching the mold and then feed the starter a bunch. If it smells bad, you can try taking a single tablespoon of it out and creating a "new" starter out of that with plenty of flour and water. If it still seems off, throw it out and start over. In order to prevent issues like this, if you need to leave it for long periods of time, freeze it in an airtight container.

The "au Levain" experiment

The boule bloomed nicely, allaying my fears about it being overproofed

So I spent the last quarter hardly making bread at all. It's been a rough time. It's been really nice to be able to start baking bread again. I still have a lot of work to do, but I'm taking breaks to bake some bread and do some Christmas things. I started off by baking a version of my Sourdough Imitation Prophet Bread. It was good, but not quite as fluffy as the last time. The house has been really cold lately so maybe I underproofed  it.

One of the other things that I've been meaning to try is this bread mix I got: Bob's Redmill 10-Grain bread mix. Usually, I would not use a bread mix. I like picking out my own ingredients for recipes. However, I was excited because it contained "7 grain cereal, whole wheat flour, rolled oats,...dark rye flour, brown rice flour, corn flour, millet flour, oat flour, barley flour, white bean flour, triticale flour, corn grits, millet grits,...active dry yeast, and soy lecithin" (Bob's Redmill). I had seen a post on Au Levain about using a bread mix that had lost of interesting grains but no additives. However, I didn't realize that in contrast to her mix which was basically just flour with added gluten, mine contained dry milk, salt, and evaporated cane juice. The salt was unfortunate, only because I didn't know how much was in their. More importantly, the milk and sugar would soften the crust and change the texture of the bread.

However, since I had bought the mix, I made it anyway. Like in the Au Levain's version, I added 30% sourdough starter by weight (whole grain, 161g), and 4 grams of salt which seemed like it would get it to approximately 2% salt content. Then I used the following method:

1. Mix starter, flour, and 350g of water (making the hydration about 70% because of my 100% hydration starter). I mixed it in my kitchen aid. I realized the bread was basically the consistency of thick batter so I started adding in bread flour until it turned back into the consistancy of bread. It must have been 6 or so ounces of flour.
2. I let it autolyse for 40 minutes.
3. Then I added the 4g salt and needed the bread for about 2 minutes on low. It didn't seem to help in the least in developing the gluten.
4. As such, I did a set of stretch-and-folds, 2 every 10 minutes for an hour. It finally, grudgingly, passed the windowpane test.
5. My house was cold...maybe 65 degrees or so. I let it sit out for 2 hours before I put it in the refrigerator overnight.
6. In the morning, I let it sit out for 2 hours.
7. Then I shaped it, but it in a banneton, and let it sit for 3 hours.
8. I baked it for 50 minutes at 425 degrees F, the first 30 minutes under steam.
9. The bread registered at 210 degrees F and I took it out. I let it cool for an hour before slicing.

Ultimately, while the bread seemed like it was going to be a failure  plenty of times throughout the process, it turned out ok. I added a huge amount of flour so the bread turned out to have a really closed crumb. However, it was still nice and crusty, despite the milk, and the flavor was good. It wasn't overwhelmingly dense either. There was one funny flavor that I couldn't quite pick out in there that I didn't like, but with so many grains I had no idea which one was responsible.

It had a very tight crumb, probably because much of the dough had non-gluten flours.

The experiment was interesting certainly, and tasty, but I'm going to check the ingredients more carefully before I buy another bread mix.

The texture was nice, even though the crumb was tight

 An interesting experiment.

Closing In on Freedom

Finals week is finally here. Its been a really long and arduous quarter. I still have work to do over break, but I have many things to look forward to as well. Holiday baking, especially bread baking, will be one of the highlights. I shall post my backlog of breads plus plenty of new stuff.

However, about 50 pages of Latin and 30 pages of Greek stands between me and bread. More this weekend.

Happy Black Friday

Hi everyone,

Happy belated Thanksgiving and happy Black Friday. I hope you all had a lovely day yesterday full of good food and time with family or friends. I took time out of my hectic schedule to cook a bunch of different dishes, but Iwill have to save my posts on those for after finals (ending December 14th) because I still have an incredibly busy road ahead of me.

So, I just wanted to say that the blog will be back soon with recipes for vegan apple pie and single-serving freezer apple pies as well as some more delicious (and semi-nutritious) bread recipes. Also, probably some discussion of the pedagogy of learning vocabulary, which has been something which as come up recently with two of the students I am tutoring (as well as learning Latin vocabulary in my own life).

I want to leave you with the lesson I learned last night: sometimes even things that sounds kind of strange, turn out to be really good. I tried this cornbread last night and I thought it was moist, flavorful, and delicious. I tend to love cornbread and hate pumpkin bread, but this was a lovely moist cornbread with just the subtlest hint of pumpkin flavor. Delicious.

Happy Holidays. Gone essaying. Back soon.