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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.

Review: Jeff Sharlet's C-Street

I just finished Jeff Sharlet’s follow-up to The Family. I’m sitting on a plane on my way to Ireland and I just devoured about half the book. While I don’t read much fiction anymore because I find so little of it compelling, it still always amazes me when a piece of nonfiction can be as or more gripping than a novel. Perhaps its an old prejudice from younger days—kid’s nonfiction is a terrible genre—that I have not managed to erase even after years of higher education. Even years in which, possessed for a passion by various books or articles, my friends would sit long hours debating into the night or call each other excitedly to find out whether someone else had read the same passage. I remember one sleep deprived semester planning to read only the first five pages of an article by – and staying up to finish it. The same article caused two friends of mine, who had spent the night in the classics lounge working and taking brief naps to regenerate, to bound out to greet my professor, bouncing in excitement, before our 8am class. Non-fiction certainly can inspire, but my gut tells me that it usually doesn't.

I may not be jumping up-and-down—I’m pretty sure that I would get chastised by the flight attendants—but I have to say that this book not just appealed to me but it impassioned me. After 2 hours of sleep, 1 hour of airport delay, and 3 hours of flying, I’m still writing this review and that in itself should speak volumes. This book is wild.

Back in the days of the John Ensign and Mark Sanford scandals I became very interested in C-Street. I heard Jeff Sharlet speaking on the Rachel Maddow show and I instantly wanted to buy his book. What appealed to me was not the hypocrisy of a Christian movement that hid and even helped the adultery of its adherents and leaders, but that a group of prominent officials could create a fundamentalist prayer cell meant to alter the way that they did government work in a country under the first amendment.

Perhaps even more, I was intrigued because I had come up with a similar idea for a novel. I was reading some Greek texts by one of the oligarchists—Xenephon, maybe, or Heraclitus, I don’t remember—and I came up with an idea about a modern oligarchic movement. Thinking back to the political writings of Chomsky that I read when I was in high school and the takeover of the democratic system by elites who manipulated the media and electoral process for their own undemocratic ends, I considered what would happen if this idea was taken wide-scale. I thought to myself, what if a group secretly began placing a number of crypto-conservatives into powerful positions in government and companies around the world preparing for an eventual takeover and essentially conservative revolution (however much of an oxymoron that idea might e). But my idea wasn’t compelling—conservatives, at least how it exists in the United States today does not inspire the devotion for a secret brotherhood like that. Then, right on television, Jeff Sharlet articulated the missing link: fundamentalism.

The Family is a fundamentalist Christian fellowship that does precisely that—they infiltrate the highest positions in government and other powerful institutions in order to network and spread their agenda. At first, it seemed like it couldn’t be true, but after vague and evasive quotes from members of the organization, I finally realized that it was absolutely true. I read The Family last year and I really enjoyed it. The exploration of the topic was deft and provided the necessary facts while giving an objective—sometimes unnervingly so—account of the operation.

The problem, however, with The Family, is that it got bogged down. Sharlet, wanting to give the full history of this insidious institution in American politics got bogged down in the details. Too many of the founders were striking men with blond hair and blue eyes described in almost exactly the same words. While one can’t change history to make it more varied, one can attempt to couch one’s narrative differently in order to keep reader interest. While I found the book fascinating, it didn’t stick as well as I would have liked in my memory and I didn’t pursue my research farther.

One day, browsing on Amazon, I noticed that Jeff Sharlet wrote another book. I put it on my Amazon wishlist, but I didn’t pay it as much heed as I might have. I was more interested in this book because it was called C-Street and so, I assumed, it would focus on the political aspects of the movement and the way in which the C-Streeters influenced American policy. He delivered. This book is an amazing chronicle of the way in which the fundamentalist contingent—specifically the family—influence American policymaking both foreign and domestic. The group’s influence runs even deeper than I anticipated and their issues are those which now appear on the forefront of America’s social battles: abortion, women’s rights, and homosexuality.

This book is magnificently written. Sharlet divides it into chapters based on the Family’s principles and each section blends politics, history, and interview. It’s gripping. Perhaps, in some sense, I have fallen prey to what Sharlet calls the problem of the American attention span. He argues that people are much more interested in sex scandals than they are in the family’s support of genocidal regimes. It did indeed take the Ensign and Sanford cases to bring C-Street to my attention. However, I hope that I have proven myself a more worthy reader than that. I found the chapter entitled “The War” to be the most engaging and almost as terrifying as the sections on the Ugandan kill-the-gays bill and on foreign policy more generally. “The War” detailed the rise of fundamentalism in the American military. The combination of superiors using their position to indoctrinate servicemen and the anti-Semitism detailed in this chapter was absolutely shocking. You have to read it to believe it.

Ultimately, I think this book was fantastic and that everyone everywhere should read it. The idea of Christian evangelicalism using government positions and advocating on blatantly elitist principles—they refer to these people as the “up-and-out”—is something that should be investigated and brought to the forefront of the public consciousness, especially since the American taxpayer is paying for a lot of the trips during which senators attempt to evangelicalize leaders of other nations—especially the poor and corrupt—is something everyone needs to ponder. Also, the writing is concise and powerful.

I’m planning on reading The Family again. Maybe on the flight home. I think I'm going to try to sleep on this next leg of the flight.

Too Hot for Bread

Waffles

It has been too hot for bread over the last two weeks. The heat is ridiculous and I never want to turn on my oven. However, I have a bunch of sourdough starter languishing in the refridgerator. So I decided to make waffles.

Recently I've been on a big waffle kick. I started over the last 4 months or so making waffles on the weekends with my sourdough starter using a slightly modified version of this recipe from Wild Yeast. I usually half the recipe when I'm just making waffles for two people, but this time I doubled the recipe and made enough waffles to store in the freezer and toast whenever I wanted a nice crispy waffle. They are delicious!

Waffles on the Cooling Rack

Recipe for Sourdough Toaster Waffles:

1. Make sure your sourdough starter is viable but also that it is young and sweet smelling like overripe fruit. If it smells wine-y or vinigar-y, your waffles will taste like vinegar. If it is not young smelling, refresh it and leave it out on the counter for a few hours until it's ready.
2. Heat a waffle iron and grease it (I use a small amount of spray canola oil)
3. Follow the Wild Yeast pancake batter recipe (I put in 2 tbsp of honey instead of maple syrup and I made the waffles half with whole wheat starter). The batter should be slightly thinner than muffin batter but thicker than crepe batter. I usually have to add a couple of splashes of nonfat milk to achieve my desired consistency. If you want a large stash, double the recipe.
4. Ladle in enough batter for one waffle.
5. Cook until it is cooked through, but not until it is crispy.
6. Take out and let the waffle cool completely. Repeat this process until all of the batter is used up.
7. Place the cooled waffles in freezer bags (air tight) and remove all excess air from the bag.
8. Throw them in the freezer and stick them into your toaster as needed!

Bag of cooled waffles for the freezer

I have been really enjoying them. I'm planning on trying sourdough crumpets before the heat dies down.