kitchenmage

Caramelized onion and cheddar breadsticks recipe

May I just say, I love my new box of light! Following the Strobist's excellent instructions for photography on the cheap, in this case the  DIY $10 Macro Photo Studio, I transformed a cardboard box into, if not a thing of beauty itself, a thing that will give that "thing of beauty" quality to other things.

When I was a young'un, I moved from "Baja Oregon" to a very small coastal town in southwest Washington. A town where the locals joked, in some cases bragged, that, upon arriving, you should turn back your clock 20 years - to the '50s. I, being a child of the coolest artistic little beach towns in Baja Oregon, thought this was mildly amusing...for about 15 minutes.

I arrived in late-spring and my first summer there was, to put it mildly, not my best year. Two things saved me that wet, foggy summer. The first was a job at the local pizzeria, where Gina, a wise-cracking New Jersey girl — everyone swore we were sisters — taught me to toss rounds of dough high in the air and, much harder, catch them again. She also let me play with the brick oven. I loved Gina.

The second bit of salvation arrived one night when I met Becky and we instantly became BFF, before there even were BFF. This bread, made in loaves, was Becky's favorite. I baked some every week or so for years and years. Then Becky and I lost touch. I also mostly stopped baking this bread. Both sad things.

Lamb burgers with feta recipe

When I was a kid, I was not exactly enamored with lamb. It wasn't common fare around my place and, when it was served, it was one of the few meats that got the utterly unimaginative preparation of salt/pepper/garlic, grilled and with mint jelly on the side. It wasn't bad, but it certainly was not the usual, creative dinner I was spoiled enough to expect. Fast forward a few years, errr, decades and lamb is rapidly becoming one of my favorite meat choices.

I am lucky enough to have friends, like Farmgirl, who have sheep and they have introduced me to many ways to prepare lamb - with nary a hint of mint jelly in sight. The only downside to this is that Susan lives halfway across the country and, try as we may, we have not yet figured out how to shove a rack of lamb through the tubes of the internets. Must be coming in the next version of Windows...

Onion and cheddar breadsticks (and hearts)

Onions, cooked just long enough to caramelize the edges and Tillamook Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese come together in one of my favorite bread recipes: Onion and Cheddar Breadsticks. It also makes wonderful rolls for sandwiches, heart-shaped ones in this case. I just posted the recipe over at A Year in Bread so stop on by and check it out.

 

English muffins and crumpets: an (almost) shared recipe

Many questions have plagued humankind for eons:

• Are we alone in the universe?
• Does god exist?
• What is the meaning of life?
• What is the difference between English muffins and crumpets?

Well folks, after a day of research and experimentation, I have the answer to one of those. No, not the first three - I took the tough one: English muffins v. crumpets.

One might wonder how dull my day was to spend it hunting down the answer to such a  question, and one might be right. In my defense, however, that's not what I started out to do...

Cooking classes in Skamokawa

photo: Kathleen Morgain

 

Would you like to learn to bake bread like those gorgeous loaves in the picture? If so, you are in luck. Kitty and Don Speranza, a pair of talented and passionate cooks who own The Inn at Crippen Creek Farm in Skamokawa, WA, are now offering cooking classes to the community as well as their overnight guests.

Before moving out to eventinierTown, Don and Kitty owned and operated Mangiamo! Catering and Italian Eatery in Portland, Oregon. Their bread is such a huge hit at the Two Island Farm Market on Puget Island in Cathlamet, WA during the summer months that they started a bread subscription service to keep their customers happy in the off-season. (Ahem, their bread is so good that I buy their focaccia all summer long instead of making my own.)

Simple, flaky biscuit recipe

Scattered.

If I had to pick one word for my life the last while, it would have to be scattered. Just as one crazy thing is brought under control, the next careens into view. Like garlic butter in your cake pan. Or a teetering stack of biscuits.

One of my surest cures for scattered is bread. As I gather the bits of ragged dough and knead them together into a cohesive whole, I am, likewise, remade just a bit, my loose edges reintegrated and all that. It's one of my favorite meditative states.

Rosemary Feta Beer Bread recipe

Some people insist on doing things the hard way, the complicated way, and I will gladly admit to being one of them - especially when it comes to bread. Not all the time, mind you, there are days when I need bread today and throw together a quick batch of baguettes, but on the other hand...well, lets just say that when I had to make fresh sourdough starter - after doing unmentionable things to my old one (the pretty pink stuff growing on it was cute but unappetizing) - I insisted on doing it by capturing wild yeast.

Worse, I made three kinds of starter: rye, white whole wheat, and white. This met with varying degrees of success, let's just say that if you plan on doing this at home, you can skip the plain white flour version. After ten days of nurturing three starters along, however, my kitchen is but a Bunsen burner away from qualifying as a mad scientist's lab. And I still haven't made any bread from the wild yeast starter, two jars of which are bubbling along in the refrigerator.

Bread 101: How to cut an epi

With the holidays coming up, dinner rolls take a step forward over at A Year in Bread. Susan, Kevin and I have posted recipes for three different takes on rolls suitable for your holiday table. We've got three tempting options for your holiday table, soup bowl or your Friday turkey sandwich.

• Farmgirl Susan's Carrot Herb Rolls are absolutely gorgeous! Full of carrots, parsley, fresh rosemary and thyme, this recipe is from a new book that Susan got her hands on (and about which she has been taunting me) Bread:Artisan Breads from Baguettes and Bagels to Focaccia and Brioche. It's going on my seemingly endless wish list!
• Kevin' Seriously Good Beer Rolls are not your grandmother's beer rolls. Dark porter plays off honey in a beer bread that, rather than the quick bread approach of most beer breads, has two rises and a starter! Golden brown and earthy looking, I am planning on making a batch of these for turkey sandwiches. (If it's a recipe from Kevin, I am guessing it makes great sandwiches!)   
• kitchenMage's Rosemary Fans are a simple variation on a baguette recipe but the rolls are a big payoff for a little extra effort. The dough is very forgiving and shaping the rolls is an imprecise science at best so it is a great recipe to let the kids help with.  

Another option when individual rolls are called for is an epi, a traditional shape that represents a sheaf of wheat. While it is technically still a loaf, they have almost as much delightfully crust as a roll and individual sections break off easily in a perfect union of form and function.

Epis are also surprisingly easy to make. You start with a baguette shape and make a series of cuts with scissors. Since the implement of destruction is scissors rather than a knife, small people can help too. Speaking of children, you can start with a mini-baguette to make a child-size epi so the monstrrrs at the table get the fun of ripping off their own piece.

Rosemary fan rolls recipe

I think every baker needs a few never-fail recipes in their back pocket. Recipes that they can play with endlessly with a fair degree of certainty of success. This recipe is a variation of one of my standby recipes: a poolish baguette from Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice. If I had to pick just a few breads to bake all the time, this would be one of them. In its original form, it makes wonderful baguettes and is well suited to being shaped for breads like epis and I have been  able to corrupt... err, vary it pretty endlessly over the years.

In fact — confession time — I once made a double batch of this bread. Except I didn't double the yeast. And I tripled the oil. (don't ask, it was late, I was rushed and had no business driving a KitchenAid...) As I kneaded the dough, stumbling my way through a series of "this feels all wrong" corrections, I slowly figured out how badly I had screwed up. Ever the good food writer, I trudged on, determined to take photos for an article titled "How to waste two pounds of flour" that I would write someday. Except for one problem: the bread was fine. It wasn't great, but it was good. This recipe earned its place in my back pocket that day.    

Potato bread recipe

This recipe was originally posted at A Year in Bread. You can read that article,  which includes a whole wheat version of this recipe here: Beth: Potato Bread

 

For reasons perhaps best explained by marketing, a lot of kids — even those who usually make sane food choices — seem to prefer bland, white bread. Sandwiches, toast, pretty much anything has to be white bread, but especially sandwiches. And kids eat lots of sandwiches.

This potato bread recipe is one I made for the first time way back when theKid craved that stuff that came in the blue, yellow and red dotted bags - you know, the stuff that makes you Wonder who buys it. The potato tenderizes the dough and amps up the yeasty rising action, creating bread that is softly chewy with a bit more substance than most white breads.

Honey wheatBerry bread ~ for the boy

He’s as sweet as Skamokawa honey
Just like honey from the bee.
           Tupelo Honey, with apologies to Van Morrison

Sometimes it is, as the kids say, all about the boy.

We all know people who have done odd things for love: ran up multi-thousand phone bills, changed names and careers, moved to a city they would never have considered otherwise, or tried to replicate a mass-market loaf of bread.

This week at A Year in Bread, I make bread for the boy...

kitchenMage's Leftover Oatmeal Bread recipe

 

When you bake bread as often as I do, it is easy to find yourself looking around covetously at ingredients in your kitchen that might have been headed for another use. Cooked cereal is one of those things that lends itself to ad hoc bread making, adding a whole grain depth to otherwise white bread. This also appeals to the frugal side that many home cooks have, turning leftovers that might otherwise be thrown away, into tasty bread.

This is less of a recipe and more of a formula to use up leftover cooked cereal, which it seems all too easy to end up with. I have a soft spot for oatmeal bread, but you can make this with any cooked cereal. Or leftover brown rice, for that matter.

A Year in Bread in midsummer

It's too hot to bake!

Well, almost too hot to bake. This month at A Year in Bread we are focusing on quick breads, with Kevin's scrumptious Cheese Bread starting us out. My post is going up tomorrow, but there is a subtle hint here somewhere about the recipe. If I could just remember where I put it.

Pesto Rolls

Over at A Year in Bread, one of my other playgrounds, I just posted my recipe for the current round of "summer breads": Pesto Rolls. Made like a savory cinnamon roll, but with baguette-ish dough, pesto and Parmesan, these are great for summer picnics where slicing and buttering is a hassle but plain bread is boring. I absolutely adore these things and start making them every summer as soon as I can get my hands on basil. Read the rest and get the recipe here. I also put up a flickr set of action photos taken while making them...and clutching a camera remote in my teeth. (yes, really)

pizza is a gateway bread...

Many people, even accomplished cooks, approach yeasted bread with more than a bit of trepidation. While the vision of a beautifully risen loaf of bread with a glossy, caramelized crust lures many a would-be baker, the reality all too often remains sadly out of reach.

I think the fact that there are so few ingredients-flour, water, yeast, and salt are essential, all else is embellishment-is intimidating. It seems to put so much responsibility on the baker. Daunting.

Depending on how you go about learning to bake bread, the process can be daunting. Bread baking has its own terminology (some in French), techniques that look simple can be anything but, and who knew there were so many kinds of flour? It is little wonder that many people don't even know where to start. If only they had someone to tell them...

                                                                                  psssst

 

Pizza.

 

Seriously, that's where you start: Pizza.

I see pizza is the perfect starter bread for a number of reasons:

• Tolerance is good. Pizza dough tolerates a lot of mistakes and abuse. As long as you don't do something truly dreadful-like forget the yeast or let the dough sit on the counter for two days-you will turn out a decent pizza. The first few may not be great, but with extremely rare exceptions, the worst homemade pizza is better than the best frozen pizza (and quite a few that you can have delivered).
• Size matters. As bread goes, pizzas are small so, unlike a loaf of bread, they aren't much of a commitment. Seriously, the time it takes to use up a loaf of bread you really don't like, yet feel obliged to eat, can seem endless. Pizza, on the other hand, is usually gone the day it is made.



• Take your time. There are a number of discrete processes involved in making a pizza: mixing dough, preparing toppings, shaping crust, assembling, and so on. The entire process can be done more or less at once or spread out over the course of a couple of days (making the dough the first day and baking the pizza the second or third)
• It takes a village. One of my favorite simple foods to cook with other people is pizza. It's a perennial favorite, infinitely adaptable, simple to make once you get the hang of it, and best of all, most people will gleefully jump in and cook with you. Nothing livens up a party like gathering around a kitchen island to decorate pizza.
• Teach your children well... Pizza is a marvelous teaching opportunity because anyone who is old enough to eat pizza is old enough to help make it, even if only a tiny bit. A toddler can stand on a chair and help you put on chunky (thus easy to grab) toppings. As children get older, and gain skills and confidence, they can take on more of the work.



• To each her (or his) own. Individual pizzas are the best. Most people love the control of building their own food, exactly the way they want it. Sometimes this encourages people, particularly small folk, to stretch their own boundaries a bit-I have watched kids who normally eschew vegetables pile onions, peppers, and olives on their pizzas and eat them with gusto.
• Money, money, money, money! According to Pizza Marketing Quarterly, US sales of pizza edged over 31 Billion dollars in 2005. At 10-15 bucks a pie, that's a lot of dough! Compare that to the cost of making your own pizza-under a dollar for the dough, another buck or two on toppings-and the cost argument is simple.



• Bend me, shape me, any way you want to. Once you have basic pizza down, you can move on to any number of variations. Calzones are one of my favorite uses for leftover dough, but you can use the dough for anything from breadsticks to foccacia. Just change how the dough is shaped and filled/topped and you have a whole new creation.
• I can fix that pizza in two notes! Most problems with pizza come down to two things: insufficient heat and too many toppings. The cure for the first is simple, buy a baking stone, preheat it in a 500° (or hotter) oven for an hour and bake the pizza as hot as you dare. The issue of too many toppings is between you and your self control.

The first step in your pizza quest is trying out some crust recipes. I have three suggestions: Kevin Weeks, Farmgirl Susan, and mine. They each offer a different take on pizza crust, both in process and results. Susan's dough is quick and particularly easy to work with, although Kevin's is seriously good too and worth waiting the extra hours for. Mine is...different. Check them out. Then come back and show us what you made.

This is why I use parchment!

Tomorrow is my day to post a pizza crust recipe over at A Year in Bread so this afternoon found me sorting through photos of pizza. While it is not what I was looking for, I had to share this one shot. The story goes something like this:

One night we were making pizza and I discovered we were out of parchment paper, which I generally use when baking breads. The stone was already hot, the pizza crust was poufy, and we were hungry. What to do, what to do?

After debating a run to the store, we decided to put the pizza directly on the stone.  Parchment is nice and all, but cornmeal is usually enough to stop a pizza from sticking to the stone. Actually, the plan was to throw caution to the wind and gently place the bare crust on the stone, quickly top it and get it back in the oven. (This actually isn't as absurd as it sounds, I've done it a number of times, with a different dough. Remember that "different dough" part for later.)

Everything that was to go on the pizza was sliced, diced and arrayed on the counter. We reviewed the plan of attack: crust on stone, toppings on crust, back in oven. Check.

someoneElse extracted the 500 degree pizza stone from the oven and perched it on the range so we could work. I looked at the crust, made from this great new recipe I was playing with, and decided that I couldn't afford to put it down on a peel or anything like that, I had to move it by hand. I picked up the crust, dashed all three steps across the room and flipped the crust onto the stone.

A Year in Bread: Come bake with us!

It all started with this chat message from Farmgirl Susan to me: “We’re plotting something...and it involves you!” I got her to tell me that "we" meant her and Kevin of Seriously Good. This was immediately followed by Susan dropping offline, which should have been my first clue this wasn’t going to be easy.

Ten minutes later, she was back.

me:  oh sure, you tell me there's some plot that involves me afoot and then you drop offline... see how you are... :)

farmgirl:  I didn't drop offline!

me:  Chat said you were offline.

farmgirl:  Computers lie, you should know that!

me:  So what's the plot? Are you going to tell me or do I have to torture poor little Bowtie? (Bowtie is Farmgirl’s virtual cat, who lives with me and I am not above torturing his adorable face...usually by rubbing his belly or something equally dreadful.)

farmgirl:  Don't you dare! I'll be right back! Geez! Thug!

me:  But he's got such cute little toes! ...and ears! ...and what do you mean "be right back?" You just got here!

farmgirl:  DO NOT EAT MY CAT!

me:  He's getting HUGE! It's either eat him or feed him. Eating him would be cheaper!

farmgirl:  I repeat: DO NOT EAT MY CAT!

me: someoneElse says he’d be great with lemon and pepper. Yum! Plus he (Bowtie, not someoneElse) hangs out under the rosemary so he's herb-infused. Wouldn’t that cost extra at most places?

farmgirl:  someoneElse says everything is great with lemon and pepper! Probably even brownies.

me:  someoneElse says he's a very good cat. Congratulations on raising him so well

farmgirl: No problem! Oh! Email from Kevin! Be right back.

me: Be right back? Be right back! Oh sure, you go talk to Kevin… But me...you leave

h

a

n

g

i

n

g

.

.

.

sniff

:(

farmgirl:  oh give me a break

me:  Sure! Arm or leg? Man you have a mouthy cat! Bowtie is in the other room just mrowing away. Sure I can’t cook him?

farmgirl: If you ever want to find out what the plot is, do not eat my cat!

me:  So send me the mail already! I want to bake bread!!! ...or eat a cat...

farmgirl:  Oh okay! Hold on! Geez!

     Impatient little thing, aren't we?

     Barrettes on too tight?

     Brownie withdrawals?

     Somebody drop a house on your sister?

me:  That's it! Brownie withdrawals...or maybe it was the house thing.

farmgirl:  oh! another email from Kevin! be right back!

This went on for the better part of an hour, ending when Susan dropped offline again. It took until the next day for me to actually pin both Susan and Kevin down to chat...

...meet the three us at A Year in Bread on the 21st for the rest of the story...

thoughts on the no knead bread

Ever swimming against the trend, I only recently got around to trying that no-knead bread...you know the one...Lahey's bread, Bittman's article, all the cool kids are making it...or is that soooo last month? grin Like I said, I'm not so hot on following the trends...

In looking up those links, it's obvious that the recipe got a lot of people talking, and baking. That's so cool! As a long-time bread baker, I think it is marvelous that there are so many people making decent bread - many for the first time. Anything that gets people who have fear of yeast (FOY), as many have confessed, baking bread is a step in the right direction.

That the bread people are baking is a crusty, open-crumbed rustic bread, which is often seen as a more 'advanced' bread is particularly sweet. Then there is the personalization; every baker seems to use a different style baking pot and people are adding all sorts of tasty stuff: sourdough, whole-wheat, olives, herbs, and even chocolate-cherry. Even new bread bakers are experimenting with a bread recipe. That's pretty amazing.

        round of applause to all the new bread bakers!

I've been working with this sort of bread dough for a number of years: wet dough, long ferment, just without the covered pot in the oven. (I used to bake bread under a cloche, which provides much the same effect when combined with a pizza stone, but even without one, I am happy with the crust my bread gets.) This lack of novelty probably accounts for my failure to hasten to the kitchen when I read Bittman's article. I looked at it as another recipe that used techniques in which I was already conversant. From that perspective, there wasn't anything revolutionary. No need to rush the barricades.

Besides, I am annoyed. Not at the popularity of the bread or anything like that. I have similar recipes I like, I don't particularly need this one right now. What gets me is that there is no movement to let the FOY go, just to shift it to kneading. Come on kids, this isn't tough stuff. Grab the bread dough, smoosh it around for a minute or two, rest it for 20, smoosh for another minute and it's done. Nothing to be scared of and it doesn't even take much time. 

Yet, I still felt the tug of possibility: what if I was missing something? When even experienced bakers, bakers I respect, said good things about it, I decided I had to give it a whirl.

So, what do I think? Well, truth be told, it is great food blog bread.

First, it is very pretty, no doubt about that. Visibly crisp crust. Beautiful open crumb. Yep. That's some gorgeous bread. Photographs beautifully, too. You could take shots of this stuff all day long. Trust me, people have. Heck, I have a few of my own. (Hi. My name is kitchenMage and I am a bread pornographer...)

It is also dead simple to produce bread that pretty. The slack dough, long ferment, and baking method combine to make a very forgiving recipe. Served still warm with a slather of butter, it's an impressive loaf, especially for someone who seldom, or never, bakes.

Well, except in one aspect. It tastes like...not much. It's not even bad enough to be notable. Flavorless, gummy, and an hour out of the oven the crust starts to toughen. Bread to make you believe in the Atkins diet. This is revolutionary?

I made two batches -just in case I screwed up the first - refrigerating the second one while it fermented to see if it made any difference in flavor, as it does with pain la ancienne. Well...no, not so much.

There was a moment of self-examination, second guessing my baking skills (is it just me, everyone else seems to love this bread...did i just leave out the salt? both times?) But you know what? David Lebovitz agrees with me. And so does the lovely bird-kisser at Food Migration whose name I can neither recall nor find. I also found this at Food Migration: "...if you don't knead it with your own two hands, how do you get the love into it?" Many of the mages at whose floury elbows I apprenticed would totally agree!

Yet I was determined to find something of value in this experience, because there must be something useful to pass along. So here you go, two things about no knead bread.

The dough on the left was fermented on the counter, the one on the in the refrigerator, something that usually improves flavor. Not so much here. What it did do, however, is make the dough much easier to work with. I weighed ingredients for both batches so they are within a few grams of each other, but look at the difference between them!

The loaf on the left is this oozy ball of wet, while the one on the right let me fold it (also good for gluten development) and 30 minutes later you could still see the fold! There was no visible difference in the texture of the bread or how much it rose...and they tasted the same, for whatever that's worth.

The other thing that was helpful was letting the dough rise on the parchment paper it was to be baked on. Yes, even inside the dutch oven. I simply placed a parchment sheet inside the basket I put the dough in to rise and put the dough on top of that. When I was ready to bake, I lifted the parchment and put it directly in the preheated dutch oven. No deflated bread from moving it off the rising surface and no sticky mess to clean up. Now, that is, even if not revolutionary, a simple change in the recipe that would make it less hassle. Maybe you could use the two minutes you save on cleanup to do something else bread related...like knead it.

getting ready for my favorite december ritual

We are lucky enough to be the host for the great annual "Thump, thump, giggle, giggle" reunion, when a handful of young women gather to kill each other on our network. And Eat. Over and over and over. For days on end. Seriously. (both the killing and the eating)

This year's bash is six people for four days, which adds up to lots of virtual death and lots of food. Coming on the heels of the book, my schedule was tight...and then the storm of madness hit and the power went out and...well, so much for schedules.

Since we got power back two days ago, I have made:

• 2 dozen Bagels
• 4 Baguettes
• 18 Rosemary olive oil pull-apart rolls
• 2 dozen pita
• 3 loaves oatmeal cinnamon twist bread
• 2 dozen cinnamon rolls
• double batch of brownies
• double batch of cookies

I'm guessing that I'm going to be too busy to post much in the way here as it's happening, but I put up a flickr set just for this, in case anyone is crazy enough to want to follow along.  It does at least give you a little hint of the mess that is my kitchen.

Menu for the bash after the jump.

Farmgirl's Oatmeal Toasting Bread, slightly corrupted

Like many of you, I am a huge fan of Farmgirl and love reading about her exploits — both in and out of the kitchen. Unlike most of you, however, I am in a superSecretBreadBakingCabal with her where we trade recipes that are in beta, inspire each other and engage in other such superSecretBreadBakingCabal behavior. Well, let me tell you, membership has its privileges.

Like this.

See that picture over there? (yes, the one with the lovely golden bread) That, my friends, is Farmgirl's Oatmeal Toasting Bread. That I baked here. Because I have the recipe. And you don't! (uh, errr...was that the outLoud voice? how rude of it!)

Yes, this is the very same recipe that Farmgirl has been promising for quite some time now. I'd say how long, but she might kick me out of our superSecretBreadBakingCabal and that would be a bad thing. Very bad.

Until she does, I can only taunt tempt you with this, my latest, variation. And OMFSM is it ever good!

Bread porn: improvisational division

There are two schools of thought about schools of thought: one says you can divide the world into two kinds of people...the other doesn't. I belong to the latter group and have never understood the reductionistic thinking that goes into black-and-white, us-or-them, 'with us or with the tourists' kind of thinking.

It only gets worse, however, when the talk turns to all things kitchen. Seems the common wisdom is that cooks can work freeform, pitching all caution and planning to the wind Iron Chef-like and creating dishes ad hoc, while bakers must follow a recipe, doing exactly what they are instructed lest their creation — perhaps sensing fear — fails to rise, gel, puff, cream, melt-at-body-temperature or otherwise perform as desired.

Balderdash!

I stand (okay, sit) here as a proud believer in the other kind of people: bakers without recipes. I do this absolutely all the time and one of the places I do it most often is in baking bread. (oh, stop cringing, it only hurts the first time!)

Multigrain Rosemary Sage Crackers

One of the year-long herbs in my garden is rosemary, which I love paired with olive oil and a bit of salt. All three flavors come through in these deeply flavorful, yet delicate, cracker that I am sure to be making many variations in the months to come. Let's call this Weekend Herb Blogging, because it still is the weekend and I haven't played a meme all week. Kayln's got interesting herbs collected on her blog every weekend, do go check out this week's offerings.

These crackers were inspired by a combination of things: the flavor profile was derived from a recipe for Herbed Olive Oil Crackers from Jerry Traunfeld's The Herbfarm Cookbook, the addition of yeast was due to a recent batch of Lavash from The Breadbaker's Apprentice, and the use of the pasta machine comes from a recent conversation with Farmgirl.

random baking tips

I've been baking a lot lately — figuring out how to make a couple of things and developing my own versions of a few others — and while I'll be writing about those soon, I am not quite ready. Until then, let me offer a few things I've learned along the way.

Those thin plastic "cutting boards" that you can pick up in multi-packs for a few dollars, although far too flimsy for my cutting needs, are a baker's dream. I've been using mine as rolling surfaces lately. It's easy to figure out how to roll out dough  — I just do the math to figure out what size empty border I need and go for it. (It's really easy to eyeball a one inch border, whereas figuring out 11x13 on an empty counter is tough!) I buy mine in a threepack and need more for those days when I have a ton of baking going on. You can even stack them with dough on them for resting periods so you free up counter space. If you use them for rolling dough, remember the untextured side sticks less. I even used one to roll out a danish dough that gets folded several times with alternating resting periods in the refrigerator. When the dough needs resting, I roll the plastic "board" around the dough, slip it all in a plastic bag, and slide it onto a shelf in the fridge. It's so easy! 

Pizza stones radiate heat that can be used to give rising bread a kickstart. I discovered this recently when I had a coolish kitchen, too many stones in the oven (I stack two 18" square unglazed floor tiles on a rack and leave them in almost all the time.), and bread that was being slooooow. After I pulled the stone out, I placed a wooden rack on top of the stone and the pan with bread doug on top of that. It was apparently the perfect distance, the dough rose perfectly and was oven-ready in about 45 minutes.

Sourdough starter makes anything better. Yeah, yeah, this is a duh. I've been working on an english muffin recipe this past week or two and, while I haven't gotten to the "great big holes" stage...yet, I have improved the taste greatly with the addition of sourdough starter. Next on the sourdough list is pitas. Stay tuned.

Made some of these almond danish the other day and have a few thoughts. First, I am not so impressed with the dough recipe. Don't get me wrong, it's tasty and reasonably flaky for the blitz-style dough, but I ended up adding 15-20% more flour to get it to resemble dough rather than mush and it took five turns to get it pastryable. I was still adding bits of flour on the fourth set of turns! I am not sure if it's me or the recipe —  it's a Nigella and I've not been so impressed with the reliability of her recipes — but next time I am just going for the real thing with a layer of butter. It can't possibly be that much more work and I really do have to master the technique. Also, the recipe calls for all bread flour, which strikes me as just plain wrong. However, even given all of that, the danish were really good. They rose to about two inches at the high spots and were reasonably flaky, the filling was good, and if I'd bought them at a neighborhood bakery I'd have been okay with it. But my standards for my own baking are high so I'm still working on this one too.

And while I've been busy in the kitchen, River has been busy too. Remember the tethermouse? Look what she can do!

Books, bread, and buckets of rain.

Don't you just love "odds and ends" posts? If not, why are you here? (Uh, nevermind, don't want to drive away all three of my fans!) I've got a number of accumulated things to write about; today's random accumulation is brought to you by the letter B.

Let's start with a bit of trivial cuteness. River staring balefully at the buckets of rain. More on that later.

Books
On my list of life's small pleasures, there's not much better than a new cookbook. Even better is free cookbooks. Today, I've got a slim new volume titled Very Pesto, which I won over at Cooking With Amy—see, all that trivial herbish information does come in handy! Although I've yet to make a recipe from it, I am having fun deciding where to start. One thing I really like about the book is that it has recipes that can be made in most seasons. (Meaning it's not all basil, which I love, but Nov. is not the time for it.) There's fennel pesto, which sounds like it would be amazing on salmon; thyme and/or oregano pestos; and a sage pesto that I am thinking about for a condiment at Thanksgiving. So much fun and I haven't even started cooking yet. Thanks Amy!

Laaaarb!

Just for my new sheep, Larb, sourdough focaccia topped with rosemary, pinenuts, and parmesan.

In case you've missed the name the sheep contest over at FarmGirl's (who I might add is the best sheep-tender of any of my friends, perhaps the best in the world) you really should go look. And lobby for Larb! I can hear her now, calling her own name as she wanders around the bucolic landscape, "Laaaaarb! Laaaaarb!"

The hot and steamy object of my desire

Bestill my baker's heart, there's a new contender for the top of my list of things I covet. Sure it's only big enough to bake one loaf at a time, but check out this baby. I've checked my pockets and between the couch cushions but I seem to be about $1287 short of the $1300 list price, darn it!
 

This gleaming hunk of stainless is Sharp's AX-700S Superheated Steam Oven, which is pretty and all that but has one feature that sets it high on my lust list. Steam! Steam that they say is superheated to 550 degrees. Imagine the bagels, the beautifully bloomed bread slashes, the sauna in your kitchen. Well, maybe that last isn't such a great selling point, but the steam is. No more hovering and spritzing the oven, just gorgeous bread.

Someone at Sharp needs to put "bread" in the ad copy, however, which currently reads like it's designed purely for the microwave loving crowd. And I have to wonder about presets that include "fresh vegetables, crisp" and "fresh vegetables, tender" but no differentation between types of vegetables other than potatoes, which have their own setting. Do their product designers think all other vegetables are created equal?

But who cares about advertising? Back to the bread baking.
I wonder if you can fit a pizza stone in it.
I wonder if Sharp wants a bread baking blogger to try.
Probably not, but a mage can dream, can't she?

The short life, and tasty demise, of a bagel: A story in pictures.

As has been noted here—and as if you couldn’t tell by the big picture of bread right up there at the top of my site—I love to bake bread. There is something about taking a few basic ingredients (flour, water, yeast, salt) and building it into one of the most fundamental foods on earth that is deeply satisfying.

Bagels are one of my oldest “treat” breads—when I was a kid, the nearest decent bagel place was miles away and I only got them once or twice a month. And since bagels meant a schmear and lox—the luck of a kid whose family includes NY deli owners and the people who loved them, the delis i mean—this was good stuff.

The life of a breadstick

My current favorite bread recipe is Pain a l’Ancienne from Peter Reinhart’s fantastic book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It’s a primal bread recipe, using only flour, water, yeast, and salt but it’s all about the technique. It is made using ice cold water, kept cold for most of the “fermentation” stage and doesn’t see much heat until it hits the oven for baking.

According to Brother Peter, this cold mix and ferment process “delays the activation of the yeast until the amylase enzymes have begun the work of breaking out sugar from the starch” and provides more sugar for flavor and caramelization during baking. According to the people who eat this bread, it’s simply amazing, with this full, deep, slightly sweet, grainy, nutty taste, a hugely open crumb, and crust to die for. (One of my apprentices just says, “…is that the special bread?”)

So I decided to make breadsticks with it. The rosemary blooming in my (tiny new) herb garden was further inspiration, nudging me to attempt a slightly modified version of Pain a l’Ancienne to create Crusty Rosemary Bread Sticks.