Notes from my kitchen, in which I bake bread and raise a few other matters
It has come to my attention that dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) — a powerful solvent linked to thousands of deaths each year — is a common additive in many foods, including breads and other baked goods. It seems I may have even unwittingly added it to my own breads on occasion — yikes!
I urge you to inform yourselves about this potentially lethal chemical, and decide for yourselves whether it is a risk you’re willing to take.
The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse’s Cooking School in Paris.
As far as I can tell, a tian is any layered dish. I’m not sure if there are other criteria, but the layers are key. They might be vegetables, or meat, or sweet things like pate sablee crust, orange marmalade, whipped cream, orange segments, and orange caramel sauce.
Personally, I like the sweet layers. And I’m always a sucker for a fruit dessert.
As is my wont, I stuck pretty close to the straight and narrow this month, following the challenge recipes mostly exactly. I did make a few modifications, so please give me a small pat on the head for being just a little bit Daring:
I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but around here it’s getting pretty warm, and that means grilling. And that means you’ll be needing some buns.
I already have a great bun recipe, but I wanted some that are sourdough-leavened (since my starter has been feeling a bit neglected lately) and that contain a hefty portion (about 84%) of whole wheat. These were an experiment that turned out rather well. They are definitely soft (from the honey and the butter), but a bit denser — and more flavorful, if you ask me — than your average hamburger bun.
In case your grill is still buried under a foot of snow (I’m so sorry!), the buns are good for sloppy joes, too.
These go to Zorra (1x umrühren bitte) and Rachel (Tangerine’s Kitchen) for BreadBakingDay #28, Buns.
[Read more…]
The 2010 March Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Eleanor of Melbourne Food Geek and Jess of Jess the Baker. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make risotto. The various components of their challenge recipe are based on input from the Australian Masterchef cookbook and the cookbook Moorish by Greg Malouf.
This is the point where I am in the habit of making excuses: excuses for why I opened a bottle of wine approximately 15 minutes after rolling out of bed, for why I’m eating mushroom risotto by myself for breakfast on a Sunday morning, for why I waited until the last possible moment to complete the Daring Cooks assignment for this month.
No excuses today. It’s just what I did.
In my defense, I will say that I did complete the most involved segment of the challenge, making chicken stock from scratch, well in advance, and had it standing by in the freezer. This was a first for me, and I loved the result.
I’ve made risotto before, and felt comfortable enough with the basic process to feel my way to a mushroom and goat cheese version. (I know, how uncharacteristic of me to demonstrate any sort of independence in these challenges. I don’t know myself any more.) Starting with the given recipe, I made these (allowed, I hope) modifications:
This is a bread we made in class (way back in the halcyon bread days, before butter and sugar commandeered my educational life).
I modified the formula to use liquid instead of stiff levain. I removed the small amount of instant yeast, and increased the fermentation and proof times accordingly. I used a different seed mixture and slightly increased the amount of whole grain flour. I added an autolyse (rest period after fours are mixed with water and starter).
So is this the same bread we made in class? Here I turn to G. W. F. Hegel, who said, “Identity is the identity of identity and non-identity.” That clears things up nicely, doesn’t it?
One of the questions people ask me most often is why you need to discard a portion of your starter every time you feed it. The answer is — you don’t; you can bake with it instead, if you’re in a baking frame of mind. However, as far as perpetuation of the starter is concerned, you’d better be taking some of it out regularly, or you’re going to be in trouble fast.
Think about what happens when you deliver a meal to those microorganisms — yeast and bacteria — that live in your starter. They gorge themselves on flour and then go about the business of procreation. Now they’re out of food, but there are even more mouths to feed. Unless you expeditiously dispose of some of those little mouths — into a bread dough, the compost pile, the trash can, whatever — you will need to bring in exponentially larger and larger meals for them, and your little dinner party party will become seriously out of control within a matter of days.
To illustrate: say you have a rather small amount of starter, 60 grams. At each feeding, you need to feed in proportion to the amount of starter you start with, around three times the flour and with an equal amount of water. If you kept feeding without taking any out, after one feeding you would have 60 g starter + 180 g flour + 180 g water = 420 g of fed starter. After the second feeding you would have 420 g starter + 1260 g flour + 1260 g water = 2940 g of fed starter. After three feedings, 20,580 g.
After just three days (six feedings), you would have 7,058,940 g of starter. You’re going to need a pretty big jar, not to mention a pretty big budget to afford all that flour.
This is not to say you must always take some out. If I have 60 grams of starter at night and plan to bake bread the next morning, I would keep and feed the entire 60 grams, giving me 420 grams. This is enough to bake a few loaves (in a few hours, once it has a chance to become hungry again) and still have 10 grams left over to keep the starter going.