Posts Tagged ‘bread’
I’ll be honest.
I’ve been categorically ignoring the whole no knead bread trend since I first heard about it back in 2006.
It became quite the internet sensation at the time, died down and now seems to be making the rounds again, due at least partially to Cathy Erway’s new book about not eating out for 2 years, I assume (which includes her riff on the recipe).
As someone who loves cooking and food as much as I do, I can say with alacrity that I’ve often thought of no knead bread as the lazy person’s shortcut, aka baking for dummies. If you asked my mother, she’d probably cluck her teeth and mutter something under her breath about it being the cowboy way. Beyond that, even though I start by mixing 90% of my breads in a stand mixer for at least part of the process, I can’t imagine giving up the interaction with the elementalness that is bread just to make life “simpler”.
But, when I saw Erway’s recipe for parmagiano, peppercorn and potato no knead bread, I made an exception and decided to try it. At the time I had no knowledge of what made her recipe differ from the standard no knead bread, so I followed everything to the letter except for 2 things. I subbed in a cup of whole wheat flour to surreptitiously improve its healthiness and instead of cracked black peppercorns, I mixed up a blend of 5 different ones that I’ve had lurking in the kitchen, including Muntok, Sarawak, Malabar, Tellicherry and Moula peppercorns crushed in a tea towel with a mallet.
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Tags: Baking, Books, bread, Cathy Erway, Jim Lahey, NY Times, The Art Of Eating In
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Aside from my timtana experiment last week, I haven’t really done a whole lot of bread baking yet this year. I’ve been more than a little preoccupied with work, planning our vacation and things of a more pastry-ish nature, so when I decided to make bread again this week there was a fair amount of anticipation on my part.
I once read that the word ciabatta loosely translates to mean “carpet slipper” in Italian. Given their delicate dough and diminutive stature I can’t really say I’m surprised, though I’m not sure what about carpet slippers is supposed to make them sound appetizing or appealing, despite the fact that they are.
Coincidentally those small, squat rolls are some that I enjoy preparing (and eating) quite a bit. Of course because I am merely an honorary Italian, I make no bones about putting my own little twists into the bread that I’m baking, and on Family Day yesterday I decided to enhance the ciabatta with a healthy dose of homemade tomato conserva.
I began the night before by mixing up a biga (sourdough starter) by combining flour, water and a small amount of yeast and then letting it ferment on the counter.
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Tags: Baking, bread, conserva
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A couple of weeks ago, I entered and won a contest over at Kitchen Therapy that netted me a free bag of a new gluten free product called timtana. Timtana is a milled all purpose flour ground from timothy grass, which is completely gluten free but full of lots of good for you nutrients like fibre, protein, calcium and iron (you can read more about it over at Kitchen Therapy if you’d like). A company called Montana Gluten Free graciously provided the bags of flour for the Kitchen Therapy giveaway.
As I’ve previously mentioned, my mother in law is allergic to wheat, so I often keep an eye out for new developments in gluten free products, and have a whole drawer in my freezer devoted to the various alternative flours that I use when baking for her. Over the years I’ve found that while gluten free baking is not easy, once you know what you’re doing improvisation is possible.
A 3 pound bag of timtana flour arrived at my door a little over a week ago, and has been sitting on my counter waiting for inspiration to reach out and strike ever since.
While an original idea has yet to take shape, in the interim I decided to use Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio app and the basic bread dough formula for a first pass.
The proportions are simple and include 3 parts water to 5 parts flour, plus a little bit of salt and yeast thrown in for good measure. Because timtana is gluten free, I also opted to toss in a bit of xanthan gum (the gluten free baker’s friend) for some extra leavening power.
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Tags: Baking, bread, flour, Kitchen Therapy, Michael Ruhlman, Montana Gluten Free, New Projects, timtana, YMMV
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A little over a week ago, Larbo over at This Little Piggy posted about his discovery of Fergus Henderson’s trotter gear (a gelatinous porky broth made with (what else?) braised trotters.
Until I read Larbo’s post, I’d never heard of this magical liquid before, but had often contemplated the versatility of a pork-based stock.
There are plenty of recipes out there for beef, chicken, veal and vegetable variations, so why not a similar frenzy for pork, I wondered.
After ruminating on Larbo’s post for a little bit, I started to consider the possible uses for trotter gear.
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Tags: Baking, Books, bread, Fergus Henderson, Grant Van Gameren, How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman, New Projects, pork, Recipes, Restaurants, The Hoof Cafe, This Little Piggy, trotter gear
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As I mentioned to DMSinTexas the other day, I spent the better part of an afternoon this weekend flipping through How To Cook Everything Vegetarian in an effort to get inspired.
After a bit of random perusal I gravitated towards the soup chapter, which coincidentally is one of my most favourite kinds of vegetarian meals. As much as I generally love poring over a good cookbook and becoming immersed in it, I’ve come to realize that the only time I cook from a recipe is when baking is involved, and even then I’ve taken to winging it more often than not. Of course, since I have such difficulty following a recipe, I didn’t make anything from the book that day, but it did set a few ideas whirring around my brain.
So, it should come as no surprise to my readers that the first recipe I did make was not technically a vegetarian recipe at all (if only because it contained no vegetables) but rather a bread recipe. With the aid of a little advanced planning, I managed to turn out a fairly decent version of Bittman’s overnight French baguettes.
But, before any of you start getting indignant and accusing me of copping out and picking something that is only inherently vegetarian, allow me to explain;
I picked the baguettes because a) they’re a pretty decent litmus test for the general usability of a cookbook’s recipes and b) I needed something to mop up the vegetarian soup I decided to invent.
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Tags: Baking, bread, chevre, Cooking, How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman, New Projects, ras al hanout, soup, squash, sweet potato, Woolwich Dairy, zucchini
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There’s almost nothing I dislike more than waste.
Having a CSA share every summer means that I’ve learned to get pretty creative with its contents so that they don’t end up going into the trash.
But, now that summer has taken it’s final bow, we’ve gone back to receiving what our organic grocer Bob from Clean Food Connection calls a “vegpak” in every order, which basically amounts to a box full of fruits and veggies that his staff will pack up for me, based on my likes/dislikes/preferences. So, while everything we receive is always something we’ll enjoy, sometimes it means we end up with produce that we weren’t necessarily expecting.
And sometimes that produce will sit around my kitchen almost until the brink of decay. Which is exactly how I ended up having 6 overripe bosc pears sitting on my counter with no immediate plans for them yesterday.
At first glance, it seemed like an ideal opportunity to make a pear crisp, but once I started to peel the pears, I realized that there was no way they’d be firm enough to stand up to that. Which is how I ended up making a puree. And once I had that puree, it was only a mental hop, skip and a jump to deciding that a pear-based quick bread was the way to go. Fortifying my general quick bread recipe with the addition of oats and a pinch of camphorous cardamom put the finishing touches on the bread.
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Tags: Baking, bread, cardamom, chocolate, oatmeal, pears, Purveyors, Recipes, The Clean Food Connection
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I’ve done quite a bit of experimental baking over the last few months; in particular veering out of my comfort zone of Local Breads to include other books and bread-making recipes.
I’ve enjoyed myself, maybe even learned a few things, but most of all this task cemented the fact that baking is my zen. Nowhere do I feel more peaceful or at ease than when I’m standing at the counter massaging a mass of spongy dough. Time to start evaluating a career change? Perhaps so, but only time will tell… though I recently read about GBC offering an artisanal bread certificate program…
At any rate, I thought I’d share a short pictorial with all of you on some of the highs and lows of my personal baking quest since September;
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Tags: Baking, Books, bread, Daniel Leader, Local Breads
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Here, my friends, is one of the real reasons I go to the lengths that I do to take care of my unruly rooftop garden.
What would from the outside appear to be a rather pedestrian sandwich, is actually the pinnacle of summer indulgences for me; the toasted tomato sandwich.
The bread? Baked fresh Sunday morning. The tomatoes? A handful of sun-warmed San Marzanos from the roof. And the bacon? That would be a meaty plank sawed from the slab I cured and smoked recently.
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Tags: bacon, Baking, bread, Cooking, Gardening, tomatoes
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For the second week in a row, I did not have the forethought to prepare a bread starter prior to Sunday morning. And while I have a jar of funky looking levain stewing in the back of my refrigerator, I can’t remember when I last refreshed it with flour to make it usable.
You can hardly blame me for forgetfulness though; I was too excited about getting to see The Pixies to contemplate poolishes and bigas on Saturday morning.
Of course, if I wanted to bake bread still, I had to choose something that would be leavened only by yeast and time. Lucky for me, I had one such loaf ear-marked from the last time I went through Local Breads to find recipes that interested me.
The bread I chose was a pane alla ricotta, which was a bit of a departure from the breads I’ve been baking of late, in that it contained both a soft cheese and butter instead of olive oil. Being the fan of ricotta that I am (I could eat the stuff by the spoonful, and when we have it in the house, I often do) I was intrigued by the potential of this bread. I crossed my fingers and hoped that it would live up to my expectations…
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Tags: Baking, bread, Daniel Leader, Local Breads, New Projects, ricotta
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Truthfully, I’m not usually one for compromise.
I want what I want, and I want it my way, so woe betide those who might get between me and whatever I’m after.
One of the things I enjoy about Sundays is the opportunity for solitude that comes from quietly baking. However, the Everyman and I had to go out to the KW yesterday afternoon, so any bread I intended to bake needed to be a little easier or more low maintenance. After last week’s recipe perusal, I had a list of close to a half dozen breads I wanted to play around with in the near future, so from that I selected the one bread that didn’t require any sort of starter or biga; the pizza bianca.
Pizza bianca is pizza in it’s most elemental form. The dough is similar to focaccia, except it’s not quite as airy. For a bianca, it is nothing more than dough baked in a blazing hot oven sprinkled with olive oil and sea salt, but to fancy it up a little, you can turn it into pizza rosso, where it becomes a tomato sauce-based pizza.
Back when I first started making focaccia, the Everyman commented that they were similar to the ones he used to buy in Italy as a snack, but mine came with more in the way of herb topping. After awhile it occurred to me that perhaps what the Everyman had been reminiscing about was a pizza bianca. I always meant to get around to making him one, but with so many tempting options in Local Breads to sample, who could blame me for neglecting the bianca a wee bit?
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Tags: Baking, bread, Daniel Leader, Local Breads, New Projects, pizza
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Sadly, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve had an opportunity to bake.
Between our hectic schedule lately, there hasn’t been any time for futzing around in the kitchen. It’s an activity I’ve missed, one that I find increasingly meditative and peaceful, and a welcome distraction from the Everyman’s incessant pow-pow-pow zombie-killing escapades. So when the opportunity to bake presented itself this weekend I jumped at it, comforted by the fact that whatever I chose would be sacrilicious.
Half an hour spent idly flipping through my regular bread book (Local Breads by Daniel Leader) on our patio led to a handful of potentials, none of which required any advance prep on my part, either. Eventually I chose a pain de mais, a corn flour and rye-based Italian bread solely on the basis that all of the other breads I’d chosen would’ve required me to walk to the store for provisions, and it was bloody steamy outside.
The recipe for pain de mais is upfront, stating that it is quite the anomaly for an Italian bread, being that most Italian breads rely on wheat flour only. Because this bread has a low proportion of wheat flour in comparison to rye and corn, the book notes that the bread will not rise much, producing something only slightly more leavened than a cracker. It promises a flavour that’s out of this world though, which was all the convincing I needed.
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Tags: Baking, bread, Daniel Leader, Local Breads, New Projects, pain de mais
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Having spent a thoroughly frantic day preparing for guests on Saturday, when bread baking finally rolled around on Sunday morning, I was more than happy to settle on a recipe that was a little more hands off than usual. Rushing to and from the market and standing on one’s feet all day tend to make this foodie grumpy, so I was on the lookout for an effortless endeavour followed by a crisp, cool glass of wine.
On top of all that, I planned to go out for dinner to research a restaurant review for my side job, so I knew I would not be around to tend to anything time-consuming (coming soon; August 6th).
After halfheartedly flipping through the pages of Local Breads and bypassing both the German and French sections, I paused where I often do; in Italy. The pane Toscano, billed as a saltless Tuscan bread, seemed simple and rustic enough to pull off with a minimal amount of fuss. The primary advantage in tipping the scales was that it didn’t require a starter more complicated than a biga. I whipped the biga together in double time, then went about soaking my poor, aching toes.
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Tags: Baking, Books, bread, Daniel Leader, Local Breads
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Despite the fact that the Everyman and I spent the weekend at the cottage, the bread still needed to get made.
Knowing that I would not be around to babysit a biga, I intended to select a dough that could be assembled in one shot. Complicating matters slightly, our organic grocer had gifted us with a massive bush-sized bouquet of basil as a thank you for being customers on his birthday last week, so I felt the need to incorporate some of that into the recipe as well, lest it go to waste. There is, after all, only so much pesto one can make. Our freezer is full of them; lemon artichoke pesto, sundried tomato pesto, roasted garlic pesto, garlic scape pesto, plain old pesto, etc etc. If you can add cheese to it, I’ve probably turned it into pesto cubes at some point in time.
Flipping through my all-important baking bible, Local Breads by Daniel Leader, I came across a loaf that sounded slightly challenging that would also meet the above requirements; an herb twist. Marking the page for later, I left the book on the counter and headed off to the cottage for a few days of summer relaxation.
Upon my return, I hunkered down in the kitchen and began to assemble the pertinent ingredients. As with anything I make, I couldn’t leave the recipe as is, so I added a few scoops of red fife flour in place of some of the white flour, and omitted the coriander seeds, which I truly despise.
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Tags: Baking, bread, Daniel Leader, Local Breads, New Projects
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