A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Only two weeks until Christmas? It’s amazing. It finally hit me last night that there’s no WAY I have enough time to do everything I wanted to do. Here I’d been sitting, planning this all out in my head, merrily thinking about how nicely it would go along; “preparing to prepare” as it were.

So, after the “oh shit!” moment I had last night I woke up with a vengeance this morning and headed down to the basement. My ears are ringing from the power tools, but it’s getting done. I’d be more specific but this thing cross-posts to facehole and twitter, so that’s right. out.

While my hearing returns to normal it’s time to redirect my effort to the kitchen. Unfortunately between the flood this summer and a backup drive failing a bit before that, I’ve lost a couple of my confectionery recipes.

Most notably a creme filling for tempered chocolates. I had a basic vanilla filling (which I did horrible things to in turning it in to a ginger creme) that was exceptional. It was made with flour and cooked in a sauce pan. Unfortunately I have no idea what it really was. A custard? Could it have been anything else? I have no idea and the clock. is. ticking.

At least I can peel and cook some of the ginger in preparation. That also gives me the ginger syrup.

Biggest problem so far (aside from losing that recipe) is that fresh ginger root up here is hard as hell to find, and when I DO find it, it’s close to $3 a pound, instead of the $1.25 or so from the asian market on Atlantic avenue. Plus the quality is only so so and no supermarket has very much of it at any given time. So I only have a little over three pounds (need closer to 10.)

le sigh

Back to it.

o/

Peel a potato

cut it up so it’s somewhere between “cubed” and “shredded”.

Boil it for a half hour or so.

drain it, keep the water!

mash it to death.

Measure out somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup of potato.

Add that to 2 cups of sourdough starter

Add 1 1/2 cups of the potato water (cooled to something reasonable, add water to make the volume if needed.)

Add 3 cups of flour (King Arthur Bread.)

Mix & Knead

Let it sit and rise (Sourdoughs seem to take far longer to start rising than commercial yeast breads. Still experimenting.)

Punch it down, split it (this is a lot of bread) and form it up.  (I’ll probably do a simple boule and a 5×9 just to test them out.

Start up oven to … oh I dunno, about 425 while that rises.

Bake for … well, until done.  We’ll see.

UPDATE: That was remarkably wet. I added probably another cup and half of flour and half a teaspoon of salt. This may end up making 3 loaves.
add 1.5 tsp of salt.

UPDATE: Meh. Took my eye off the ball. Didn’t come out very well. Still learning my way around the second rise with my starter.

Ok, I’ve just been informed that there are people out there who actually read this drivel and used to do so for the baking.

Here’s the deal.

Oven’s expensively out of order, so I’m stuck with my Cuisinart bread machine. Delightful as bread machines go but it’s bloody cheating.

A few days ago I tried my BeerBatterBread recipe in the thing and it really didn’t work so well. It under mixed (I restarted the cycle to give it a thorough going over) and it didn’t rise very well. It’s a chemically leavened bread, not a biologically leavened one. Now, there are settings for that on the machine but either they don’t work well or I have to tailor the amount of baking powder in the recipe for bread machine use.

Eyeballing it next to the recipes they gave me yielded no meaningful clue.

The result did actually taste pretty good. Though it did bake a bit too long. This cooked all instead of almost all of the alcohol out, which is a shame. There’s a slight sharpness to it when properly made that I now understand is incomplete evaporation of the alcohol in the Guinness.

The original BeerBatterBread recipe is a slight modification of the one found in the most awesome Kuro5hin post of all time. (I figure it’s ok to post the same link twice seeing as how I hadn’t posted it in 5 or so years.)

I’ll do some more experimenting and see what I come up with.

Unfortunately my current economic situation rather perfectly precludes me from doing any reasonable baking.

Haven’t posted a bread recipe in a dog’s age.  I made this last weekend when in Virginia and it was a rather impressive hit:

For the dough:

You’ll also need:

Topping:

You can go a few ways with this. What’s worked for me is the following:

As you can see, it’s actually a very simple bread. Because the focus of this is primarily on the topping and crust, you have some latitude in how much attention you want to pay to the bread proper. This is something I pull out as a crowd pleaser when I don’t have my kitchen, bowls, scales, measuring stuff and ingredients handy (my kitchen doesn’t exactly travel well.)

1. So as for technique you can really just combine everything, mix and knead, then set to rise for about an hour and a half. It should be close to doubled if not more.
2. Pan the dough into two well-oiled 8×8 “brownie pans.” I’m a big fan of pyrex for this. However, this past weekend I used a large piece of stoneware that was quite nice. Unfortunately I don’t quite know what the dimensions were. Let it rise in this form for a bit over an hour.
3. Preheat the oven to 375
4. Carefully dimple the dough with your fingers. You should push down a little more than half way with your finger tips. This isn’t the most precise of operations. At the end the dough should have a grid of dimples over the whole thing.
5. Pour 1/3 to 1/2 Cup of olive oil over the dough. What you’re looking for here is for an awful lot of it to slide down the sides into the bottom of the pan, with a bunch pooling in the little dimples you just added to the surface.
6. Add the Kosher/Sea Salt and the Rosemary. But do NOT top the loaves with cheese. That comes later.
7. Into the oven (at 375) for a half-hour.
8. Pull both loaves out and then sprinkle the top with cheese. I’m frequently surprised at how much cheese can actually be added without overpowering this, so don’t worry. (If you put the cheese on before they go in the oven then the cheese will burn before the bread is actually done and you’ll end up with an unavoidable mess. Different cheeses behave differently, but doing things this way is pretty safe.)
9. Put them back in the oven for the last 10-15 minutes. You’ll have to eyeball it. You’re looking for the toothpick test plus a couple minutes.
10. Take it out and let it cool a bit before cutting in to it. It’s not a baguette so I’m not going to suggest you wait until it’s completely cooled. But give it a minute.

The addition of the Olive Oil is quite nice as it essentially deep-fries the crust. This is why it’s important you don’t try to do this on a simple cookie sheet or (heaven forbid) a silpat.

It looks like a lot of steps, but there’s really not so much that can go wrong. It’s a nice crowd pleaser.

I’d also encourage experimentation with toppings.

Of course if you’re being persnickety you can doll up the process a bunch and you’ll no doubt get a great enhancement. So things like proofing the yeast and setting up a preferment so you can get a second or third rise out of it is strictly optional.

The Fannie Farmer cookbook is awesome. Check it out:

This classic American cooking reference includes 1,849 recipes, including everything from “after-dinner coffee”—which Farmer notes is beneficial for a stomach “overtaxed by a hearty meal”—to “Zigaras à la Russe,” an elegant puff-pastry dish. Bartleby.com chose the 1918 edition because it was the last edition of the cookbook authored completely by Farmer.

One of the things that I think way too much about is the sort of disposable culture problem that’s grown out of advances in industrial and economic progress. We don’t make things any more. We don’t FIX things any more and it saddens me a bit.

So Friday night (that would be yesterday) I decided to try my hand at making butter. Not a big deal, just get some heavy cream, a smidge of salt, put it in the kitchen-aid and go for a bit, right?

Actually yeah. It’s the weirdest thing. I let it go for a bit (20 mintues?) and all of a sudden the sound the thing changed and it was making this weird sloshy noise.

I walked over to it and damned if there wasn’t a big wop of butter sitting in a pool of what turns out to be buttermilk (neat! who knew?)

You have to work the butter a bit to get the rest of the water out of it, but that was easily accomplished with a big zip-lock freezer bag. (Kneading butter’s not my idea of a good time. Though I have to say I could really see where it would be part of one. >;-)

So now, for two pints of organic heavy cream (I tend towards organic milk products. I’m not an environmentalist. I just think it tastes better enough to pay more.) I have about a pound of butter and two cups of buttermilk, which is rather more than I expected.

I did the math and realized that, not only do I have a better result than store bought. It’s an interesting novelty and, get this…

IT’S FUCKING CHEAPER TO MAKE BUTTER YOURSELF THAN IT IS TO BUY IT!

Yes. Even with the “organic” premium compared to plain old non-organic butter. Add in the price of buttermilk (which I use in baking ALL the damn time) and this is just win/win/win.

You’re welcome.

I’ll amend this post with more details if anyone’s interested.