Back From the Dead

Legion was ailing.

The rise time was getting longer and longer, and Legion didn't smell right. At first, it was more sour, but then it started to smell...off. It still made bread, but not very good bread. I wasn't sure if I should give up and start over. I mean, Legion is 9 years old. Maybe it was time?

Recently I was lucky enough to be at an event catered by the culinary school, and got to see the Chef who had given me Legion and still had the original culture. We chatted and I learned some things. Things like - don't leave it in the fridge. Feed it more often. It needs to be stronger.

So I followed his advice and started dumping out starter, feeding it a smaller amount daily, and keeping it on the counter, with the lid slightly off to give it more oxygen. After a few weeks, it lost the funky smell. Finally I felt like it was ready for bread so over the past weekend, I made a batch. 

And it was as good as I remembered, with normal rising and proofing times. I think I have been successful in resurrecting Legion!

Sourdough Bread Bowls

I've been teaching the youngerchild to cook and one of the things we made this week was beef stew. There was a lot left over, so we decided it would be fun to try to use Legion to make bread bowls. Last night I mixed up the dough:

150 g Legion (starter)

6 cups bread flour

3 cups water

1 oz olive oil

1 T. sea salt

After letting it rest for 30 minutes, I pulled and folded it 5-6 times every half an hour for a total of three times. I ended up having to lightly oil the bowl, too, since it was really sticky (maybe do this first next time?). Then I left it overnight to ferment. 

This morning I shaped it into three small round loaves and lined three salad bowls with floured cloth. The loaves were placed seam side up in the bowls, covered with the cloth and then put in the fridge. On top of the cloth I used plastic cover them all to help keep the moisture in.  

This evening, about six hours later, I flipped the loaves onto baking sheets lined with parchment and dusted with cornmeal, slashed them with a knife, and baked them for 40 minutes at 450˚F. 

It's a similar bread to the sandwich loaves I've been making for years but the extra manipulation led to a lighter crumb which was exactly what I was hoping for.

99.9%

Almost done. Really, about 99.9% done. The inspector signed off on it last Thursday.

All that is left is the bathroom threshold, the shower door, a ring to go around the radiator pipe (because basic chrome wouldn't do for the bathroom with the tin ceiling, so we found one to match) and we have to replace one of the shower heads because it leaks. Apparently it's a design flaw, hopefully the replacement doesn't also leak. 

But what that really means is that we're back in the kitchen. And starting to unpack. And definitely baking! Yesterday I started a batch of cinnamon rolls and froze half of them before they were proofed. They can be thawed and proofed when we're ready. The other half of the batch went in the fridge and slowly proofed overnight; this morning I took them out and let them finish proofing on the counter. Then we feasted on cinnamon rolls!

Also yesterday I started a batch of bread which I just baked and, in a little bit, I will be making a cake for my husband's birthday. He has a vision of what he wants and hopefully I can make it happen. I am, as usual, winging it. 

Speaking of wings, I fed the bees today, dug out the flow hive box and put it on the hive, and generally checked on things. They seem to be doing fine.

So Many Updates

The renovation is almost done. YAY! It's been such a long time. 

We are starting to move back into the kitchen, and have a little more cleaning to do before I can fully move everything in but I'm getting everything sorted and even made my first batch of bread in the new kitchen. It just came out of the oven about an hour ago. Everything smells so good!

There are things that are yet to arrive but they are not critical to functionality: the shower door, the light for the kitchen sink, more shelf liner, and so on.

In other news, I made some syrup for the bees who seem to have made it through the winter and observed them to be bringing in pollen already. Where they are finding it, I have no idea, but they seem to be doing what they are supposed to. I'll keep feeding them for a bit longer and then once it's consistently warm and there are flowers, I'll stop. I'll also get the flow hive box on top around the same time. I also got to use my new bee helmet and it's such an improvement on my old one, I'm no longer looking through mesh but a clear panel and it feels more secure. 

Another Use

Last night, while baking bread, I threw in the oat pulp from another batch of oat milk and adjusted the water in the recipe based upon the texture of the dough. Today the bread baked and it's just wonderful, the oats make almost no difference in the crumb of the bread but augment the flavor just enough to be noticed. This is another handy way to use all that oat pulp we're generating, so glad it isn't going to waste.

So Many Strawberries!

Last night I made strawberry shortcake with a quart of the berries we'd picked the day before. It's always popular and because we eat it so quickly it's hard to get a photo. This time I remembered to take one before we ate. We got another quart of berries from the farm share today which are already mostly gone!

My mulberry tree is really doing well this year and just today I got half of the mulberry juice I need to make a batch of mulberry jelly. I will likely do that over the weekend as I am working tomorrow.

Today I'm making bread. I managed to (finally) find bread flour in the stores again, and so now I'm making plain bread, just bread flour and all purpose flour, my starter, salt, sugar, milk and water. No teff, or spelt, or sprouted wheat flour (although I quite like that last one). Instead of an egg wash, I'm using water sprayed on just before baking. I did forget to get it started last night, which would have allowed it to ferment overnight and for me to be done much earlier. I woke up this morning, remembered that I hadn't made the dough last night, got it started by 8 am, so it's had all day to ferment and then about 3 hours to proof before baking. It's in the oven now. 

Ancient Grains

In my continued effort to make bread while bread flour is hard to find, I decided to play around with other grain flours I have found in the store. A little while ago I picked up some teff, knowing nothing about it. I made a batch of bread today with it; proportionately it was 1/6 of the flour and the rest was bread flour.

One of the things I did not realize about teff is that it is gluten-free. Which explains a lot. The dough was softer, and wetter, and while it baked very nicely I had a harder time getting the loaves out of the loaf pans because the loaves were less firm. The taste of the bread is interesting, though. Teff is used to make injera, Ethiopian flatbread which is fermented and has a sour taste. I'm not sure if the sourness to my bread is from the teff or the starter but it does have a more complex taste than usual. It's quite good.

In terms of texture, I think I like the bread made with spelt better, but likely that is because spelt has gluten in it. I have buckwheat flour, too, so I might play with that as well.

Daifuku

My rice flour finally arrived from Amazon so I spent a little time today making daifuku: red bean filled mochi balls.

You make the mochi by cooking rice flour with sugar and water and this can be done in the microwave or by steaming the mochi.

I probably rolled the mochi a little too thinly because I made 18 balls, not 12 as the recipe indicated. The difference is visible in the picture: the ones that are darker have a thinner mochi layer and the others were made after I rolled out the scraps again and so were thicker. The thicker layer is desired. Even so, they're easy and tasty!

I also made another batch of the Anpan today using the sourdough starter again. I still need to figure out how to get them to fluff more when they're baking. Today's batch was proofed for an hour, the recipe suggests half that time but I'm thinking they might even need to be proofed for longer. I still have plenty of red bean paste so I'll try again another time. 

Anpan and Potstickers

The ones with the sesame seeds were the batch with Legion

One of the things I hoped to make with my red bean paste was Anpan, a Japanese bread with red bean paste inside. I followed this recipe and was rather worried that the yeast wasn't working properly as the buns didn't really rise much. So while they were proofing I made another batch, using Legion. I replaced the water and 50g of flour with 100g of Legion. The dough felt more elastic and definitely was easier to work with. However, the original batch, with the powdered yeast, was allowed to proof longer and that might explain the difference in size.

Both of them were fairly dense inside which, again, I attribute to not very active yeast and insufficient proofing, respectively. They still taste better than the red bean rice dumplings I made last week!

The other thing I worked on today was another batch of potstickers, using wonton wrappers this time. These made me very frustrated while I was cooking them: I fried them in oil for a few minutes then added stock and let them cook on low for another few minutes. Sometimes that worked perfectly and sometimes, well, they're not called potstickers for nothing, I guess.

Back to Experimenting

Since I've been having a little trouble getting all-purpose and bread flour, I was looking for ways to make bread without using as much bread flour. I picked up a bag of spelt flour and made a batch of bread today with that. I used 32 ounces of bread flour and 6 ounces of spelt. It looks more like when I used to make this bread with whole wheat flour but, since I'm still using milk as part of the liquid, much softer and springier. Especially when warm!

It is good, though, that I'm starting to see flour in the grocery store more often. Hopefully that is a trend that will continue.

Tomato Sauce

In the ongoing effort to organize the freezers, it was time to get the bags of quartered tomatoes out from last summer. Usually I end up with about 5 gallons of tomatoes but this year it was only 3. They take up so much space, because they're bulky and heavy. It is amazing to me that each gallon, once run through the food mill and cooked down to a reasonable sauce texture, yields one pint of sauce. Makes one wonder about the sheer amount of tomatoes those big companies use to make all those cans of sauce!

These three pints are plain, not spiced in any way.

Also, I just finished baking this week's batch of bread; I added even more milk instead of water to see how soft I can make the bread and still have it be sturdy enough for sandwiches. I've been trying to get flour where I can; I have enough bread flour for 2 more batches, and I bought some spelt flour just to try something different when the bread flour runs out. I am starting to see more flour in the grocery store, but it's all purpose, not bread flour, and so I'll keep an eye out for bread flour. 

Easter Feast

Today, for Easter, we pulled out all the stops. By that I mean we cooked, non-stop. All day.

See? Not cracked!

Breakfast was bacon and egg sandwiches on homemade bread, which was immediately followed by me making a NY style cheesecake for tonight's dessert. I may have finally cracked the mystery of how to keep my cheesecakes from, well, cracking. I let it get almost done, turn off the oven and let the cheesecake cool in the oven for a while. Twice in a row now I've managed to produce an uncracked cheesecake. With different recipes each time.

While that was going on, I also made bread. So as soon as the cheesecake was out, the oven was in use again, baking a milk and honey sourdough bread, 2 sandwich loaves and one round loaf for dinner.

Then, as soon as the bread came out of the oven my husband started to roast the duck for dinner. We normally only do ducks on New Years but when we ordered them we were told we had to buy the whole case, which was six ducks. Three were roasted on the holiday and the other three have been waiting in the freezer. Now we have two left, and unless I find another specialty butcher shop that will be it for a while. I'm sad to say our local butcher shop closed.

From the duck, I was able to render about 2.5 cups of fat and we have some leftover duck meat as well that maybe I'll make into pad thai as that was really great the last time.

After our feast of roast duck, fresh bread, and miso cauliflower, we put strawberry pie filling on the cheesecake and served it over a drizzle of chocolate ganache. So, so good!

Enriching

For the past four years, I have been making bread. Ever since I got Legion, I have managed to keep it/them alive, make bread often enough to never have to buy it in the store (except for artisanal loaves, which sometimes I just want), and gradually tweak the bread recipe to be basically where I want it to be.

However, there are times when I want it to be softer, and survive being stored in the freezer without seeming stale when it gets out. I've tried different flours, different sugars, adding more water, vacuum sealing the loaves (which I do NOT recommend) and even adding an egg.

Now that we're home all the time, thanks to the pandemic, I am making bread more often, barely fast enough to keep up with my family and all the sandwiches we're eating. But it gives me more opportunities to adjust the recipe even further. For the past 2 batches I replaced one cup of the water with milk. We are all really liking the results: a softer crumb, better tolerance for the freezer, and a slightly richer taste.

16 oz starter

38 oz bread flour

3 T. sugar

1 cup milk

1 cup + more water (until desired dough texture)

2 T. salt (added just before taking out of the mixer)

I decided to share my bread making routine so you can see how easy it can be. To be fair, I have a slow growing starter so I can let the dough ferment overnight and it works great. Here we go:

This is the dough after fermenting overnight, about 9 hours.

Divided into 3 equal parts (I weigh them) and then rolled and allowed to rest, covered, for 5 minutes.

Pans are prepped with PAM and then parchment on the bottom. Then they're dusted on the sides and bottom with cornmeal. 

Loaves are formed and placed in the pans to proof, generally takes about 4 hours. 

I proof them near the radiator, even if it isn't on. These are ready to bake. They get an egg-milk wash and are scored, then baked at 400˚F for 30-35 minutes, turning the baking sheet every 15 minutes in the oven.

As soon as they come out of the oven, they come out of the loaf pans. The sesame goes on before baking, if you're going to use it. 

Tastes Like We Remember

When the kids were little, they went to a daycare which had its food provided by the daycare provider's husband's restaurant. One of the most popular items was chicken-orzo soup, aka Avgolemono. The kids both loved it, as did the adults. From time to time we would go back to his restaurant and buy it by the quart. But it's been a long time since we've been able to do that, and he doesn't have it on the menu every day. I decided to try my hand at making it.

I found this recipe on line and made a few tweaks based upon what I had in the house. Instead of four quarts of chicken stock I used two quarts of my "Ducken" stock and two quarts of water. I used about 3/4 cup lemon juice. Other than that, I followed the recipe to the letter. One thing I would change for the future would be to try using four eggs instead of three. It just wasn't thick enough. Otherwise, it tasted just like we remembered. The children were pleased.

The other project for today was more bread. Now that everyone is home and eating lunches here every day I need to make bread much more often. In my quest to get softer sandwich bread from my starter, I tried something new with this batch. I replaced some of the water with 1 cup of milk. I'm pleased to say that the bread is super soft and springy, and I will definitely use that trick again!

Merry Christmas!

Well. It's been a while, hasn't it? It's amazing that I never really know where the time goes. As far as I know, Thanksgiving just happened, and then Christmas came up like a freight train. You know. First you can't hear it at all, and then it's just this vague, slightly familiar sound in the distance. And then before you have a chance to really process what that sound might be, it's RIGHT THERE and you have to run to stay ahead of it just long enough to let it pass by safely. Only, in this case, safely means everyone is together and well fed and gifts are purchased and wrapped on time despite all the other commitments.

I'm not quite done, mind you. We just had Christmas. Tomorrow is the big shindig for 10 people.

Today, just my parents and the four of us feasted on duck legs confit with miso cauliflower and these amazing Parker House Rolls from eat the love. I made the dough yesterday and stopped at the point where the rolls were in the pan before they were proofed. Today they proofed and baked and I topped them with Hawaiian black sea salt and they were just terrific. Yesterday I also made eggnog crème brulée and had them ready so all I had to do today was the brulée part and the garnish. Made things so much easier, giving us time to open presents in the morning and make a Lego Gingerbread House centerpiece. (It's pretty cute.)

Tomorrow there will be beef tenderloin, baked stuffed shrimp, Persian rice, and individual berry trifles. So much cooking!

Almost Ready

Not pictured: Banana Bread

The Baking with Honey entries have been delivered to the fairgrounds. I have been up since 5 am baking bread, making Earl Grey white chocolate ganache (for the scones) and generally getting everything ready. I'm super tired, as I only went to bed at 1 am!

See, I got home from my first shift at my new job at 12:30 am and then I needed to form the loaves of bread and get them proofing. Prior experience has taught me they don't need that long to proof and so I set my alarm for 5 am. That was perfect timing. The bread got baked, it smelled lovely (tasted lovely, too. I may or may not have eaten almost half a loaf just now for lunch....) and I had enough time to coat the scones with ganache, cut the brownies, get everything wrapped up and loaded in the car.

After I dropped the youngerchild off at the bus stop I went to my riding lesson at which I almost got kicked; the horse I've been riding lately gets rather anxious when being tacked up but is fine basically the rest of the time so I'm learning how to avoid his teeth and hooves while still getting him ready. I was able to scoot out of the way this time! As soon as my lesson was over I drove straight to Topsfield and got all my entries checked in. Then I headed home and got cleaned up.

Now I have to plan the entries in the regular Foods Department competitions. I entered in 4 categories: yeast bread, muffins, 2-crust pie and 1-crust pie. All that baking will happen on Saturday. Sunday we'll head up to the fair and I'll see how well my entries did!

Trial Run

Next week I'll be doing a lot of baking for the fair. First of all, I want to enter a few things in the Baking With Honey competitions. I made scones with honey a few weeks ago which I'll do again but I wanted to try bread again. Last night I tweaked the bread recipe I use with Legion to increase the amount of honey as my previous attempt was described as "not enough honey."

The proportions are: 16 oz. Legion, 38 oz. bread flour, 1/2 cup honey, 2-1/2 cups water, and 2 T. salt.

I'm happy with the crumb, and an independent observer said she could taste the honey, as I can't right now (I have a cold). I'll make another batch in a week and have it ready to enter as of Thursday morning. It'll be tricky because I'm starting a new job and my first shift is Wednesday evening, getting out at midnight. Hopefully I can get it all together!

Week Summary

Currently, I have a batch of pizza sauce in the canner. This is another thing I've not made before but since the farm share keeps offering unlimited produce I felt like it was a thing to try. I brought home just over 9 pounds of plum tomatoes yesterday, just enough to make a batch, using the recipe in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, page 366. For this, I used the 12 ounce jars, since I feel that we often open a jar of pizza sauce and then only use half of it. Maybe this is still too much in a jar but we'll just have to commit to using more of it.

Also this week I turned in all my canning entries so I'm done making canned goods for the fair. I'm not done making things for the fair, though, but now we've turned to the baking part. In an experiment, I made my usual bread with a few changes in technique. First of all, I made the bread with all bread flour and a whole lot more water: 16 ounces starter (Legion), 38 ounces bread flour, 4 T. sugar, roughly 22-24 ounces water, 2 T. salt. Then I turned the dough into an oiled bowl and used the pinch and turn technique I used most recently for the baguettes a few weeks ago. This dough is much stiffer and difficult to do this way but I wanted to see what happened. What did happen was we got a nice, spongy crumb with a few extra air pockets in it. Not what I expected but still very good. I might try a few more tweaks before I have to make a batch for the fair.

Lastly, I made a cheesecake using the honey cheesecake recipe that won last year in the baking with honey division. I'd never actually tried it again so had no idea how it was. Well, it may now be my go-to cheesecake. It was the smoothest cheesecake I've ever made, and it didn't crack, either! My trick there was to turn the oven off just before I though it was done and then leave it in the oven to cool down more slowly. And so easy: 2 pounds of cream cheese, 2/3 cup honey, 4 eggs and some vanilla, poured over a graham cracker crust and baked at 300˚F for about an hour.

I'm still trying to decide what to bake for the fair in general. It depends on which day I can go on that first weekend as there are different categories competing on different days. I won't really know which day I can go until much closer to the actual weekend. It's also Parents' Weekend for the youngerchild's school and I'm starting a new job that week as well!

All Day Affair

Both the projects I made for tonight's dinner took most of a day or more.

First, I made baguettes. To be fair, I made them for a little party yesterday, but the recipe made three baguettes so I had one left for dinner tonight. I used a recipe my friend had developed (he has some of Legion and so adapted a couple of recipes to use the starter instead of making a new poolish from scratch each time):

16 oz bread flour

6 oz starter

1 tsp salt

pinch of instant yeast

9+ oz water

Put the flour in the mixer, make a well in the center for the starter. Sprinkle the yeast and salt around the edge of the bowl (not touching the starter). Add the water and mix. Knead in the mixer for about 15 minutes until the dough is wrapped around the bread hook and is elastic and smooth. Turn out and quickly shape into a ball and place in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover. Then you can take as little as 6 hours, doing a fold of the dough hourly (pull up the dough from the sides and form a pouch like a dumpling) or a whole day or more by putting the dough in the fridge and doing the folds less frequently. I think I ended up doing 8 folds over an entire 29 hours (I was working in between all these steps). Then yesterday I got up at 4 am to shape and proof the loaves in a couche. At 6 am the loaves were in the oven (spritz with water and score with a lam first), 420˚F, boiling water tray for the first 10 minutes and then 15-20 minutes without the boiling water. (Then I went to work.) The general feedback was that the bread needed more salt but that the crust was firm and the inside was soft and full of big holes, which is what I was trying to achieve.

Then today I worked on this recipe for "Sunday Sauce." I'm not really sure how it's supposed to taste, but it smelled like one of the Italian restaurants we like, so I guess I did OK. I got it all on the stove and simmering by noon and it simmered all afternoon until about 6 pm. Maybe that was too long, but it seemed fine. We have a LOT of sauce and meatballs left over.

The other thing I made today was a sweet pepper relish, using the recipe in "The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving," page 164. Since I plan to enter this in the fair, I need to remember that I used 9 long sweet peppers, some dark green and some light, 2 very large onions, and 5 Hungarian hot wax peppers. Those were all from the farm share, as last week's distribution was rather pepper-heavy. There aren't really any cucumbers anymore. My last batch of pickles, the sweet icicle ones, are almost done. I have one more day in which I drain the syrup, boil it and put it back over the cucumbers. I'm not really sold on this one, I have to say. It reminds me of watermelon rind pickles which, while fun to make, were too cloyingly sweet for me.

Parsley Garlic Bread

Using Legion, I made a batch of parsley garlic bread. As I mentioned in the previous post, the recipe calls for bread and rye flours, neither of which I had. Instead, I had all purpose flour, corn flour and white whole wheat flour, so I used a combination of those. The parsley is mixed in at the end of the kneading process and the garlic gets folded in before proofing. I made two loaves - one round and one more like a ciabatta. The proofing took far less time than anticipated so even though the fermentation step took all night, the proofing took about 90 minutes. I ended up baking them in the morning yesterday before I went to work.

For dinner last night I made cheese fondue and we used one of the loaves as the dipping bread. The garlic added a really great flavor to the meal. The rest of the cut up cubes will be frozen and saved to make stuffing when Thanksgiving rolls around. I have the round loaf yet to use but that will need to be used soon before it goes stale. Maybe for dinner tonight or tomorrow?