Parbaking, Pretzels and Rye

"Parbaking is a cooking technique in which a bread or dough product is partially baked and then rapidly frozen for storage. The raw dough is baked normally, but halted at about 80% of the normal cooking time, when it is rapidly cooled and frozen."

-- Wikipedia. They really want donations now.

Last time I made rye bread I parbaked a loaf and stuck it in the freezer so my housemates wouldn't starve without fresh bread. That was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but I realized that it may provide a good way to have fresh, homemade bread without the 4-6 hour lead time.  So this weekend while I was making rye bread (8 hours) I decided to experiment with parbaking a simpler loaf.

I mixed up a simple loaf--white flour, water, salt, yeast, and some whole wheat flour and olive oil for flavor, and no recipe because I eyeballed everything except for the salt--and set it to rise while I prepped my rye bread loaves for the oven. The rye got the silpat treatment, with a dusting of flour and a nice shaping (I forgot to slash until 5 minutes into baking, which was a shame). 

The whole wheat was divided in two and plopped down into my loaf pans to help me control the variables I'm working with.  Loaf bread will have the same shape regardless of its hydration level, meaning that varying my ad-hoc recipe will still give somewhat consistent results.

After 20 minutes of baking I pulled the whole wheat bread out and stuck it on a rack to cool briefly.  It was fully risen but just barely turning golden on top.  Then into plastic bags and into the freezer, and I'll see how I did later in the week!

Meanwhile my rye bread was doing its usual long, slow rise.  This was the third time I've made it and the first one was by far the best.  I'm starting to think that this is purely because I cut the caraway in the second two loaves.  It's possible that the delicious flavor I associate with rye bread is just caraway, caraway, caraway.

Finally, I also made pretzels with real lye again last week.  Last time I failed to understand the difference between parchment paper and wax paper and melted my wax paper to the pretzels.  This time around I had a silpat and used that.  The result was a real, proper lye pretzel:

Cafe Solaar, now with pastries

Hey all,

I frequently get asked why I don't make more pastries, and my answer is always that if I tried out five pastry recipes my housemates would have heart attacks from eating them and I'd have to pay rent for everybody for the month.  And then I wouldn't have any money left for ingredients.

That being said, I would like to try out some pastry recipes.  It's just a challenge because they're never as good the next day--so I can't take them to work or karate.

We've had a running joke that we're running a coffee shop at our house.  People stop by and we almost always hand them a tasty espresso or a cappuccino with the latest attempts at latte art.  Sometimes on the weekends we have waffles, sometimes pancakes, sometimes fresh fruit or fresh bread--but never pastries.  And what's a coffee shop without pastries?

So here's the idea: one of the next few weekends I'll make all of the recipes that have been sitting on the back burner for a while.  I'll stock up on butter, make some proper croissant dough, and borrow a Tartine cookbook from somebody.  Maybe I'll try to make morning buns.  Maybe macarons and muffins, or tarts and toffee.

Would you show up and save my housemates from themselves?  Are there any tasty recipes you've been itching to try?  Do you want to come help bake in my house, or do you like the idea of free butter?  Let me know, and I'll see what I can do to make it happen.

Cheers!

Stand mixer and rye bread

I got a new-to-me electric blue Kitchenaid stand mixer last week.  Michael and I worked together to buy it and in the first day we made three separate batches of deliciousness with it.

First came the blueberry muffins, ready and waiting on the table when I rolled out of my room.  Then I tried a rich, sweet bun with bacon and onions inside.  The bacon was cooked by filling the pan with water, dropping the bacon into it, and cooking until all of the water had boiled off.  I delegated that task to anybody else in the house who would take it.

The recipe called for a stick of butter and half a cup of milk.  We were out of milk so I used almost a cup of heavy whipping cream instead, which made the final bread deliciously rich.

Makin' the bacon

Tiny bacon packages

Adem with the bacon

Happy ball of dough

Bacon disappearing

The bacon rolls went in only a few minutes.  I also made some with no bacon and ate them on the plane as travel food the next day.

Next came rye bread from this Smitten Kitchen recipe.  I baked two loaves: one parbaked, so I pulled it out and stuffed it in the freezer before it was finished baking.  The second one came out of the oven and disappeared in five minutes, and was rated one of the best tasting breads I've made by Nathan.  I think this was due to the large number of caraway seeds.  I'm trying this recipe again a few times to make sure I can make it consistently, then I'll be varying the ratios of rye and white flour to get a darker loaf.

I parbaked the loaf on request from Nathan because I was heading out of town for a week; halfway through the week he pulled it out of the freezer and chucked it into the oven and got to enjoy homemade bread even without the baker.  This is also a good way for me to have fresh bread ready to eat at any time.

The strangest thing about the stand mixer is definitely how clean my hands were at the end of making the dough.  I like it for making very wet, hard-to-knead doughs; the rye dough and ciabatta doughs are a great example of these things.  I'm also planning to use it for making cookies.  Open engineering challenge: design an add-on to the Kitchenaid to extrude, cut, and place cookies on a sheet.

Mmm

More rye bread is in the oven now.  If it doesn't disappear overnight I'll be taking it to karate--and if you're from kenpo and reading this, I suggest you bring cheese.

Desserts

"Butter and sugar are the konami code of baking."

I'll do bread for Thanksgiving.  For now: desserts!  Homemade pop tarts (nutella and raspberry jam) and green tea shortbread cookies with white chocolate ganache.

Food photography is a whole different rabbit hole, and I've decided not to go down that rabbit hole for the time being.  That means that 1) I'm going to continue posting cell phone photos with poor white balance while I focus on making good bread and 2) I'm going to keep using Adem's photos when I want to make my food look good.

Photo credit goes to Adem.

Bonus photo: a normal dinner cooked by Nathan

Almost ready

So green!

Happiness

They didn't last long enough for a picture

Careful with the dough

I'm also working on some different bread techniques.  I'll report back on those later.

Experiments with pumpkins

The challenge: Make a pie, muffin, or cupcake dish that combines pumpkin and apples so that their flavors are each distinct (no pumpkin muffins with squishy chunks of apple).

The inspiration: A can of pumpkin puree.

The result: A lot of fun with a mandolin and apples.  One apple tart with a very chewy pumpkin crust.  Twelve small and essentially inedible pumpkin cookies.

Lessons learned: Pumpkin needs a lot of sugar to be happy.  Mandolins are fun.  A pile of thinly sliced apples with cinnamon and sugar tastes great no matter what is underneath it.  Disgusting cookies should be labeled or thrown out, not left in the kitchen for unsuspecting visitors.

Fall breads

Yesterday I made a whole wheat walnut bread and a pumpkin-cream cheese swirl quick bread to take to work. The pumpkin bread was a great success, probably in large part because it was mostly butter and cream cheese by volume. The whole wheat walnut bread didn't even make it to work--Greg declared it delicious and made a lot of it disappear. The rest became breakfast.

Tonight I'm trying baguettes again and reading Samuel Fromartz's In search of the perfect loaf, which my mom sent in honor of my attempts at baguettes.

The quick bread recipe came from this blog.  It's a quick bread in that it only takes a few minutes to put together, but the bake time is well over an hour.  It was very rich.  Honestly I thought that the only thing the cream cheese section added was the aesthetic effect of having a swirl when the loaf was cut apart.  I would rather accomplish that by making two different colors of batter and mixing them.  I'm deciding what would go well with pumpkin to make my second of these loaves.

It was too soft to cool on the wire rack

Walnuts everywhere!

Got impatient, didn't let it rest much before baking

I can control my phone camera from my watch

...but I never know what the photos will look like

This week in pictures

Baguettes, round two

Ready for the oven

Mid-disaster

Yum

Photos by Adem

Baguette

Dinner prep

Taiwan beer with Vietnamese sandwiches

Poison!

Ready to turn into sandwiches

Mixing pretzel ingredients...

while watching Das Boot...

...which made me forget the salt,

Seriously, this stuff is poisonous.

Process control

Autobreads, roll out!

Quick updates: I've used up another 25 pounds of all-purpose flour and am down to a backup bag of bread flour (10 pounds) and a bit of whole wheat flour.  I feel bad ordering 25 pound bags from shopping express, but it's also the best way for me to get them home.

And on to the bread!  Nathan has requested a bread that will exercise the delayed start on our oven.  He has a mental image of waking up in the morning to sweet fresh bread, the scent wafting through the apartment...

I'm not there yet.  I've made a few attempts and they look kinda funny.  It's a good challenge and it may be my theme for the week.  I can make dough when I get home, punch it down once right before I go to bed, and set the timer to start baking at 8:30 AM.

Left: same dough, baked normally.  Right: autobread.

Autobots, roll out!

Success bread and fail pretzels

I made some baguettes as a test run for a party we'll eventually be throwing.  This was my first time making baguettes.  They're delicate, require time and patience, and don't respond well to improvisation.  So they're basically the antithesis of my baking style.

Nonetheless, I rolled out of bed by the crack of noon and had dough ready and rising by one.  The recipe called for it to triple in size during both the first and second rising.  Exciting!

We left the house during the first rising, so when I got back it looked amazing.  (Leaving the house is the only way I can resist poking it every ten minutes.)  Check out that gluten structure!

Six people for dinner, so I cut it into six pieces.  Then they rest for a few minutes and the shaping begins.

Check out that mat!  It's a brand new silicone rolling mat that I got so I can have a large, clean surface to knead on.  The nonstick is helpful, and I have no qualms about covering the entire thing with flour and dough.  I'm pretty unreasonably stoked about this purchase.

Left to rest, then rolled out and set to double in size again.  Covered with only a light napkin so they can get some air and form a light crust.

Before

And after!

Check out that crust!

And that crumb!

Bonus chocolate shapes

They bake for 25 minutes in a 450F oven full of steam.  Turns out keeping the oven at 450F brings our induction stove to its knees and makes Greg and Nathan sad when they are both trying to boost dishes for dinner at the same time.

The bread became Vietnamese sandwiches and tomorrow's breakfast.  I'm really happy with how it turned out--I've rarely made anything this delicate before.

I also decided to try out making chocolate decorations, mostly because I wanted to do some fancy stuff with icing and I don't actually like iced cookies.  Turns out you can just melt chocolate on the stove and pipe it like icing onto parchment paper to make cool shapes.  And that's super easy to do, so I definitely didn't 1) melt a silicone spatula and not notice for five minutes of chocolate stirring and 2) burn chocolate in a pan when I forgot to turn the stove off.

My next project was pretzels for a coworker's birthday.  Same recipe as last time, same lye, same oven, same bowl for the lye, same baking sheets...but I forgot the salt and I used a different brand of parchment paper and the pretzels stuck to the paper just about permanently and etched the cookie sheet through the parchment paper.  Basically everything is terrible about them.  It's probably the end of the world.  I'm not sure I can ever bake anything again.

Awful.

Anyway, I think they'll still be tasty in the morning, and Adem got some photos with his nice camera while I was making them, so I'll upload those when I get them.  The chocolate is tasty and amusing (Claire made the pretty patterns, I made the hedgehogs and fancy letters) and the bread was just plain excellent.  On balance I'll call it a success.