Photos: late August

Plain white bread

Currant bread

I think I killed my sourdough starter.  It taught me that four hours is not that long to wait for bread.  I feel bad for mistreating it.  I'll probably go back to sourdough in the winter when it's darker and colder.

Photos: August

First foray back into baking recently was with these loaves of white bread.  Baked in the dutch oven but they were much lower moisture content than the no-knead breads, so the crusts are not as nice.

Golshan is back in town!  He's doing Golshan things, like riding bikes.  I made rye bread when he arrived, but forgot to take a photo.  Here's a photo of him instead.

This one was a simple white bread with about a tablespoon and a half of butter.  Other ingredients: 2 tsp yeast, 500g white flour, 325g water, 2.5 tsp kosher salt.  It rose fast because there was so much yeast, but had a really even crumb.  Nice sandwich bread, good with jam, and didn't need any butter on top.  A little too smooth and plain for my taste.

This oatmeal bread had a strong molasses bite.  I used some whole wheat flour and didn't use the powdered milk.  One day I'll buy some and be less baffled by recipes that call for it.

Photos: April/May

Tartine bread

That crust

Not a bread

Cornbread mini-muffins

Cappuccino!  Nathan is back from Japan!

Cranberry currant bread

Adem: "Is this the kind of bread you put butter on?  I don't think this is the kind of bread you put butter on.  I feel like this is the kind of bread you just *nyarm nyarm nyarm*".

Cranberry currant bread!  Made with three flours (whole wheat, rye, all-purpose) and some of my happy starter, along with some instant yeast because the starter had been living in the fridge.  Recipe from Bouchon Bakery.

Gingersnaps!

Thought process here: "I want to make a cookie.  But a thin cookie.  Not a sugar cookie.  Something like a lace cookie.  But we only have quick oats and those make bad cookies.  Hm, but oat cookies sometimes have molasses.  What about cookies with molasses?  Ooh, this recipe has ginger in it, and a bit of cayenne.  Wait.  Gingersnaps!"

I used this King Arthur Flour recipe.  I ran out of white sugar and used 1/3c white and 2/3c dark brown.  That meant that the cookies didn't spread much.  For the second batch I made them in tiny balls and squashed them flat.  The proper way to do that is to cool the dough, roll it out, and slice it into squares or cut out shapes.  I'll do that with the second half of the dough.

These cookies are tiny.  Gingersnaps are supposed to be bite-sized and delicious.

Photos

Lots of flour 

And a very sharp knife to get those score pattersn

Raisin bread for Wyles

Made in a loaf pan

No-knead sourdough recipe

New recipe.  Still tweaking it.  This is a forgiving recipe so I'm being lax in the descriptions of timing.

Three stages of tasty

For the past few days I've been making a batch of this dough at night, letting it sit out on the counter or in the fridge overnight and through the working day, then turning it out and baking it whenever I get home.  Currently I'm playing with how much salt it has.  When I get that right I'm going to use more whole wheat flour and see what that does to the rise times and the deliciousness.

500g all purpose flour
375g water, any temperature
150-200g starter
2 tsp table salt

Starter

Directions:
Pour water into bowl.  Scoop starter into water and stir to dissolve.  Measure salt into bowl and stir to dissolve.  Immediately add 100g flour and stir to dissolve.  Add 400g more flour and mix.  The result should be shaggy and sticky.

Pre-rise dough

Cover and let sit overnight.  Feed your starter while you're at it.  Mine gets 100g water and 100g all-purpose flour per use.  I'm considering feeding it 25g of whole wheat and 70g white for a bit to make it more robust.

After this you treat the dough like any high-hydration, no-knead bread.  If that doesn't mean anything to you, read on.

Turn out onto floured surface and fold over itself a few times.  Flour all sides and let rest briefly (five or ten minutes) to relax.

Fold your dough like this:

Let sit for a while.  An hour, maybe two.  If after half an hour your dough ball has become a dough disk (no surface tension) fold it again.

Heat your oven to 450-500F with a dutch oven in it.  I've been using 500 but it makes handling the dutch oven very difficult.

Flour the top of your bread.  Gently loosen it from its resting place; dust the bottom with flour if necessary.

Pick up the dough ball with both hands, gently.  The bottom should be facing up when you're holding it.  Get a buddy to open the oven and slide the dutch oven out partway; drop the dough into the dutch oven, seam side down.

Cover and bake for 30 minutes.  If your oven was at 500F drop it to 450F.

Uncover and bake for 10-15 minutes.

Pull out of the oven.  Turn out onto a rack.  Try not to eat it for the next ten minutes.  It's still baking inside.  Fail and eat it anyway.  It's okay.  It'll be tasty.

Final stage

The song of the sourdough

If you put your ear very close you can hear a wonderful crackling noise coming from the crust of a bread that just came out of the oven.

If you put your ear too close it will hurt a lot.  That's the dutch oven.  It's about 450F.  I don't recommend putting your ear too close.

This was the nytimes no-knead recipe with about 200g of my starter in place of instant or active dry yeast.

A fruitful day

Last week I was challenged to an apple crumble throwdown at work, so on my way home today I grabbed an arbitrary number of apples from the supermarket.  I figured some of them would become crumble and the remainder could be easily turned into applesauce.

Apple soup

The crumble is mostly using the leftover almond streusel from the pastry party.  I misread a recipe and ended up with three times as much streusel as I wanted.  The extra has been bagged up and waiting in the freezer for a few weeks.

I consulted with Serious Eats and picked Braeburn apples for the crumble.  Unfortunately I don't think they were very sweet.  I'm a little concerned about the throwdown tomorrow.  The applesauce made it through one round of cooking, was tested, and was turned back on with more sugar and water for round two.

To add some extra flavor to the crumble I toasted almonds in the oven for 7 minutes at 350 (convection), then ground them up and mixed them into the crumble.

Brioche rising

This weekend I also baked up some brioche (by request) and some Tartine bread.  The Tartine recipe starts with 1 kg of flour and is easy to scale.  For some reason I either make the full recipe or a half recipe; this makes either one or two gigantic loaves.  It also takes hours (and hours and hours) to make.  The result is wonderful but I'm not sure it's worth it compared to going to the city.

Oh yeah, and I made some micro English muffins.

Can you guess what this is?

Valentine's Day

Cookies; http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/01/italian-almond-and-blood-orange-cookies-recipe.html

Busy day

One-day sourdough: faintly sour

POP TARTS

Challah

Bouchons

Yum

If he doesn't watch out his face will get stuck that way.

Bouchon with whipped cream.  Amazing.

Disclaimers: The sourdough was from some time last week.  The challah had an extra egg and not enough flour, so it was really rich.  Also almost overwhelmed my stand mixer.  I didn't actually make the pop tarts--Adem made them from start to finish while I was working on the challah.  I don't know if bouchons have to be bouchon-shaped to be called bouchons.  Buying a mold seemed silly.  I really like typing the word bouchon.

Pop tarts from Smitten Kitchen.  Challah from Smitten Kitchen.  Bouchons from the Bouchon Bakery cookbook.

Party photos

Courtesy of the wonderful Alice Che:

Blueberry muffins

My English muffin; Nathan's sous vide egg with pancetta and crispy quinoa

Michael's croissants

This is what I always think my food photos should look like.  They never do, of course, but I'm glad I have friends who can help out.

And here are some by Adem:

A satisfied guest

Carefully sprinkling thyme

Whipping siphon in action

776 irish special

Michael works on cream puffs

The hats were a great idea

Thoughtful barista

Ready to rumble

The infamous espresso machine

I would make the photos larger if I wanted to spend time* with HTML.  But I don't.

*more than 5 seconds