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

Bouchon and Tartine

Bouchon sourdough

Tartine sourdough

Forgotten and burned sourdough

Second Tartine sourdough

I finally caved and got a starter from King Arthur Flour.  It's giving me much more consistent results with both flavor and rise.  My first Tartine sourdough was wonderful but also took more than eight hours.  Tartine says that you should not knead the dough, but instead turn it every half hour for several hours.  Bouchon, meanwhile, says to knead the dough with a stand mixer and then let it rise twice.

My first Bouchon sourdough was made in a rush so I didn't give it enough time to rise.  I therefore can't yet compare it to the Tartine recipe.  The second Bouchon sourdough was going great until I decided to go eat dinner and watch Futurama "for five minutes while it darkens" and came back to a blackened lump in the oven.

The dutch oven is giving beautiful crusts.

Sneak Peek: Cafe Solaar

Last Monday I asked Michael if he wanted to make pastries this weekend.  On Tuesday I sat down and tried to pick recipes from Bouchon Bakery.  On Wednesday we culled our recipe list, wrote down all of our ingredients, and made massive Amazon and King Arthur Flour orders online.  On Thursday I started checking the mail for my starter.  On Friday I ordered a chef jacket to keep all of the flour on a single piece of clothing, and Nathan texted me that "about 100 pounds of flour just showed up" (it was 30).  On Saturday I made bread to keep the starter happy; on Sunday we did prep work (dough, starters, anything we could do ahead of time) from noon to midnight; and finally, today, I woke up at 6:50 to start baking.

The results were worth every minute of work.  Here are some of my cell phone photos, but expect higher-quality photography from Alice, Adem and Kiran soon.  (Thanks, photography team!)

My first list of recipes

Croissants in the making

Craquelines, shaped and rising

Where was I focusing?  No one knows!

Fezzik was only wearing this hat for the bacon

The final menu

Planning.

Real-time updates happened here.

Olive bread

Some time during my team's last planning meeting it was decided that one of my objectives for the quarter would be to bring olive bread for the team. Last week we started our quarterly planning retreat and I realized I hadn't yet made olive bread. This is probably because I don't like olives. At all.

Anyway, I figured that not liking the ingredients didn't have to stop me and whipped up a whole wheat olive bread. Derived from this recipe: http://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/panne-all-olive-olive-bread.

I used the same water to flour proportions but used half whole wheat flour. I kneaded it instead of waiting overnight, and added several tablespoons of olive oil to make it tastier.

Heated a dutch oven at 450, baked covered for 25 minutes and uncovered for the last fifteen. Because thanks to Nathan and Christmas I now am the proud owner of a lodge dutch oven and a copy of Tartine Bread!

It worked really well. Beautiful crust with olives sticking out and a nice moist crumb thanks to the olive oil.

I love my kitchen

In California.  I love the brand new oven, the spice cabinet, and the large stock of baking supplies.  Most importantly, I love the temperature: right around 70F almost all the time.  The extraordinarily, strangely consistent weather in Palo Alto in spring through autumn makes baking a joy.  In winter I struggle more with temperatures for proofing and rising, but the new oven has a "proof" mode that holds it at a steady 75.

Bellevue bread

Over Christmas I went home to Bellevue and baked for my family.  I first started baking when I lived at home after freshman year.  I'm grateful to my parents for putting up with more than a year of awful bread, and I feel that I should make good bread for them in return.  So I go home, I set my dough to rise, and...it doesn't.  Because Seattle is north, and north is cold, and our house sits right around a happy 60F.  Not too bad for humans, better for the environment than keeping the heat on high, but hard for the yeast that live inside my bread.  Sometimes rises take twice as long; sometimes I try to put dough to rise inside an oven at the lowest temperature and accidentally start baking it, and once my bread completely failed to rise after an optimistic 24 hours of waiting.

Fortunately this time my first bread was a complete success.  It was a whole wheat loaf with butter.  Simple and easy.  I baked in loaf pans so I didn't have to worry about shaping and so sluggish dough would have some support to rise up instead of spreading.

Approximate recipe:
2.5 - 3 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp yeast
1 tsp salt
1 c hot water
1 - 2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp sugar.

This is what I use as the base for a lot of my improv bread.

White bread, nice crumb.

The next loaf I made on impulse when relatives came over, and I was rushing.  It was the same recipe as the first loaf but I substituted in all-purpose flour and olive oil instead of butter.  I didn't give it quite enough time to bake so after a few slices I hit a rather doughy core.  I stuffed it back in the oven and let it bake for a few more minutes, then sliced off the newly-baked bits and repeated the process.  It was delicious and led to more than a few jokes about half-baked ideas.  I repeated that one a few days later and baked it properly for an even better bread experience.

Then I made whole-wheat molasses bread.  It's one of my favorite loaves that I've made in California but this time something went wrong.  I'm not sure if it was the brand of the flour, the type of molasses, or some environmental factor I can't identify.

Oh, and I also ended up redoing a bunch of grout in the kitchen while I was there.  Maybe that's why I'm less sanguine about that kitchen than usual.  Mom and Dad, if you're reading this and the grout failed please let me know so I can fly back and fix it.

Cookies!

At some point I impulse bought a set of a hundred and one cookie cutters on the internet for very little money; as a result I had to make something other than my usual snickerdoodles.  (No, it was not a drunk purchase.)  I used the Smitten Kitchen brownie roll-out cookies and recruited Michael as packaging engineer to get the highest packing density of cookies given the constraints of a rolled-out sheet of cookie dough.  You could also write a program to optimize this!

The dinosaur is basically the grown-up dog.

The cookies were fun to make and made a fun contribution to our holiday party.  Unfortunately they were not nearly as tasty as they looked.  I suppose they would have gone well as part of an ice cream sandwich.  On their own they are not quite sweet enough.  They are simple and easy, but too sandy for my taste.  Choosing the shapes was the most fun part.

What needs red eyes?  EVERYTHING.

I brought premade icing to work to decorate these and discovered that safeway sells icing that says not to refrigerate, before or after opening.  I find this highly suspicious.

That dinosaur looks murderous.

 I also baked up the last of the green tea cookies.  They went over much better than the chocolate ones.

Bottom center: green tea cookie dinosaur.  Yoshi!

I'm thinking next time I'll do gingerbread instead.

Parbaking Results

Needs more work.

Last time I mentioned that I had parbaked loaves and then frozen them. I think I took them out too early on the first round of baking--they don't rise at all in the second round, so the first is critical.  When I baked them the second time they took at least 45 minutes to fully bake instead of the expected 25, and didn't have a great texture.  More theories: I should have fully defrosted before baking or I should have baked at a higher temperature.  Either way, disappointing results and a few leads on how to improve.