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.

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.