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

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.