chrysanthemum

Practically scientific or Weekly bread, part two

I completed my bread experiment with this week's baking. I did make a double batch, so I have four loaves, but I only kneaded one--the first one--for longer than usual. I kneaded it for about five minutes, until I could not knead it any longer, simply because it was so obviously the wrong thing to do. It soaked up flour almost as fast as I could add it, and it got progressively smaller and stringier as I kneaded. Usually when you knead bread--for one thing, you're kneading it before the rise--but usually, the dough becomes more supple and elastic as you work it. This kneading wasn't having that effect. At. All. The kneaded loaf is the one on the right.

When I finally gave up and plopped it down on the baking sheet, it was horribly ugly. It looked like something out of a slasher movie. It plumped up a little during its 30-minute rest, but was still ugly when I put it in to the oven. You can see that it didn't get any prettier in the oven. The crust is less like crust than say, scar tissue. I cut it this morning for toast, and I pretty much had to saw at it.

Here the kneaded loaf is in front, and you can see that it's a bit shorter. I'm not certain that the kneading made this loaf smaller. Dividing the dough is not the most exact science, so I might have just started with a smaller amount than I did for the second loaf. However, you can also see that the kneaded loaf is a little denser, and the air pockets inside are fewer and smaller.

 

See? You can even see how I had to work to cut through the (left) kneaded one.

I did a taste test, too, of course. Toasted with salted butter, kneaded on the left, not-kneaded on the right. Salted butter makes up for a lot of things, but even here, the unkneaded bread is better. The kneaded one is just too dense and chewy. The lighter crumb of the unkneaded bread is much more pleasant.

I feel so much better for having tried it both ways. Now you try it too!

Weekly bread

We had a little brunch with friends on Sunday morning, and I have to say the toast we made was really not up to par. It was a loaf of supermarket French bread, and I'm sure it was just fine, but yeesh, it was so ... soft and ... soft.

I started baking bread last fall from my Aunt Cheri's recipe for Aunt Lisa's bread. Aunt Lisa is really, truly Italian, came to Indiana from the mother country as a bride, and she makes the best bread, entirely, it seems, by look and feel. Nothing so fussy as measuring ingredients is involved, so Aunt Cheri sort of tamed the process for us simple American girls who are married to our measuring cups.

I'm a complete hack, but except for the one week where I radically decreased the amount of salt, this recipe works. It requires nothing complicated, just a warm room, and a few hours at home. The bread is crusty outside, toothy within, and as much as I love it soaking up sauce or soup or bright yellow egg yolks, it makes ridiculously good toast. And grilled cheese sandwiches. I'm starting to salivate just a little here...

Here's what you do:

Stir together, in a very big bowl,
7 1/2 cups flour
4 teaspoons salt
2 1/4 teaspoons yeast (one packet),

then add
3 1/2 cups of warm water (I have no idea precisely how hot the water is--it's not blistering, but it feels pleasantly hot).

Stir it until you can't see any more flour. Cover it with a tea towel and a bath towel (this is the only part where I think maybe Aunt Cheri is pulling my leg, but I keep a bath towel in my rising spot now), and put it in a warm place (about 75 degrees) for 3 1/2 hours.

Give it a good stir so that it sinks back down in the bowl. This is a pretty wet dough, and it's going to look weird, not all puffed and dry and full of potential like other bread you've tried. It's going to look sticky. Cover it up again and let it sit for another 1 1/2 hours.

Spray a couple of largish circles of non-stick cooking spray on a 12 x 18 cookie sheet. Heavily flour your countertop (I use a big flexible plastic sheet that's meant for rolling pie crust--it makes the cleanup ever so much simpler when you don't have to scrape dough off the counter), and scrape the bread dough out onto the flour. Divide in into two roughly equal pieces with a big knife, and knead each one lightly.

Like I said, this is a wet dough. It is supremely sticky. It will drink up plenty more flour. I do not knead it for long. I knead each piece for about a minute. Like I said, I'm a complete hack, and maybe my Aunt Cheri will say I need to knead for way longer, and I'm completely of two minds on whether I can see Aunt Lisa kneading for one minute or ten minutes, but whatever, it's working with this tiny amount of kneading, so I'm just kind of going with it. I knead each piece a little, adding enough flour that I can touch it without it swallowing my hand--it's like The Blob--and then I quickly pull the edges around and under so that it makes an amoeba-like ball, and drop it onto one of the sprayed circles on the baking sheet. Then I do the other one.

Once they're both on the sheet, put the tea towel over them to rest for 30 minutes, and preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

After the 30 minute rest, take off the towel and notice that the loaves are probably touching each other. This is totally fine. Put the sheet in the oven and set the timer for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 400 degrees and bake for another 50 minutes. Cool the breads on a rack. They'll break apart from each other quite easily.

Dip like crazy at dinner, and toast it up all week long.
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Now that I've written all that out, it's totally obvious to me that I need to do some serious experimenting here. Next weekend, after I pick up another 50-pound bag of flour, I'm going to make four loaves, two this way, and two with a lot more kneading. Also, I've ordered a kitchen scale, and I'm going to gather a little data about the amount of flour I'm starting with. Surely a weight would be a great deal more precise than the measuring-cup method. And now I'm wondering if I make this bread every weekend for 20 years or so, if I won't just get to a place where I don't need to measure anything, I just add the flour until it looks right...?   

The Toothcracker Suite

I mixed up a double batch of Mrs. Miller's Cut-Out Cookies yesterday morning and popped the dough into the fridge to chill for the day. After dinner, Lyra and I rolled a batch and cut them out into all the shapes she chose from our cookie cutter drawer. She tried to sneak in some Easter bunnies and a palm tree, but you know how I am...

Then this morning, I mixed up the icing and got out the sprinkles, and we set up shop on the dining room table. As many sprinkles as you're witnessing here, imagine at least that many licked off sticky fingers, and double it to get the number I swept up off the floor afterward. Yummy.

I've been eating these cookies at Christmas for probably 30 years now. My best friend in elementary school, Jennie Miller, her mom used to make these cookies for all the holidays, and she happily shared the recipe with my mom, who started making them too. I think I made my first batch when I was about 11. I remember calling Jennie's house for advice and getting only her dad on the phone, and he just did not have any good cookie-rolling know-how to share.  

I only devoted a third of the big batch to the kids' whimsies. The rest are iced plain, no sprinkles or sanding sugar. We've got a big selection of treats on hand just now (we're snowed in and I've been baking and baking and baking), and in order to switch freely from one kind of cookie to another, I like to minimize the amount of pure sugar I'm ingesting. Yeah, that sounds like a bunch of BS to me, too...

Two company dinners

I love to bake. This past weekend was so, so satisfying:

• four loaves of bread
• a pear crisp
• an apple pie
• a mess of pie crust cookies

plus

• a big pot of beef and barley soup
• three large jars of applesauce
• an eggplant parmigiana

I didn't get any knitting or sewing done, but that pie was everything I wanted it to be.

This is what happens if you slice your pie-crust cookies too thin: they all fall over while they're baking and you end up with pinwheels. Every bit as tasty.

We had dinner guests on Saturday and Sunday nights this weekend. We often have friends over for dinner, and we almost always include the kids in the preparations; they help with chopping or baking baking or setting the table. My parents entertained all the time when I was growing up, and while I wouldn't claim that I always loved helping with their dinner parties, having dinner parties always seemed like the most natural thing to do. I love planning menus, even simple ones like these two meals were, making food and then just feeding people.

On Sunday morning the kids and I went out to Target to get some more back-to-school clothes, and they were very keen to get some Halloween decorations. Ben picked out this jack-o-lantern window cling set, and Lyra chose a pack of Halloween paper plates. She set the table with them last night. They didn't really seem sturdy enough for eggplant parmigiana, so we ended up swapping them for our regular plates, but I'm hoping that her interest in setting the table is the start of a long love of cooking for her friends too. 

Friday morning, 9 a.m.

Today, instead of going out for lunch, I went out for donuts. Plain cake, dipped in a latté. Please no frosting, no sprinkles, no nuts, no coconut. Just the cake. And the coffee. Perfect.

Plus we saw a bear

Drove up to our favorite U-pick berry place yesterday morning. It was kind of grey and cloudy and cool, perfect for picking. The raspberries, blueberries and blackberries were all ready and waiting. We picked about 20 pounds all together, I think.

Lyra and I were alone in the raspberry canes, picking a few and eating a few, reciting sections of Blueberries for Sal. She wondered if any bears could be nearby. I assured her that there weren't, but couldn't really think of any very good reasons why not.

Michael and Ben picked tons of blueberries, and then the kids and I picked a few pounds of blackberries. Actually, they might be tayberries or marionberries, we're not entirely sure. They're mostly as big as my thumb, and picking 5 pounds of them took about 5 minutes. They're that big.

I love picking berries. I love letting my greedy side run wild, even just for an hour. Picking berries, I think, is all about greed. But having picked berries is all about work. Tonight there's raspberry ice cream in the freezer, blueberry crumb bars in the fridge, half a pie on the counter, and bags and bags of berries in the freezer, safely tucked away for winter baking.

And on the drive home, we did see a bear. A grown black bear in the trees in the highway median. He stood up, looked at the cars racing by, and then turned back into the trees. Michael and I both saw him at the same time and were pretty shocked. Neither of us has ever seen a bear outside of captivity before, and there it was, stuck in between all those cars. We weren't exactly in the suburbs, but we weren't out in the wilderness either. I hope it got out okay, and I hope it didn't scare anyone too badly on the highway. I think I'd completely freak out if I saw a bear lumbering across the highway I was speeding on. Yeesh...

Oh, also, this is my 200th post. I've been blogging for 25 months. Today I got a 60,000th hit on my blog. Those are all kind of nice numbers, aren't they?

Strawberrypalooza

We took the kids out to pick berries yesterday, more than 20 pounds. There's a little bit of strawberry pie left in the fridge today, but not much. There's strawberry ice cream in the freezer and some jam underway. Also a plain bowlful in the fridge. For the moment, I'm kind of strawberried out. I'm sure it won't last, but that third piece of pie kind of did me in...

Not sure what to call this

'Kitchen aid'?

or 'Stand mixer'?

These, though, are whole-wheat cherry chocolate-chip pecan bars. A mouthful in more ways than one.

Lyra said they were good, even with the nuts inside.

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Whole-Wheat Cherry Chocolate-Chip Pecan Bars

Butter an 9 x 13" baking dish and preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

1 1/4 c. all-purpose flour
1 c. whole wheat flour
1 t. baking soda
1 t. salt

2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
1/2 c. white sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar
1 t. vanilla
2 eggs

1 c. oats
1 c. chopped dried cherries
1 c. chocolate chips
1 c. chopped pecans

Combine the dry ingredients in a small bowl.

Cream the butter and sugar in a larger bowl, then add the vanilla and eggs.

Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture and mix.

Add the oats, cherries, chocolate and pecans and mix till it looks like everything is evenly distributed.

Spread in the prepared baking dish and bake for 25 minutes.

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I usually make these without the cherries or pecans, but with 2 cups of oats. Shredded coconut is a nice addition, and probably any number of other things, too, but this time I wanted cherries and nuts.

Chocolate: It's what's for dinner

When I went to college, I was (almost) completely innocent. The most decadent thing I had ever had on a pancake was whipped cream, and it was almost certainly out of a can, eaten after a full night in the car on the way to Walt Disney World for spring break. But in the fall of 1987, Pearsons dorm, Mount Holyoke College, the breakfast cook was more than happy to make you anything you wanted for breakfast every damn morning. There was no reason to eat toast or cereal or even donuts--though, to be fair, I don't think there donuts available, and if there had been, I likely would have eaten some. Anyway, she introduced me to chocolate chip pancakes, and then she made them for me every morning until Christmas. Yikes.

These days I almost never put chocolate chips in the pancakes. My darling husband aspires to hermit-like levels of  ... whatever the stark opposite of chocolate dependency is. He swears he doesn't like it. I don't believe him for a minute, but I do try not to serve chocolate as a main course at any meals. You should see the way he looks at me when I put chocolate chips in the banana muffins. Yeesh.

Nevertheless, pancakes are one of my favorite standby dinners on nights when he's got class. This quarter his classes have been early enough that he's always home for dinner, so the kids and I haven't had pancakes for dinner in ages. But there was some special study group for Thursday's Stats exam tonight, and people, that bacon chocolate bar was practically burning a hole in the countertop. Let me be the one to tell you, if you have the slightest affinity for bacon, for chocolate or for pancakes, this is your dream meal. You may not want it for dinner, depending on your sensibilities about these things, but seriously: Yum.

Heart of fluff

My sweet friend, h., whose bloggy birthday is today (Happy Blogday!), sent me marshmallows. Again. These, she said, were rolled in superfine granulated sugar and were meant to be homemade Peeps. The Peeps people need to contact h. immediately, because nothing as garish as this should ever be compared to these luscious pink hearts. So smooth and soft and dreamy. I ate them all myself. (Not all in one sitting. I swear.) My children, much as I love them, do not deserve marshmallows of this caliber. They're perfectly happy with the Jet-Puffed ones from the store, and frankly, are better off not knowing about the extreme deliciousness of homemade marshmallows.

Thank you, h. I promise to get your surprise mailed off tomorrow.