St. Paddy's Stripy Cat

As a little preview for St. Patrick's day and for my first time participating in Bread Baking Day, I've decided to make a sweet variation of Irish soda bread. Thanks to Mansi of the Fun and Food Blog for hosting this most appropriate event of making quick breads in the month of St. Patrick's Day!

The recipe comes from Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cookery Course. Darina Allen runs a cookery school in Ireland. She is a leader in the movement towards eating local, organic cuisine and has been for a lot longer than it has been in fashion.

Simply put, I cannot say enough good things about this cookbook. It seems to be on the shelf in every house I visit in Ireland (about 6), but I have never considered buying it. I have a lot of cookbooks and having skimmed through it, I decided that it was too similar to the Joy of Cooking in its encyclopedic coverage of every topic under the sun. Having lugged home too many cookbooks in my suitcase, I was also put off by its massive bulk. But it couldn't be avoided - we were given it as a gift this last Christmas.

And boy am I glad - in a few short months it has become one of two (Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food is the other) that I turn to almost daily. What's so great about it?

Ms. Allen is a passionate advocate for eating locally and seasonally, which is reflected in most of the recipes. The recipes generally group foods from the same season, which means that I can easily find a recipe to match whatever happens to be in my cupboard.

The sheer number of recipes at first seems like overkill, and I thought it would be hard to choose between recipes. For a reasons I can't understand, the number of recipes seems exactly right - for example, there are 13 recipes for preparing cauliflower, one to fit every mood.

So enough about my cookbook - what is Stripy Cat? It's a variation of Spotted Dog, which is a variation of Irish Soda Bread. Soda bread is a traditional Irish white flour bread, leavened with baking soda and buttermilk. It's a crunchy, rustic, tender, flavorful loaf, a little lighter than the delicious Irish Brown Bread, about which you already know I have passionate feelings.

Spotted Dog is a slightly sweeter version of soda bread, containing an egg, a little sugar and raisins, mmm. Good, but I was looking for something a little richer, and apparently so were they....

Stripy Cat is Spotted Dog but with dark chocolate chunks instead of raisins - even better!

We've made it before, but it wasn't quite what we were looking for ... today we added about 50% more chocolate, a handful of nuts, and a few more teaspoons of sugar. It turned out exactly as we hoped. Rich, crunchy, moist, chocolaty, but not too sweet.

Here is the recipe, with my variations.

In a few of my past bread posts, I've discussed the necessity to reduce flour if you're in Colorado. I do not find that to be the case with soda leavened breads. A friend of mine in New York who experimented with Brown Bread after my first post found that she had to reduce the liquid in order to get the same texture. The takeaway from this is that you should cut in the liquid slowly and stop when the dough seems only just moistened but picks up all the flour.

Stripy Cat

• 450 g (1 lb) plain (or all-purpose) unbleached flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 Tbs sugar
• 120g (4 1/2 oz) best quality, bittersweet dark chocolate, chopped roughly
• 1 handful walnuts, chopped
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
  
• 350ml (12 fl oz) buttermilk
  

Preheat the oven to 425⁰, with a baking stone if you have one.

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Mix well by lifting everything with your hands repeatedly to aerate the flour.

Mix the egg and buttermilk in a small bowl. Pour half of them over the dry ingredients and use a spatula to gently cut them in. Pour the rest of the milk mixture over the dough bit by bit, cutting it in - be sure not to overmix or add to much liquid.

The dough will be very thick and sticky and have lumps of unincorporated flour. Pat the dough into a rough ball and then drop it on a cookie sheet or pizza paddle. Flatten the ball a little into a loaf, and then cut in a deep X.

Cook on the sheet or stone at 425⁰ for 10 minutes, then lower the heat to 400⁰ and cook for 35 minutes more. The finished bread will look golden and sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.

This recipe is a basic summary of instructions - my older post on Irish Brown Bread gives helpful tips which I didn't want to repeat here. Also, if you haven't tried this bread - you're missing out. But that's not the topic for today...

This rich, buttery, crunchy bread is a nice contemporary twist on a great traditional Irish bread. Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

Colorado Sourdough from Scratch

Today was attempt #2 at using my sourdough starter to actually make bread. As much as I love tending to it and seeing it grow, I'm not looking for a new pet - it's time to put it to use.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was trying that very day to make my first ever sourdough bread. Many, many hours later, my "boules" were about as risen and tender as slightly misshapen softballs. Yumm. I decided not to waste the electricity to bake them - there was no hope.

What went wrong?

The recipe I used was suggested as the easiest one to start with for new sourdough bakers in the King Arthur book -

Pain Au Levain with Whole Wheat.

• 1 c. (9 oz) ripe whole wheat levain - yes, I have that finally!!
• 1-2/3 c. (6-5/8 oz) whole wheat flour
• 2-2/3 c. (11-1/4 oz) unbleached bread flour
• 1-1/2 c. (12-oz) cool water
• 1 Tbs honey
• 2 tsp salt
  

I am not going to recount all of the steps in detail here as the recipe is actually FIVE pages long with a few extra sidebars on other pages. If anyone is interested, let me know, and I can provide more detail.

Actually the recipe wasn't hard - easy steps with short risings in between, followed by one long rising. So I was surprised that my dough was so leaden.

After thinking back on each step in the process, I had an idea for what the problem might be. This recipe is a little unlike other yeast recipes I've used in that it suggests that you add all of the flour and water to your rising agent in the first step, stir it slowly and then let it sit for 20 minutes. This step is called an autolyse and is apparently quite important.

Heartland Mill, supplier of organic grain products, says, "This pre-hydration allows for better links between gluten and starches and results in shorter mix times and improved dough extensibility. Loaves made with autolysed dough will be easier to shape and will have more volume and better crumb structure."

In other recipes I've used, which don't happen to have this step, when the flour is added to the liquid, you only start with about two thirds of it. The remaining flour is added during the kneading process so that you can judge whether or not it is necessary.

Well, being a bit baffled by the autolyse step, I thought I'd better just follow the instructions and added all of the flour.

And this, I think, was the problem. Colorado is extremely dry, which makes the flour here extremely dry. The drier your flour, the more liquid it will need. When making bread, your liquid amount is predetermined, so all you can do to get the right balance is use less flour. When I make yeast bread, I typically add about 1/2 to 1 c. less flour than suggested for a two loaf recipe.

Rather than pay attention to this previously observed pattern, I just dumped in all of the flour. As soon as I began the first kneading step, I sensed a problem.

Whole wheat bread dough is extremely wet and sticky to knead, which is quite different than white bread dough. After a good kneading period and the right amount of flour, a white bread dough will feel smooth, warm and elastic - maybe a little tacky, but definitely not sticky. Whole wheat dough will feel elastic, but it will be much more sticky. If you add enough flour to whole wheat dough to make it smooth, the dough will be so heavy that the yeast won't be strong enough to make it rise.

And that was my problem... my dough felt exactly like white bread dough.

So today I started over, which brings us to the present...

Man, this bread takes a long time to make. I am not kidding, here are (roughly) the steps:

• Mix the starter, water and flour slowly.
  
• Let rest for 20 minutes
• Add salt and honey, knead for a few minutes
• Let rise for 45 minutes
• Put dough on floured surface, spread into a rectangle, fold up like a letter, twice, put back in bowl.
• Let rise for 45 minutes
• Repeat folding step
• Rise for, surprise, surprise, 45 minutes
• Turn onto surface, divide in two, draw up edges and pinch together
• Let rest for 20 minutes
• Shape into boules (long, long explanation here which I don't really understand, basically I ... shaped them into taught rounds)
• Put into bowls or baskets lined with heavily (didn't do it heavily enough!) floured, smooth tea towels and cover
• Let rise for 2 to 2-1/2 hours
• During rise, preheat oven to 450⁰ for half hour with baking stone on middle rack and iron skillet on bottom rack
• Bake loaves on stone for 10 minutes at 450⁰, then 20-30 minutes at 425⁰. When putting loaves in the oven, put 1/2 c. water into iron skillet to create steam, which makes the crust crispy.
  

The only modification I made was to hold back about 3 oz of the bread flour from the first step. As it turns out, I never needed to add it back. The dough seemed to fit the description pretty well from thereon out.

How did it turn out? ... It was everything I hoped for: chewy, tender, crusty, and with the extra flavor of a whole wheat loaf.

So ... living in a town with great artisan bread available, was it worth it all the effort? It tasted quite similar to expensive breads I've bought. The one extra characteristic I noticed was that it tasted fresher. I don't know why, given that any bakery bread I'd buy around here would have been baked that morning, but my husband and I both agreed that it definitely tasted fresher. And it's pretty cool that I made the whole thing using flour, water, honey and salt.

Notice that in the picture, the loaf is half eaten. That picture was taken about 3 minutes after we cut into the first loaf. That might give you an idea of how it tasted. So at this point, I'm thinking I'll keep my little pet around for awhile.

Yeast Gone WILD!!!!!

And now for my next baking adventure. I've introduced brown bread - a simple soda leavened bread. I've had a first attempt at using sprouted wheat (haven't tried sprouted wheat bagels yet, still on the list).

These aren't quite doing it for me... I really have a craving for a nice, chewy crusty loaf.

Through all the research and experimentation I've done (OK, I admit - not that much, but I have read my two baking cookbooks and I have really good reading comprehension) , I've come to realize that this is not such an easy thing to come by. Soft, tender, yeast leavened sandwich bread is pretty easy to make at home, and it generally only takes a few hours. But this wasn't what I wanted. The more recipes I read, the more I realized that the crusty, chewy texture of French, sourdough, and other types of artisan bread comes from growing a starter for a minimum of one night, and often more.

After browsing a few choices, I decided to attempt a sourdough starter completely from scratch - no yeast, nothing except water and whole wheat flour. I've heard that sourdough starters can be extremely finicky and difficult to make, but what's the worst that can happen... I'll throw a bunch of flour away? Thank goodness for Boulder's Curbside Compost Pickup - that helps alleviate the guilt!

I chose a method from King Arthur's Whole Grain Baking. The basic steps are as follows:

• Combine 1 c. (4 oz) whole wheat flour and 1/2 c. (4 oz) cool water. Cover and leave at room temperature.
• The next day and the day after, feed the mixture by discarding half of the mixture and mixing in the same amount of flour and water. Cover and let sit. By the third day, the mixture should show signs of expansion and smell fruity.
• Every day thereafter, the mixture needs to be fed every 12 hours with the same amount of flour and water.
• After the 5th day, the mixture can be used as a starter.

What does all of this mean? It sounds so mysterious. Why do I have to wait for 5 days if the mixture starts to expand after two? Well, I found lots of conflicting information, but the explanation that seems to make the most sense to me is a great explanation I found from Mike of Sourdough Home.

Basically, whole grain flour is loaded with lots of different yeast and bacteria. Through regular feedings, the two that you are interested in - yeast and lactobacillus bacteria will eventually thrive and kill of all of the rest. This takes about a week. If you aren't regular with your feedings, your starter will either stop growing or start growing other things you don't want, like mold. He recommends that you use a starter when it is at least a week old and doubling in size every 12 hours.

By the way, you discard half the mixture at every feeding unless you want an exponentially growing starter (doubling every 12 hours and doubling the amount of flour needed to keep it from starving). I like bread, but I'm not planning on making that much.

So how did mine go?

The initial mixture was a very thick, dry paste. I was skeptical. See picture on the right...

The next day, I didn't see any sign of activity, but it did smell distinctively yeasty. That seemed positive. I fed as instructed.

By the third day, it was growing like crazy. It looked bubbly and smelled fruity, just as described.

I faithfully fed it every 12 hours (or so!) and by the sixth day it was still going strong and I was dying to use it. To the right are pictures of my growing blob after this morning's feeding and this afternoon when I got home from work. You can see why I call it a blob - I could have nightmares about this.

So it seems that in Colorado it is not so hard to get a sourdough culture started... I would have liked to have said that my next post would be about the great bread I made with it, but I'm afraid this will take a little more practice. I attempted my first bread tonight and after about 2 hours of rising, the dough hasn't risen at all.

Well, I'll have another blob of excess starter ready in the morning for attempt #2. If it doesn't get me first ...

Toothy Sprouted Wheat Bread

I am a bread lover. I pretty much love every kind of bread except for cheap, mass produced bread. I toggle between various favorites: Irish brown bread, meaty, tender French bread (it's not whole grain, but is irresistible), crusty, tangy, whole grain sourdough, sweet, multi-grain, seeded, artisan breads. We're pretty lucky actually, the selection of breads in Boulder is amazing. Udi's, BreadWorks, Whole Foods. Yet somehow I'm still always looking for the perfect loaf to make myself.

I don't even know exactly what I want. Actually, I guess I want it all. A thick, crunchy crust. A soft, chewy (what I call meaty) interior. The extra bite and nutrition of whole grain. Sometimes I like the tangy taste of sourdough, sometimes I want something milder.

Taking the whole grain idea to the extreme are the makers of sprouted wheat baked goods. And as I said in my last post, I LOVE sprouted wheat bagels and want to try to make them. Given that I had never worked with sprouted wheat before (or made bagels, for that matter), I thought I should start with an easy bread recipe.

Sandwich breads, which don't require an overnight starter, seem to be one of the easier yeast-leavened breads to make at home, and as all of the sprouted wheat bread recipes I found were of this variety, I thought this was a good place to start.

I had a few recipes to choose, from two different cookbooks: King Arthur's Whole Grain Baking and Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads. I chose the recipe from the latter because the King Arthur's recipes had a larger set of ingredients - I thought the simpler the better. I also liked the Book of Breads' recipe because it uses 100% whole wheat flour. I don't often find completely whole grain recipes, so I was eager to try it.

I sprouted the grains for a total of three days - the recipe recommended 3-4, stopping when the sprout was the same length as the berry. I was a little confused as to how to decide this. From almost the first day, there was a very thin sprout (or two) emerging from the berry. By the third day, this sprout was longer than the berry on almost all berries. I also noticed that there was a thicker sprout coming out of some of the berries, which wasn't nearly as long as the berry yet. I wondered whether this wasn't actually the sprout that the recipe meant. I decided to ignore this and just use them after three days.

The recipe I used was a simple recipe consisting of mixing regular yeast with warm water, honey, brewer's yeast, oil and whole wheat flour. After letting this mixture double in size, the sprouts and the remainder of the flour are added and kneaded until the dough is smooth, stretchy and slightly sticky (as apparently whole wheat breads always remain stickier than white bread).

One thing I always find tricky about making bread is that I can never decide exactly when the dough has doubled in size (it'd be so much easier in a cylindrical bowl). I once took a cooking class in which they recommended that you are careful never to let bread risings go too long, as this can make the the air bubbles in the cooked bread irregular. Apparently this is especially a problem in Colorado because bread rises faster than at lower altitudes. Anyway, I thought that I had erred on the side of punching it down too early, but the texture ended up being fine.

I would say that the final product was a bit of a disappointment, but this could be because I'm expecting everything from one loaf...

The crust was pretty good for a sandwich loaf, and the whole grains added a nice flavor. The crumb (or texture of the air bubbles) was regular and soft.

I think I was disappointed for a few reasons. First, I guess I just don't like sandwich bread that much. It was crumbly and a bit dry after just a day or two, which often happens with homemade, obviously preservative free, bread. The more serious problem though was the star of the show - the sprouts. They were a tooth killer. I don't know if I should have waited for the thicker sprout to grow longer or what I could have done differently, but these sprouts were not right. Some of them were so hard they could have taken out a tooth.

Interestingly, both King Arthur's recipes called for grinding the sprouted berries in a food processor with some water and adding these at the beginning of the recipe rather than adding whole berries later in the process. I did a little more poking around, and it looks like most recipes call for grinding the sprouted berries. And my worry about the berries being hard because of not having sprouted long enough seems to be unfounded - all of the images I found show that my sprouts had grown enough, if not too much.

All in all, I'm still intrigued by the prospect of making sprouted wheat bagels, but I think I need to do a little more experimentation with sprouted wheat itself before I can hope to achieve the Alvarado pinnacle.

Incidentally, Alvarado Street has an FAQ in which they discuss the ingredients in their baked goods. Basically they sprout berries in water, drain and and grind them, adding fresh yeast, salt and honey or some other sweet ingredient. That sounds pretty simple, but almost too simple. I may have to try experimenting with this method next, although I have a feeling it will take a lot of attempts to go completely recipe free with success.

Sprouting Wheat Berries

I realized in rereading my posts that I've been exploring mostly animal products - dairy, meat and eggs. Ironically, these aren't that large a part of my diet - I've just been on a recent kick of using up milk and finding pastured eggs.

My diet consists much more of vegetables and grains than animal products, so I thought I should start a new project related to one of these...

One of the few processed, non-local foods I buy is Alvarado St Bakery Sprouted Wheat Bagels. Why do I buy non-local bagels? Because they are TO DIE FOR. Soooo sooo good. They are hands down the best bagels I've ever eaten, and I want to learn how to make them.

Double challenge! I've never cooked sprouted wheat anything, and I have no idea how to make bagels.

I decided to divide and conquer, by making something with sprouted wheat before trying the bagels. I settled on a recipe for sprouted wheat sandwich bread in "Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads".

First I obviously have to sprout the wheat, which takes 4-5 days.

Here is my setup. Fill a jar with warm water and 1/4 c. wheat berries. Cover the jar with cheesecloth and a rubber band (or in my case, an old t-shirt poked with a few holes). Drain out the water, lay the jar on it's side in a dark, warm place. Add and drain new warm water twice a day, saving the water to use later on the bread. They are finished when the sprouts are as long as the original seed.

And after one day, my seeds are starting to sprout! Cool. I don't know if I should be this excited - Something in me is wondering if I feel deprived from never having done the seed in a cup science project as a 7 year old.

I don't have a sprout cam, but I will post a few pictures as my little buddies progress.

Irish Brown Bread - Breakfast of Champions

So now I’ve started a blog. I will confess that I don’t really know what I’m doing. Do I start by gradually explaining my food philosophy in sequential entries? Do I start by talking about my food heroes? Do I start by talking about what I’m cooking right now? I’m sure it doesn’t matter, but for some reason it feels like my first substantive entry should be about something profoundly important.

So here it is… My favorite food: Irish Brown Bread. Specifically, my mother-in-law’s Irish Brown Bread. I swear that this bread is so delicious and feels so wholesome and filling in my belly, that if humans had to pick a single food item on which to survive, I’d definitely recommend this one.

The first time I had it was a few months after I started dating my (now) husband. We went to Ireland for a few days for a wedding. We stopped at his parent’s house where his mother had laid out a quick breakfast of this strange lumpy looking bread, juice and tea. From the first bite, I was blown away. It was crusty and heavy, but moist and delicately flavored. The grains of wheat tasted nutty and complex without being dense or earthy as whole grain breads often are. I couldn’t stop eating it.

I asked him what was this amazing bread, had his mother slaved over it for hours? He said, “What that stuff, you like it?” He’d grown up with it at every meal, day in, day out, for his entire childhood. Then he had a slice and said, “Yea, I guess that is pretty good.”

Now, anyone who’s been to Ireland knows that the bread there is pretty good. Every pub, whether it has a good or terrible menu or no menu at all, serves delicious soup and brown bread. But it just doesn’t match up to hers.

I had to learn how to make this bread. My first strategy was to ask her for the recipe. That didn’t get me very far. She doesn’t follow a recipe. She makes it by feel, and every day, it’s a little bit different. How could I possibly “mix some wholemeal flour with buttermilk until it seems about like this?” And to make matters more complicated, she has unsuccessfully tried making the bread in the US, even bringing her own flour with her. Something in the climate changes the taste and texture. Hmmm…

Second, what on earth is wholemeal flour? It looks just like American whole wheat flour, but there is something different about the taste and texture. Check out this link out to see an example of the confusion over how to find wholemeal flour in the US. King Arthur’s defines it as “a coarsely ground, soft red whole wheat flour” and even sells it.

So my next strategy was to look for a recipe using American ingredients that tasted close. I read through every recipe I could find online or in books, looking for something that sounded close to the taste I remember. After a few attempts, I found an epicurious recipe that is as close as I think I’m ever going to get. It’s not quite as good, but it’ll do. On a recent visit, the master herself proclaimed, in true Irish fashion, that it was better than hers, which is simply not true, but must mean it’s not bad!

So how do you make it? It’s incredibly easy.

It consists primarily of wholemeal flour (as discussed above), leavened by baking soda and quite a bit of buttermilk. The contrast of the buttermilk and the wheat is what gives it the amazing texture and taste. The wheat tastes nutty and crunchy, while the buttermilk tastes moist, velvety and creamy.

I usually use regular whole wheat flour, but once I did use fresh ground whole wheat flour bought at the local farmer’s market. I can’t honestly say that I could taste a difference, but I let it sit around a while before using it, which probably had an effect.

I follow the epicurious recipe pretty closely, but here are a few extra notes.

Sprinkle a pizza paddle or baking sheet generously with cornmeal before starting. Your hands are going to get really messy, so you won’t be able to do this later.

Don’t buy toasted bran and germ, just toast them in a pan for a few minutes until golden and nutty smelling.

Mix all the dry ingredients and the butter together in the bowl as instructed. Then slowly add the buttermilk. This dough should be handled just enough to get the ingredients holding together or it will become tough. I use a large spatula and a folding motion to mix in the liquid and stop well before it’s mixed in. The amount of liquid needed varies. The dough should seem moist and sticky but not oozing, and it will be quite irregular. In the bowl, I use my hands to form the dough into a ball and then transfer it to the paddle, patting it down into a mound. Use a sharp knife to cut a deep X into it. Either bake it on the cookie sheet or better yet, slide it off the paddle onto a baking stone.

This is hard to do, but be sure to let it cool completely before cutting it, or steam will escape causing it to dry out. To serve, cut it into quarters along the X and slice each quarter like a mini loaf.


Finally – what’s the best way to eat it? Smeared in butter and orange marmalade is the traditional way, although open faced sandwiches with cheese and ham make a delicious light lunch. The only real rule is that you have to eat it quickly, as it dries out after a day or so. This hasn’t ever been a problem in our house.