A Veritable Cornucopia of Valentine's Edibles (Verily)

The plan for Valentine's Day proper was to partake in some SF Beer Week shenanigans and get a cheap dinner and instead do a big, fancy meal cooked at home the previous day. The Beer Week event was a shit-show and we went elsewhere, but the dinner was a roaring success. We had worked out a decent menu consisting of things we both agreed would be delicious: a candied walnut, cranberry, and feta salad with a cranberry vinaigrette; rosemary and cranberry pork tenderloin with sauce; roasted root vegetables tossed in oil and herbs; hand-made truffles.

You'll notice a theme running through the meal - cranberries. We thought it cute to have a culinary theme, especially a red one (the default color of Valentine's). Spoiler alert: a very sugary theme can be a bit oppressive, especially when you have cranberry juice instead of wine with the meal. Do note that each dish, except the truffles (more on that later), was delicious on its own; having a link between two dishes is nice, and I'm sure a greater chef could have made it work. Also, cranberries turn purple-ish when cooked into things like sauces.

Also I want to re-iterate something: the pork was amazing. Seriously, a delicious testament to porcine perfection. It may not have equaled the levels of NOPA's pork chop (and, if you happen to find something as good, TELL ME) but for home-cooked meat I don't think I've had much better. The recipe was quick, easy, and not intimidating for a non-meat-cooker such as myself. Recipes, photos, and cutesy stuff follows.

Mashed-and-Baked Parsnip with Sage "Gravy", Broccolini, and Spicy Beans

A few ideas planted themselves in my mind yesterday - broccolini is and will always be delicious, I haven't made potatoes ever, and sauces are delicious. A plan was hatched for cooking: one surefire thing, one probably good thing, and one experiment. All on the same plate! Well, this is the overall meal. I would say "rousing success" but I usually under-season things and it was a dinner for one, so no actual judgement was passed upon this meal.

The "surefire thing" actually turned out to be two things - the broccolini and the beans. I've charred broccolini enough times to call it a go-to dish and I have definitely cooked enough beans to feed an army of very flatulent soldiers. The rest of the meal was more experimental - while I have consumed, and watched the process of cooking, mashed potatoes many times, I have never partaken in the process. I guessed my way through it (and used parsnips instead of potatoes) by boiling them until they were quite soft, then mashing them. It seemed to work.

The gravy was an educated guess at how to make a no-meat no-packet gravy. It mostly worked, but it did take a while. My basic idea was learned watching my grandmother produce the gravy for Thanksgiving last year - she boiled chopped onion in some water until it essentially disappeared. Then she added turkey drippings, but I wasn't about to cook a turkey just for the drippings. Bean liquid, that which comes in the can with canned beans, seemed a likely substitute.

While I had the oven set to 475 degrees and pre-heating, I got a clever idea for the already-mashed parsnips. Throw them in the oven to brown! It would be perfect, a true masterpiece, a notch on my belt of amazing meals. The reality was a little different - I don't think it did anything much to them - but I can pretend. The rest of the things that came out of the oven were good enough.

Mashed-and-Baked Parsnip Cake w/ Gravy/Beans (serves 1.5, takes 1h or so)

• 2 parsnips
• 1 carrot
• 1 medium yellow onion
• 1 bunch radishes
• 1 bunch broccolini
• 1 bunch fresh sage
• 1 can brown beans, undrained
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 tbsp flour
• cumin
• paprika
• salt
• pepper
• olive oil
• (optional) source of spiciness (here: sriracha sauce)

Peel onion and slice into rings/slivers. In saucepan with lid, place onion, water, fresh sage, and liquid from can of beans. Bring to boil, add the cumin and paprika, then cover and simmer while you prepare everything else. Chop parsnips into smallish cubes and place in boiling water until a fork destroys them.

While things boil and simmer, prepare everything else: dice half of the carrot, slice long strips out of the other half, dice most the radish leaving a few thin slices for garnish. Preheat oven to 475 degrees. On baking sheet, place broccolini, sliced carrot, sliced radish. Brush lightly with olive oil and sprinkle salt on top.

Drain parsnips and mash them, adding a dash of olive oil, salt, and paprika. Heat on medium for a minute or two while stirring in the diced carrot and radish. In a bread pan or other oven-safe dish a few inches deep, form parsnip mixture into a square. Place baking sheet of broccolini et al and bread pan of parsnip et al into the oven.

While everything bakes, heat the beans in a pot, adding salt and pepper plus spiciness. If you don't want them spicy, they should probably get an additional flavor of something, but I leave that to the reader. After ten minutes, shut off the oven. Increase heat on simmering gravy to high and gradually add in flour, constantly whisking while it boils. Let boil for a minute or two, it should thicken as you stir, and reduce back to simmer.

Serve as I have in the picture, or freestlye that dish.

More Experiments

A followup on two previous experiments for today. The first, and most delicious, would be the bread (the first link, previously named "Cornmeal Raisin Rolls"). I think, after tweaking the recipe a bit, I've got a new name for it - Chewy-as-Hell Bread. Also delicious. Also containing raisins. I doubled the amount of cornmeal in the dough and slightly upped the raisins - this made it a tad firmer, and infinitely chewier, than the previous recipe. If you want to bake this at home, you can experiment with adding a very small amount of honey (like a teaspoon or two to give it more sweetness) and changing the amount of raisins (up or down, your call).

I just noticed - the scoring pattern kind of makes the loaf look like a pile of crap. Umm, I assure you, it tasted nothing of the sort. I tried two new things on this loaf, in addition to tweaking the recipe. First, I used a poor-mans couche/basket combo to try and shape the loaf better. As pictured below, I prepared a metal boal by putting some paper towel in it, spraying it with a bit of oil, and then dropping the dough in, seam-side up. If we go by finished product, I think it worked, but visually there was no indication of any differences, besides creating a pocketed pattern on the dough (seen below on the right).

The other major change in baking style was to improvise a dutch oven for the first half of baking. I baked in a cast-iron skillet, but put a spare 9x9 casserole dish I had over the top. I think this had an effect on the dough, but I didn't try an A/B test so I don't know for sure. It definitely had a very crispy crust around it, more than I usually get from a loaf.

Chewy-as-Hell Bread

• 310g unbleached bread flour
• 255g warm water
• 60g polenta-grind cornmeal (previously: 30g)
• 20g raisins (previously: 15g)
• 7g salt
• 4g instant yeast

The night before:

Combine yeast and warm water, making sure yeast is active (it should bubble a little, the yeast will mostly dissolve, and it will smell great). Combine all dry ingredients except raisins in a bowl, mix. Add the water and yeast, stirring for a minute with a wooden spoon until all the water is absorbed. Add the raisins, stirring for another minute. Let rest for 5, then stretch and fold four times with a ten minute rest between each. You must stretch and fold - you can see the before and after below. The dough goes from a gooey, sticky mess to an almost-manageable, still sticky ball.

The day of:
2 hours before baking, remove the dough and shape into a loaf on a lightly-floured work surface. Proof at room temperature, covered. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. 10 minutes before baking, remove the cover and coat an oven-safe pan (cast iron, no wooden handle) with cornmeal (normal cornmeal, not polenta-grind). Place the loaf in the pan. Right before placing it in the oven, score the dough. Put in oven, cover with another oven-safe metal thing, and reduce heat to 450 degrees. Let bake for 12 minutes, rotate the pan and remove the lid. Let bake for 12 more minutes, turn off the oven, and let the dough sit in the oven for 5 more minutes. Cool for an hour before cutting/serving.

Experiment Two, Shortbread (Longer Bake Time)
And an update on shortbread experimentation: I tried cooking for 20 minutes at 325, using the base "sweet" recipe. Much better - very flaky and hard, a tiny bit browned. I think 350 might be the optimal temperature for 20 minutes because the very center still had a bit of yellow, not white, dough.

Sourdough is Hard, Let's Go Shopping

My sourdough starter decided it was mature enough to enlist in the bread-making army a few days ago. For a fresh recruit, it didn't do a bad job. Now, sourdough starters are hard work. Not in a prison sentence, manual labor kind of way; it is more like taking care of a small child for the first week. You have to stir it a few times a day, feed it every few days, and keep a careful eye on it. It took about 8 days to go from a small pile of flour and pineapple juice to a mother starter that now sits in my fridge, to be picked apart and used in any future sourdough breads.

On top of that first week of twice-a-day checking, the bread involves much more waiting than any of the other loaves. I went with two recipes - San Francisco Sourdough (fitting) and 100% Whole Wheat Sourdough. Both were purist - that is, they contained no yeast beyond what I captured in the air for my starter. This meant making a bread-specific starter [few minutes of mixing, 6-8 hours of waiting], making the dough itself [few minutes of mixing, 40 minutes of stretch-and-fold, 2-3 hours rising that night], and letting it rise yet again before the baking [4 hours of rising]. I can't imagine cooking this bread having to work that day.

Going for the purist version, especially for my first sourdough, was probably a mistake. The San Francisco loaf did not rise the least in the oven and I undercooked it - it became a somewhat doughy, very dense mass of sourdough. Still tasty, mind you, but nothing like the lean bread in airiness. Next time I may have to add in some instant yeast after the starter to get those pockets a-forming. The Whole Wheat fared much better, as evidenced by the photo above. Neither loaf really had much sourdough tang; I will assume this is due to my starter being fresh.

 Now that I have the starter, I can try some fancier recipes without worrying about subbing in instant yeast for the starter - Pain au Levain might come next, or possibly even a panettone-based recipe (though the one in my book needs 12-16 hours to rise, which would be difficult to fit into any schedule).

Snickerdoodles

A dessert! A delicious, delicious dessert! This recipe made its way to me via Smitten Kitchen and it looked easy enough. I won't copy the recipe here (as we didn't modify it at all), but there were a few learnings from it.

Something was slightly off with our cookies when they came out of the oven - its either the fact some extra salt spilled into the recipe, or that our cinnamon and sugar bowl wasn't empty when the last cookie was coated. I would recommend switching from 1 1/2 cups sugar in dough and 1/4 cup reserved to 1 5/8 cups sugar in dough and 1/4 cup reserved. You can use the extra sugar/cinnamon mixture as an ice cream topper. Trust me, it is really good.

 Otherwise, no changes in the recipe - the cooking time of 10 minutes was spot-on. The second batch ended up getting 12 minutes and the smaller ones got far too crispy. Also, be warned, these are soft cookies. If you want your snickerdoodles hard, go elsewhere.

 A word of warning: if you don't have a mixer, fluffing butter and sugar can take some work. The strategy I used was to cube the butter to about the size of sugar cubes and knead the sugar in by hand. Once it is a smooth consistency, put it in a small bowl about twice the volume of the butter mass and stir quickly with a wooden spoon until it gets fluffy or airy. You can also use a whisk towards the end, but it isn't strictly necessary.

Pesto Chicken, Veggie Roast, and Bananas Foster

I don't know if you've ever had Bananas Foster. If you haven't, you should. Do you like sugar and butter? Lighting things on fire? Ice cream? You get all of those things, in about ten minutes of work, for a recipe that will kick the ass of any cookies or cakes your pansy-ass could bake. Need I say more?

Bananas Foster served over hemp-milk vanilla ice cream

Actually I guess I do because this post is short and contains no recipes. Dinner had aspirations of a salmon baked in pesto, served with oven-roasted vegetables. The corner store (while not technically on a corner, it satisfies all other requirements) failed to deliver. While an impressive selection of dried foods is admirable, the only meat they had suitable for cooking was chicken.

Also, being me, I like trying to make my sauces from scratch. Pesto from scratch isn't bad under the assumption you have either a mortar and pestle, or a food processor. Otherwise just buy it pre-made. Trust me.

To pair with chicken, potatoes, carrots, and onion was deemed sufficient. Potatoes because they are delicious, onion because seriously have you never roasted an onion? Stop reading and go do it. It is amazing. I think the carrots were for color.

Pesto chicken, roasted veggies

Basil Pesto (makes enough for 2 peoples chicken)

• 1 bunch of basil leaves
• 1 clove garlic
• dash of olive oil
• dash of salt
• pine nuts

Finely chop the basil and the garlic. The fineness is a function of your obsessive-compulsive tendencies and patience, but think of nori flakes or dried herbs for a size guideline. In a mortar and pestle, add a splash of olive oil, 1/4 of the garlic, and 1/4 of the basil. Mash this for a few minutes and taste. Here you decide if the 1-1 ratio of basil and garlic is good or not. The mixture should look too liquidy to be pesto right now - if it isn't, add a bit more olive oil. After deciding your ratio, continue adding in basil and garlic until you've used up all of one or the other. Remember this ratio for next time. When you have a decent consistency, add a dash of salt and 10-ish pine nuts , mashing them in. Taste and serve (or add more pine nuts/salt but don't forget to serve).

Oven Roasted Veggies (serves 2)

• 4 small potatoes
• 2 carrots
• 1 yellow onion
• 2 stalks rosemary
• dash of salt
• dash of pepper
• dash of olive oil

Preheat oven to 425. Slice the potatoes, carrots, and onions into approximately thumb-sized pieces. Place in a oven-safe dish so they aren't stacked up, toss in some olive oil and stir everything around. After adding a coat of olive oil, add the seasonings. Put in oven, covered, for 20 minutes, stir, and cook for 20-30 more minutes (until the potatoes are soft, the carrots are slightly crispy, and some of the onion has carmelized).

Pesto Chicken (serves 2)

• 1 recipe pesto, above
• 1 chicken breast
• pine nuts
• lemon juice

Preheat oven to 425. Cover chicken breast in pesto, squirt lemon juice on it, and add some pine nuts. Put it in the oven, covered, for 20-25 minutes. Remove the lid and cook for 10 more minutes. Really, did I need to write that recipe out for you?

Bananas Foster (serves 4)

• 2 bananas, cut in half down the middle then lengthwise
• 1/4 cup butter (half a stick)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons rum
• vanilla ice cream

In a pan on the lowest heat your stove can manage, melt the stick of butter. Slowly add in the brown sugar and raise the heat to medium-high. Once the sugar has been incorporated, add in the bananas. Cook this for a few minutes - the bananas should brown but not fall apart (yet). Remove from heat, throw in the rum, return to heat. Wait for it to light on fire. Try and get it to lite on fire by tilting the pan and exposing the rum to the side of it. Be disappointed that nothing burst into flames.

Immediately serve over two scoops of ice cream by removing the bananas, then drizzling the remaining sauce on top. Eat immediately. If you let it cool, you have ruined the dish and missed out on delicious.

This Bread Contains no Water

Except that which is found in beer. Yeah, you read the right. Also it contains cheese. So, two delicious and wonderful things, all rolled up into delicious, delicious morsels. This bread is somewhat of a departure, as it can't (easily) be used for sandwiches or have things spread on it. It exists in a condiment-free vacuum; a galaxy of tastes yet to be explored. It is also, distinctly, bread - not like dessert breads or pastries.

So, yes, this bread is magnificent and wonderful. It has Lagunitas Brown Shugga and some sharp cheddar cheese. The other ingredients are nothing new - flour, yeast, salt, brown sugar, melted butter (presumably for a bit of flake), buttermilk (for softness), and chives. It, like all the bread I've cooked before, came from Artisan Breads Every Day (specifically, "Soft Cheese Bread").

The dough was very firm compared to the liquid-heavy ones I have been making lately, requiring a lot more hand-stirring time (6 or 7 minutes, compared to a usual 2-4) and a kneading instead of a stretch and fold. For liquids, it had (roughly) equal parts buttermilk and beer, and a 3:1 flour to liquid ratio (by volume).

To get the swirl, after overnight cold fermentation, the dough was rolled flat and cubed cheese placed on top. I then rolled it up from one end, closed the seam with a wet fingertip, and sliced it. I let these slices rise. Sadly, some of them rejected cheese cubes during this process, preferring to use the space for expanding dough. They were reprimanded and the cheese was pushed back in before I placed them in the oven.

The only flaw with the cooking (although I wouldn't call it anything other than cosmetic) were darkened bottoms, as the cheese melted out of the spirals, coated the bottom, and then cooked into a crispy delicious layer. Actually, that sounds less like a flaw and more like a delicious accident.

LazyDinner (Teriyaki Tofu)

I had plans, big plans, for dinner last night. I was going to pick a recipe out of my comfort zone, I was going to cook that shit up, and it was going to be good. Except it was raining so I took MUNI home. Not the wisest idea, that. After getting stuck for 30-ish minutes, I arrived home much later and much hungrier than anticipated.

Scrap my adventurous plans, its time for some stir-fry. Lazy stir fry. With beer.

The grocery store sells these pre-packaged, freshly-prepared "stir fry" mixes. Mostly bell pepper, but also some zucchini and squash. That, a block of tofu, and some Soy Vay, and we've got ourselves a meal. Adding a recipe wouldn't be too useful - I think it was equal parts teriyaki sauce and beer, plus the tofu and veggies, served on rice.

An Experiment in Breadmaking

Having not royally screwed up any of the last few batches of bread, I decided to experiment in the hopes of fixing the situation. I was not successful. That is, to say, I was successful in making good bread but not in failing.

Raisins really pop in a hot oven, its impressive

I based my recipe on the "Lean Bread" from Reinhart's Artisan Breads Everyday as seen before, but I wanted a few modifications. I really liked the polenta-grind cornmeal from the Struan I cooked as it gave the bread a bit of toughness and chewy. Given that, I was biking home on my way to make the bread when I passed by a coffee shop I frequent. They server donuts there in a rotating variety of flavors, and one of my favorite is the cornmeal cherry. And so it was set - I would make cornmeal cherry rolls.

Except I didn't have any cherries (dried or otherwise) and the closest grocery store was closing in five minutes. I did have raisins, however. You can find the recipe at the end of this post, but first a bit on what I would fix with it next time.

What the rolls looked like inside.

For one, the dough looked pretty good on first mixing, achieving that "shaggy ball" Reinhart talks so much about.

The shaggy ball

However, the stretch and fold steps felt far too much on the watery side - the dough was far too easy to stretch and flattened out immensely when I let it sit. For reference, this is what it looked like after overnight refrigeration:

Notice how it has spread out flat to fill the available space. It also had not risen much, but enough to go forward with the dough. I made rolls the usual way - oiled work surface, floured hands, shaping with the palm of my hand. Everything looked fine when I set the dough to proof

Rolls ready to proof for two hours

Except...

Rolls after one hour

They had completely lost their shape and were very sticky to the touch. I whipped out a cutting board, floured the hell out of it, floured the hell out of my hands, and rolled them around a bit before shaping them again. This second working probably saved the shapes:

Post second working/shaping

That means I either needed a little less water or a little more flour in the base recipe. I thought the cornmeal would soak up water like flour, so I replaced flour 1:1 with cornmeal. Given how watery the final dough was, and the amount of flour I added in while working the dough, my guess is a good ratio would be more like 1:1.5 (that is, if you remove 10g of flour, you can add in 15g of the cornmeal). However, a dough this liquidy can make rolls so it didn't really ruin my plans. If you wanted to make a loaf, definitely up the amount of flour by 20g or so.

Cornmeal Raisin Rolls (makes 8-ish rolls)

• 310g unbleached bread flour
• 255g warm-ish water
• 30g polenta-grind cornmeal (coarse ground cornmeal)
• 15g-ish raisins
• 7g salt
• 4g yeast

The night before:

Combine all ingredients in a bowl, stir with a wooden spoon for 2 minutes. Let rest in the bowl for 5 minutes, uncovered, at room temperature. Lightly oil a work surface and your hands and do the stretch and fold method 4 times, giving a 10 minute rest between each iteration. To stretch and fold, plop the dough down on the surface and pull the dough out from the top, folding it back over itself. Repeat on the bottom, left, and right. Put it back in the bowl and cover for 10 minutes before repeating. After the 4 iterations, cover and place in the fridge overnight.

The day of cooking:

2 hours before cooking the dough, remove it from the fridge. Flour a work surface, flour your hands, and form rolls with the dough ball allowing a layer of flour to get worked into each roll. Put parchment paper down on a baking sheet, flour the paper, and place the rolls on it.

1 hour before cooking the dough, if the rolls have sagged, gently work them again by flouring a work surface and your hands. Make flat palms and put a hand on each side of the roll, and rotate it gently. Place back on floured parchment paper.

30 minutes before cooking, heat the oven to 450 degrees (you can also use the hearthstone/steam burst baking method, but I didn't).

Cook the rolls for 10 minutes, rotate the pan, cook for 5-8 more minutes. Turn off the oven, but leave the rolls in for another 5 minutes. Let cool for 20 minutes or so before serving unless you want to burn yourself.

Simple Vegan Pancakes, Improved

An improvement to the vegan pancake recipe I've posted before, along with more photos. This adds a banana to the batter itself and some honey to sweeten the deal. The banana alters the taste a bit, but mostly serves to increase the creaminess of the finished pancakes. The end result are very fluffy pancakes that are similar in texture to the buttermilk pancakes I grew up with.

Ingredients you will need (to make 4 pancakes, enough for 1 person with a small side)

• 1/4 cup pastry flour
• 1/4 cup buckwheat flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk
• 1 banana
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp honey
• tiny pinch of sea salt

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1) Cut the banana in half and mush it with the back of a spoon into a paste.

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2) Stir in the rest of the ingredients, saving half the other half of the banana for later.

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3) Place two spoonfuls (ish, about 1/4 of the batter) into a frying pan on medium low. Flip the pancake when bubbles form in the center, like this.

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4) Let cook about ten more seconds, remove from heat. Top pancakes with remainder of banana, sliced.

Con-Struan the Yeast Label Wrong

Okay, I can't believe I just made that pun.

No, wait, I can.

First off, the final product:

Loaf of Struan bread, for my toasting pleasure

Now, tell me if you can spot any problems in this photo:

Ingredients, going left-to-right, top-to-bottom: bread flour, buttermilk, oat bran, cooked brown rice, polenta-grind corn, salt, yeast, water, rolled oats, brown sugar.

Here are some problems: the honey in the recipe isn't pictured (but I did still use it), my photo composition (especially w.r.t. colors) could use some work, you can't see that the bowl on the bottom left is full of water, and the yeast pictured is "Active Dry", not "Instant" as called for by the recipe.

The last one is killer. Turns out active dry isn't quite as effective as instant yeast (research says its about 25% dead weight, so the 9g called for in the recipe should have been about 11g or 12g). Also, you are supposed to wake it up more than simply mixing it in with warm ingredients. By giving it a bath. Man, I don't want to give my yeast a bath. I just want to throw it in with some flour and make magic.

But you couldn't tell anything was going wrong at first - I mixed all the ingredients together as instructed and it formed a nice shaggy ball:

The flour on top is for kneading the dough, which I dutifully did. Then, there was the stretching and the folding, as outlined in many previous posts. After that 45 minutes of work, I was left with this beautiful specimen:

"Great work, Mikey!" I thought. Except when I checked in on the dough the next morning, I was greeted by... a ball of dough that hadn't risen the least bit. Like so:

I still had a day and a half before I planned to bake it, so I thought to give it time.

Time was not what it needed.

It needed me to read directions properly.

I talked to a coworker more versed in bread baking than I; she recommended I work in a little bit of yeast that I had woken up via bathing, and then let it rise a bit. That sounded like a lot of work, so I did something that was less work instead. The 2 hours of room temperature proofing called for by the recipe? I did that in my oven (which is gas, so it maintains a nice temperature of maybe 10-20 degrees above room temperature). That got it to perk up a bit, rising to maybe 125% of its original size. I then let it proof for another 30 minutes on the counter while the oven heated before baking.

It didn't quite save it, as you can see from the sliced picture above. It is quite dense, but nowhere near as dense as the breadtastrophe of yore. Also, I ate the heel without any peanut butter or other accoutrements and I found it delicious. Hopefully it passes the coworker test tomorrow. It certainly passes the "good lookin" test.

Buckwheat Fuckup

I mean, the name kinda says it all and I was none-too-careful when measuring the ingredients. It went something like: start sauteing some garlic; when it browns, throw in the firm tofu. Spray with Sriracha an amount you think you can handle. When things start looking done, add in soba noodles and sliced zucchini, plus some additional oil and some vinegar. Let it cook on medium-ish for five minutes, stirring constantly. Consider adding additional Sriracha; actually add in additional Sriracha; regret it immediately. Try to rectify it by adding a dash of sugar and salt. Call it tasty enough and decide you can't fuck it up anymore than you already have.

Oh, maybe I forgot to mention the first fuckup? I wanted to give it a little something to cook in besides oil. So I surveyed the kitchen and it went something like this: Vanilla soy milk? No, too sweet. Coconut milk? No, did that a few days ago. Olive oil? No, too much oil? Mustard? See that Sriracha? Ketchup? Too easy? Balsamic vinegar? I think I read that vinegar goes in Asian cooking, what the hell why not... oh whoops that smells not like what I'm trying to cook at all. Oh well, add some sesame seeds, turn off the heat, mix one more time, and serve.

It actually tasted great - I think the vinegar mostly cooked off because the heat was up a bit. Should you cook it? Probably not. You aren't me.

Breadtastrophe Rematch, Round 2 (Spoiler: Victory by KO)

See previous post here for recipe info, etc. I envisioned this dough being perfect for tiny sandwiches, adorned with fancy meat and cheese, so I formed it into rolls. Slightly large rolls, placed a little too close together on the pan for baking. So they baked into each-other and I had to pull them apart post-baking. Still delicious though:

You can see the marks from pulling them apart

Almost everything went right. The amount of rosemary was about perfect for a hint but not a blast, the inside of the dough had pockets galore after baking, nothing scorched or undercooked. The pre-worked dough was bubbly like woah. The sea salt sprinkling was also pretty light which was complete guess work. This is what it looked like, removed from fridge in the morning:

Bubbles! (No Buttercup or Blossom, sorry)

I did learn a few lessons from the dough/cooking. When adorning with herb toppings, put it in post shaping right before you proof (let sit) the dough. I instead saved them for the very end, right when you would score the dough before putting it into the oven. Otherwise, it doesn't really stick in and flakes off with the lightest touch, ruining my five-pointed rosemary stars. Or it could be that it just won't work without pressing it in.

Also, when stretch-and-folding a dough in the bowl instead of on a separate surface (as I did with this batch), you should probably re-mist the bowl with oil after the last iteration before refrigerating. The dough had to be peeled away from the metal, probably ruining some airpockets in the final product.

Call it "The Peanut Butter Suffusion"

Using my newfound Copious Amounts of Free Time™, I used a weeknight to try creating a recipe based on things I enjoy. For reference, here are some things I enjoy: peanut butter, ginger, sesame seeds, puppies, and programming languages. You can't cook with the last no matter how delicious a Haskell Curry sounds, and cooking with the penultimate isn't something I'm quite prepared for. So how did it turn out? Tasty, but could use a bit of refining. See for yourself:

(There is rice under the tofu)

How to recreate it, assuming you want one meal and not quite enough leftovers for lunch the next day (I haven't tested this yet but it looks like a small meal).

Tofu and Sauce:

• 12 oz firm tofu, cubed and pressed
• 1/3 cup peanut butter (salted)
• 1/4 cup unsweetened almond milk (although any milk will do here)
• 1 tsp sesame seeds
• 1 tsp freshly ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp honey
• 1/2 tsp chili flakes (adjust to spice level, this is "basically nothing")
• olive oil

Broccolini and rice:

• 1/2 cup uncooked rice
• 8-10 pieces of broccolini
• olive oil
• sea salt

Cooking instructions:

Assuming your rice will take 40-ish minutes, start cooking the rice. Mix the peanut butter, almond milk, and honey together until it blends into a consistent texture. Stir in the rest of the seasonings (sesame seeds, ginger, chili flakes). Put aside.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. In a frying pan, add some olive oil and brown the tofu over medium-high. The goal is to give it a slight crispness on each side, but not to deep fry it. As it is browning, . Once happy with texture, reduce heat to medium-low and stir in the peanut butter solution. You can let this sit for a bit while you do the next step.

On a baking sheet, lay down the broccolini so it isn't touching. Brush with olive oil and sprinkle salt on the tops; flip over and repeat on the other side. Cook on the top shelf of your oven for about five minutes, then shut off the oven and let it sit for five more minutes inside the oven. The goal is to lightly scorch the heads and cook the rest of it thoroughly, giving it a crunch on top.

Serve the tofu over rice with the broccolini on the side.

Thoughts:

This will create a delicious meal, although the sauce did not quite work as intended - I envisioned something with more liquid, but I created something a little firm. It did brown nicely with the tofu leading me to believe I didn't make a mistake. So, the rating is "delicious, would cook again". However, you could always add more milk or some water to the recipe. You could also up the amount of sauce created, as this was only enough to coat the tofu and not the rice.

Breadtastrophe Rematch, Round 1

I wanted revenge on the lean bread for the failure of last time. I haven't baked it yet (cold fermenting for a few nights first), but I may have bested it. Which is easy, really, considering I royally screwed the recipe up last time. It called for "Unbleached White Bread Flour" which I translated into shopping terms of "Unbleached White Flour."

Not the same thing.

Whoops.

Ingredients

For the rematch, I decided to spice up the recipe with rosemary - equal parts rosemary as salt, 7g in this case. Upon mixing the dough, I knew it was going to turn out right.

Dough, post mixing, pre stretch-and-fold

It has a much wetter texture, good amount of shag, and a really good feel in the hand. I proceed to do the stretch-and-fold on the dough four times, and there is a definite transformation of the dough during the process (unlike the previous attempt). It comes together and gets loads of taffy-ness, looking more like a ball of dough and less like a potato mash, but it still has all the gooeyness you look for.

Dough, post stretch-and-fold

Guess that extra gluten is useful after all, but the final verdict will come in a few days. I plan on making single-serving sandwich rolls, topped with some ground sea salt and rosemary before the bake. Call it a bastardized, simplified Rosemary Diamante.

The Real Reason Dinosaurs Went Extinct

Because they are so delicious!

Delicious dinosaur English muffins

Yes, those are English muffins made in the shape of dinosaurs, using cookie cutters. They were delicious. They looked awesome. Most of them were missing legs, heads, or other assorted appendages (before we even took any bites, none the less!). We ate them a few ways:

Delicious as (kind of) eggs florentine!

Delicious coated in mashed dinosaur organs (strawberry flavoured)

The recipe was from Artisan Breads Everyday - yet another cold fermenting dough, and containing no sourdough starter. It was prepped on a Thursday when I woke up and cooked on a Saturday. This was the first enriched bread I've made - that is, one consisting of more than flour, yeast, and water. Much of the liquid in the cold fermented dough was milk, into which honey and olive oil were dissolved. Added to this were the standard bread ingredients, mixed by hand and neither kneaded nor stretch-and-folded, but simply refrigerated for two nights.

The morning of baking, the dough got the standard rising period followed by folding in warm water and baking soda to make it rise even more (it bubbled slightly, in fact). Sadly, the dough was not as runny as envisioned and it didn't properly fill the molds. You can see below what they looked like cooking - note the dusting of cornmeal everywhere, to add both texture and prevent everything from getting stuck. These dinosaurs popped right out of the molds - the only casualty was a velociraptor head.

The cooking process, including not-quite-filled cookie cutters.

This worked not as well as hoped, but better than expected. There were a few sad T-Rex and velociraptor molds made, but they had too many skinny limbs and extensions to turn out given the somewhat gelatinous dough. Having English muffin fights should become a part of a complete breakfast.