Cold-Proofing Bread

I have this "ideal" breakfast I've concocted in my head; I think it stems from watching Gary Hustwit documentaries and a few shorts on noma. Plus reading Dwell, on occasion. I'm sitting at a table, probably made of some reclaimed wood. It is a small table - suitable for two - though the room is larger. Everything about the surroundings are rustic; I bet there are even terrariums hanging from the wall. It is in Scandinavia, of course. I'm eating breakfast with my partner before we head to work; a slice of toast cut as thick as a sandwich, a pad of butter with a light sprinkle of sea salt. Some fresh jam on the side. An egg, sunny side up and cooked to perfection.

Well, I can make part of this breakfast no problem. I've done it with E a few times now - I just steal a piece of dough from whatever loaf I'm cooking up and get fresh bread for two without prematurely staling the rest of the loaf. The egg, jam, and butter are all at hand. The crucial thing missing is the texture - the crust should be thick. When you look at a slice head on, you should be see a thick, brown ring around the center like bark on a tree. I'm not there yet, but I'm trying.

I have two angles of attack, which I'm currently pursuing one of. The currently ignored angle is the steam/dutch oven approach. I know this is necessary, but it is also relatively easy to figure out - you get crust from cooking bread in a humid environment. The easiest way to do that is to enclose the bread in a dutch oven for the first part of baking (or to use a steam bath in your oven, which I find difficult). The other angle of approach is in the proofing. Letting the dough dry out slightly can form a darker, deeper crust. Having read the Tartine book, as well as a few brief mentions of "cold proofing" in Reinhart, I've been adapting my usual loaf to the method.

The way I have usually cooked by bread, known to some as "No Knead", is a strech-and-fold followed by overnight cold fermentation and proofing at room temperature. That is, you make the dough and let it sit in the fridge for a night or two, then you shape it, let the dough proof, and cook it. The cold proofing is like that; instead of the rise happening the fridge, its the proof. Mix the dough, let it rise, then shape it and throw it in the fridge. It goes directly, the next day, from the fridge to the oven. The crust is a much deeper color and scoring the loaf more effective.

The only non-obvious part is that, when moving the dough from the fridge, you want to make sure you aren't refrigerating it on the same surface that it bakes on. You want the heat to hit the bread instantly, and a cold baking sheet going in the oven with it will ruin that. I've taken to proofing it on parchment, which is then placed on a plate and covered. I make sure a baking sheet is in the oven when preheating, and then carefully slide the parchment onto the sheet when the oven is hot. This gets a very even crust, instead of a pale and weak bottom.

Ethnically Challenged "Latkes", and a Twist on Rosemary Loaf

Continuing a theme of amazing weekend weather, we had another one. A somewhat hectic schedule led to me eating exactly 2 meals at my apartment the entire weekend, Friday included. One of which was a simple breakfast. Now, some of that was warranted. A truffle-making class Saturday morning gave me the opportunity to take E to Sightglass coffee. Her comments were mostly "I can't believe your drip cost more than my latte", "this is pretty good", and "yeah, you were right, this place is pretty awesome inside". Lets consider that a glowing endorsement. The truffle class was wonderful; I feel like I can make truffles at home. Some cooking classes I've been to and heard of are more like a dinner party; the instruction takes a back seat to drinking wine, socializing, and doing (but not being instructed in) prep work. Not this one.

The lack of cooking finally caught up to me on Sunday; not wanting to go to the grocery store I settled on quinoa and apple. Not the most exciting meal, but spruced up with a little bit of earthy pu-erh tea in the water, pan-toasted almonds, and a light mirin-cayenne finish it was a nice grounded meal after a weekend of heavier fare. It also put me in the mood to do something Japanese; I wanted tempura but didn't want to deep fry something. So I made latkes, except Japanese. Both those words should be in air quotes, by the way.

A recipe would do no good, but the thought process was such: latkes are a starch + egg/flour (binding) + flavor. Replace the shredded potato (starch) with sushi rice (also a starch) and move the flavoring away from the normal (onion, sour cream) to something Japanese (shitaki, seaweed, edamame) to get a new dish. It worked, impressively. 2/3 cup cooked sushi rice, 2 eggs, enough corn flour that I felt it was binding, and far too many hand-extracted edamames later, I had something that would form into patties and cook in a bit of oil. For a bit of final flavor, I also added a tad of furikake to the batter, a pre-cooked shitake pressed onto the top of each, and served on a piece of dried seaweed. Pre-cooked mushroom is important to get all that moisture out. I served it with a bit of raw kale and cucumber salad, with cooked kale just because I love kale so much. The only lack was wasabi, which I left at E's when we made latkes in the past.

I also found the time to toy around with bread - I think my loaves are doing well flavor-wise, but the visuals are sometimes lacking. With this last loaf, I was going for a tiled pattern, with raised, flour-coated tiles separated by rivulets of cheese tween them. You can see how that turned out:

In short, there was a bit of flooding. I think my problem was a too-short rise; given the temperature of my apartment and my impatience, this is unsurprising. What I attempted to do was make a cold-fermented loaf (that is, mix the dough at night and let it rise in the fridge) with a bit of rise time before it went to sleep for the night, and putting it to bed pre-shaped. I gave it 1.5 hours on top of the 45 minutes of mixing + stretch and fold, then another hour in the morning before going in the oven (instead of 2 hours). I'm unsure if it needed a longer night rise or a longer morning rise; the Tartine bread gets exclusively a night-time rise and has an amazingly crispy crust so that leads me in the direction of more pre-ferment proofing.

The pattern was made by coating the top in flour then scoring a grid on the loaf. Finely-grated hard cheese (like asiago, for instance) was carefully sprinkled into the cuts, making sure it didn't spread out of the lines. I did the scoring immediately after bringing the dough from the fridge; pushing this off until cook-time might be preferred, which is less of an issue if it doesn't have a morning rise at all.

Ginger-Puffs

Over the slow weeks of the holidays, E and I talked a few times about making cookies but never quite got around to it. Something about lazy days spent huddled in front of your computer, slaying dragons and harvesting all manner of material, makes me want cookies. Unable to resist the urge any longer, I created these beauties:

The recipe is mine, approximated by browsing a few cookie recipes online to get some basics (I don't know how much flour you need per egg, nor the baking soda/powder requirements) and took the rest from my long history of making shortbread. The goal here was a fluffy cookie - Blue Bottle has these snickerdoodles which transcend cookie-dom; they are fluffy and airy, not too sweet, full of flavor. I wanted something like that at home. An aside: the rest of their cookies are spectacular, specifically the Sesame Absinthe Cigar (né Biscotti Regina) and their Gingersnaps.

For flavor, I didn't want to go grocery shopping which left me with a few options: fresh ginger, chocolate (chips or powder), nuts, oats, and molasses. Also malted barley, which I use for bagels, caught my eye; molasses in cookies is good but adds a heavy flavor; I figured the malted barley would do a lighter flavor and keep the cookies a white/yellow color. That plus ginger settled it, and so I got these. They are very fluffy and not too sweet with a ginger punch that has gotten stronger overnight; they almost border on biscuit/scone territory, but are definitely cookies.

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Ginger-Puffs

Makes ~15 cookies (feel free to double; this is roughly a half-batch)

1 cup flour

1 stick butter (1/2 cup)

1/4 cup sugar
1 egg (I wouldn't double this - most recipes online are 1 egg for every 1.5-2 cups flour)
1 tbsp malted barley (you can use honey as a substitute)
~1 knuckle fresh ginger (1 tbsp most likely, though I didn't measure)
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda (because there is some acidity in the cookies)
1/4 tsp baking powder (because I wasn't completely sure there was enough)

If you have a mixer, this recipe is really easy. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy stirring. I don't, but I still did it. Combine the butter and sugar and mix quickly until creamed. It helps if you chop up the butter and leave it on the counter to soften. Add the egg to the bowl and beat on high for as long as your arm can take, then another minute or so (at least 5 minutes). The goal is to get some air into the batter.

Add the baking powder, vanilla, salt, barley, and grate the ginger over the bowl (so that if any liquid comes out you get that as well). Stir for just a minute or so, until blended. Line baking sheets with parchment. Form cookies by filling a tablespoon with batter and level off, then scoop out with a spoon onto the sheet - these are your cookies. Cover with plastic and cool in the fridge for at least an hour. Cook at 350 for 17-20 minutes, until the edges have begun to brown.

If you want, you could chill the dough between mixing and shaping; this would allow you to actually shape the dough by hand instead of plopping it onto the sheet because anything else is too sticky.

Sourdough: a Revival

I spent the past week with a cold, bookended with bouts of bread baking. Not much other cooking besides; a fair amount of canned soup, scottish oats, sandwiches, and eating out. I did make a comical observation - my weekend dinners consisted of three cultural takes on "round piece of dough as delivery method for meal"; namely Ethiopian, burrito, and gyro. I thought of pizza on Monday to round it out, but decided soup would be more fitting. But, yes, on to the bread. Last year, around this time, I started a sourdough experiment that ended when I got lazy and the sourdough got mold. Sad, really. A chance encounter with the Tartine Bread book in an art museum gift shop told me there was an easier way. Less baby sitting starter, less watching dough rise. Sign me up!

Armed with my partially-remembered sentences from a book and my newly-purchased cheesecloth, I began the starter. I did the following, and it seemed to work, though I'm not sure how proper it is: I put 1/4 cup whole wheat flour, 1/4 cup bread flour, and 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp warm water in a bowl (non-reactive, non-metal is a must - use Pyrex or equivalent) and stirred it. Cheesecloth on top, let it rest in my kitchen for 3 days. Made sure it smelled funny - cheesy, almost. Threw out half of it, added in enough flour/water to bring it back up to the same size; stirred. Let sat for 2 days. Made sure it rose a little. Also, smelled funny. Threw away half of it, refreshed back to size. Everytime it rose and then fell, I refreshed; the period is a feeding every 2-3 days right now and I've reduced the size a bit so it is perfectly sized for making a loaf of broad ~160 grams, of which 80 goes into a loaf. The refresh amount is about 2 tbsp of each whole-wheat and normal flour and 2.5 tbsp of water.

I've made two loaves with this; the first (pictured below) was a half-whole wheat bread with ~70% hydration. I skimped on salt accidentally, leaving it with that peculiar taste of bread that doesn't have any salt. The second loaf (both pictures above) was 100% white flour, not counting the starter, with ~80% hydration and black sesame seeds. The second loaf was infinitely better, so I've included the process below. And, for the person who doesn't have a few hours in the morning spare for bread, this recipe is fantastic - straight from the fridge to the oven, easy peasy. Delish.

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Rustic Sesame, Naturally Leavened

Makes a single loaf

80g starter (recipe approximately above)

320g bread flour

256g cold water

10g black sesame seeds

5g salt

Take the starter right when it needs refreshing; that is, it has risen recently and begun to fall. Combine with flour, water, and sesame seeds and mix with a wooden spoon until it has come together, then stir for a minute longer. Cover; wait 30 minutes. After that first wait, add the salt to the bowl, lightly wet your hands, and stretch-and-fold the dough until you can no longer feel the grain of the salt. Cover, let rest for 3-4 hours. Stretch-and-fold it every 30 minutes or so, until it feels very difficult to do so or the bread has risen a bit (it will feel fluffier). Refrigerate the dough for a day and a night.

After giving it time in the fridge to complete the rising process, turn your oven up to 500 degrees and prepare, as I did, a bespoke dutch oven consisting of a cast-iron frying pan and a brownie pan, turned upside-down, for the lid. Have this in the oven to warm up. Remove the bread from the fridge, flour a work surface and your hands, and shape it into a round somewhat. After you think the cast iron is hot (30 minutes or so), place the dough on some parchment paper and put the parchment paper in the dutch oven, reducing the oven to 475. Cook for 20 minutes, remove the lid, and cook for 15-20 minutes longer (until the bread is ~200 degrees inside, looks golden brown, and sounds hollow).

Eat.

Sesame Spelt Bread

Back to non-failing bread, and it feels pretty good. This is after my no-rise bagels (dead yeast) and my no-rise mini baguettes (too much salt). Now, there is definitely one are where this recipe could be improved and a large avenue for experimentation. But - still good, still workable. Not a complete failure. The recipe is based off of the 50% whole wheat rustic from Artisan Breads Everyday, but contains a few tweaks. The goal was to create something like a pain au levain, without all that starter business. (Not that I'm against starters; one should be starting up this weekend).

It wasn't perfect, but it was close. The bread was a bit too much like a honey whole-wheat sandwich loaf than I would have liked. That is, it was soft but not airy, and excelled at soaking up honey (and, presumably, pbj if I had it handy). The spelt gave it a nice nutty flavor; I don't think the sesame seeds did anything besides poke out of the crust like sailors bobbing in the waters near a shipwreck. The biggest issue was definitely the texture, which was caused by my inclusion of olive oil in the recipe. I would cut it in half as an experiment; removing it entirely would likely prove drastically dry. Walnuts would also have been a great addition to this loaf, though I did not have them handy.

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Sesame Spelt Loaf

Makes 1 loaf

225g water

130g bread flour

130g whole wheat flour

20g spelt flour

20g sesame seeds

12g olive oil (halve this for a airier, less moist loaf)

5g salt

3g instant yeast

At least a night before you want to bake the bread, combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix. Add in the water and olive oil, and stir with a wooden spoon for 5 minutes. Let rest for 5 minutes to hydrate things, then stretch and fold 4 times with a 10 minute break between each. Place in a clean bowl, cover tightly, and place it in the fridge.

The day of baking remove the dough from the fridge 1.5 hours before you wish to put it in the oven and shape it however you like (it might actually make great rolls as-is, without cutting down the olive oil). Place it on a parchment-lined pan, cover it, and let it sit until baking time. Preheat oven to 500, put the bread in, lower to 450, and cook for ~35 minutes. Check and rotate the loaf at the 15 minute mark. It is done when it sounds hollow and the top is very hard.

Reruns, But No Less Delicious

I took a bit of a break from cooking the past weeks, which means no blog posts. Actually, that isn't quite true - I did do a bit of cooking this past weekend, but it was over a camp stove. Not anything fancy, not anything worth writing home about. To prep, though, I did make two loves of lovely lovely Struan, using the Artisan Breads Everyday recipe. It served us well, making all kinds of sandwiches you can imagine, as long as said sandwiches used an ingredient from the set of {peanut butter, jelly, cheddar cheese, honey}. So, really, not too hard to imagine all those sandwiches. E did have one suggestion, which I will try next time - removing the buttermilk in the recipe. Struan is incredibly soft and almost fatty for a bread, and it really doesn't need to be. I think a straight replacement of beer for the buttermilk might do the trick.

Not actually the struan

Due to the wonders of owning a car in San Francisco, I have to move it many mornings for street cleaning, where they run a loud truck down your street with an escort of parking ticket providers. On the plus side, I get to enjoy coffee and a snack at a random coffee shop while working. I also took advantage of this time to finally make ciabatta, pictured above. It is the same rustic recipe I use for mini baguettes, but it requires a much longer proof time. Three hours is what the book recommends - one of just sitting there, then two hours of proofing after shaping. I think the long time is to give the dough time to settle into its shape lest it rise up against you. Well, I'm not a very good oppressor. Look at that hunchback of a loaf.

The tastiness was not impacted. The cooking time may have been a bit off - book recommended 12 minutes, rotate, 15-20 minutes more. I gave it 12 + 20 and it wasn't quite done when I finally cut into it. I think the crustiness improvement method should have been used - after the allotted baking time, shut off the oven but leave the bread in it for 5 extra minutes.

The struan

Sovrano Grana and Mushroom Shortbread

Mushrooms are a funny food to me. I think I hate them, on the whole, but I find it hard to not try using them every few weeks. I don't quite learn my lesson, or I see a recipe that looks good, or I think "maybe this time they will taste good". I'm not quite fooling myself, either, because I have enjoyed mushrooms and I even know a kind I can reliably enjoy. But I still branch out from there. So, crazy idea, why not stick some dried mushrooms and some strong cheese on shortbread? Don't mind if I do.

I found myself going to the mushroom shop in the ferry terminal surrounded by things that sounded delicious. Candy mushrooms? Sweet mushrooms? Almond mushrooms? How could any of these things be bad? So I picked up some almond mushrooms and took them home. I opened the bag and almost immediately gagged. These things are strong and pungent. They taste nothing like almond and mostly like ass. I persevered, hoping for the best. The amount you see below is how much I thought I would use, but the smell and taste convinced me to only use half as much (for nine shortbreads about the size of two thumbs put side-by-side). Any hint of mushroom flavor baked out in the oven, so I was left with only their texture. Maybe more next time, or maybe just not mushrooms.

I made a slight change to the recipe I've used in the past, adding a tiny bit of baking powder to get more rise out of the shortbreads, figuring it more fitting for a savory dish. The cooking time/process, however, got miffed a little - they cooked a bit too long and got very crispy internally. You can see the browned bottoms below. The amount of baking powder was a complete guess - 1 teaspoon seemed good, as 1 tablespoon was obviously too much.

Sovrana Grana and Mushroom Shortbreads (makes 9 biscuits/half a cookie sheet)

• 8 tbsp (1/2 c) flour
• 4 tbsp (1/4 c) butter
• 2 tbsp powdered sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• few pinches of grated Sovrana Grana (feel free to use any salty, hard cheese)
• (optional) few dried almond mushrooms, chopped to bits. Use at least twice what you see in my photos

In mixing bowl, "whip" butter. If it is fresh from the fridge, just stir it with a wooden spoon in a small bowl until it gets creamy. Add sugar, blend, add flour and baking powder, blend again. On cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, form biscuits by pinching off a bit of dough. Roll dough between palms quickly to get a sphere, then rock side-to-side while pressing to make a nice biscuit shape. The quicker the better, so the butter doesn't melt.

Put a some of the mushrooms into each biscuit by pressing them in, then plop grated cheese on top of each biscuit, also pressing it in lightly. Place, covered, in fridge for at least 30 minutes. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees; cook biscuits for 10 minutes, rotate, and cook for 5-10 minutes more (depending on desired crisp).

I'll do an experiment later with baking powder to get a better feel for how to make lighter, more savory shortbreads.

Shortbread, Now Entering Beta Phase

Knowing I had an evening of nerds planned for tonight and only a few hours last night to whip something up, I went with shortbread. The host of the evening is a ginger fanatic, to say the least, so the natural topping seemed to be ginger. Got home too late to go shopping, but I had candied ginger lying around. Doesn't quite match the triple threat of his candied/dried/fresh ginger cookies but it will do the trick.

What you see here are the finished bites - basic shortbread, topped with a small piece of candied ginger and a light sprinkle of crushed black pepper and sea salt. You can't quite make out the salt in this picture; a coarser grind would have been both more delicious and more visually appealing. The salt and pepper form an X, but these are meant to be eaten in one bite so the unequal covering won't matter. You can actually see it clearly in the pre-baked shot which is both better post-processed (thanks Picasa!) and a better angle.

I think my alpha batches have been serviceable, maybe even sometimes delicious, but this new beta phase is miles above the previous batches. It might be the flavoring. it might be the thin-ness, or it might even be the prep method. But because I wasn't experimenting I changed far too many factors to really know. Maybe it was just a combination of all of the things I've done before (350 degree oven, 20 minute cook time, no funny flours, very thin for ultimate crisp).

Ginger and Pepper Shortbreads (makes 15-ish bite-sized shortbreads, feel free to double/quadruple recipe for a "normal" batch)

• 8 tbsp (1/2 c) flour [unbleached all-purpose or pastry flour]
• 4 tbsp (1/4 c) butter, frozen
• 2 tbsp powdered sugar
• Candied ginger
• Coarse sea salt
• Fresh ground black pepper

Grate the butter into a mixing bowl (I'm trying this because it worked so well in the biscuits) and add in the sugar. Mix with a fork until it the sugar is incorporated. Add in flour and whisk to distribute the ingredients. Usually, the butter is beaten and everything incorporates easily. However, with frozen butter, that won't happen without either a liquid (currently banned from my shortbreads) or some pressure. So, after ingredients are evenly distributed, get in there with your hands and squeeze the dough until it all forms into a ball.

On a lightly-floured cutting board, roll out the dough into a rectangle or square. It should be very thin - slightly thinner than a #2 pencil. Use a metal spatula to square off the edges. Transfer dough to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and, with the spatula, cut most of the way through the dough to form a square grid - you can cut all the way through, but half is enough. It will break apart easily after cooking.

In each square, push a piece of candied ginger into the dough so that it forms an indentation. Hopefully this is enough to get it to set. Sprinkle a cross of black pepper from one corner to the other of each square, and a sprinkle of salt perpendicular to that. Turn on the oven to 350 degrees and place the cooking sheet in the fridge for 20-30 minutes.

Remove the chilled-again tray and place in oven for 10 minutes, rotate, and cook for 10 minutes more. Let cool. Eat one to make sure they are good, then break the grid apart completely so it isn't obvious you ate one before bringing it over to a friends place.

Pain a l'Ancienne Sage Twists

So I made these baguettes again. I can't help myself - they need an hour to rest/rise before going in the oven, cook in 12-15 minutes, and then 15 minutes to cool. Compared to a minimum 2 hour rest/rise for other recipes (and don't get me started on the time to cook and cool a loaf), it is hard to beat. You get a crispy, crackly exterior, lightly caramelized, with a moist and airy interior every time.

I cannot stress how delicious this bread is, compared to the amount of work involved. Even when you botch the recipe, like I did. The botching explains the shape, by the way. I completely spaced out when measuring water - I needed ~225 grams and poured ~275 grams. Thinking myself something of a bread-baking baller, I believed it fixable. The stretch-and-fold was nothing of the sort; the dough was a soup that clung to anything near it. I used a silicone spatula to do something like a stretch-and-fold - I would slide it under a side, pick it up, and let the dough back down, about 8 times per repetition and a repetition every 7-10 minutes for 40 minutes.

This still did not fix the dough; in the morning it was still soupy and impossible to touch. I floured more than I have every floured before, but even after caking it you can see above how liquidy it was. The mini-baguettes wouldn't hold their shape at all, but I found by doubling them back and twisting them (after a coat of flower), they stuck together well enough to be baked.

My other modifications to the recipe was adding 10g of chopped fresh sage (to a half batch) and putting some sea salt crystals on top of each baguette after shaping. I'm glad I didn't use more sage - other herbs/flavourings I've put in bread like this have been on the 15g-20g range, but sage packs quite a punch. I am going to have to be careful, or I will only end up baking two breads: these baguettes and Struan.

Shortbread Thickness

For today's shortbread experiment (well, Friday's but posted today), I played around with thickness/shape. Unfortunately, in doing so, I regressed w.r.t. the baking temperature. I mistakenly baked at 325 for 20 minutes, despite finding out in a previous experiment that 350 was optimal.

We have three sizes here: normal/normal, half/normal, and normal/half. The first part is how thick it is, the second part is how wide it is. You can see that the thinnest one is the most colored inside, but then you realize it is an optical illusion due to my phone camera taking a bad photo and my cleanup attempts failing. The half/normal came out the crumbliest, and the normal/half and normal/normal were indistinguishable. Remember, the goal for shortbread is to cook out most of the butter so it becomes crumbly instead of mushy. Here is my pinky for reference. And, yes, these things are small.

On the left we have pre cooking, and on the right post-cooking. They do plump a little in the oven, and lost a little bit of their shape. The important bit is letting them cool completely - they are actually best the next day (or, at least a few hours after baking) instead of fresh out of the oven like most cookies are. Yay for not during myself!

100% Whole Wheat Hearth Bread

Another bread knocked off the list from the cookbook; this time the "hearth" 100% Whole Wheat bread. Hearth in the title refers to the consistency of the dough as well as the cooking method - it aims to be light and fluffy, full of air pockets, with a crispy crust. Very much like a baguette or ciabatta you get fresh from a bakery. You probably don't want to use it for a sandwich and you are ripping off chunks instead of slicing it. Unlike sandwich bread, it usually contains only the essentials (flour, water, yeast, salt), although that was not the case with this loaf due to working with whole wheat.

Whole wheat flour is very hard to get fluffy bread from. It is dense and doesn't really develop gluten as readily as your standard white flour. To give the recipe a little bit of spring, it called for a bit of brown sugar (to help the yeast, I believe) and a bit of oil (to remove the dryness you get from whole wheat). The water percentage is also much higher than a standard loaf of bread, but not quite as high as the rustic bread I've cooked a few times into mini baguettes. It still uses stretch-and-fold instead of kneading, and a ridiculous amount of stirring. Five to seven minutes at "medium" by hand with a wooden spoon is not the easiest thing in the world.

On the left is the dough ball fresh out of the fridge, ready to rise for 2-3 hours. On the right, it has spread out quite a bit after the rise, and been scored. I tried something new with the scoring - I cut it very deeply, then sprinkled a mixture of white flour and corn meal into each of the scores, smearing it with my fingertips. This created a distinct look to the scoring and possibly helped avoid my usual scoring problem of the bread simply rising through the scores and only ending up with light wrinkles. I did cut the dough deeper than usual as well.

Shortbread, Now With Buckwheat

For todays (well, not todays but you know what I mean) micro-recipe, I did a 50% sub of buckwheat flour for normal flour, and a baseline of 1/2 tbsp powdered sugar. So, roughly 1/2 tbsp powdered sugar, 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, 1 tbsp buckwheat flour. The dough was a lot firmer and required far more stirring to get the ingredients to come together.

 Pre baked on the left, post baked (but pre cooled) on the right

The finished cookies also tasted like buckwheat, obviously. I'm not sure this was a good thing. Another thing I experimented with in this batch was cooling time - I split the single-serving into two biscuits. I at one after 30 minutes cooling time, and ate the second after about 2.5 hours of cooling time. The 2.5 hour cooling time was far superior, as after 30 minutes the biscuit still had quite a bit of heat and chewiness (not something one looks for in an ideal shortbread). The 2.5 hour one was not quite that perfect combination of flakiness and dryness I expect, but it was much closer. I think my baking time/temperature might need some adjustment.

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).

Shortbread Micro-recipe, Take Two

A follow up to the last post is in order. I made the 1-2-4 shortbread (a single serving, in fact) last night. This one came out much better. Same process: chop butter and whip it with a fork, add sugar and whip again, add flour and stir. I shape the dough with my hands, then put it on parchment and slip it in the fridge for 30 minutes. This time I went with 325 degrees instead of 350, but the same cooking time (9-10 minutes). This is just about when the shortbread begins to glisten but not lose its shape.

Pre-baked is on left, post baked is on right. The dough was noticeably stiffer, but it still "melted" in the oven. I think this is going to be a normal part of this recipe, as I hesitate to add any more flour. After I let it cool for an hour, it had hardened into what I would consider normal shortbread consistency - flaky and very solid. It was also delicious. Up next: either adding another ingredient (vanilla? raisins?) or playing around with the flour (whole wheat, buckwheat, etc).

Remember, this was made with 1/2 tablespoon of sugar, 1 tablespoon of butter, and 2 tablespoons of flour. And it made exactly one shortbread. Working with an amount of ingredients this small is phenomenal - I take one of my tiny sake cups and a tiny fork and can whip the butter with minimal effort; it softens quite easily given how little there is.

Experimenting via Micro-Recipes

While eating a piece of shortbread, I thought to myself, "Mikey like! Mikey make?" except not necessarily in terms so simplistic. So, straight to the internet where I discovered many interesting facts about shortbread - its long and storied history, its place in cultures across the world, and its humble origins. Namely, 1 part sugar 2 parts butter 3 parts flour. If you check wikipedia, you'll note the flour bit says "oatmeal flour" but since when have I read things properly?

My plan, and I will continue with it, is to take advantage of the few ingredients and simple ratios of shortbread to experiment by making a very small  batch (a cookie or two) and tweaking things one at a time. I started off today with a baseline where I took a single tablespoon to be a part. Two biscuits where formed - a baseline sweet to be topped with powdered sugar, and a baseline savory to be topped with sea salt. Other than those toppings, applied after baking, there were no differences in the biscuits.

I made a guess on preparation and baking - refrigerate the dough to set it after shaping and an oven heated to 350 degrees, cooking time of 10 minutes. Now, that wrong type of flour mentioned above truly bit me on this night of baselining. See, oatmeal flour is a thicker, heartier type of flour than the unbleached all-purpose flour I employed. The beautiful 1-2-3 ratio did not produce much beyond slightly heated dough. Post-baking, the biscuits had notably melted and failed to solidify the least bit. Once cooled, they were semi-firm and questionably delicious - they reminded me of sugar cookie dough. I dutifully ate them, however, in the name of science.

 The next step, then, is to re-baseline the recipe using a 1-2-4 ratio. While not as mnemonic as 1-2-3, it pleases me that it forms a list of powers of two. From there, assuming I get good results, I will experiment with toppings, fillings, and dough ingredients - and I will reduce down to a half tablespoon as the "part", which will make a single biscuit. Hopefully I get good results out of this experiment, though eating a spoonful of flour butter sugar isn't the worst thing a man can do.

Thumbprint Rolls (Blueberry and Cinnamon/Sugar Crumble)

More free time than usual due to the holidays, so I'm doing more baking. The original plan was to cook something using Panettone dough as it is a very involved and time-consuming process. Luck (or laziness?) was on my side, and I was spared to ordeal when I read the recipe in my book - it used a starter. As my starter is still forming, I did not want to try substituting instant yeast in for a recipe that complex.

 I found a recipe that looked awesome - Fruit-Filled Thumbprint Rolls. I'll spare the dough details, as it is just cinnamon roll dough (use your favorite recipe). After getting your dough all ready, at the point when you are ready for it to rise, form it into tiny rolls and proof. Right before they are to go in the oven, wet your thumb and push into each roll in the center, creating a nice divot to fill with sugary substances. My rolls had in issue - I either didn't make big enough divots or I didn't let them rise for quite long enough. Many rolls "popped" when baked, rejecting their sugary implants and depositing them all over their surface.

Of course, you should have made your sugary substances by this point. I went with two filling options - blueberry filling and a cinnamon sugar crumble with raisins. The blueberry filling was made using a slurry of sugar, water, and corn starch that was stirred constantly over medium until it was boiling, then blueberries were thrown in as it was removed from heat. Boiling sugar water is really fun, you should try it some time. The cinnamon sugar crumble was, well, cinnamon, sugar, butter, and flour mixed together (flour added last), then topped with a few raisins once the pastry was filled.

The final part of the recipe was much looked forward to by myself - making a sugar glaze, brushing it over the rolls the second they come out of the oven (covering them in a fine, and mostly invisible, layer of sugar). The real topper was waiting for them to cool and then drizzling ever more glaze on top. To make glaze, put a dash of vanilla in a cup of sugar and whisk, then gradually add liquid (water, milk, etc) while whisking until it hits the consistency you are looking for.