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.

I Tried to Make an Origami Turtle but All I Made Was a Mess

Origami instructions you don't want to see: "Divide again, getting sixteenths." Followed by "One more time, getting thirty seconds." And note that this still left room on the side for seven more divisions, getting a total of thirty nine pinch creases along the top and bottom of the page.

Of course, this was followed by "Divide each of the gaps along the bottom edge in half." Here was where I wisely said "no" and simply marked the places I would need on the page. I wish I had done it sooner—the marking instead of folding—so my turtle would look healthier than this:

Turtle that looks more like a dinosaur of some sort.

All of this folding was just needed to get eleven parallel diagonal lines in teach of three directions (horizontal, and two diagonals). Without a ruler. Yes, instructions are provided which divide paper into 39 even sections without a ruler. Like so:

Just the two sets of diagonals. You can faintly see the pinches along the edge forming 39ths.

All of these folds are to form the lines on which three scales lie, as well as defining lines for scales formed later in the folding. Sadly, something went wrong in my creasing, pleating, or temperament (the most likely candidate) and I ended up with two scales, paper that didn't lie flat, and squished edges. To make the pleat, you have to fold everything at once - six edges for each hexagonal scale (which are all pleats, so twelve folds each) and three scales, plus some extra folds, leads to a very confusing diagram with arrows pointed everywhere.

It looks kinda squished because it is. Ideally, every fold would be firm and perfect. This is not an ideal turtle.

I may try this again and use the ruler-and-pen method or I may just fold a scaled model that uses all of the prefolds, not upsettingly few of them. All told, this took about two hours from start to "finish".