Weekend Baking, Part 3

Pane Siciliano. Another two-day bread. But oh so worth it. This is very likely one of the most visually appealing breads I've ever made. Between the "S" shape and the deep color of the crust, it has taken A LOT of willpower to wait to eat it. But I must because I've already got a loaf of ciabatta going and I don't need bread going stale left and right, it'd be madness. (It should be noted that I freeze a lot of bread when I make it. If you wrap it in foil and then stuff it into a freezer bag, it holds up pretty well. I just can't eat it all quickly enough!)



So anyways.. this is another Reinhart bread, which means that it was complicated and I don't feel like typing up the whole recipe. But I will share a few things. First, this is a bread made partly with semolina flour. Semolina flour is the same stuff dried pasta is made from and when you bake with it, it imparts a wonderful flavor and aroma to the bread and it helps to makae the crust the deep color it is. The other things that help with that color are olive oil and honey. Other than those items, it's a standard bread. Sort of.


Making this was easier than the ciabatta, though there was a lot more kneading involved. But that's kind of fun and it's a nice workout. And as if it were possible, baking these loaves smelled even better than the ciabatta loaves. I'll post an update after I've tried a slice, but I am very excited.

Weekend Baking, Part 3

Pane Siciliano. Another two-day bread. But oh so worth it. This is very likely one of the most visually appealing breads I've ever made. Between the "S" shape and the deep color of the crust, it has taken A LOT of willpower to wait to eat it. But I must because I've already got a loaf of ciabatta going and I don't need bread going stale left and right, it'd be madness. (It should be noted that I freeze a lot of bread when I make it. If you wrap it in foil and then stuff it into a freezer bag, it holds up pretty well. I just can't eat it all quickly enough!)




So anyways.. this is another Reinhart bread, which means that it was complicated and I don't feel like typing up the whole recipe. But I will share a few things. First, this is a bread made partly with semolina flour. Semolina flour is the same stuff dried pasta is made from and when you bake with it, it imparts a wonderful flavor and aroma to the bread and it helps to makae the crust the deep color it is. The other things that help with that color are olive oil and honey. Other than those items, it's a standard bread. Sort of.


Making this was easier than the ciabatta, though there was a lot more kneading involved. But that's kind of fun and it's a nice workout. And as if it were possible, baking these loaves smelled even better than the ciabatta loaves. I'll post an update after I've tried a slice, but I am very excited.

A ha!

I did some reading about ciabatta today, specifically about the recipe I used.  Turns out a lot of other people had the same issue of not getting big, open holes and a super-light airy texture.  I'm happy to find out it wasn't something I did wrong but of course this means that I'll need to choose another recipe for the next go around.  I'll pencil it in somewhere...

Grumble

If anyone of the few people who are reading this knows anything about using Blogger, I need a little help. I don't know if it has something to do with using a mac or if its Blogger itself, but basically Blogger hates me and ignores all requests to reformat any of my posts and seems to insist on choosing its own formatting for the post below this one, so... any help? Thanks.

Weekend Baking, Part 2

Ok.  This was on the plan for the weekend.  I got a copy of "The Bread Baker's Apprentice," by Peter Reinhart for my birthday and I've been itching to try one of the recipes from this book since.  Reinhart is a James Beard Award winner so I figured I can't go wrong.  I won't go into the recipe much since its rather involved and there's a a lot of technique-type details that require photos from his book to really get a grasp of. 

The process was kind of fun but it was also a little more difficult than some of the breads I've made.  This may have contributed to the new burn on my left hand, but that might also have been because I'm a little bit stupid and careless.  Verdict's still out on that one.

The loaves looked great.  They smelled amazing.  The whole damn house smelled like a bakery after they'd be in the oven for about 10 minute.  The crust was a great combination of crunchy and soft, a little bit like the soft sided Italian bread we used to get up in Syracuse.  Sadly, when I cut into the first loaf, I didn't find the big holes I was hoping to find.  I'm not sure exactly where I went wrong, but the crumb was pretty tight.  It's not a dense bread by any means, though.  I actually really like the soft, light texture.  But it's not ciabatta.  At least I don't think so.  After I cut a few more slices I started to see some bigger holes, but still nothing like was I was expecting.  I did make three loaves though, so maybe one will turn out be be what I was expecting.  If not, they definitely deserve a repeat attempt.  

Weekend Baking, Part 1

I wasn’t planning on baking anything last night, but I had some free time and wanted to make something, so I tried to decide what I wanted.  At first I settled on chocolate chip cookies, but I thought it’d be worthwhile to try something new and then I remembered a recipe I had come across for chocolate chip yogurt muffins.  I know, it sounds kind of weird, but they ended up being kind of normal.  Well…not exactly.

 

Anyways, here’s the recipe from thefreshloaf.com after I made a few tweaks

Heat oven to 375F.

DRY: 

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour 

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 cup chocolate chips

WET: 

1 beaten egg

6 oz.  low fat vanilla yogurt 

1/4 cup milk

1/4 cup melted butter or margarine

1 tsp. vanilla extract

Combine all dry ingredients (including options) in a large bowl, and wet ones in a smaller bowl. Add wet ingredients to the dry ones. Stir only till moistened.

Fill large or small muffin tins 3/4 full. Bake about 16-18 minutes for large muffins; 12-13 minutes for minis.

The original recipe says that they freeze well.  I’ll probably freeze a few just to test it out.

So here they are.  They came out pretty well.  They’re not nearly as rich as some muffins, which may or may not be obvious based on the ingredient list, but they’re good.  They’re moist and tender, slightly sweet and have a nice hint of vanilla from both the yogurt and the extract.  The originally recipe also says you can use any number of things in place of or in addition to the chocolate chips, like blueberries or chopped nuts, etc. so that may be in order for the next go.  But for now, I’ll enjoy these.

Out for a little ride

Last night I went out for a bike ride through the neighborhood, partly to celebrate finally fixing my bike and partly because it was too damn nice to not be doing something athletic outside. It was a decent ride, about an hour or so. I'm not actually much of a biker, but I've had a nice mountain bike for a few years and sometimes I can't think of any other ways to stay active, so I take the bike out.














Sometimes I wish I had a road bike so it'd be easier to ride to the store or something, but yesterday I was glad I had the mountain bike. I rode around some of the streets for a bit then decided to go play on the gravel walking trails that wind through the woods that my development mostly cleared out for its existence. I got to see the brook that some of the streets claim to be next to (none of them really are) and there was some cool trees and rocks along the way too.














I finally had to pack it up though because I'd be riding in the heat with my pack on to carry my camera and I was drenched in sweat and awfully hungry. But that made it easy to commit myself to devoting most of the rest of this weekend to food.

Ankles

One of the ways I keep myself sane and busy is playing in a volleyball rec league over in Charlottesville.  This season I'm on 3 teams, which has been great.  It's basically the next best thing to skiing, with the big bonus being that I can play volleyball year-round.  Two of my teams this season are more or less the same, with both including the husband-wife-daughter team of George, Sharon and Lisa.  I digress...

The other night was apparently a bad night for ankles.  In one of my games, George and I went up for double block and when I came down, I landed on on his feet and turned one of my ankles just about as far as you can turn an ankle without spraining it.  Scared the hell out of me.  I sprained an ankle a few years back and last summer I did something (I still have no idea what) to my right foot that left me barely able to walk for a few days and still has lingering effects even now, almost a year later.  I was shook up, but at least I was okay.  

But then later on in the match George and Sharon got tangled up near the net and Sharon went down, spraining her ankle.  It started swelling up fast and it didn't look so hot when I left to go home.  Fast forward a bit and I was sitting at home eating dinner when I get a call from Sharon.

"You'll never guess what happened."

"What?"

"George sprained his ankle in his second match."

So...bad night for ankles.  I don't know what this means for my teams since it puts two people out of commission, but I'm sure we'll work around it somehow.  Until next week though, how 'bout everyone wears some ankle guards just to be on the safe side?

Musings on Summer Jobs

Riding into work this morning in a light rain, I got to thinking about summer jobs of years past.  I think days like today just have a way of triggering thoughts like that.

I’ve had a lot of odd jobs.  My first was as a combo dishwasher/busboy/waiter/coat checker at the wonderful Liverpool Country Club, where I worked wedding after wedding for a couple of years starting the day I turned 14.  The receptions were usually on Saturday nights and we came back in on Sunday mornings.  Four or five 14-year-old guys working with little supervision- probably against some labor laws- makes for an interesting time.  After that I worked at Wendy’s, doing just about everything but making salads.  Making salads was the girls’ job.  Sexist?  Maybe.  But that’s just how it was.  We also employed an old woman who spoke only Italian and her only discernable responsibility was to go wipe down tables every 15 minutes or so.  There was also this guy Chad who basically only worked the bun warmer.  And before you get to thinking that maybe the bun warmer was difficult to operate, the bun warmer is a microwave that’s been crippled so there’s only two settings: 1 dozen buns and 2 dozen buns. 

Then after Wendy’s I moved on to my most glamorous job of all – car washer!  There was actually nothing glamorous about it, but I came to love it, three summers’ worth.

I got the job at the Honda dealership near my house and it was my first 40-hour/week job, with the hours only getting worse from there.  I started out a timid high school grad and finished it a foul-mouthed college guy.  The job didn’t actually make me foul-mouthed, but it did teach me that sometimes telling your boss to fuck off may not only be appropriate, it can be fun!  Granted, my boss was a strange guy.  If we weren’t yelling at each other across the garage then that was actually a bad sign.

It was a solid job, though.  Now I can was a car in 6 minutes with the right tools and can do a damn good detail on even the filthiest car in an hour or two.

There’s just something about working in the summer, I guess.  I think people who didn’t have summer jobs are strange.  I mean… what were these people doing with their time when all their friends were working?  And you could divide them into two groups – the ones who were annoying because their parents gave them plenty of money to do whatever they wanted and the ones who were annoying because since they didn’t work they never had enough money to so much as go out for an ice cream cone.

My summer jobs also gave me a lot of stories to tell.  Weird stories, funny stories, stories no one actually cares to hear… lots of stories, which may eventually be told here.  But we’ll see. 

Quesadillas

I would’ve liked to have thought that my first food post would be about something I cooked, but my roommate’s dinner attempt last night was too misguided to ignore.  He’d had a craving for quesadillas and even made a special grocery trip for supplies.  However, through some combination of laziness, ineptitude and a lack of culinary knowledge, the only items he end up with were the following:

-Flour tortillas (admittedly an okay start)

-Kraft shredded Italian cheese blend (the beginning of divergence from concept)

and last but not least

-Oscar Meyer deli-style shaved rotisserie chicken breast (complete breakdown)

Fortunately he seemed to realize his disadvantageous starting position and proclaimed he would make up for it with seasonings.  This, however, was not to be.

I got home from playing volleyball and was immediately informed that the quesadillas were a failure.  They were “just missing something.”  So I asked what he had ultimately used for seasoning.  The response? The Italian cheese blend (which isn’t really a seasoning), Kraft parmesan cheese (also not a seasoning), and butter flavored spread (again, not a seasoning).  That was it.

Sigh.  It’s sad to see such humble attempts go so horribly awry.  I agreed that the quesadillas were probably missing something, and just to prove a point I pulled some cumin out of the spice cabinet as a kind of “here’s one of those missing things.” Being that this was his first attempt at a new dish since he found hamburger helper like 10 months ago, I don’t know that I’d expect him to be trying anything new anytime soon. 

I, on the other hand, hope to be doing some baking this weekend.  Either some new bread recipes (ciabatta, anyone?) or I may just give baguettes yet another go. 

An Introduction of Sorts

I suppose I should introduce myself. I'm Adam. I'm a displaced New Yorker (Syracuse, not NYC) living in Virginia after graduating from the University of Virginia. I work, I cook, I bake, I play volleyball, I ski, I love music and I've recently taken up photography. This blog will much follow these pursuits, some more than others and maybe with some bonus stuff thrown in along the way.

So.. welcome.  I hope to add a lot more content as I get the hang of this, so come back and come back often.