Cherry-chocolate whiskey ice cream and a bunch of breads

Last week was busy, due to choral concerts, so I never managed to blog about the ice cream and breads I made two weekends ago. I tried making baguettes for the first time, to meh results. I also made a white whole wheat bread and a yeasted cornbread; both worked out well.

This weekend I made my first bread with instant potatoes (but mostly with whole wheat flour): Irish potato brown bread. It also was a winner, but it didn't stay fresh for long, so soon afterward I baked a loaf of Swedish rye.

More excitingly, I unvented a new ice cream flavor: cherry-chocolate whiskey. It's like Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia, but with a better recipe and added rye. I also made a yummy chocolate peanut butter ice cream, with peanut butter chunks.

Ice cream

I started out wanting to make a fruit ice cream, to go along with a peanut butter chocolate ice cream I was already planning to make. Strawberries looked great, but the birthday boy wanted cherries, so I figured I'd make Ben & Jerry's recipe for Cherry Garcia ice cream.

This was the first time I'd tried Ben & Jerry's recipe book, and although it was good for inspiration, it seemed lacking in implementation. It called for shaved Hershey's dark chocolate, when I expected chunks of better chocolate. It didn't give any hint as to how to avoid having the cherries freeze solid. And it used whole eggs (not egg yolks) and didn't cook them—an interesting approach, but one I'm leery of. It's not even close to their own recipe, I suspect. So I decided to adapt a recipe from The Perfect Scoop.

Since the occasion was an adult's birthday where whiskey would be consumed, I got the idea of adding some sort of booze to the chocolate-cherry ice cream. My daughter informed me that bourbon and cherries go together, and I found some Bulleit in the cupboard. It was rye, not bourbon, but I figured it'd work.

Cherries and whiskey go together

I pitted maybe half a pound of cherries, cut them in half, poured rye over them, and put them (covered) in the fridge.

Then I got some good dark chocolate disks (from Berkeley Bowl), chopped them, and refrigerated them, too.

I made the rum-raisin ice cream base from The Perfect Scoop, minus the salt, and refrigerated it.

The next day, I churned the ice cream, substituting the cherry-infused rye for the rum. When it seemed to be close to done, I added the cherries (which I'd chopped a bit more because they were very alcoholic) and chocolate. The alcohol in the cherries seemed to unfreeze the ice cream, so I had to churn it another 10 minutes or so.

If you like whiskey and boozy ice cream, this is delicious! The cherries were perhaps overly boozy; I might try soaking them less next time. And there will be a next time.

An added bonus was that the alcohol made this ice cream stay scoopable, even after a couple of days in the freezer.

The peanut butter chocolate ice cream, on the other hand, did not stay scoopable, but it was delicious. I added little peanut butter disks to it. I might do that again, but I'd make them much smaller.

The only other difference from before was that I made the ice cream using Skippy "natural peanut butter spread" (no stirring needed) instead of TJ's unsalted peanut butter. I don't know if the difference was noticeable, but I tried the Skippy because David Lebovitz recommends against peanut butters that separate.

Bread

I tried to make baguettes, but they were disappointing—they didn't rise well. Apparently, they tasted good, though. I used the usual Josey Baker sourdough recipe, mixing the dough at 4 pm or so, and "kneading" it at 4:50, 5:15, 5:40, and 6:20. I expected the dough to be risen at 8:20, since it was warm, but by 7:30 it looked dangerously big, so I put it in the fridge.

The next day at 2 pm I took it out, and divided the 820 g of dough into 3 parts that I pre-shaped. At 2:15 I shaped it into baguettes, which I supported using rolled-up placements that were covered with parchment paper. I covered the baguettes with plastic. I scored 2 of the loaves and tried cutting the third into an epi, but my scissors were too short to do that well. Still, the epi disappeared first. People like bread that they can grab a chunk of.

I used rolled-up placemats to support the rising baguettes

The white whole wheat bread was a Hensperger bread machine recipe (p. 127). I might have used a delay timer. I used light sesame oil, which is currently my favorite oil for baking. The maple syrup was half grade A and half grade B, because that's what I had. I reduced the salt and yeast by one half. I don't remember much about the bread, except that I liked it, and it didn't seem very different from a regular whole wheat bread.

The yeasted cornbread was a Josey Baker recipe (p. 208). I used whole wheat pastry flour instead of Kamut flour, and sodium-free baking powder and soda. I don't recall whether I added any of the salt the recipe called for. People liked it, but I think I like regular cornbread better.

Yeasted cornbread

I'd been wanting to make a bread with instant potatoes, so I made Irish potato brown bread (Hensperger p. 117). It was nice but delicate, and it turned stale quickly. Like all breads with potato flakes, it can't be made using the delay timer.

Sunday's Irish potato brown bread was great for French toast Wednesday night

Tuesday night I set up some Swedish rye to be baked by 7 a.m. Wednesday. With fennel, honey, and citrus zest, that bread is a heavenly smell to wake up to!

Swedish rye, baked on the delay timer

The recipe (Hensperger p. 136) calls for orange zest, but we were low on that, so I used mostly lemon zest. This bread is delicious, whether on its own, in French toast, or as the basis for a tuna sandwich.

Swedish rye, the inside

Fail breads, great brownies, and more

It's been a while since I posted, in part because it's no fun to talk about failures. Here's what's happened since I last posted:

• I forgot to put salt into a sourdough poppy-sesame seed loaf (which I'd never made before).
• I didn't seat the bread pan well, ruining a sourdough buckwheat loaf (which I'd successfully made before).
• I made a pretty good rye bread from a new (to me) cookbook.
• I successfully made super lemon ice cream and chunky raspberry sauce (which I'd made a few times before, but not recently).
• I found a delicious brownie recipe that features coconut flour, and I made it twice.

Salt. It's the reason I started baking bread. I can't take too much sodium, and most bread has an awful lot of it. So I bake bread with about half the salt the recipes call for (halving the yeast as well), and it usually turns out.

Without salt, bread tastes anywhere from boring to downright nasty. The sourdough poppy-sesame bread tasted nasty. I can't be sure that leaving out the salt was the only reason for this bread's failure, since I'd never made the bread before (much less any recipes from Josey Baker Bread's sourdough section). Here are the problems with the bread:

• Nasty flavor, making the bread inedible. (Lack of salt was definitely a factor. It's also possible that the poppy seeds were bad.)
• Failure to develop gluten. The bread stayed wet, the gluten never seeming to develop. (Kneading helps gluten and this was a low-knead recipe, but so is the sesame bread that I've made successfully a few times. Salt makes gluten stickier and stronger, which is what you want in yeast-raised bread. More info: Fine Cooking's article about how to increase or limit gluten development.)
• Failure to rise in the oven. (This might have been as least partly because I didn't preheat the baking stone for a full 45 minutes; I was in a hurry.)

Here's what the dough looked like when it was supposedly ready to shape:

Here's the outside of the cooked loaf:

Not undercooked (nor overcooked)

Here's what it looked like inside:

Enough of that. I didn't take a picture of the failed sourdough buckwheat loaf, so I'll just describe it. Imagine a tiny ball of bread around one paddle, and a big lump around the other paddle. The tiny ball was hard, the other one seemed a bit compressed, and together they were smaller than when I successfully cooked this bread before. I threw out the bread without eating it.

If I ever hear the bread machine making a racket again, I'll restart the cycle from the beginning, rather than reseating the bread pan and letting it continue.

Here's the rye bread, which was from the Raisin Pumpernickel recipe in Rustic European Breads from Your Bread Machine, by Linda West Eckhardt and Diana Collingwood Butts (p. 175). I took the caraway seed option instead of raisins. I probably halved the salt and yeast... I don't remember.

My first slice attempted was timid, so I sliced again
(as you can see from the curvy line at the top left)

I messed up on the baking a bit, forgetting to decrease the heat from the 400 degree preheat to a 375 degree baking heat. Strangely, the instructions say to bake it "until done...or until golden brown and done through." How are you supposed to know that a dark brown bread is golden brown? I sense cut and paste.

I shaped the dough as a free loaf, covering it for the first 20 minutes of baking. If I make this bread again, I might just use a loaf pan, since the bread crust didn't stay crisp for long. And if it comes to that, why not just bake it in the bread machine?

Here's a picture of the inside.

 Great with tomato, mozzarella, basil, and olive oil!

Changing the subject to ice cream, I made super lemon ice cream with chunky raspberry sauce, from recipes in The Perfect Scoop. I'd gotten a request for birthday ice cream the same morning. For most of the ice creams I make, this would be a problem, since I usually cook one day and then churn the next (so the custard is completely cool). I chose this recipe because it's tasty and it requires no cooking.

As usual, I used lemons from the garden.

You whir up the lemon zest with some sugar, and then you add half and half.

The raspberry sauce was also good, as always.

Ingredients for the chunky raspberry sauce

Finally, the brownie recipe. It's on the back of the Let's Do... Organic Coconut Flour package, and it's very similar to a King Arthur chocolate coconut cake recipe. Moist, deliciously chocolatey... it's a winner. It's gluten free (whatever) but definitely not low in cholesterol or fat—lots of eggs and butter.

I've made these brownies twice, both times adding chocolate chips. The brownies are OK cold, but they're great room temperature or warm. When I make them again, I'd like to try adding nuts or cocoa nibs—with or without chocolate chips.

Sourdough, Josey Baker, & Peter Reinhart

I've been making lots of different kinds of breads lately, driven by two factors:

• Borrowed bread books
• Newly obtained starters (thanks, Lee & Andrew!)

The borrowed bread books are Josey Baker Bread (JBB) and Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads (PRWGB). I've met Baker in person (before I started baking bread) when he was dropping off loaves at my office in San Francisco. He seems the same in real life as he does in the book—super enthusiastic and energetic. Reinhart also has bay area ties, but he doesn't live here any more.

I borrowed JBB first, after I happened to notice it in the Mountain View library's bookmobile. JBB takes the approach of teaching you through a series of recipes. I skipped recipe #1 and made #2, "A two-part mix". It turned out fine, although I don't remember much about it; it's a pretty plain loaf. I made a couple of changes, using graham flour for the pre-ferment (since I was out of regular whole-wheat flour) and halving the salt.

JBB: A two-part mix (recipe #2)

Reading ahead in JBB, I saw that most of the recipes called for sourdough starter. I'd already wanted to make breads from real, time-tested sourdough starters, so I decided to use Facebook and Google+ to ask for starters.

Lee's starter (found via the Facebook post) is a white sourdough starter derived from Goldrush Sourdough Starter, which doesn't have a great reputation. Lee said that the first time he tried a Goldrush starter, it failed completely. The second time, however, it took. He has used this starter for years, even taking it on week-long scout camping trips.

Andrew's starter (found via the Google shuttle) is a whole-wheat "mother starter" from PRWGB. Andrew didn't happen to need PRWGB for the next week, which is how I ended up borrowing it. (Thanks, Andrew!)

There I was, with a bunch of starter and two books I had to return soon. It was time to start baking. However, I didn't have much time, given work and my commute, and most of the recipes in both JBB and PRWGB take multiple days to make. I was able to refresh both starters during the week, but I couldn't make most of the recipes.

So that we'd have bread during the week, I used Lee's starter to make sourdough buckwheat bread from Ruth Hensperger's The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook (TBLBMC). Sourdough buckwheat bread is a really nice loaf of sandwich bread, with flavor from buckwheat, whole wheat, and orange zest. It's not the heart-healthiest recipe (mostly white flour, with an egg and some butter), but I might well make it again.

TBLBMC: Sourdough buckwheat bread

Changes I made to the recipe include halving the salt, halving the yeast, and using buttermilk powder & water instead of buttermilk. I might've also used a little less butter than the recipe called for, thanks to spillage.

Next, I made another relatively quick recipe: JBB's adventure bread, which is made almost entirely of seeds—no gluten, and no flour. It's held together mainly by chia and psyllium. You can see the recipe on David Leibovitz's blog. I wasn't crazy about this bread, and my husband hated it, but it's certainly interesting, and it holds its shape amazingly well. If you try adventure bread, I recommend eating it warm, preferably toasted, so it isn't clammy. I omitted the salt entirely, but it'd probably taste better with salt.

JBB: Adventure bread

Finally the weekend came, and I could prepare two-day recipes from JBB and PRWGB. Saturday I started JBB's sesame bread and PRWGB's whole wheat sandwich bread. The sesame bread isn't a sourdough bread, but I'd been wanting to make it ever since getting the book, and I'd recently found the brown, unhulled sesame seeds it called for. I started a little late in the day (after noon), so I ended up staying up very late, so that after the 12 hour pre-ferment, the mixed sesame bread could rise for 3 hours before I stuck it in the fridge for up to 3 days.

The PRWGB recipe is 100% whole grain. It uses a soaker (salted, soaked whole wheat) along with a bunch of starter. I made the soaker Saturday morning, so that it'd be ready to mix with the starter and bake Sunday. Even though PRWGB featured this recipe in its "Master Formula" section, it was sufficiently complex that I wrote a 9-step timeline of what I needed to do. It felt like Thanksgiving, with less risk of food poisoning.

Timeline for PRWGB's master formula

When I started prepping to make the dough, I remembered a big pastry board I'd given my daughter. It's a beauty, but I don't think we'd used it before.

Pastry board with ingredients ready to mix

I tried using the stand mixer to mix the dough, but it didn't seem to be working, so I ended up mixing by hand. Then I kneaded for what was supposed to be under 5 minutes but went much longer, until the dough got close to passing the windowpane test—stretchy enough that a small amount you pull off can form a translucent "windowpane". Kneading must be a good core workout: the next morning my abs were a little sore!

I'm not experienced at shaping bread, so I'll spare you the pre-baking pictures of shaping the bastard, but here's the final result, which is huge, by the way.

My version of a bâtard (which means bastard in French)

The resulting bread tasted fine, but the crust was disappointingly soft. I suppose I should've expected the soft crust, since it was described as a sandwich bread, but if I'd known I would've just baked it in a pan.

I took my time with the JBB sesame bread, not baking it until Wednesday. I goofed up the flip into the Dutch oven, so it ended up folded in half. The end result looked a little weird, but it was delicious!

Not bad for a loaf that took a header

My husband and I keep eating this bread. It tastes great, it's nicely chewy, it's good in a sandwich or by itself or alongside dinner... This is a seriously yummy bread. Even though only a small percentage of it is whole wheat, I'll make it again. The sesame seeds help make up for the white flour, right?

Great by itself or with dinner

The only change I made was halving the salt. I made the pre-ferment and dough mix Saturday, shaped the dough Monday or Tuesday night, and then baked it Wednesday. (Note: Eat this bread within a day or so. By Friday evening, it tasted stale.)

The ugly side looked like a monster's face. I ate it anyway.

Both JBB and PRWGB feature whole-grain, artisanal breads. JBB is more approachable; it's breezy and doesn't require lots of reading before you get to work. On the other hand, JBB didn't answer all of my practical questions (should I cover my proofing basket? what does "fold in the sides of a circle" mean—how can circles have sides?). PRWGB is more thorough and authoritative, but you have to flip around a lot to get all the information you need.

When I started this post, I thought I'd end up buying one of the Reinhart books but probably not the JBB book. After making the bâtard and the sesame bread, I've swung the other way: the PRWGB bread was a lot of work with a disappointing outcome, and the JBB bread was delicious and easy (though not quick).

I've also discovered that I'm not really into kneading. In the future, I'll probably let the bread machine do the work.

Finally, I'm planning to buy a baking stone and a lame. Maybe a banneton basket, too. No more monster-face breads for me.