Toasted sesame wheat bread and real sourdough

Over the last week or so, I've made two kinds of bread two times each, successfully.

First, I made toasted sesame whole wheat bread (Hensperger p. 113). I'd tried this before, unsuccessfully. Last time I used toasted walnut oil and dark honey; this time I used light sesame oil (as the recipe called for) and regular honey. Like last time, I reduced the salt to under 1t and the yeast to 1-1/2 t.

Toasted sesame whole wheat bread: a little lopsided but very tasty

This bread looked a little funny but tasted great and kept fresh for many days.

Yum

A week later I made another loaf. It turned out prettier, but equally tasty. I love this bread!

Less lopsided

First piece, sliced while the bread was still warm.
(I couldn't help myself.)

If you look closely, you can see the sesame seeds.

The other bread I made was my first successful, real sourdough. By "real" I mean it had no added yeast—just the wild yeast from the starter. I'd tried making a similar recipe before, but failed due to forgetting the salt. Like last time, I used a Josey Baker recipe. Unlike last time, I added 1 teaspoon of salt (half of what the recipe called for).

My first successful sourdough

Although this bread tasted great and had a nice crust, it wasn't perfect. It had a big flying roof (empty space beneath the top crust). I suspect I didn't let it rise enough before shaping it. I also wonder if slashing deeper might have helped.

Flying roof

Also, the crumb was inconsistent—it looked dense in some sections, with a different sheen.

Inconsistent crumb

Still, it was delicious!

The next two photos show the dough when first mixed and then after the final stretch-and-fold. (I suppose real kneading would be much faster, but Josey Baker calls for stretch-and-fold, and that's much less intimidating to me than kneading.)

   

The following two photos show the dough in the banneton, when first added and when about to be baked. Per Josey Baker's instructions, I used rice flour to keep the bread from sticking. (Actually, his instructions say to use rice flour on muslin, but I wanted to try to give the finished bread a spiral design; it didn't work.)

   

Finally, here's the bread just after being transferred (on parchment paper) to the heated stone.

Immediately after slashing the loaf, I put a big soup pot over the bread and closed the oven door. 20 minutes later, when I removed the soup pot, the bread hadn't risen much. I took this to mean that it wouldn't rise more, but it really really did. I wonder if I could have scored the bread again at this midway point, but I suspect it was too late.

A week later, I made the bread again.

The initial sourdough mix: whole-wheat sourdough starter, water, and salt

I followed the same process as last time, but the weather was warmer.

I marked the dough's position after the final stretch-and-fold.

It was hard to figure out when the dough had risen 150%. A straight-sided bowl or bucket might make that easier.

Ready, I guess.

I used muslin in the banneton this time, and covered the banneton with plastic instead of a paper towel when I put it in the fridge. Like last time, I wasn't sure it had risen enough when I put it in the oven, but I had a deadline. Next time I might let it rise a couple of hours before putting it into the fridge. I did let the dough sit out for 40 minutes while the oven and baking stone heated.

Bottom side up, ready to bake

I made an effort to score the loaf more deeply this time. After slashing the loaf, I found a a great page, Scoring Bread, that seemed to indicate that I did it completely wrong—that a less angled cut in a cross shape or even parallel lines might be better for a round loaf. Oh well.

Deeply scored in a curved line at an angle

Halfway through baking, as usual, I removed the pan from on top of the loaf. The loaf had risen nicely but not too much—it looked better to me than last time. Interestingly, there was no ear, but an even spread from the cut (as the page I looked at said should be the case for a cut that was perpendicular to the loaf, which I wasn't trying to do).

After 20 minutes

After 15 minutes more of baking, the bread was starting to look very dark in spots, so I took it out.

I put the bread on a rack to cool. For the first time in my short baking experience, I noticed that the bread made small crackling noises as it cooled. Apparently, that's not a bad thing.

The crust has an interesting texture, bubbly in spots and jagged in others. Some people like these crust bubbles, called bird's eyes, and some consider it a fault. The bird's eyes were probably caused by proofing the dough in the refrigerator with plastic wrap on top, so the dough stayed moister than before. Also, I'd washed the banneton, and it might have still been moist.

Bubbly crust toward the bottom of the loaf

The crust was more jagged in the slash. At least one of the dark spots was the top of a large bubble.

Jaggies in the slash, a bubble just above

The crumb was much better than last time—more consistent, and no flying roof!

The taste, like last time, was excellent. 

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.

Sesame bread maker in training + applesauce bread

This week we used up applesauce, and I taught my husband how to make one of our favorite breads, Josey Baker's sesame bread.

Sesame bread: always good!

Josey Baker's sesame bread is an easy recipe, but it has certain time constraints. It calls for mixing the pre-ferment, waiting 12 hours, then mixing in the rest of the ingredients, then waiting 3 hours, and then refrigerating at least 3 hours before shaping the bread. Once you've refrigerated the finished dough, the timing is fluid. All in all, this bread takes 23 hours to 6+ days to make, with the first 15 hours being the least flexible.

We usually like baking the bread Friday or Saturday, so we can share it with friends, but that requires starting during the week. My weekday mornings are not usually flexible, so it was time for Nate to learn how to take my place. I happened to work from home Thursday, so we could make some bathroom remodeling decisions. That meant the education of Nate could start Wednesday evening.

We toasted the sesame seeds, then started soaking the seeds that would go in the bread (as opposed to on it), and made the pre-ferment—some whole wheat, a little yeast, and some water.

The next morning, we mixed the dough. We'd had uneven dough coloring before, but we solved it by mixing the water with the pre-ferment before adding the other ingredients.

Mixing water with the pre-ferment before adding solids made for a uniform color (finally)

Thursday night we shaped the loaf and put it back in the fridge.

When I came home Friday evening, the bread was in the oven. What a treat! It came out well, the only flaw being a couple of big bubbles near the surface.

I started digging at a bubble and couldn't stop until it was a gaping maw

On to the applesauce. Nathan made it last week with the last of our pink lady apples, along with a healthy dose of ginger. I used 2 cups of it in applesauce bread, and Nathan used the rest in applesauce muffins.

Applesauce bread: tasty yet imperfect

The applesauce bread I'd made before. It's based on the applesauce variant of The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book recipe for banana bread (p. 323).

I made this bread similarly to last time, with the following adjustments:

• Maybe half the vanilla called for (we were running low on vanilla, and the applesauce was strongly ginger flavored)
• No spices (because ginger)
• Hazelnut oil (probably didn't matter)
• No salt (as usual)

As usual, I used no-sodium baking soda (a bit more than doubling the called for amount) and baking powder. I love these no-sodium substitutes. Real bakers say they aren't quite the same, but they do the job for me. The baking soda substitute has a huge amount of calcium, interestingly.

No quickbreads for me unless they're made with no-sodium leavening,
like Hain's Featherweight baking powder and
Ener-G's baking soda substitute

Unlike last time, I had whole wheat pastry flour, so I used exactly the flour the recipe called for. Instead of walnuts, I used pecans—a full half cup in the recipe itself, with more on top. And like last time, I used giant raisins.

The recipe recommends double-panning, so the crust doesn't burn before the inside is cooked

We cooked the heck out of this bread, and yet it still seemed undercooked on the bottom.

Less cooked the further down you go

We couldn't cook it any longer without burning it. I wonder if you can ever get an eggless applesauce quickbread to seem fully cooked.

The top: plenty cooked

By the way, let me just say that I love my little Oxo measuring cups. Measuring 3 T of oil (1.5 oz), followed by 1/3 cup of honey (80 ml), was no problem at all.

This little beaker makes measuring oil & (afterward) honey easy

I have no pictures of Nate's applesauce-oatmeal muffins, but they were good. We didn't double the topping, but that's not a bad idea. Nuts would also be good added to the batter and the topping.

Ice cream cake (again) and a fallen bread

Last weekend I made an ice cream cake and some black bread. Both were fine, although the cake crust was still too hard, and the bread collapsed in the middle.

Ibrahim's birthday cake

I had marching orders for the ice cream cake. It had to have:

• chocolate ice cream
• rainbow sprinkles
• whipped cream (lots of it, sprayed from a can)

I'd rehearsed last week with a yummy malted milk ice cream cake, and I applied what I learned. Most everything worked, but I'll change a couple of things next time:

• Make the crust thinner; I tried not packing it as tight and cooking it less, but it was still just as hard as before
• If I use sprinkles again, use bigger ones that aren't round; the tiny round sprinkles bounce everywhere! (I packed them around the side, which looked nice, and we sprinkled a few more on top of the whipped cream.)

And of course, for anyone but my nephew, I'd insist on a different ice cream flavor. Coffee or toasted almond or malted milk or peanut butter would all be great. Shaved or grated chocolate would make a nice coating for the sides and maybe the top.

Bowed Bohemian black bread

I don't know for sure why the Bohemian black bread fell. It did stay in the bread maker for a few hours after it was cooked (oops), but I'd think by then it would be too late to collapse. Maybe not.

Fortunately, it still tasted great. We used it for sandwich bread and out-of-hand eating, as usual, and also for bread crumbs in Sodium Girl's pork & fennel meatloaf. Yum!

Ice cream cake, two sourdoughs, cornbread, and C.R.O.W.W.

This week I made ice cream for the first time in months. I also made a sourdough whole wheat bread, helped make some sourdough waffles, took another stab at C.R.O.W.W (cinnamon raisin oatmeal walnut whole wheat) bread, and made some cornbread.

Ice cream cake

I made this cake for my friend Mia's birthday. I was happy to make it because (1) Mia is great and (2) it was good practice for my nephew's birthday cake next weekend. His ice cream must be chocolate, but we could do something more interesting with this one.

Malted milk ice cream cake

I used The Perfect Scoop's recipe for malted milk ice cream (p. 51), omitting the salt and reducing the malted milk balls from 350 g (2 cups) to 210 g. (The first time I made this ice cream everyone loved it, but it had so many mix-ins that it was hard to taste the ice cream.)

Two options for malted milk: Carnation and Horlicks

I used Carnation malted milk powder, since I could tell how much sodium it had (a fair amount, but not so much that I couldn't eat it).

Carnation has 100 mg sodium per 3 T serving.

I'd found some Horlicks in an Indian market in Berkeley, but its sodium contents were so shabbily labeled that I was afraid to use it. Seriously, why would you measure salt instead of sodium? And why would you measure it in grams instead of milligrams?

Horlicks has 0.5 g salt (200 mg sodium?) per 25 g (2 T?).

The night before churning the ice cream, I made a chocolate cookie crust in a springform pan, following a recipe for mock chocolate cookie crust. I let it cool overnight on the stove. The next morning, I put it in the freezer for about 20 minutes as I churned the ice cream.

Chocolate cookie crust in a springform pan

It'd been so long since I'd made ice cream, I'd forgotten little things like how to transfer the ice cream into the container, or setting something to catch drips. It didn't help that I was transferring to a much wider container than usual. I sprinkled on the chopped malted milk balls as I transferred the ice cream.

It worked out pretty well, although the crust was difficult to cut through. I'll do some things differently next time:

• Try not to pack the crust as much. (I considered not using as much crust, but everyone objected to that.)
• Smooth the ice cream with the underside of a metal measuring cup, as described in America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, p. 629. (I didn't find that recipe until after I'd made the cake.)
• Remove the bottom of the springform pan, as well as the sides, before cutting.
• Put the pie onto a flat plate before cutting. (To do: Find/buy a large, flat plate.)
• Press handfuls of rainbow sprinkles onto the sides, as ATKFC suggests. (My nephew specifically wanted rainbow sprinkles on his cake. For anyone else, I might use nuts or chocolate.)
• Put a plate under the springform pan in the freezer, to avoid drips of ice cream.

Sourdoughs

In sourdough land, I made a whole wheat sourdough bread and the sponge for sourdough waffles. Both were OK but could use improvement.

Whole wheat sourdough bread.

The sourdough bread (Hensperger p. 280) was marred by a too strong taste of molasses. I've used molasses before in bread and liked it, but (1) this was the bottom of the bottle and (2) the other molasses breads had strong-flavored ingredients like cocoa and coffee that probably masked the molasses. If I make this bread again, I'll use honey or sugar instead of molasses. The texture was fine, but the bread wasn't even tasty when toasted; it just smelled a little like burnt molasses.

Two sourdough starters in the bread machine.

The recipe calls for 1 cup of sourdough starter, preferably next-day white starter made with whole wheat flour. Instead I used about 2 T of a rather solid (Josey Baker) whole wheat starter. Then I added enough of a rather liquid white starter to make 1 cup. Other changes I made to the recipe:

• Reduce salt to under 1 t.
• Reduce yeast to 1 t.

The sourdough waffles, from this King Arthur Flour recipe, were going to be pancakes, but we couldn't find all the parts to our griddle. The mix was a bit thin for waffles, and they didn't cook up as nicely as usual. (No pictures: we ate all the evidence.) Next time I'll use less liquid or more flour. Or I'll make pancakes.

Cornbread

I made the same cornbread I made last week, but I used an 8-inch pan instead of a 10-inch pan. The cooking time was longer, but it was just as good. I like crust, so I slightly prefer the 10-inch pan, even though it's harder to handle.

Cornbread in an 8-inch cast-iron pan

This time I used a flavorless oil (canola or peanut) instead of hazelnut oil, and the cornbread still came out tasty. This bread was just for me, so there were leftovers, which were good for at least a day or two.

C.R.O.W.W.

I made this bread like last time, except for the following changes:

• Doubled the raisins (to 1 cup)
• Doubled the nuts (to 1/2 cup)
• Used toasted pecans instead of walnuts

1 cup of Berkeley Bowl's jumbo raisins mixed medley

1/2 cup of pecan pieces

The upshot? This is a tasty loaf of bread. Doubling the pecans and raisins was a good thing to do and didn't cause problems with mixing. (OK, they weren't perfectly mixed, but they weren't all on the bottom either. I call that a win.)

Slightly misshapen, as usual

Recipe reviews: Sodium Girl's Limitless Low-Sodium Cookbook

This evening I gave my aunt a copy of one of my favorite cookbooks, Sodium Girl's Limitless Low-Sodium Cookbook by Jessica Goldman Foung, who blogs at sodiumgirl.com. I spent a bunch of time adding bookmarks for recipes I liked or loved, and little "don't do it" signs for a few recipes I don't recommend. It'd be silly to do that again the next time I give someone this book, so here are my notes.

This cookbook isn't perfect. The directions don't always seem tested, and sometimes they're unnecessarily convoluted. I suspect that Sodium Girl is a self-taught cook who happens to be a wizard at figuring out combinations of ingredients that work without salt. These recipes use tons of herbs, spices, and other flavorful ingredients, such as tamarind paste. Although not every recipe works, the ones that do are utterly delicious.

Loved it

• Tamarind "teriyaki" chicken skewers (p. 90)
• Don't bother skewering the chicken. Just stir fry and serve it over rice.
• Salad of grapefruit + avocado with toasted pumpkin seeds (p. 125)
• So good!
• Half a jicama is enough.
• Try it with 1/4 cup or less of olive oil. (It calls for 1/3 cup, but that seems like overkill.)
• Pistachio + broccoli pesto-crusted salmon (p. 196)
• Use half the amount of pistachios.
• Trader Joe's sometimes has unsalted, shelled pistachios; get them online if not in the store.
• Don't go overboard on the broccoli.
• This makes a lot of pesto; you could probably reduce those ingredients by 25%.
• Don't buy too much salmon; 4-6 oz per person is plenty.
• This recipe is very filling (lots of good fats!).
• Pork + fennel meat loaf (p. 226)
• Yum!!!
• Don't bother basting with ketchup so often. Once before it goes into the oven and once halfway through baking is plenty.
• We've made this twice in the last week.
• Whiskey orange pulled pork (p. 227)
• Cook [the boneless pork butt] until the meat falls easily from the bone??? Riiiight.

Liked it

• Mushroom broth barley soup (p. 143)
• Makes a lot (enough for 8 people, not 4 to 6).
• We omitted the dried mushrooms (probably because we didn't have any). It was fine without them but would probably be better with them.
• The whole black peppercorns were a bit much; just use more ground pepper.
• We reduced the cooking time (15 minutes simmer -> 5, 45 minute covered simmer -> 30).
• Chicken wraps with plum sauce (p. 212)
• Tasty!
• The sauce makes the chicken gray; consider coloring the chicken somehow to make it more appetizing?
• Pumpkin turkey pasta (p. 217)
• Beef taquitos (p. 222)
• I think we've made this with chicken a couple of times.
• Don't bother rolling up the stuff and baking it; the tortillas fall apart. Just bring out the meat and some warm corn tortillas, and let people roll their own.
• Moroccan lamb stew (p. 239)
• We might have loved this, but I only made it once a long time ago, so I don't remember.
• Can use > 2# of lamb, even without the bone.
• We used an entire orange (from a serious juicer).
• The couscous can wait until just before show time.
• Quick chai tea cookies (p. 250)
• Sliced almonds taste better than pumpkin seeds.

Don't bother

• Homemade chorizo patties (p. 67)
• Might have been good with some salt.
• Fraiche start carrot quiche (p. 68)
• We tried this twice, without success.
• Once we used creme fraiche, and once greek yogurt.
• With creme fraiche it was too creamy and not eggy enough.
• The crust was better the second time, when we used half shortening (and half butter) instead of all butter.
• Beef + broccoli with szechuan orange sauce (p. 225)
• Coating the beef (step 3) was a waste of time; stir frying would've been easier and better.
• We used oranges instead of mandarin oranges; mandarins would've been better.
• We didn't like it enough to try again.

Want to try

Pickles, curry, .... We haven't made even half the recipes I want to try. I'll put a list here eventually.

Cornbread & sprouted whole wheat bread

Yesterday I made two tasty breads:

• Bread Machine Sprouted Grain Bread, from the One Degree organic foods website
• Company Corn Bread, from p. 305 of the Better Homes and Gardens New Baking Book (which was new in 1998)

I wanted to make a sandwich bread, but I couldn't use my normal recipes because I'm almost out of regular bread flour. (Most of the sandwich bread recipes I like are about 50% whole grain.) I'd had some sprouted wheat flour for a while and not known what to do with it, so I searched the web for recipes that use 100% sprouted wheat flour. Of three recipes that looked reasonable, this was the only one with reviews, and the reviews were positive.

I made the following changes to the One Degree recipe:

• 1 t salt (instead of 1.5 t)
• 1.5 t yeast (instead of 2.5 t; next time I might try 1 t)
• raw cane sugar (turbinado) instead of coconut palm sugar

When I opened the flour bag, I realized that the flour smelled a little stale. Sure enough, it was 3 months past its "best by" date. Oops.

Best by 3 months ago

I went ahead anyway. We needed bread!

I set up the bread to cook on a delay. It was too early to set it up for the next morning, so instead I timed it to be done by an hour before the latest time I expected we'd be home. We ended up coming home early, and the bread hadn't even begun to cook. I'd forgotten to reset the bread machine clock when time sprang forward the week before. I was too tired to wait for the bread, so the cooked bread stayed in the machine for hours. Oops.

Despite the stale flour and extended time sweating in the bread machine, this was still a tasty loaf of bread. It had a bit of a flying roof, but mostly the texture was very nice. The recipe had said to set the crust to light, but I didn't, and I'm glad.

The worst of the flying roof

On to the cornbread. It's a simple, quick recipe that I'd made before and was sure would work. I made the following adjustments:

• no salt instead of 3/4 t
• TJ's roasted hazelnut oil instead of plain cooking oil
• sodium-free baking powder (Hain's Featherweight)

Delicious. This stuff is great warm or cold, and nobody missed the salt. The recipe has quite a bit of fat (1 T butter in the skillet plus 1/4 cup oil in the recipe). The fat no doubt helps the flavor, and the pan required no cleanup afterward.

I'd used roasted peanut oil the previous time I made this cornbread. I loved the taste (roasted peanuts, yum!), but some of our guests didn't seem so enthralled by it. The hazelnut oil is more subtle, and it's been great in every bread I've used it in. (Walnut oil, on the other hand, didn't make a good tasting bread.)

The cornbread cooks in a 10-inch cast-iron skillet in a 400-degree oven. The texture is great, but the bread could be thicker. Next time I might try an 8-inch skillet. The recipe suggests a 9-inch round baking pan as a substitute, but I love using cast iron to cook.

The cornbread in the skillet