Garlic sourdough, take 2

I made garlic sourdough for the second weekend in a row. Last time it turned out well, but I wanted more garlic pieces. This time, I used two heads of garlic, not just one. But, it turns out, two is a bit too much for everyday eating. It was good in an overwhelming, Stinking Rose kind of way, but not something you'd want to eat for more than one meal. (We did manage to finish it eventually, but it was more out of duty and a great breadbox keeping it fresh, and less because the bread was so good.)

This week's garlic sourdough

This time I also used a starter that wasn't as many hours old, so it had plenty of life in it. I think I did two iterations of starter revivification, one the night before making the dough, and one the next morning. I mixed the dough in the afternoon.

The size of the dough, pre-refrigeration, was similar to last time's. I kind of messed up on the shaping, though. I shaped it once, realized I'd forgotten to add the garlic, and had to shape it again. Like last time, I patted it out into a rectangle, folded it in thirds, and then folded it in half to create a longish loaf. I popped quite a few big bubbles doing this, since the dough was going a little crazy.

The previous week's loaf, just before going into the fridge.

This time, unlike last time, the dough grew a huge amount in the fridge. I'm glad I oiled the plastic wrap.

After ~15 hours in the refrigerator

This time, as I have the past few times, I put parchment paper on a cookie sheet, put both on top of the basket, and then tipped them all over, so the bread could fall onto the parchment-covered cookie sheet. The bread held on a bit to the basket, but not nearly as much as last time.

Ready to go in the oven.
I still could do better with slashing. It took a few tries to get the cuts I wanted.

I meant to use the cookie sheet as a peel, but I accidentally left it in the oven for the first, covered part of cooking. I used our largest pasta pot (from Ikea) to cover the loaf. It's not quite as wide as I'd like, but it's not too confining.

After 20 minutes of baking, I took off the pot... and realized that
I'd forgotten to remove the baking sheet

I removed the sheet and parchment paper and baked until I remembered to take the bread out. Maybe 15 minutes? The bake was a little bolder than I sometimes prefer, but it tasted really good—not burnt at all.

Like last time, the bread wasn't as high as I'd like, so it was a little hard to slice. I think I'm going to try cooking it in a pan next time. Fortunately, my birthday is coming up, and I've asked for a covered clay loaf pan.

A slice

In one place, an air pocket had formed around a mess of garlic. I was a little scared and a little excited to taste it, and rightly so. It was intense!

A bunch of garlic is at the lower left

Cornmeal honey bread

Last night I decided to wake up to some bread, so I put the ingredients for Hensperger's cornmeal honey bread (p. 148) into the Zojirushi and set it to be finished this morning.

Cornmeal honey bread

What a great smell to wake up to!

This isn't a cornbread. Instead, it's a soft white bread with buttermilk (powder), honey, butter, and a small amount of cornmeal. Although I love the cornmeal texture, Bob's medium-grind cornmeal always manages to lodge in my one sensitive tooth. Ouch.

The crumb

The bread looked a little crestfallen and uneven, like many of my bread machine breads (probably because I reduce the salt and yeast). That didn't bother me.

A bit of a dip in the middle

Notes on recipe ingredients/adjustments:

• Halved the salt to 0.5 teaspoon.
• Halved the yeast.
• Used dark, flavorful honey.

One thing I wondered was why it added so much gluten. I can see adding gluten to a whole wheat recipe, but this has no whole wheat at all, and only 10% of the flour by volume is cornmeal. (The rest is bread flour, which has plenty of its own gluten.) I don't object to gluten. But additional gluten in a white bread just seems questionable.

2 sesame breads and a garlic sourdough

This week I made three Josey Baker breads. All tasted good but were a bit... wilted.

First, I made two loaves of sesame bread. I'd intended to make one, but accidentally added twice the water I needed for the pre-ferment, so I decided to go with it.

I didn't take a picture of the first loaf. I started it Friday (having taken the day off to attend to miscellaneous business), baked it Saturday morning, and took it to a party Saturday afternoon.

The second loaf stayed in the fridge until Sunday, when I baked it and it was soon demolished.

My husband can't keep this hands off
this sesame bread.

Both loaves of bread turned out flatter than I expected, but maybe I've just been spoiled by the sourdough I've been making lately. This recipe is a quicker one that uses a bit of yeast and no kneading at all.

Both loaves were pretty flat, yet the texture was good.

Thursday night, I started waking up the sourdough starter. Strangely, it kept getting very strong very quickly. I used one of the strong batches after it had mellowed a bit and smelled great, but perhaps I'd have done better to use a less aged child of the strong batch.

I decided to make the sourdough into a sourdough-garlic loaf. I roasted a head of garlic, disposed of the skin, and chopped the larger cloves into 2 or 3 pieces. Then, when the dough was ready to shape, I preshaped by spreading it out flat, putting cloves on top, and then folding the dough into thirds (the short way) and then in half (the same way). After a bit of a rest, I shaped it as usual, trying to keep the garlic on the inside.

One roasted head of garlic + sourdough

I then put the shaped dough into a basket, covered it with plastic wrap, and refrigerated it.

Shaped and ready to refrigerate

Tuesday night I took it out. It hadn't risen a huge amount, and unfortunately I kind of banged it while trying to get it out of the basket. Eventually it came out, and I slashed it and baked it.

Ready to go in the oven

The oven spring was a bit disappointing, but not surprising given that the pre-ferment was a bit old and past its prime.

The baked loaf

Fortunately, my family didn't care. When I came home Wednesday evening, the loaf was almost gone. Apparently, it made great sandwiches with cream cheese and lox, optionally toasting the bread first.

Closeup of one of the cuts

The texture seemed good to me.

I ate the end plain

The next time I make garlic sourdough bread—and there will be a next time—I'll make these changes:

• More garlic: Roast 2 heads of garlic. Perhaps smush one into the dough, but keep at least one in chunks.
• Less aging of the starter.
• More careful handling of the dough when transferring it from the basket.

The last picture in this post is neither a loaf of bread nor ice cream, but our dog Bitty. She used to be beefier (we'd joke about the amount of yummy meat on her thighs), but kidney failure and what we suspect to be lymphoma have taken their toll. She's a barker and can be annoying, but she's still a good dog who's amazingly perky, given her medical problems. We'll miss her funny walk and the way she runs from her own farts.

Bitty

Back from vacation, back to bread

I just returned from being out of town/country/continent nearly three weeks. Fortunately, I had 4 days to rest, recover, and get back on Pacific time.

The first thing I did upon getting back, late Wednesday night, was to take my two sourdough starters out of the refrigerator and refresh them. Then Friday morning I made some cinnamon-cherry bread in my Zojirushi. Saturday morning I made sourdough.

The cinnamon-cherry bread was based on Zojirushi's 1.5# 100% whole wheat apple bread recipe, but with the following changes:

• instead of 1/2 c of dried apple, I used 3/4+ c of chopped dried sour cherries (from Berkeley Bowl)
• instead of regular sugar, I used raw sugar
• instead of molasses (which I couldn't find in the house), I used a strong honey
• I increased the cinnamon about 50%
• I reduced the salt and yeast 50%

The resulting bread was very good, either fresh or toasted. I just had some toasted, with butter, and that was delicious.

On to the sourdough. Both starters woke up after their 25+ day rest, with no problems.

Saturday morning I started making the usual Josey Baker sourdough loaf. The kitchen was warm, so everything progressed much more quickly than the times listed in the book.

I slashed twice,
but not deeply enough or at a big enough angle,
so the top cracked a bit between the slashes.

The result was good, as usual.

I put our biggest stock pot on top for the first 20 minutes,
but it was a little too small, so one end was a bit misshapen.

I went for a bold bake, which resulted in a nice crust and still moist interior. I think I might back off a little bit next time, though, since some parts of the crust tasted almost burnt.

Sourdoughs, buckwheat bread, and cold stuff

Last week I made a bunch of bread, plus some frozen goodies. All the bread turned out well, though not without incident. The ginger ice cream was delicious, like before, the waffle cones were fine, and the mocha sherbet was... well let's just say it was great in a shake.

Breads

First, let's cover the breads. I made the usual adjustments to the recipes, generally reducing the salt and yeast (if any) by half.

Sourdough #1

I made the first sourdough Friday from dough that had been in the refrigerator since Sunday. By the time I was ready to bake, the dough smelled slightly alcoholic. This would be one sour loaf of bread! But in a good way.

The temperature in the kitchen was mild

I shaped the bread around 9:30 a.m. I smooshed it flattish (it had risen fairly high), folded it in thirds, and then started moving the edges under, to create a tight surface.

After shaping

By 11:20 it had risen quite a bit.

During the final rise

I put it in the oven around noon.

Scored and ready to bake

I forgot to put a pan over the bread, so it cooked faster than usual, but otherwise I couldn't tell any difference. It's possible that the crust was harder than usual, which is not a bad thing for me. The inside was still moist.

The crust sang again!

By Saturday night the bread was all gone.

Sourdough #2

Sunday morning I mixed the dough for a loaf of sourdough with poppy seeds and toasted sesame seeds (both of which I'd soaked in hot water the night before). I'd tried making this bread before, when I was just getting started with Josey Baker sourdough, but I'd accidentally omitted the salt, and the result was inedible.

Unfortunately, when I happened to notice that the cookbook's definition of the weight of the required amount of dough (375 g) conflicted with the flour bag's definition for the same volume (300 g), I chose the flour bag's definition. So this was one very wet loaf. I couldn't really slash it.

Just after "shaping"

Shaping was a messy affair, but we managed to roll it in seeds and plop it into a basket. This was at about 12:40, just before I left for a baseball game.

When I returned, at about 4:30 (A's won!), the bread had risen above the basket. Yikes! It wasn't that warm out (maybe 68 degrees), but this new sourdough starter is very enthusiastic. I put the dough in the refrigerator while waiting for the oven to finish preheating.

The end result was very tasty and had a nice texture, but it was very flat. I'll make it again with the full amount of flour.

Buckwheat bread with cinnamon and pecans

I made some buckwheat bread using a Hensperger recipe, but not from the usual cookbook. This recipe was from p. 38 of The Pleasure of Whole-Grain Breads.

Buckwheat bread with cinnamon and pecans

The bread was tasty and good, although everyone had been eating the sourdoughs so much that they rather ignored this bread.

Three-seed whole wheat bread

This half-whole-wheat bread from p. 116 of Hensperger's bread machine cookbook was supposed to have sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds. I couldn't find the poppy seeds, so I substituted black sesame seeds.

1 T sesame seeds, .5 T black sesame seeds

Other adjustments I made:

• Used light sesame oil instead of sunflower seed oil
• Reduced the salt from 1 t to 3/4 t
• Reduced the yeast to a scant 2 t

It was a tasty bread, and I ate way too much of it.

Tasty warm, with a crunchy crust that'll no doubt go soft

Cold stuff

To help celebrate three birthdays, we made ginger ice cream, mocha sherbet, and waffle cones, all from recipes in The Perfect Scoop. I'd made the ginger ice cream before, but the other two recipes were new to me.

Ginger ice cream

This was delicious, just like before. It's so creamy and subtle that my son initially mistook it for coconut, but then the ginger bite comes on.

Mocha sherbet

This tasted kind of weird, possibly because I used King Arthur's espresso powder instead of real coffee. Or maybe the Dutch cocoa wasn't great. Whatever the cause, we didn't like it as an ice cream-type treat. It smelled and tasted like frappuccino mix instead like delicious mocha.

However... it made great milk shakes! We blended it with milk (no additional sugar) and topped it with whipped cream and a few candied cherries in syrup. Delicious!

Waffle cones

This was the first time we broke out the cone maker I'd gotten a year or so ago. Somehow, I'd thought it would make sugar cones, but it doesn't. It makes waffle cones. I don't really like waffle cones. They're too big, for one thing. If I'm going to have a cone, a sugar cone is the only kind I've ever liked.

Still, the machine and the recipe (from The Perfect Scoop) made reasonably good waffle cones, though it took us a while to figure out how to shape them without burning fingers or leaving a big hole at the bottom.

I'm going to see if I can find a sugar cone shaper and recipe.

Toasted almond ice cream and a lost sourdough starter

A week ago, in a minor frenzy of sourdough baking, I forgot to save some of the starter I'd been using for all my sourdough. It was a whole wheat starter using a Josey Baker recipe, which I'd converted from a Peter Reinhart starter I'd gotten from my bus buddy Andrew.

Ugh.

Fortunately, I also had a white sourdough starter from Lee. I hadn't been using it much, but I'd been waking it up and feeding it regularly, thank goodness. I used it to inoculate a new batch of whole wheat starter. Interestingly, the new starter was (at least initially) much more active than the starter I'd been using. Within a few hours of feeding, the starter would rise tremendously. It didn't hurt that the weather was quite warm (for here) the two days I was feeding it; the kitchen was 75-79 degrees much of the time.

I made a double batch of sourdough Saturday. It almost raised out of the bowl that I'd used before for a double batch.

Saturday night I shaped one loaf (rather badly). Sunday morning I baked it. By Sunday night that loaf was gone.

The crust sang again!

Other baking I did in the past few days:

• Coconut flour brownies (again)
• Almond cake with apricot jam and browned butter frosting
• I used the magically moist almond cake recipe on the back of Bob's Red Mill almond flour, which also calls for coconut flour
• The coconut flavor overwhelmed the almond flavor, but fortunately we all love coconut
• To make the almond flavor more pronounced, I made browned butter frosting (from Better Homes & Gardens New Baking Book) but used almond extract (a little over half a teaspoon, I think) instead of vanilla. The color was a bit gray; I would've added a little coloring—a drop of yellow food dye? coffee powder?—if I'd had more time.
• I used two 9-inch round pans to bake the cakes. They came out well, but it would've been better if the cake had been thicker—the frosting dominated the cake. (Even my frosting loving husband said so.) I don't usually like frosting, but this was pretty good.
• C.R.O.W.W. bread
• It came out very dark, probably because I (taking a shortcut) soaked some raisins in hot water before putting them in.
• It tasted good but seemed dry.

I also made two ice creams (from one batch of the base) from David Lebovitz's toasted almond with sour cherry recipe. They were very good but not great.

Toasted almond stracciatella

Here's what they both have in common:

• A delicious toasted almond base. No complaints there.
• Too much chopped almond mixed in. A few minutes before I finished churning, I add 1 cup of coarsely chopped almonds, as directed. Even for me, this was too much. Half a cup would probably be better.
• Stracciatella. Just before the end of churning, I added a stream of melted chocolate to make little chocolate chips. I thought this was kind of lost, but others disagreed and said they could taste it. I'd rather have larger chunks of chocolate or a river of soft fudge.

The first ice cream was just the above. It was good, but had too many almonds. The creaminess of the ice cream was overwhelmed by the crunch of the almonds (and chocolate).

While dishing out the second ice cream, I added candied cherries (as directed by the recipe). I made these from the Lebovitz's Sour Cherries in Syrup recipe, using Trader Joe's dark morello cherries.

Making sour cherries in syrup

People liked the cherries but felt that they overwhelmed the almond ice cream—that the ice cream might as well have been vanilla. (Not that there's anything wrong with vanilla; it's just easier to make than toasted almond.)

With candied cherries

I'll certainly make toasted almond ice cream again, using this recipe, but I'll skip the cherries and mix in half the amount of chopped almonds. I probably won't add the chocolate, either.

The next time I make cherry-chocolate whiskey ice cream, I might well use the sour cherries in syrup instead of booze-soaked cherries.

Sourdough onion rolls and pocket breads

Our friend Johnny brought over movies and food, and he put me in charge of bread for hot links (and, for me, chicken). I decided to make onion sourdough buns. They came out really well!

Onions on the inside and outside of this sourdough roll

I made the usual Josey Baker sourdough recipe, but I when I combined all the ingredients, I added 2/3 cup of chopped, cooked yellow onion. (Nathan had chopped a big onion for me and cooked it in some olive oil until it was soft. The onion cooked way down; that 2/3 cup might have been as much as 1-1/2 cups.) The remainder of the onion went into the refrigerator, waiting to go on top of the buns.

Sourdough with cooked onions, just after mixing

Details:

• Started waking up the sourdough Thursday night. The last refresh was Friday night. Saturday at 2:45 pm I mixed the dough.
• I stretched the dough at 3:34, 4, 4:20, and 4:40.
• By 6:10 the dough looked like it had grown by almost 50%, so I put it in the refrigerator.
• At 6:30 I read that you should punch down the dough when it's first refrigerated, so I took it back out and gently tried to squeeze out the bubbles. Afterward, it appeared to be just a bit bigger than when it started out.

Sunday morning I took out the dough, cut it into 6 pieces, and shaped it like half-length baguettes. Here are some of the sites I looked at for inspiration.

• For tips on onion breads:
• Cinnamon-Spice and Everything Nice: Easy no-knead onion rolls (uses butter to adhere the onions)
• From the Grapevine: Sourdough onion bread (no onions on the outside; uses an egg wash to adhere poppy seeds)
• allrecipes.com: Soft onion sandwich rolls (uses egg white to adhere onions)
• realsimple.com: No-knead onion rolls (uses nothing/oil to adhere onions; tent with foil if tops brown too rapidly)
• Another recipe used margarine, yuck.
• For tips on shaping:
• King Arthur Flour: Baguettes: Do Try This at Home (King Arthur Flour)
• How To Make the Perfect Hot Dog Buns

At 11:45 I finished shaping the buns. The first and last (top right and bottom left) were different. The first I shaped poorly. The last I brushed with water instead of olive oil before putting the onions on it.

Ready to rise

At 2:10 I put the buns in the oven, on parchment paper on the pre-heated baking stone. I put a pan of hot water beneath them, and nothing over them (I didn't have pans that would fit on top of them). At 2:35 Nathan spun the buns 180 degrees and removed the parchment paper. At 2:40 they were suddenly looking very baked, so we took them out.

Fresh out of the oven

They might not look like much, but they were good! Tasty, just the right size and consistency to stand up to hot links without being hard to chew. The amount of onion, the degree to which it was cooked, and the taste were great. Yay!

Hot link in a bun

I couldn't tell any difference between the oil-brushed buns and the water-brushed one, or the "well-shaped" buns and the one I thought I'd bungled. I did realize that with 1 teaspoon of salt, each of the 6 buns had as much as 400 mg sodium, which is very high for me. So next time:

• I'll just use water to attach the onions. 
• I won't stress about shaping the buns perfectly.
• I'll make a couple of smaller buns.

Next, I tried making pocket bread, Josey Baker's name for muffin-sized pieces of sourdough bread with add-ins. Meh.

Pocket breads filling up the bread box

I used great ingredients—Trader Joe's dark chocolate peanut butter cups, plus some Belgian chocolate wafers to add up to over 1 cup. We just weren't crazy about the results.

• Sourdough plus chocolate are just OK together. I'd rather have chocolate with a less flavorful bread. Sourdough goes with savory ingredients, as far as I'm concerned—or perhaps with lots more sweet ingredients.
• 1 cup of chocolate pieces was not enough to get a piece of chocolate in every bite.
• The peanut butter got lost.

The resulting dough was supposed to be 12 muffins' worth, but it filled 12 muffin cups plus a little loaf pan.