Taking my Ciabatta Out for a Spin

Today I made my first ever panini sandwich (or panino, if you prefer) using my own home made ciabatta.  I don't have a panini press or grill pan to make those cute little grill marks on the sides, so I just cooked the sandwich in a dry frying pan over medium heat, pressing down with my fingers and a spatula.  It worked pretty well (even the somewhat precarious flip) although I wouldn't have minded if it had gotten a little thinner and crispier in some places.  For the filling, I layered fresh mozzarella, shredded basil from my garden, and a sliced heirloom tomato from the farmer's market.  Then I drizzled a little balsamic vinegar and olive oil over the filling and dusted a little sea salt and black pepper on top and added the other slice of ciabatta.  Yum.

Ciabatta, mi amore

Bread this good makes me want to simultaneously toss out my law degree to open a bakery and never bake again.  On the one hand, I think that I have finally arrived as a baker par excellence and that I should share my gift with the world(!!!!!).  On the other hand, I despair of ever making a loaf of bread this wonderful again.  This bread is perfect.

 
For once, I have no words.  In fact, I'm having trouble even typing this because I'm so busy shoving slices of this delicious bread in my mouth.  With a glass of wine and a few slices of cheese, it's as close to paradise as anyone has a right to be on a Monday night. 

So first, let's give credit where credit is due:  The River Cottage Bread Handbook.  This recipe put me off at first because it looked time consuming and different from the other recipes I have tackled recently.  I was sure that the author couldn't mean it when he said to fold the dough in three "like a blanket" multiple times during the rising period.  Not only did he mean it, he was completely right about what it did for the dough.  The air pockets in both the dough and the finished loaves are divine.  My concerns about the time-intensive process proved unfounded, too.  To be sure, you need to set aside about five hours to follow this recipe, but I was doubly rewarded by the sheer amount of bread it made and by the gift of time broken up into 30 minutes increments - perfect for cleaning my house.  Moreover, the ratio of water to flour is perfect and kneading the dough didn't give me sore arms.  The olive oil and semolina give the bread a rich, farmhouse taste.  In conclusion, this is the airiest, softest, most subtly flavorful bread I have ever made.  I am in love.

Garlic French Bread II: Too Moist, Too Flat

Yesterday I made the same garlic french bread recipe that was the bane of my existence last weekend.  I really wasn't in the mood to spend half my life kneading unresponsive dough, so I added enough water to make the dough sticky and easy to manipulate.  I also dissolved the yeast in the water before I added it to the flour/salt mixture.  I don't know if this was my best idea ever.  I also let the dough rise for a really long time.  Like three hours.  Because I fell asleep.  Honestly, I helped my awesome friend Holly celebrate her 30th birthday on Friday night, and I really shouldn't have gotten up and tried to make bread the next morning.  The bread is surprisingly tasty (probably thanks to the eight cloves of lightly roasted garlic I added to it) but came out a little flat.  I like that it is moister than the last loaf, but maybe I should add slightly less extra water next time. 

The number one problem with this batch of garlic french bread was that it consistently expanded by oozing and spreading rather than by rising upward.  I think that this must be due to extra moisture in the dough.  So, I guess the moral of today's post is, don't add THAT much extra water.  And probably also: don't bake hungover.  Luckily, I get a redo.  Today I'm taking my first ever stab at ciabatta!

Parker House Rolls

When I'm short on time, but still want something delicious and home-made, this fantastic recipe from the Joy of Cooking will be my new standby.  It is essentially the same recipe that I used for the hot crossed buns earlier this week, but leaving out the sweet ingredients.  These dinner rolls would be perfect for Thanksgiving dinner, but would be equally excellent for making a tiny lobster roll.  They are as delicious for breakfast and lunch as they are for dinner.  The only danger is that, since they make such small sandwiches, you might end up eating five sandwiches for lunch, like I did today!

I learned my lesson from earlier this week and was careful about the length of time I kneaded these rolls.  In fact, when I looked back over the recipe, it merely directs to knead the remaining flour into the dough, not to do any additional kneading.  I kneaded until the dough had absorbed all the flour in the bowl and the dough was spongy and still a bit sticky on the inside, then tried to handle it as little as possible when forming the rolls.  Although the recipe called for the rolls to be cooked for about 15 minutes in a 425 degree oven, I cooked them for about 12 minutes in a 400 degree oven, and they came out golden brown and wonderfully soft.  I will definitely make these again!

Hot (un)Crossed Buns

I'm not sure I'd ever had a hot crossed bun before.  If I had, it hadn't made a huge impression on me.  I kind of had an idea that they were sweet rolls, although I also may have confused them with Chelsea buns, which I've also never had, although I think they're sweeter.  Anyway, after laboring all day on the garlic french bread on Sunday, I was looking around for something fun and easy.  Ideally, I wanted a cooking project that would taste yummy and satisfy my need to cook more without spiking my frustration level through the roof.  The Joy of Cooking, my old standby, came to the rescue.

I was flipping through the bread section, looking for a fast bread that didn't require lots of milk and eggs - items I am ambivalent about during the best of times and certainly can't afford at the moment (seriously, the only eggs I don't feel completely guilty about eating cost nearly half my weekly shopping allowance!)  As soon as I saw the recipe for hot crossed buns, I knew I had found what I was looking for.  It only required one rising period and 20 minutes in the oven, plus, it called for raisins, one of my favorite foods.  I didn't notice until I was almost finished making the dough that it called for one egg.  I'm not sure how I missed it, since the Joy is very clear in its ingredient lists.  I think I assumed that, as in the other roll recipes in that section, the egg was optional.  At any rate, I didn't have any eggs so I carried on without them.  The rolls turned out just as delicious as I had hoped, but a little dry.  I have two theories for this.  First, I would have let them rise a little bit longer if I hadn't had plans in the afternoon.  Second, I think that I kneaded them too much!  After working with tough dough all morning, I think I might have been a bit too excited to be kneading nice soft dough.  Finally, I have a third theory, that eggs help bread rise and would have added moisture.  The next time I make these I will remember to add the egg. 

Nonetheless, I'm happy with the result.  These buns are slightly sweet, the golden raisins are delicious, and they kind of remind me of Christmas with all the cinnamon and nutmeg.  They're excellent with a little butter and a cup of tea in the morning.  When I realized that the "crossed" in the name referred to actually drawing a little cross on the top of the rolls, I skipped it.  Who wants to do extra work for something that has no effect on the deliciousness of the food?  Which leaves me wondering what to call these yummy un-crossed buns.

I Stand Corrected . . . also, this tastes AMAZING!

I have to admit that, while I was waiting for the dough to rise this morning, I thought a number of not very kind things about Confessions of a French Baker by Peter Mayle.  The book purports to be a guide to baking loaves like a professional, artisanal French baker, aimed at an audience of regular people, like me.  Or maybe not.  Although the first chapters of the book linger over the romance of bakers arriving to work well before dawn to lovingly craft their loaves and the smell and feel of yeasty dough being shaped into perfect baguettes, batards, and boules, it does not give much space to what I consider the much more important aspects of bread-making: ratios of ingredients, kneading technique and length of time, and rising periods.  In fact, the recipes contained in the second half of this book almost universally call for both mixing and kneading the dough in an electric mixer.  I have always been of the opinion that anything that can be made with a mixer can also be made by hand (see Thursday's post), although sometimes it requires more effort, so I simply made these recipes the old fashioned way.  But I have never achieved completely satisfactory results. 

Over the past few months since I checked this book out of the library, I have been experimenting with its recipes, particularly the baguette recipe, and have come to the conclusion that the measurements did not survive the translation from French to English and from European to American measuring systems unscathed.  I find that I consistently need to add more water, and that my dough often doesn't rise nearly as much was one would expect from dough with such an obscene amount of yeast in it. (4.5 teaspoons? Really?)  Today, while I was waiting - and waiting - for my most recent batch of dough to rise, I began to wonder if it really did make a difference whether I mixed and kneaded the dough by hand or in a mixer.  Maybe I'm not strong enough to mix really stiff dough by hand, and that's why I'd been adding extra water.  Maybe, 15 minutes of kneading in a mixer is actually equivalent to more like 25 minutes of kneading by hand, which seems like a lot, but some of these doughs have been really tough.  I even formulated an experiment in which I would go to the home of a friend who has a stand-up mixer and make bread solely by machine for a day. 

All this is really just another way of saying that I was doubting Confessions of a French Baker and thinking that I would never get a really good loaf of bread from its recipes.  Today it proved me wrong. 

I decided to try garlic french bread, a variation on the traditional batard in which you add 6 chopped cloves of garlic to the dough before kneading.  The recipe was indecisive about whether the garlic out to be cooked first - in one section it called for sauteed garlic, while in the instructions it said simply to chop the garlic and add it to the dough.  I love roasted garlic and dislike raw garlic, so I decided to roast mine in the toaster oven before adding it to the dough.  I ended up needing about a 1/2 cup more water than the recipe required, plus a little extra salt, and there was so much yeast that the yeast was actually falling out of the dough as I was kneading it, although it slowly dissolved in.  Even though I had added a little extra water, the dough was very dry and very tough to knead.  I kneaded it for about 15 minutes, until I was completely sick of it, and put it in a bowl in the slightly warm oven to rise. 

Every rising period seemed to take ages longer than expected, and the dough just barely doubled in size.  In short, it had none of the fabulous airiness I've come to expect from dough that has risen multiple times.    Once I had formed the dough into batards, I decided to let it proof for as long as it needed to start to breathe a little.  At that point, I didn't really care if the loaves came out small as long as they weren't unbearably dense.  Really dense bread just isn't fun to eat.  I ended up letting the dough proof for over an hour on top of the preheating oven, and although it didn't double in size it did get noticeably fluffier.  I cut the dough into leaf shapes for fun, then sprayed the loaves and the inside of the oven and popped the loaves in.  About ten minutes in I sprayed the oven again.  After about twenty minutes, I turned the heat down from 450 to 400 degrees, afraid that the loaves were browning too much on top.

What came out of the oven were savory, not-too-dense, crisp-crusted loaves of french bread, with a strong hint of garlic.  They are absolutely delicious with butter slathered on top, and I can't wait to try them with cheese!  I'm not sure how these loaves came out of that not very promising dough, but I can only assume that that dough needs a much longer rising period (and possibly higher room temperatures) than others.  The loaves are still not as airy as I'd like them to be, but not nearly as dense as I'd feared.  I'm also completely sold on roasting the garlic first.  Although the taste is not as strong as it would have been if I had used raw garlic, the softness of roasted garlic allows the flavor to spread throughout the loaf, rather than being captured in pockets of garlic.  In the future, I may try this recipe again with more like 10 cloves of roasted garlic.  I am also going forward with the mixer experiment (if my friend agrees, and who wouldn't want someone baking in their house all day?)  More updates to follow . . .

The Stand-up Mixer Debate

What is it about stand-up mixers and marginally domestic girls in their 20s?  It seems like stand-up mixers used to be something that our grandmas had, and, if we realized how useful they were, we could look forward to inheriting them rather than tossing them out as relics or pieces of junk.  As far as I can remember, neither of my grandmas had a stand-up mixer, at least not during the time when I knew them.  My mom definitely never had a stand-up mixer.  I don't know if it was our consumer culture that placed "now" over "good" or a glitch in our understanding of feminism that made us think that any woman who got near a kitchen was betraying her ideals, but a lot of women my age grew up thinking that cooking was unimportant, boring, or someone else's job.  Or worse, we believed that we were cooking when we poured something frozen into a saute pan.  Regardless, we never learned to value cooking meals from scratch, and so we never learned how, and so we never wanted mixers.   At least, I think that's how the progression ought to go.

But this post isn't really about the cooking and life skills we've lost.  After all, we've seen a huge surge of interest in all things do-it-yourself, back-to-the-land, and crafty in the past ten or so years.  People are taking steps to slow down and connect with their families and with the planet by making more home cooked meals, growing their own fruits and vegetables, even canning fruit and raising chickens.  But, where, in all of this interest in "from scratch" does the resurgence of interest in products like the KitchenAid Mixer come from?  When I was taking my first steps toward a more "from scratch" lifestyle six or so years ago, I was focused on reinventing the wheel.  I thought that, to really be from scratch, my food had to be made by hand.  Luckily for me and my occasional dinner guests, I didn't extend this idea to its logical (if absurd) conclusion and start cooking my meals over a camp fire.  But I did start to think about where my food came from and then later tried to gauge how much energy input went into getting it from where it came from to my table ready to eat.  I figured out that you could make most things that called for mixers by hand (even meringues, though I wouldn't recommend it).  I also figured out that there are some things, like pumpkin, that really do taste better after a few minutes in the food processor.  At that point, it becomes a decision and a trade-off.  Is the improved consistency worth plugging in the food processor for a few minutes?  Can I make this dish in another way?  If it will taste the same, I try to go the non-tech route.  And I now own a couple of sturdy appliances that get me through the tasks that I have decided really are worth plugging in for.

Which brings me back to the mixer.  All of a sudden, this summer, I absolutely had to have a KitchenAid mixer.  I think it was a combination of the lingering euphoria from looking at friends' wedding registries (so much shiny cookware!) and soreness from all the hours I was spending alternately hunched over my computer and laboring in the kitchen.  There might have been whiskey involved, too.  I searched on the internet (purveyor of so much shiny cookware) and found a sturdy-looking refurbished mixer.  It was still woefully out of my price range.  I talked about it for weeks.  I tormented my mother, my best friend, and my roommate, not to mention my Bar study partner.  In the end, I didn't buy it.  A girl with no job who has never been able to afford a washer and dryer or a car shouldn't be purchasing fancy cooking appliances.  That was when I started to wonder what had happened to me, and why I felt so strongly about needing to own a stand-up mixer.

Which came first, our interest in cooking from scratch or our interest in shiny cookware?  The answer to that question is different for everyone, and I don't think it really matters as long as we're doing something that makes us healthier and happier.  If good marketing by sellers of beautiful cooking tools is getting more budding cooks into the kitchen and more home cooked food on people's tables, I think it's a win for everyone.  And yet, it frustrates me to think that our new-found love of cooking and living in a sustainable way has come full circle to once again support the consumer culture that a lot of us have been trying to get away from.  Why did I really want a stand-up mixer?  Was it because my arms were sore, or because everyone else had one?  I think that I was hugely influenced by the well-marketed idea that delicious food comes from a beautiful kitchen, and that people who have the "right tools" are able to accomplish more.  For me, this is a bad thing.  I turn to cooking for all kinds of reasons: to control the food I eat, to "vote with my dollar" at the grocery store, for the comfort that crafting by hand gives me.  I don't like to think that I do it for the shiny consumer goods, even if I can acknowledge that they're pretty.  I'm curious how other people feel about this issue, or whether I'm the only one who stays up at night agonizing over consumerism and its grip on me.

In the end, not getting the mixer was the right choice for me.  No matter how much I tried to use it, it would have been just another thing that took up unnecessary space in my life (and that I would have developed some form of guilt about).  At least for now, I have decided that I already have all the tools I need to be a great cook:  two hands, a bunch of cookbooks, a little ingenuity, and a lot of resilience.