Dark Herb Bread

I used this bread for the Cheddar Tomato Spread (recipe on previous post). It has a great texture for sandwiches and went well with the sharp Cheddar.

I broke down and finally bought a mortar and pestle after trying to pulverize the garlic and herbs with an ice cream scope and saucer! It's from my favorite bread book, James Beard's On Bread.
2 packets dry yeast
1 Tablespoon granulated sugar (1 used raw sugar, which was yummy; the yeast like it alot.)
1 1/2 cup warm water (warm on the wrist,like a baby bottle -- about 100 to 115 degrees)
3 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup rye flour
1 1/2 cups white flour
1/4 cup olive oil
1 Tablespoon salt (I used Kosher)
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
3 small cloves of garlic, peeled
2 Tablespoons parsley, chopped
1 teaspoon rosemary

Proof the yeast with the water, sugar, and 1/2 cup water.
Mix the flours, reserving 1/2 cup of white flour.
Add the salt, pepper, and olive oil and mix well.
Add the yeast mixture and 1 cup water.
Mix into a sticky dough.
Grind the parsley, garlic, and rosemary into a paste. (Ice cream scoop doesn't work very well!)
Work the paste into your dough.
If you have a small food processor, divide dough in half and work half at a time with the bread blade. Process until the dough is smooth and elastic, adding more flour if needed.
After you knead both halves, place in in a well-oiled bowl, turn to coat, with the oil.
Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
Punch down, knead another 5 minutes, and shape into two loaves.
Place in two well-buttered bread tins.
Cover and allow to rise above the rim of the loaf tin.(Cover with plastic or brush with oil to prevent dough from drying out)
Slash the loaves about 1/2 inch deep with a sharp knife or razor blade.
Bake in a preheated oven at 400 degrees for 20 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 degrees and continue baking for 30 minutes.

More Christmas High Tea

We also had two kinds of meat sandwiches.

Roast Beef, Gorgonzola, and Pear Sandwich

100% Whole Wheat Bread, 1 loaf
Roast beef, deli sliced (plain), 1/2 to 1 pound, depending on how thick you make the sandwiches
2 firm, yet ripe, pears
1 eight ounce container of Gorgonzola crumbled cheese, room temp
1 ounce cream cheese, softened to room temp

Mix the Gorgonzola and the cream cheese and set aside
Slice the pears (you can leave the peels on if you have a thin-skinned pear)

Butter the bread (as discussed in the previous blog -- keeping your sandwiches fresh)
Spread with the Gorgonzola mix
Top with pear slices and roast beef
Finish off sandwich with another piece of bread.
Cut off crusts and cut up in halves or quarters.

Turkey and Cranberry-Jalapeno Salsa Sandwich

1 loaf brioche bread
1/2 to 1 pound deli sliced turkey breast
8 ounces cranberry jalapeno salsa (recipe to be posted here)

Butter the bread for freshness.
Spread with the cranberry jalapeno salsa.
Top with another slice of buttered bread.
Cut of crusts and cut into halves or quarters.

Tomorrow I'll post the salsa recipe, courtesy of my good friends, Steve and Christy, and the bread recipes I used, courtesy of Mr. James Beard's On Bread.

How to Dirty Lots of Dishes

I hosted Christmas Day High Tea yesterday. Holiday events for my family are generally very casual, buffet-style meals, plates loaded with everyone's favorite delicious dishes and kids plopped in front of the TV. But, for reasons ranging from my own expanding waistline to my father's recent illness, I wanted to focus the event on family togetherness--enforced or not.

The tea party was a great success in this regard--my guests enjoyed visiting with the people at their tables (unfortunately, I have a house-of-small-rooms, so there isn't anywhere we can all sit together), and my oldest daughter led us in a rousing game of Victorian Steampunk Tea Party Trivia as the maid (oh, wait, that's me, isn't it?) cleared the tables. Lots of good-spirited competition there.

My tea party was resplendent with china, silver, cloth napkins, fancy centerpieces, etc. Not only did I dig out my own good china (service for 8), I went to the thrift store and bought more. That would be one of the first features to go in the casual partying most of us are used to. And I agree, the people are more important than the plates, and saving the already-overworked host or hostess some time is vital. But once in a while, the nice things are . . . well. . . nice.

I was reading this morning about accoutrement of religious ritual. I thought about attending Christmas morning mass, then coming home to set up my tea party. So many pretty objects! They are just that, pretty objects, until they're dedicated to a higher purpose: honoring God and focusing the worship of the people or honoring my folks and focusing us on each other. I think it was worth an other hour or two washing dishes last night.

But what did we have to eat? Here's the recipes for the finger sandwiches:

Black Olive Spread on Sourdough
Purchased sourdough sandwich bread (1 loaf) I used Pepperidge Farm
1 15-16 oz can of pitted black olives, drained
1 8 oz pack cream cheese at room temperature, cut in chunks
cream or half and half

Chop the can of drained olives in the food processor. Add the cream cheese, process, adding a little cream as needed to achieve a smooth, spreadable consistency.

Cheddar Cheese and Sundried Tomato on Dark Herb Bread
Dark Herb Bread (recipe to follow in this blog, or use your own favorite)
1 cup sundried tomatos (soften in hot water if they are not packed as "ready to serve")
1 and 3/4 cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
1/4 cup cream cheese, room temp
cream or half and half

Process the tomatoes, cheddar cheese, and cream cheese in the food processor, adding cream as needed to achieve a smooth, spreadable consistency.

To keep your sandwiches fresh for storing in the fridge until tea time, thinly butter both sides of the bread, then spread with the sandwich filling. Cut off the crusts. Cut the sandwiches into halves or quarters. Store in an airtight container, placing a piece of wax paper between each layer.


Tea Party, part two,next time.

Rabbit Food

Some nice people invited me to watch Miss Potter this afternoon, so I thought I'd bring a snack from my old Peter Rabbit cookbook. I hadn't look at it in years, since my children were little and I was a stay-at-home mom. It's much worst for the wear; kinda gross looking, actually. But we obviously used it a lot; the cover was stained, petrified crumbs fell out of the spine, and the pages for the best recipes were stuck together. I have dozens of cookbooks on my shelf, but the state of the pages is a good way to tell what I'd recommend.

After much deliberation, I settled on carrot cookies. Although "natural," these cookies aren't health food. Each cookies is about 2 points, according to my Weight Watcher calculator. I guess that's about 140 calories. I accidentally left out the butter, and they were fine. That might have saved a half a point or so.

Littletown Farm Carrot Cookies
(from Dobrin, Arnold: Peter Rabbit's Natural Food Cookbook, Fredrick Warne, New York, 1977)
1 1/2 cups sliced carrots
salt
1 C unbleached white flour
1 C whole wheat flour
2 1/2 baking powder
1/4 t cinnamon
1/8 t nutmeg
1/2 t salt
1/2 C shortening
1/2 C butter
1 C brown sugar
2 eggs
3/4 C golden raisins
shortening to grease the cookie sheets

Boil the sliced carrots in enough salted water to cover, for about 15 to 20 minutes. Until tender. Cool.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. and grease cookie sheets.

In a small mixing bowl, stir the flours, the baking powder, the cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt together with a fork.

In larger mxing bowl, mash the carrots, and add the shortening, butter, and brown sugar. Blend well. Beat in the eggs, then fold in the flour mixture, then the raisins.

Drop by spoonfuls onto the cookie sheets about 2 inches apart and bake for 10 minutes.

Yield: 4 dozen cookies.

What Does Food Writing Have to Do with Fiction?

Food writing seems almost too easy.

While all writers struggle to uncover long-buried memory triggers, to share reality in basis terms like smell and taste, and to touch readers with evocative connotations, food writers' material puts them ahead of the game.

For my nonfiction class, I've just read MFK Fisher's The Gastronomical Me, some of the famous essayist's most autobiographical pieces. Reading the book reminds me of how many childhood memories are keyed into some sort of food or cooking.

I don't think it's just people like Mrs. Fisher, or even me--"foodies," as the media say--that remember life in terms of food. We're a nation obsessed with eating, or not eating, as the case may be. The childhood favorites, the holiday meals, the sack lunches, they are all right there, just under the surface, informing our adult food neuroses.

Although I've been told to delete any and all scenes that involve people making tea, pouring coffee, and the like from my fiction, I suspect taking a cue from the easy life of a food writer wouldn't be a bad idea.

Yes, filling space with the protagonist fiddling with the tea service is probably a bad idea. But finding the meal--a pauper's thin gruel of oats to a king's roast turkey, dripping fat and swimming in onions and sage--that defines the emotional energy of the scene is an excellent tool.

Serve it to the reader and he'll be eating out of your hand.

Fermenting in the Collective Unconscious

Yeast are one-cell fungi –Saccharomyces cerevisiae. They’re my sort of creature; they love carbs and warm weather. As they go about their business in the bread dough, they change starch (some of the flour) into sugar, and then ferment the sugar into alcohol and a gas (carbon dioxide.) This gas, along with trapped air, gives the dough air pockets and the bread a porous texture -- for soaking up olive oil and butter, of course.
Did a multi-tasking, Egyptian baker walk off and forget about his flatbread dough, leaving it to the unsettling influences of air-borne yeast cells? Or did an apprentice, too lazy to go fetch another bucket of water, decide to make up a batch of bread dough with beer? Food historians like Reay Tannahill in Food in History enjoy imagining such scenerios, but no one knows how the yeast finally got into the dough. Since brewers and bakers often worked side-by-side, either story could be true.
The lazy apprentice story, however, has more dramatic potential. It’s about a person, faced with a problem. He makes a decision and takes a risk. For the yeast to do its thing, flour from unparched wheat (i.e., rare and expensive) would have to be used for the dough. That raises the stakes for our hero. And beer-leavened bread would have a more dramatic climax than the weak reaction we’d expect from an early sourdough prototype.
I think I’ll name him . . . “Joe.” He’s a 12-year-old . . . slave . . . a bright smart-aleck who dreams of bigger things . . . Excuse me, I’ve got to go make some notes.

Too Good to Be True?

Lured by the promise of instant fresh-baked bread, I tried the "Simply Crust Bread" from Hertzbert and Francois's Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery that Revolutionized Home Baking (St. Martin's Press, $27.95). Reading the title takes longer than mixing up the batch!

The Secret is a stash of premixed, prerisen, high-moisture dough in your refrigerator: a vat of it, ready to go at a moment's notice. Well, not quite. I manage to spend an entire week-end on this project. My family got impatient, but in the world of fresh bread, this method is pretty fast, once you get the dough in the fridge.

This recipe yields four pounds of very wet dough, which doesn't require kneading, a time-saver right there. After it's risen, only bake what you need for one meal, and store the rest. (However, it can't go from fridge to oven; allow about an hour for chilled dough to warm to room temperature.)

To make the dough, mix 1 1/2 Tablespoons active dry yeast into 1 1/2 Tablespoons coarse salt into 3 cups lukewarm water.

Then mix in 6 1/2 cups flour. I used bread flour. The dough will be loose and wet.

Cover and let rise, 2 to 5 hours.

You can bake the dough without refrigerating it first, of course, but I got a late start on Saturday, It wasn't risen in time to bake for
Saturday evening supper, so we had cornbread instead.

I shifted everything around in the fridge to make room for four pounds of bread dough and planned to bake it for Sunday night. However, we ended up having a very late dinner, waiting around for dough to warm up enough to bake and then for bread to cool enough to cut.

Several hours before you actually need bread, cut off a hunk of your chilled dough. It should be around a pound; I weighed mine, but I'm like that. The recipe says your hunk should be about the size of a cantaloupe.

Place the dough in a greased bread pan or form into a round loaf and let it rest on a cornmeal-sprinkled pizza peel. The dough's yeast cells need about an hour to wake up from their suspended animation and get the dough ready for baking. Right before you slide it into the oven, dust with flour and slash the top with a serrated knife.

Put a broiler pan in the bottom of the oven. Preheat it, the oven and baking stone, if you're using one, to 450 degrees.

Here's the fun part. As soon as you slide the dough in the oven, pour a cup of water into the broiler pan and shut the door, fast. This steams up the oven and give the bread a hard crust. Bake 30 minutes and cool completely before slicing.

We like this bread alot; it had a great crust, good flavor, and a light texture. It was chewy, and even chewier as leftovers. I baked bread from the fridge vat every few days, and my later efforts had a mild sourdough tang, which was nice.

The Bessing of the Nile

Bread wasn't always a plastic-wrapped squishy white loaf or even a brick-oven baked baguette. According to Reay Tannahill in Food in History, the best cook-out side dish a Neolithic homemaker could offer was unleavened flatbread, baked on a hot stone. A gritty, high-fiber griddlecake -- obvious from the worn-down teeth found in fossil skulls. That early baker didn't lack leavening agents: the problem was with the grain.

Wheat had to be toasted (parched) before thrashing it, or the seed would not separate from the husk. But parching the wheat destroyed the gluten-forming proteins. These proteins, in contact with yeast, produce air bubbles, then rising, and then a light porous loaf.

However, Praise Geb! (Egyptian god of the earth), a momentous event occured at the beginning of the Egyptian dynastic period. A new wheat strain appeared, which could be threshed without toasting it first. A luxury item was born: raised bread.

Today is a cold, but sunny, Saturday, and I'm planning to bake. And as the smell of fresh bread fills my house, I'll think on the Nile.

Bread is your Friend

Bread's my favorite food. And writing's my favorite job.

But I've exiled myself from bread over the past few years (evil carbs!), and this winter I've hit my first writer's block. The solution to the later is getting behind a worthwhile new project, and what would be more worthwhile than reconciling with my old friend, Bread?

I plan to work my way through some bread classics, reflect on this most basic food, and mix in historical trivia, delicious tidbits, and nutrition facts along the way.

All bakers know that bread is forgiving and loves us; I suspect it's a great teacher about life and art, as well.