Category: Food

I apologize for bragging, but after considerable practice, I’m ready to claim that I’m now as confident with sourdough artisan breads as I long have been with traditional yeast breads. The keys are the right guidebooks (chiefly The Breadmaker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart), a steam oven (the Cuisinart CSO-300), a few simple tools like a baker’s stone, a peel, and a razor-blade lame for slashing the tops, and lots of patience.

One of the best discoveries I’ve made in the last year is sprouted whole wheat flour. It has turned out to be much easier to work with than whole wheat flours. And sprouted flour almost certainly is even healthier, with a lower glycemic index and easier digestibility. When getting a start with sourdough artisan breads and pursuing your practice, I think that one is pretty much obliged to work with unbleached bread flour. But once you’ve got that down pat, you can move on to more challenging flours such as sprouted whole wheat.

Sprouted whole wheat flour loves being fed to your sourdough starter. However, you need to give it a little more time. Another of my discoveries (no surprise to sourdough professionals) is that sourdough bread doughs love the refrigerator. Invariably, when I split a batch of dough in half and bake part of it today and part of it a day or two later, the bread made later is better. Not only does the later bread taste better, but it’s easier to get a better crumb with coarse holes, and more oven spring. Just be sure to take it out of the refrigerator in plenty of time to get the dough up to room temperature.

It’s getting to the point that yeast breads don’t even seem like real bread anymore. Sourdough bread makes toast that is greatly superior. And while a yeast bread will be moldy on the third day, I have never seen a sourdough bread go to mold. You can toast it for days. I’m sure that it’s the lactic acid that preserves it.

The loaf in the photo above sprawled flat (as usual) when I put laid it on the baking stone in the hot oven. But by the time it was done, it had sprung straight up to almost twice as high, and the top burst open nicely.

That’s fall greens in the photo below, with egg salad from home-laid eggs.

Pumpkin soup

I go into Winston-Salem regularly to get groceries at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, but I usually get the heck out of town as quickly as possible, because I miss the peace and quiet of my hermitage in the foothills. But today I was in downtown Winston-Salem, I was hungry, the weather was beautiful, and I figured that it was high time I treated myself to a proper lunch.

None of the restaurants downtown appealed to me very much. They seemed far too trendy and aimed at a younger set. However, just west of downtown is a lovely old restaurant named Bernadin’s. I used to go there frequently years ago, before I moved to California. At the time, it was called Zeveley House. It is more or less French, and it’s as nice a white-tablecloth bistro as I know of.

I tend to be stingy, but I called a moratorium on stingy today. I ordered the grilled salmon without asking the price. I was almost shocked when the check came. The salmon, which included a salad and potatoes and vegetables, was $13. I was expecting anything from $14 to $19. The soup, which came with bread and butter, was $6.

No doubt I still think like a San Francisco person if I’m in a bistro, and I know that good food can’t be cheap. But this seemed shockingly reasonable to me. Country restaurants or the places that I called “fried fish houses” will sell you grilled salmon for the same amount or more, and you’re not likely to be pleased with what they set in front of you. But the cooks at Bernadin’s obviously are well trained, and lunch was delicious.

I will definitely do it again. I sat outside in their patio, by the way, and I was the only person there. I don’t feel the slightest stigma having lunch, or even dinner, alone in nice restaurants.

The salad that came with the salmon

Grilled salmon, one of the day’s specials

When I was a young’un growing up in the country, people had apple trees and actually bothered to pick them up and use them. That meant that, when apples were in season, you might get them at every meal. Everybody’s favorite is apple pie, but that takes time. I don’t know about you, but for me eating apples raw (except maybe in Waldorf salad) takes some discipline.

But the easiest way to make apples that even young’uns will eat is to fry them. The word “fry” makes it sound more unhealthy than it really is. It just means cooking the sliced apples in a skillet, in butter, with some cinnamon and maybe a wee bit of sugar. The fried apples are then served like a vegetable along with supper. I don’t know of anybody who thought of fried apples as a dessert item.

Fried apples can be worked into any meal. Here the fried apples are a topping for sprouted wheat pancakes with toasted walnuts, maple syrup, and blackberry preserves.

Speaking of maple syrup, Trader Joe’s has it at a reasonable price, imported from Quebec. Don’t hesitate to buy Grade B maple syrup. I like it better than Grade A syrup because Grade B has a sassier, more rustic maple syrup flavor.

All during the night, a steady rain blew in from an Atlantic storm. The high temperature forecast for today is 62. This is sprouted wheat pancakes with maple syrup and blackberry preserves. I wish I could say that I made the preserves, but a friend gave them to me.

After I got Peter Reinhart’s amazing book The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread, the first recipe I undertook was the recipe for sourdough bread. I swear that I can now make some of the best sourdough bread I’ve ever had.

I am a bit ashamed to say that the second recipe I undertook was the recipe for pizza crust. I swear that I can now make some of the best pizza I’ve ever had.

Compared with sourdough loaves, pizza crust is a snap. It’s so easy that it might as well be done right. Reinhart insists on starting the dough at least a day ahead. It rests in the refrigerator overnight. Stretching the dough on your fists, though it looks like a fancy trick, really isn’t. The dough will stretch, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It may not come off your fists perfectly round, but that’s not a big deal, and within certain limits you can slide the crust into a rounder shape after you’ve put it on the baker’s peel and before you put on the toppings.

For a proper pizza crust, you’ve got to have a baking stone. If you bake on a baking stone, you’ve got to have a baker’s peel. That’s really all the apparatus you need other than a hot oven.

I almost never post recipes here, mostly because I rarely write down recipes of my own concoction. However, I’ve written down an approximate recipe for my vegan meat loaf. It’s a very healthy, low-glycemic, high-protein dish that keeps well and makes great leftovers. The intent is not to make a meat analog and trick anyone into thinking they’re eating real meat loaf. Rather, the intent is just to make a good vegetarian main course. It’s also a low-cost dish. Most of the ingredients can be bought in bulk. I usually think of it as a winter thing, but with the small steam oven I can make it in the summer without dumping too much heat into the house.

Soak the soybeans overnight. Cook them according to any recipe for cooking soybeans. I usually cook them in the pressure cooker. Drain the beans but reserve the liquid.

Soak the hulled barley overnight. (Pearled barley does not need soaking.) Cook the barley according to any recipe for cooking barley.

Coarsely chop the walnuts. Chop the onion fairly fine. Mash the soybeans with a potato masher. Mix all the ingredients in a big bowl. Use good judgment about whether the mixture looks too dry. When it’s finished baking, you want it to be firmly set in the pan but not too dry. If the mixture looks too dry, add a tablespoon or two of the soybean cooking water.

Put the mixture in an oiled bread loaf pan. Drizzle the top with oil. Cover the pan with foil. Bake it for about an hour in a 325-degree oven. It should be sizzling, moist, firm, and not too crusty when it comes out of the oven.

Serve it hot and sauce it with brown gravy.

If you like this dish enough to make it a second time, then alter the recipe to suit your taste. I like the texture and chewiness of the walnuts and barley. If you’d prefer a texture more like a paté, then you can use a food processor. Vary the seasonings. Make it more sassy by substituting more Worchestershire sauce for some of the tamari. Try curry paste or harissa instead of ketchup. Consider adding some herbs, or an egg. This a basic recipe that you can customize for your family’s tastes. You can modify this recipe to make a breakfast sausage by diminishing the amount of barley and walnuts, increasing the amount of wheat gluten, and seasoning it with sausage spices such as sage and pepper. As sausage, keep the mixture in the refrigerator, and fry in it patties for breakfast. It’s the combination of barley and wheat gluten that give the loaf its meaty chew. Experiment with the proportions of the ingredients to get a texture you really like.

Too much of it left over? Ran out of leftover gravy before you ran out of meat loaf? Use it to stuff peppers or to make cabbage rolls. Or reshape the leftovers into burgers and fry them. Use it in, say, a layered squash and cheese casserole the way you might use ground beef.

We’d all benefit from eating more barley — especially hulled barley, which is a whole grain. If you read up on barley, you’ll find that it has a very good influence on the digestive system. The gladiators were sometimes called “barley eaters.” The ancient Greeks also ate a lot of barley. If you’re not an experienced barley eater, start with pearled barley before you work up to the much more rustic hulled barley. We all know that walnuts are good for us. Soybeans are an excellent, cheap source of protein. I can’t imagine eating soybeans as a solo dish, but they go well with other hearty ingredients. The combination of amino acids in seed, legume and nuts (barley, soybeans, and walnuts) make a high-quality vegetarian protein.

Serve it with any vegetable. This is a dish with which you definitely won’t want any bread. Maybe that’s why I made it today — to deal with my temptation to make more sourdough bread.

A little research suggests that bread books fall into two basic categories: Books for people who want good bread without investing a lot of time and trouble; and books for people who want the best possible bread no matter how much fuss or apparatus is involved. I’m in the second category. The first bread book I ever bought was James Beard’s Beard on Bread, the 1973 edition. Much has changed since then. Americans know a great deal more about good bread than they used to, so we have much higher expectations.

I shopped around for a book for those who aspire to artisan-quality bread. Peter Reinhart, author of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, believes that 80 percent of the quality of bread is in the quality of the dough and that only 20 percent relates to the oven. I remain somewhat skeptical of that, because I doubt that Reinhart struggles very often with unsatisfactory ovens. But I do take his point — that making the dough is very, very important.

The first recipe I tried from the book was his basic sourdough recipe. I tend to not slavishly follow recipes, but in this case I thought I owed it to Reinhart to follow his recipe — he calls them “formulas” — as carefully as possible. Reinhart’s philosophy is that the fermentation process must be long and slow, so that biological and chemical processes can break down the starches and bring out the flavor. I am not going to argue with that. I have tended to rush breads, including sourdoughs. I won’t do that anymore, because Reinhart’s s-l-o-w sourdough was by far the best bread I have ever made. It may even have been the best bread that I have ever had, including in San Francisco and Paris. Both crust and crumb were superb, and the flavor was incredible. By the way, I have been using King Arthur organic unbleached flour (which is shockingly pricey but worth it), a sourdough starter that I ordered several months ago from Breadtopia, Celtic sea salt, and filtered well water. That’s it.

I think I have pretty much identified where my breadmaking skill needs to be improved to get to a really professional level. The new steam oven has solved a major problem. I’ve acquired a baking stone and a baker’s peel, which are necessary for hearth-baked breads such as sourdough. I think I’ve learned my lesson about rushing breads, and I won’t do that anymore. My remaining problems have to do with the final shaping of the loaf and getting the loaf, once it hits the oven and springs, to go upward rather than to sprawl. I’m getting better at creating the surface tension in the final dough shaping to make that happen. Steam is essential, or there won’t be much oven spring at all. And when you bake on a flat stone to get a good bottom crust, there’s no pan there to keep your loaf from spreading. But as for the taste of my sourdough bread and the quality of the crust and crumb, I’m happy.

Reinhart includes a thermometer in his list of essential equipment. I got one. For the sourdough bread, he suggests a final internal temperature of 200 to 210 degrees. No problem; 207 degrees is when bread looks done to me, but the thermometer certainly helps control the process. He likes proofing baskets but considers them optional. I’ve ordered some Banneton proofing baskets, and I hope they will help to get my loaves to push upward in the oven rather than to sprawl.

The diet scale has been in the closet. I’d better get it out and start watching my weight again.

Who doesn’t like an Alfredo? You can no more not like an Alfredo than you can not like a doughnut, or a potato chip. Though heavy cream is not as deprecated as it once was, it still seems pretty decadent. But because I am a decadent person, I always stock Organic Valley cream. I use it in my morning coffee. My half & half days are over. The cream is always there in the fridge in case I take a notion to make homemade ice cream. And of course I use it in wicked cream sauces. I make a beautiful faux-Bernaise with cream rather than a true Hollandaise (though I am resolved to be quicker to make real Hollandaise sauces and real specialty mayonnaises with, say, olive oil. We Southerners love our mayonnaise.

One way to diminish the sheer decadence of Alfredo sauces is to use spaghetti squash as the pasta. It just so happens that spaghetti squash cooks excellently in the new steam oven. It’s surprising, really, what a satisfying substitute spaghetti squash is for the real thing. Alfredo sauce over spaghetti squash is a very low-glycemic meal that eats (as we say in the South) as good as a high-carb meal.

This Alfredo was made with garlic and fresh tomato, topped with roasted asparagus. I’m using three modes of cooking here — the steam oven, plus the grill, plus a saucepan on the stovetop. It’s thrilling to have multiple modes of cooking just a few steps apart. The grill is on the deck, and the door to the deck is just to the right of the kitchen stove and steam oven. I don’t know why I waited so long to upgrade the kitchen. Cheap, I guess.

The tomato, by the way, was a gift from a friend who is a retired agricultural extension agent for the county. I count two former, and one current, agricultural extension agents among my friends. Former and current agricultural extension agents make excellent friends. Ken is in Alaska this summer, so there is absolutely no glory in the abbey’s garden this year.