Category: Food

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.

After you have struggled for as long as I have to make professional quality bread at home, including sourdough, you eventually realize that it cannot be done without a steam oven. Truth is, throwing water into a hot even accomplishes very little. The Dutch-oven method of baking — trapping steam inside a covered Dutch oven — is hardly any better.

From Googling for steam ovens and dreaming, I’ve long known that commercial steam ovens can’t be had for less than about $3,000. I’d often wondered why no one (or so I thought) made an affordable steam oven for home use. Somehow I missed the fact that Cuisinart came out with such an oven early last year. It’s a combination steam, convection, and toaster oven. It’s the Cuisinart CSO-300. It can be bought in the usual places from Williams-Sonoma to Amazon in the range of $265 to $285. Of course I bought one as soon as I became aware of its existence and read up on the reviews.

I won’t attempt a full review of an item I’ve baked in only once, but it worked beautifully for my first loaf of sourdough bread. The oven can serve as a proofer, using a temperature of around 100 degrees F plus steam. I gave the loaf its last rising in the oven, then baked it using the oven’s bread mode. Bread mode starts out with steam for the first part of baking. Then it shuts off the steam and switches automatically to convection mode. The steam-assisted final rise plus 10 or 15 minutes of steam as baking starts gives a fantastic oven spring — the best I’ve ever had, by far, effortlessly. The steam also gives the crust that nice “shattery” texture that proper bread should have.

I often feel a fair amount of remorse when I spend money on nonessentials. But it was pretty easy to justify this purchase. Being able to bake proper bread is a part of it. But the small oven also uses far less energy than a big oven. This oven is better insulated than most small ovens. It’s the first convection oven I’ve ever owned. My only oven was the big oven in the stove. Those who have reviewed this oven say that the steam function is great for reheating leftovers without drying them out. I have not owned a microwave oven for years, just because I don’t like what they do to food. Until I bought this little Cuisinart, I did not really have an efficient way of reheating leftovers. I have not tried it, but the oven’s “super steam” mode is supposed to be great for steaming vegetables, a job I usually do in a covered saucepan. “Super steam” also is said to be good for casseroles that need to stay moist, such as rice dishes. I’m sure the super steam mode will be great for my vegan meatloaf, which contains barley, ground walnuts, and soybeans.

Next: probably a peach pie. Someone gave me a bunch of homegrown fresh peaches.

Making homemade bagels may seem daunting, but it really isn’t. It had been ages since I’d made bagels. Then it occurred to me that bagels would be excellent candidates for finishing off in a gas grill.

You can read various theories on what defines a bagel, including the use of barley malt in the boiling water. But, as far as I’m concerned, what defines a bagel is that they’re boiled before they’re baked. This boiling of the dough until the dough sets is what gives the bagel’s crust its “pull.”

Today’s bagels were a mixture of sourdough and yeast. The flour was about a third stone-ground whole wheat and two-thirds unbleached white flour. There are many recipes on the web (as well as YouTube videos) on making bagels, so I’d suggest starting with some Googling if you want to try it.

I really don’t think bagels are prone to failure. What happens when the dough hits boiling water is really more predictable than what happens when dough goes into an oven. Plus, bagel dough is not a delicate affair. A strong, less wet dough (which is easier to deal with) is fine for bagels. If the dough were too soft, you’d risk having it fall apart in the boiling water.

Managing them on the grill is a challenge, though. No spot on my grill seems to be exactly the same, so uniformity is a problem. I found myself frequently moving the bagels around to try to equalize their baking. Given that I had to shuffle things so much, getting perfect grill marks was out of the question.

The bagels were delicious. The crust was better than any bagel crust I ever had in San Francisco (which is not the best bagel city in the world). No one in his or her right mind would claim the ability to compete with New York bagels.

The rising is done, and they’re ready to boil

A bagel in boiling water

Brunch today was low carb — roasted onions and cabbage and a slice of vegan baloney — to help make up for bagels at supper.

I was itchin’ to try the gas grill as a bread oven, so I made a loaf this afternoon. It was not perfect, but baking in the grill seems entirely manageable. And after some Googling, I see that plenty of other people also use grills for baking bread.

To add a margin of safety, this loaf was only about a third stone-ground whole wheat and two-thirds unbleached white flour. It was a mixture of sourdough starter and ordinary yeast, which has become a habit with me mostly because I like the taste. There was not much oven spring, but I have never been good at oven spring. Such oven spring as I got was not at the top of the loaf, where I had slashed an X, but around the edges.

My grill has a warming shelf several inches above the grill surface. I set my cast iron skillet on the shelf. To try to get some steam into the oven, I put a pan of water on the grill and let it come to a boil before I put the bread in the oven. The bread was still slightly too done on the bottom because of the high flame down there, but that was not a big deal. It didn’t burn.

The best part of this bread was its shatter-y crust — not a bit tough. There was a very slight whiff of flame in the taste, but not much. Here are some observations and some notes for the next attempts:

— Put the pan of water directly under the bread pan to keep the bottom crust from getting overdone. Use less water.

— Get a smoker basket and give the bread a teensy touch of hickory smoke.

— Throw an onion on the grill for the last ten minutes or so to give the crust a little roasted onion taste.

Overall, it was a fine little loaf of bread with a superb crust. I think there are two keys to getting a good crust. One, don’t use any oil at all on the dough either while it’s rising, or in the pan. Use only flour to prevent sticking. And two, get as much steam into the oven as you can. Steam is always the biggest challenge.