Category: Food

Whole wheat sourdough bread from homemade starter

I am a novice at sourdough bread, but I do think I’ve learned that sourdough requires experience. Experience not only for the baker, but also for the sourdough starter. My sourdough starter, which I made from scratch, is now a month old. I first made bread with it when it was seven days old. The first loaf rose, and it was decent bread, but each subsequent loaf has gotten better. I think this is because I’m learning how to handle sourdough and because the starter is getting more mature. At first, the starter had more of a neutral, fruity smell. Now it’s getting more and more sour and smells more and more like sauerkraut.

Yesterday’s bread took six hours to rise. I suppose that’s normal, but I’m still learning.

Here’s a link to my previous post on sourdough.

Coconut custard pie

More and more, when I Google for recipes, I get recipes from published cookbooks on Google Books. I’ve had it in my head for a while to make a coconut custard pie. My usual reference for standard recipes is the 1943 edition of Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking, but Rombauer’s recipe didn’t fit my ingredients. I wanted a recipe that uses dried, unsweetened coconut. I found such a recipe at Google books, in the cookbook The Dessert Bible.

I only make things like this when I have company. My mother is visiting. We finished off the chocolate apple sauce cake I made on Saturday, and the coconut custard pie was next on the list of dessert recipes I wanted to try.

The temperature here yesterday got up to 85F. So it’s out with the hot drinks, in with the cold.

I have become addicted to banana nutmeg smoothies. I make them in a blender with soy milk and cashew nuts. Cashew pieces were the cheapest nuts yesterday in the Whole Foods bulk department, at $4.69 a pound. This is a nice, easy way to eat more nuts, and at a decent price.

Put half a cup of raw cashews or cashew pieces into the blender. Add soy milk to make 2 cups. Whiz for a minute or more. Add a banana, two tablespoons or so of honey, a quarter of a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and half a teaspoon or so of ground nutmeg. Whiz again for a minute or more.

It’s as rich as eggnog and a hundred times healthier.

My second baking of sourdough bread today was considerably improved. I’m starting — starting — to get a feel for sourdough. But I think that it’s going to take some time to become confident and skillful with sourdough. Still, today’s bread had a better balance of flour and water. The crust was good. The starter is becoming more sour.

I’ve got to stop all this breadmaking, lest I start gaining weight. But still, I never buy bread. There’s no bread in the house unless I bake it myself. I have found that when I start getting bored with my own cooking, one sure way to perk up my interest is to make hot biscuits. Whole-wheat biscuits are completely decent, but proper Southern biscuits can only be made with white (that is, unbleached) flour. Olive oil works, but truly proper biscuits require shortening. The biscuits above were an experiment with palm oil, which I had never used before. The palm oil and unbleached King Arthur flour made fantastic, melt-in-your-mouth biscuits.

I have a lot of doubts about whether palm oil is a good thing. I bought it primarily for pie crusts. Used in moderation, I suppose it’s not so bad. And it’s certainly better than a hydrogenated shortening such as Crisco, which I would never use, ever, under any circumstances. The liver and veins simply don’t know what to do with hydrogenated fats. Palm oil, at least, is in a natural form that chemists haven’t tampered with. It has been used in the tropics for thousands of years.

Here’s a link to my previous post on sourdough.

Spectrum sells its refined palm oil as vegetable shortening. It’s white. Unrefined palm oil is red and contains a lot of carotene, and therefore vitamin A.

So flat! Big mistake…

I couldn’t wait to try out my 7-day-old home-cultured sourdough starter. It’s probably a miracle that I even got bread that rose, and was edible. I ate it, for sure, with spinach salad, Stilton, and a slosh of chardonnay. But I have two big criticisms of my first effort.

1. The dough was too wet. I’ve been working on making breads with wetter dough that are less kneaded and more coarse and bubbly. But I think I took that too far. The dough needs to be dry and stiff enough to hold a proper boule shape. My dough did double, though, within a couple of hours. Something is growing in there.

2. Though the bread did not taste at all yeasty, it also didn’t have much of a sourdough taste. My guess is that the problem primarily is the youth of my starter. I’m hoping that, as the starter matures, the lactobacillus bacteria will get a stronger foothold against the yeast, producing more lactic acid in the dough and hence a sourer taste. There may also be tricks I need to learn about how long to let the dough rise, when to feed the starter before I make the dough, and so on. This is something I don’t fully understand yet.

This is clear: Making sourdough bread is a fairly different set of skills than making bread with commercial dry yeast. I think I’ve also learned already that making sourdough bread requires more judgment and a greater understanding of the biology and techniques of breadmaking. Sourdough bread takes longer and rises slower. There are more variables, more things that might go wrong and that the experienced baker must work around or compensate for.

Oh well. One’s gotta start somewhere. But ultimately I want to learn to bake a smart but peasanty sourdough loaf that will be the signature bread of Acorn Abbey. The bread contains nothing but King Arthur whole wheat flour and water. There is no oil, except to coat the pan. Some time ago, I stopped even putting salt in bread, unless company is coming.

My previous posts on sourdough: Day 1 ; Day 4.

The fed starter

Ready for the oven, flat or not

For the first three days, there was no apparent activity in the sourdough starter. But on the morning of Day 4, the starter was nice and bubbly. It smells good — nice and fruity. On the fourth day, the directions I’m using call for switching to water to feed the starter, rather than pineapple juice. I hope I’ll be able to start baking with the starter in a few more days. Here’s a link to my post on Day 1.

Cabbage in sweet and sour sauce

A friend in California has been asking for my recipe for cabbage in red sweet and sour sauce. Rather than typing something into an email, I thought I’d take some photos and blog it. James-Michael used to frequently request this dish back in San Francisco. For years, we never lived far apart, and we kept up the tradition of Sunday night supper. Many is the time I rode my scooter in a cold fog over Twin Peaks to cook at his apartment. More often I cooked at my apartment, and James-Michael had the more important task of selecting the after-supper DVDs.

Those of you who are more experienced cooks, please excuse the detail. This is a tutorial for James-Michael, who is still a novice cook. As I’ve mentioned before, I rarely follow recipes exactly. Rather, I read recipes for the concept and then run with it.

This concept came from a recipe that was included with my Aeternum pressure cooker, made in Italy, which I bought in the 1970s. The original recipe was for a whole cabbage, with the stalk excavated, stuffed with Italian sausage. Though I used to make the stuffed version, with vegetarian stuffings, for years I’ve mostly just used plain cabbage, cut in half and with the stalk removed. You can make it in a pressure cooker (especially if the cabbage is whole and stuffed), but you can also use a covered pot.

1. I’d suggest starting with a smallish head of cabbage. Remove the outer leaves and wash it. You also need a nice, strong onion. By the way, I bought this cabbage at Whole Foods. It’s organic and was grown in Watauga County, a mountain county not too far to the west of here.

2. Cut the cabbage in halves. Cut out the stalk. Chop the onion coarsely.

3. Cook the onion gently in a tablespoon or so of olive oil. No need to brown it. Just cook it until it’s soft and translucent.

4. Add about one and a half cups of water. Bring the water to a boil. Add about a tablespoon of sugar. I use raw sugar. Also add about three tablespoons of vinegar, some salt, and some pepper. Add two or three tablespoons of tomato paste or ketchup, enough to give the sauce a nice red color. Optional: add a small handful of raisins.

5. I don’t think this dish would come out right without the celery seed. Use about half a teaspoon, or a little more if you like.

6. When all these ingredients have been added to the sauce, boil the sauce gently for a few minutes. Then put in the cabbage. Ladle the sauce over the cabbage. Cover the pot and let it simmer gently for about an hour. Every 10 minutes or so, lift the lid and ladle more sauce over the cabbage. Test the cabbage with a fork to see if it is becoming tender. When the cabbage is tender, consider how much sauce you have. If there’s too much sauce, and it’s watery, then after the cabbage is tender remove the lid, turn up the heat, and boil off some of the water. If at any point while the cabbage is cooking the amount of sauce gets too low, add a little water. Half the art of cooking is getting the sauce right. You want it to be concentrated and savory, never watery.

Here’s your virtual supper! I served the cabbage with pinto beans and rice. To make the rice, I chopped some raw nuts in a blender, then browned the nuts lightly in a pan. When the nuts were browned, I added the rice and stirred in a spoonful of the cabbage sauce to moisten it. Then, at the table, I spooned some cabbage sauce over the rice.