Into the Woods

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