works of wanderlust

Category: tucking in

  • Honey Brown Sourdough (Part Two)

    Yesterday morning I started preparing an experimental loaf of sourdough where I replaced all but a little of the water in the recipe with a honey brown lager.

    Today, the loaf has been proofed, baked and sampled.

    A loaf of sourdough cools on the countertop.

    But let’s back up a step.

    I’ve been pondering sourdough mix-ins. In the past year of pandemic lockdown I’ve baked about a hundred and fifty loaves of bread. Ninety-percent of these have been baked purely to answer the “we need bread” call. There are a few reasons I turned to sourdough as a mostly reliable source of food during the pandemic, and some of them are practical. Yet, I’ve long had a curiosity about working towards honing skills in arts and science, and tending a sourdough starter to bake awesome bread checks off a few boxes in that inquisitive mindset approach to life.

    Sourdough also overlaps nicely with the Philosophy of the Cast Iron Guy (TM) in that a sourdough starter is simple, down-to-earth, and extremely useful. Flour, water, and cultivated yeasts can be fed and maintained for years (and generations) with some basic care and feeding, and at anytime a little bit of that starter can bring a bit more flour and water to life to create a delicious loaf of bread.

    Plus, I cook most of my sourdough in cast iron, so there’s that.

    Yet man cannot live on bread alone. Someone said that.

    I have often looked for ways to make the bread a bit more interesting. Adding some cheese or herbs makes a delicious loaf. A swirl of cinnamon and sugar in a sweetened bread is amazing if it works out right. And, of course, I’ve collected various varieties of flour to play with the blend that makes up the bread itself.

    Yesterday, I tried substituting the water for beer.

    Beer is largely water, of course, and the other ingredients in a brew overlap so neatly with sourdough that it has been said that beer making and sourdough baking are cousins in the culinary world.

    So, what does beer bring to the blend?

    To prepare to answer this question effectively I made sure that before baking with a full can of my beer of choice, a Sleeman’s Honey Brown Lager I had more than one can in the house. Last night, after prepping the dough ball for it’s final rise in the proofing basket, I poured myself one of the other cans and settled into the couch to do some relaxing and a bit of writing.

    The honey brown has a sweet and malty taste, and while I’m not a beer expert it would rank somewhere mid-to high on a refreshing scale. It’s not quite one of those gulp down in the heat of summer brews, but it’s closer to that than, say, an IPA which I would usually consider a run-over-your-tongue and savour-it beer. What I was focusing on with the bread, however, was did any of those beer flavours carry over to the final loaf?

    First, bread had a lot more air bubbles in it than usual. I’ve made the foundational sourdough recipe so many times now that I’ve got a really good feel for times and temperatures. This can be caused by a lot of things, and usually it’s because too long of a rise, but with the outside temperatures being in the minus thirties it’s been tough keeping the house consistently warm, let alone speedy-bread-rise warm.

    Second, the darker colour resembeled a loaf I’d have cooked with a blend that had a lot more full grain flours in it. I cook white bread often, because usually I run out of the smaller bags of multigrain or whole wheat and we always have white bread flour. My white bread has a distinctive shade of pale (though not ever bleached white) and this 100% white flour bread was not it. The amber-hued ale brought a richer colour to the final loaf that I liked.

    Finally, the bread did have a stonger flavour than a plain white loaf. I would say that it wasn’t a beer flavour specifically but rather something more nutty or generally richer and deeper. Beer-adjacent, definitely. The best way I can put it is that while normally I eat my bread for breakfast with jams or honey, somehow I would think this loaf would do better with a bit of swiss cheese or as part of a less-sweet sandwhich. The complexity of flavour that the beer gave to the bread was enough that can confidently say dabbing a gob of strawberry jam on this would clash and make it tough to swallow.

    Was it worth sacrificing a can of beer (over free tap water) for a richer loaf? Moderate postitive. I’m going to try a stronger, darker stout beer (likely a Guinness) next to see if there is an even richer final result to be had, but while the results with the honey brown lager were subtle I think I would try this again, yes.

  • Honey Brown Sourdough (Part One)

    I’ve been thinking about beer breads a lot lately.

    Since the start of the pandemic lockdown, I’ve been the family baker. Nearly one hundred and fifty loaves of sourdough of varying shape and quality have emerged from our oven in the last year.

    I’ve tried numerous flour blends to mix up our sandwich loaf selection.

    I’ve attempted sweet breads with sugar and cinnamon mixed in for fun and fancy.

    I’ve added cheeses or herbs to create savoury side loaves to accompany larger meals.

    Yet, somehow, I’ve never dabbled in diverting anything but the dry ingredients.

    Bread and beer have a long, entwined history. Some have rightly noted that bread and beer are essentially equivalent food stuffs: grains, water, yeast in combination and fermented. My fitness-focused friends who avoid carbs at all costs often remind me that beer is just liquid bread, after all.

    Then, does it make sense to make bread with beer as an ingredient?

    Ingredients for a beer-based sourdough set out on a countertop.

    My experiment began this morning as I cracked open a can of lager shortly after 8am.

    And as I write this, the following ingredients are hydrating in a bowl on my countertop:

    1 can (326g) Sleeman Honey Brown Lager
    38g of warm water (to set the desired hydration)
    500g white bread flour
    12g salt
    250g of active sourdough starter

    This is me experimenting, please note. As I write and post this I don’t know how it will turn out and I’ll link to Part Two (hopefully tomorrow… sourdough is a multi-day process) with some notes and photos on my success or failure.

    As this is an experiment, my plan is to try a couple different loaves with a couple very different beers. Also, I’m sticking with 100% white flour (y’know, to control the variables in this deeply precise countertop research project) which I hope will let the beer flavours stand out. The first beer is a simple, medium amber lager, a honey brown from a Canadian large batch brewery. For a second attempt, I’m looking to try a darker beer, likely a Guinness to see how that affects the colour and taste.

    The dough now mixed will take a couple hours to properly hydrate and develop the gluten on the counter. I’m going to lean on a shorter fermentation period because, again, I do want the beer flavours to stand out over the general “sour” flavours, so I’ll be looking to have this in the fridge for some of today and then do an overnight final proof before baking tomorrow morning.

    And then, voila! Beer bread? Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion.

    Or should I say.. con-glut-ion!

  • Can I use a cast iron pot or pan to boil water?

    One of the adages of cast iron cooking is that to improve your cast iron cookware, just use it.

    What is not necessarily clear in that basic advice is that to make any cast iron seasoning better, stronger, and more resilient, the use of your cast iron should follow a couple basic principles about how it should be used. Simply:

    Heat and oils are good in that they improve your seasoning.

    Soaps and acids are bad in that they degrade your seasoning.

    So, where does water fit into these rules? And what do we mean by boiling water?

    A small bottle of water sits in the middle of a cast iron frying pan.

    For example, a lot of recipes call for a portion of water (or broth or wine or other neutral liquid) and instruct bringing it to a boil. Is this bad for the pan?

    Or, when I first started using my cast iron dutch oven I was unclear on if I could use it to, say, cook up a big pot of pasta or if I should stick with the steel pot we’d been using for years.

    I did a lot of reading on this a number of years ago and the best advice anyone gave me on this topic is simply that the strength of cast iron is not boiling water: there are better tools.

    Boiling water is not necessarily going to ruin you cast iron, but it’s definitely not going to improve it. In the same vein of thinking, adding liquid to you recipe is fine, though these are not the dishes that build up the seasoning nor make it better. Water in your pan or pot does not follow the basic principle that heat and oils are improving your seasoning. And some have argued that boiling water alone (or with salt or pasta) can actually loosen the seasoning on your pan and cause it to flake off.

    In a pinch (say out camping with a single pot) sure… heat up that soup, steam your veggies over the fire, and just use your iron. That’s what you’ve built up that legacy seasoning for, after all. But know that you’re withdrawing from the seasoning bank you’ve been saving into.

    So again, there are better tools. Keep and use a steel pot, and save your cast iron for what it does best. Not boiling water.

  • What’s the best first cast iron pan to buy?

    First, always consider that the tool you’re most likely to get the most use out of is the tool you have the most reason to use. Buy a pan to suit the type of cooking you like to do.

    A big flat skillet will let you cook big batches of pancakes or grilled sandwiches.

    A small frying pan will be your breakfast companion for years to come.

    A generous dutch oven will serve you well for chilis, deep frying and crunchy sourdough breads.

    So, the simple answer here is buy the pan you need first and build out a collection from there.

    A simple grilled cheese sandwich on a flat cast iron pan.

    But, you ask, what would the Cast Iron Guy recommend?

    You’ve read all about this cast iron movement and you’re looking at your chipped and scratched collection of aluminum pans from the supermarket and pondering leaping into building a legacy collection of cookware and begin replacing your nonstick throwaways.

    You can’t go wrong with a medium-sized frying pan, of course. A simple ten to twelve inch pan is a staple of any collection and will be of great use in any kitchen.

    But the piece I recommend, the piece that sits atop my stove and rarely ever finds it’s way back into the cupboard, the piece that I would buy as a gift for a friend or family member who was debating their first acquisition is a round griddle.

    I own the Lodge 10.5 inch round griddle. *not a paid endorsment

    This piece is a low walled, simple round, smooth pan with a bit of a lip around the rim. It’s simple to use and maintain, and cooks just about everything day-to-day: grilled cheese sandwiches, quesadillas, fried eggs, crepes & pancakes, and naan bread. It heats fast for warming leftovers. It packs well and I often take it local travelling to hotels (like when we go skiing in the mountians where we often have a kitchen but usually not-so-great pans.) It’s an all-in-one workhorse for egg sandwiches, grilling sausages, and my lunchtime meals-for-one. It goes into the oven as a roasting pan for numerous meat and vegetable dishes, and if I need to broil anything it’s the pan I turn to first.

    And if I was rich, I’d buy these by the caselot and hand them out as gifts.

    So, my recommendation: you need a great first pan, and you are not looking to fill a specific cooking need, I don’t think you can go too wrong with a simple round griddle.

  • Can I use a self-cleaning oven to strip a cast iron pan?

    The short answer is yes.

    The more complex answer is … maybe.

    A self-cleaning oven is the closest most of us have to a blast furnace inside of our homes. And as many people will tell you while there are multiple ways to strip old seasoning from cast iron, the high heat of an oven’s clean cycle might be the simplest.

    My oven claims that on self-clean mode the temperature gets to nearly 900 degrees Farenheit (or about 480 degrees Celsius.) That’s hot. Hot enough to incinerate the seasoning off of any pan.

    So what is cast iron seasoning anyhow that we can burn it off our pans, pans that we use over heat all the time?

    The back side of a small cast iron pan sitting atop a cutting board.

    Cast iron seasoning is a layer of polymerized oil.

    Oil is a word we use to describe a vast variety of chemicals with complex molecular structures and specific physical properties. Cooking oils generally come from crop plants and we can eat them.

    Polymerizing is a fancy way of saying that many smaller molecules can be chained together to form one massive molecule. Plastic, rubber, nylon are examples of polymers you might be familiar with already. Cast iron seasoning is also a type of polymer.

    Cooking oil at the right temperature can be turned into a polymer onto many types of surfaces. We take advantage of this process to season cast iron cooking pans, covering them with lots of very large oil polymers that at the correct window of temperatures create a non-stick cooking surface. Simplistically, we are creating a kind of coating by linking uncountable small oil molecules together using heat.

    This coating improves and strengthens with just enough heat, but as with many types of natural compounds if we use even more heat we can destroy it too. By design, because we like to have clean things, it incinerates at the same temperature of other charred food bits, grease, and cooking stains… or the temperature a self-cleaning oven.

    So, yes, you can exploit the almost-blast furnace temperatures available in your kitchen to burn the polymerized oil layer from your cast iron pan and “clean” it bare in your self-cleaning oven. Almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit will reduce those polymerized oils to a fine ashy powder that you can wipe off with a damp cloth.

    The maybe part of this answer is that high heat is unpredictable. Even some of the best cast iron is not made as uniformly as it may appear as you heft that heavy pan onto the fire. Pans are meant to be heated and then disperse that heat in a specific way (into food, into the air, etc.) So when you heat a pan in very hot in contained space, in a way it was not designed to be heated, there is a chance it could crack or warp.

    I’ve personally stripped multiple pans by this method and never had a problem, but all of those pans were replaceable and inexpensive. If I was restoring something more valuable or an antique, I might not take the shortcut of a self-cleaning oven.

    So again, can you use a self-cleaning oven to strip a cast iron pan… maybe. This method is fast and convenient (especially if you’re already cleaning your oven) and you can start fresh with a bare metal pan. This might be worth the maybe.