works of wanderlust

Tag: bread

  • merrily along, one

    I routinely find that I have a hundred little often-good things that I want to post about but (a) I don’t want to post a whole article about and yet (b) I don’t want to lose them in this rambling, barely-read record of our little life here which can so easily drift into complaining or rambling.

    With world events swirling in such frustrating ways it really is easy to get lost in the negativity and yet a piece of me is realizing with crystal clarity that the hopelessness being drilled into us day after day by the media, by the fascists, and by the universe itself is a feature (for them) not an accidental byproduct.  

    “How dare we celebrate the positives while they’re busy burning down the world?” I have been told in maybe not so literal a phrase… but the meaning has always been the same: despair you fool, and now pay us our due.

    So. I want to start a new ‘series’ on this site where I just reflect on some good things that have been going on in our lives.

    Like.

    The Kid got a summer job. I won’t tell you where or necessarily what she is doing, but she is currently getting paid a decent union wage to spend her summer outside with kids and helping the community. The only days I won’t be jealous is when the mosquitos finally come out.

    One of my longer-serving running friends is getting married today. It’s one of those tiny, family only weddings, but we took him for drinks last week and sometime today, atop a streetcar crossing the river he’ll get hitched to his long-time girlfriend, soon-to-be wife. 

    I’ve been reading more. You may have noticed from the review-count on this site, but I’ve read more in the last three months than I have in the last three years, it seems, and losing my patience with the written word while I was trying to write more was a point of distress for me lately. Digging into words as a consumer is a huge positive shift for me.

    Oh, and I finally fixed our television box last night. Two hours it took to figure out that the problem we’ve been having for months and months, the set top box resetting and inexplicable technical fails was in fact a borked power brick. The don’t tell you this but they basically put little computers inside those little power blocks now and become another point of failure. The Wife gets to watch her shows in peace now.

    The dates are secret for obvious reasons, but we booked our trip to Japan later this year. That’s about all I have to share on that for now, except to say that we have flights and hotels scheduled to spend over two weeks in Asia later this year with plans to go to Tokyo Disney, the Ghibli park, and eat a lot of tasty Japanese food. Sorry, we’ll do Korea next time.

    Lately, I’ve been making music. I mean, playing a lot and learning a lot and loving sound for the raw enjoyment of it in my own ears with no expectation of sharing it beyond headphones or my living room walls. The act of learning and honing enough skill on the piano has allowed me to flex musically beyond tinking keys and the exploration of synth sounds is a deep art form.

    Of course, finally, I can’t neglect to tell you that I get free bread all summer. Well, kinda. I stumbled on a (potentially in error) crazy deal at the grocery store where I traded in some of my loyalty points for three bags of bread flour. I think there was likely a zero missing on the redemption value, but everyone gets a break once in a while and me, I have nearly twenty kilos of bread flour thanks to my acute mathing skills in the grocery aisle. 

    See? Good stuff all around.

  • six years of sourdough

    Well, I have just spent the last few days working on the migration of a bunch of old blog content and… I apologize. if you clicked on this expecting a more “bready” opening paragraph, well, sorry. Nerdy things beget nerdy things, and sourdough bread and blogging are both pretty nerdy things walking hand-in-hand through this house.

    My blog archives are stuffed to the rafters with foodie content.

    That was even more evident when I realized that I had accumulated over thirty posts on the subject of sourdough while I was writing the Cast Iron Guy blog a few years back.

    My starter, the same starter I pulled out of the fridge today in what has become part of my regular routine of warming it up to start the bread-making process later this evening, turned six last month.

    No cheating. No fudging. No malarky. It’s legitimately six years old.

    And I’ve not gone longer than three weeks without making bread (and even that was just the once because we toddled off to Europe for a summer vacation in 2023 and of course I wasn’t baking bread!)

    As I moved and cleaned up all those old sourdough posts, tho, it struck me that compared to the early days of my baking I have not been nearly as experimental as I was back in 2021 through 2023. The last couple of years, in fact, have seen but a single innovation in my loaf approach and that is the acquisition of a large covered Emile Henri loaf pan (not cast iron!) which has become my exclusive go to bread baking vessel.

    Shape and pan aside, I used to experiment a lot more.

    I dabbled in flours.

    I attempted hydration with beer.

    I tried sweet breads and savoury loaves.

    Lately, tho? White bread, sandwich loaf style, ready for my breakfast toast with butter and strawberry jam. Simple, staple, and kinda boring… at least in as much as it makes for interesting blog posts.

    So I guess if you came here looking for sourdough ideas you should know that there are quite a few scattered through the archives of this site, neatly filed under “sourdough” … but you should also know that while I’ve stopped writing as the Cast Iron Guy, I am still quite a bit of a nerdy sourdough bread guy. (I’m making a batch tonight!) And I will be looking for, thinking about, and scheming up interesting ways to expand that thirty posts to a much longer list as this updated blogging effort continues.

  • another sourdough day

    It’s a random Wednesday morning in March and I’ve just pulled my starter out of the fridge. The lovely box of yeasty goodness will celebrate it’s fourth birthday next month and my daughter is keen to break out the sourdough recipe book and try some recipes that are not bread.

    In the meantime, I’ve been writing quite a bit in my daily thread this past month and a half about my sourdough and it felt like a good day to combine, mix, fold and proof those words into a proper post here.

    Set oven to hot and…

    sourdough loaves

    I’ve stopped counting how many loaves of bread I’ve made with my starter. It passed the three hundred mark about six months ago, and I ran out of room for tick marks on the lid of the container where I keep the magic.

    I made two more last night, sandwich loaves in little cast iron loaf pans, crispy on the outside and fluffy and delicious on the interior.

    This morning (February 13th) there are about one and a quarter loaves left. That’s what happens when four adult (or at least three adults and one not-quite-but-eats-like-an-adult) lives in your house. Fresh bread does not last long.

    sourdough first day

    I sometimes tell people who ask about my bread that sourdough isn’t difficult. It’s just twenty minutes of work spread across two full days.

    On day one I start in the morning and take my starter out of the fridge. Some people will tell you that you need to keep in on the counter, feed it every day, and care for it as if it were a child. My starter will be four years old next month and he comes out of the fridge for about 12 hours at a time, just long enough to prime for action… then fed, watered, and right back to bed.

    My starter comes out of the fridge at about 7am, before I head out to work, and by the time I get home it’s warm and bubbly and active.

    I mix my dough, and while I’ve got the flour out on the counter, I replace the half of the starter I used with two parts flour and one part water and double him back up to his regular size with a good mix.

    The starter goes back in the fridge. The dough has some countertop time and some folds over the next couple hours, and it joins the starter.

    Ten tough minutes of work, spread across that first day and I’ve got a fed starter and a bowl of dough resting for tomorrow.

    sourdough second day

    The dough spent the night in the fridge and this morning, shortly after I got up and while I was bustling around the kitchen to feed the dog and make coffee and wake up, I put the covered bowl onto the counter to warm up a bit.

    It was still cool an hour later when I weighed, cut, kneaded and rolled the dough into a pair of loaf blanks and dropped them into my parchment-lined cast iron loaf pans.

    Those two loaves will rest and proof on the counter, out of the way from disturbance, covered and quiet and warm at room temperature until later today. Maybe it will take ten hours, twelve hours or even fourteen — it all depends on the mood of my yeast this week. (But I’m guessing 12 hours.)

    When those loaves rise up over the lip of the pan and start to look and feel ready, I’ll heat the oven up to 450F and put them inside for a thirty minute bake.

    When the timer chimes, I’ll pull them out onto a cooling rack and savour the smell of fresh baked bread through the house while it lasts. It only lasts a while, sadly.

    Ten more minutes of work, spread across the second day and I’ve got two loaves of fresh sourdough ready to enjoy for breakfast in the morning.

    sour flour power

    The flour makes all the difference to the end product… at least according to my daughter, who will devour a half loaf of bread in a sitting when I use 100% white bread flour to make my weekly breads versus a slice here and there when I substitute even as little as 10% for rye, whole wheat or some other blend into the mix.

    I prefer the grainy breads and the darker results.

    But there is something captivatingly powerful to the teenage mind for white bread, it seems.

    This is doubly strange when one considers that we never buy white bread. Not that we buy bread much (or ever really) now anyhow but back when loaves of sliced bread were still on our shopping list we would always go for the grainy, wheat-ish, non-white bread every time.

    Hamburger and hot dog buns, sure. White bread.

    But sliced loaves? Never.

    So, all this means that I’ve had to limit my flour experimenting to alternate bakes, white one week, blend the next, repeat, to surrender to the allure and power of white bread flour.

    dough, soured

    The thing about sourdough is that there is an advantage to a long proof.

    So, when you mix your dough on Wednesday night, say, and intend to rest in the refrigerator overnight and then countertop proof it the next day so that, say, you can bake it on Thursday evening… but you forget and go to work instead and leave the dough in the fridge…

    Well.

    You can countertop proof it on Friday and bake it up Friday evening (instead of Thursday as you had intended) and not only is the final bread fine, it is arguably better for the longer rest in the fridge. Better flavour. Better rise. Better all round.

    Amazing.

    This may have definitely been a true story.

    bread journaling.

    Do you keep a baking journal.

    I know, if you’re not a hardcore baker or sour-bread-head, then maybe that sounds a little nutty.

    But after nearly four years of baking sourdough from my little kitchen and having a few of photos and plenty of tasty memories, I realize I haven’t kept great notes on what I made, how I made it, or when or why or how or whatever…

    I blogged a bit, and you can find it here.

    I made lots of tick marks on my starter-ware to denote a baking event.

    But I couldn’t tell you the specifics.

    Specifics and details and notes are how you learn and get better.

    My bread is pretty good, but it could always be better, right?

    So. Maybe a journal isn’t a terrible idea.

    How do you keep a bread journal and what kinds of things do you write in it?

  • Lotsa Bread

    I’ve been thinking about bread a lot more than I’ve been writing about it here.

    Eating it too.

    I crossed yet another sourdough milestone this past weekend when I extracted from my hot oven a pair of pandemic bread loaves, loaves numbered two-hundred-and-forty-nine and two-hundred-and-fifty.

    Yes, I keep track.

    And yes, I’ve baked 250 loaves of sandwich bread in the last two years since that fateful day when I got sent home from the office to work in my cold basement.

    My starter, which turns three next month, is mature and active and beautiful. I pulled it from the fridge that same afternoon to warm up on the counter, prepping my plans for bread baking even before setting up my laptop for work.

    Two years of bread. Three years of sourdough. Two hundred and fifty sandwich loaves and so many other random baking experiments that had I not kept careful record of I might not even believe it myself.

    In that time…

    My flour collection has rotated through all purpose bags, to generic supply-chain shortage stocks, to small mill local flours, to artisan bakery bags, and grocery store best for bread varieties.

    I’ve played with beers replacing water.

    I’ve dabbled in mix-ins and spices and cheeses and sweetness levels.

    I’ve made bagels and pizza dough and buns and pan bread.

    It’s been two years of hundreds of hours of baking that has taught me so much about bread yet has only just whet my appetite to learn more. And there is lots more to learn.

    I go back to the office (at least part time) in a couple weeks and the mid-day bread baking breaks will shift to accommodate that new life.

    It’s a little sad, but then again, when I started this and was only a couple dozen loaves in I joked with my daughter that someday she would inherit the “pandemic bread starter” that bit of flour and water and yeast that helped sustain us through a weird time in history.

    And it really did.

  • Cheesy Garlic Pan Bread

    Back in December I was going through my end-of-the-year questions and spent a post lamenting the fact that despite baking up a lot of sourdough, I hadn’t spent much time exploring the potential of my starter as a starter for other recipes besides bread.

    A goal for 2022 was to branch out, and the suggestions I gave myself in that post were to try some variety of recipes such as doughnuts, bagels or english muffins.

    Instead, as inspiration would have it, I started instead with a crusty pan bread.

    The Youtube algorithm tends to show me a lot of baking content these days, and my playlist offered up a recipe for a thick crust pan pizza. I skipped the pizza part and instead used some of the pizza advice and a half a recipe of my sourdough bread to whip up a tasty cheese bread that complimented our evening meal of beef stew.

    cheesy garlic pan bread

    500g bread flour
    350g water
    12g salt
    250g active sourdough starter
    250g hard cheese
    3 garlic cloves
    60ml olive oil
    10g finishing salt

    I made my basic sourdough recipe using the flour, water, salt and starter. This went through the typical hydration and folding cycle and then got covered and popped into the fridge overnight. Technically, I only used half of this to make the pan bread and used the other half to bake some simple sourdough rolls, but I’m sure any innovative baker can figure out something clever to do with half a recipe of ready-to-rise sourdough dough.

    I oiled up my ten inch cast iron pan (using half the oil) and halving the dough from above, I balled and then flattened it, shaping it into a thick disk that sat about an inch from all sides of the pan. It was about 8am when I did this, and I wouldn’t go onto the next step until nearly 5pm when the dough disk had risen to a lovely volume that was closer to being ready to bake.

    My folks had given us a huge wedge of gouda cheese as part of a Christmas basket, so I grated down a bunch of that. I also crushed the garlic in the remaining oil. Just like one might do with a loaf of foccacia I dimpled the surface of my dough disk with my finger tips then spread the garlic oil roughly over the surface.

    Here’s the first trick I learned from that Youtube video. I took about half the grated cheese and made a thick edge right up against the edge of the disk and touching the cast iron. The point here is that as is melts it drips along the crack and gets all fried and crusty making a crispy cheesy edge.

    The point is, you want the cheese (and quite a bit of it) right up to the edge of the dough.

    With a saltier cheese I may have skipped this extra finishing salt sprinkled atop this whole creation. I like salty garlic bread, probably an artifact of growing up on garlic bread made from buttered toast sprinkled with garlic salt not real garlic, but it really does bring an added dimension to the finished product.

    This spent 28 minutes in a 425F oven, but I was watching it carefully for the last five.

    The second trick I learned from that Youtube video came right at the end. I checked the browning on the crust of the bread after I pulled it out of the oven to make sure it wasn’t too brown (it wasn’t) and then lit up the stovetop where I continued frying the bread right there in the cast iron pan for another 3 minutes. That crust just browned up a little more and it popped out of the pan glorious and crusty and cheesy as I expected.

    My biggest problem was making sure there was some left over for tomorrow.

    It was delicious, fresh and steaming hot from the oven, and I’ll be adding this to my regular rotation for family meals or perhaps even to share with friends some day again.