Sourdough Pancakes

In the interest of expanding both my sourdough recipe repertoire, as well as adding a new kind of bread-related post to the site, this morning I decided to get up and once and for all figure out how to make sourdough pancakes.

There are a lot of recipes available online and in books, and I've tried a few of them in the past. Here's the thing about sourdough though, everyones' starter is a different consistency (no matter how much we try to maintain ratios, it just never seems to pan out). So most of the recipes I've tried have flopped.

Today I took a different tack; I looked up a half dozed recipes (both sour and standard), compared ingredient ratios, wrote down some notes, and went to the mixer. From there I just tried to keep the same basic ratios intact while working with about 2 cups of starter as the base. This is what I came up with:

2 Cups Starter

1 Large Egg

2 Tbl Oil

2 Tbl Honey

1/2 Tsp Salt

3/4 Tsp Baking Soda

3/4 Cup Flour

With the starter in the bowl, I added all the wet ingredients. It still looked a little thin so I took a stab at how much extra flour I might need (started with a half a cup), I added the salt and soda to the flour and gradually mixed it in. It was still a little thin so I added another 1/4 cup of flour. That seemed to do the trick so I got to cooking them up.

Pizza Night

A long week and a particularly tough Friday combined with ladypant's new job called for a celebration in the form of pizza night. The crust was a standard french bread recipe with the addition of olive oil and about half the yeast.  The toppings were mushrooms, caramelized onions, blue cheese and mozzarella cheese. One pizza had homemade pesto for the sauce, the other had tomatoes instead.  Only the tomato pizza got photographed. The pesto pizza was gone before a photo could be taken.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Whole Wheat Pizza

The best part about having a stand mixer is how easy it is to throw together some pizza dough together the night before, let it rise in the fridge, and have homemade pizza that night. This dough is made with whole wheat and the pizza has sausage, fennel, mushrooms and artichoke hearts.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Simplicity Gone Sour

Over the holidays I was given a small bit of someones Sourdough Starter. I've always wanted to make good sourdough but all my starters have left me lacking for rise, and all my recipes have left me lacking for flavor. Fortunately my girlfriends father is a bit of a Sourdough officianado and has been (quite successfully apparently) making good sourdough for some time.

Since I've never had much luck with sourdoughs (and since I was mildly inspired by Mikes post) I decided that the best way to go was to keep it simple. I read a bunch of recipes for sourdough and settled on the following:

two cups starter
some oil (to keep the dough from sticking mostly)
a small bit of sugar (to get the yeasties going)
and a smaller bit of salt (for flavor)
and enough flour to make a dough (I made mine fairly soft as I was afraid of too dense a loaf)

I mixed it all up, kneaded, covered, and walked away. I checking in on it now and again and after about two hours it had doubled. I loafed it, scored it, put it on the stone, and waited about 20 minutes until it started to puff up.

Now this is where I strayed from habit. Rather than pre-heating the oven, I put the bread in at the same time I turned it on (someone suggested it and it didn't seem like a bad idea at the time). The total bake time turned out to be something like an hour and a half, unfortunately I pay attention to the bread more than I do the time...

I'd say I learned two things from my this try at sourdough that probably apply to all breads, but seem to have particular importance to sourdoughs; first, start with good ingredients (starter!) second, be patient.

Decorative Beer Bread

For Christmas this year I went to Molly's house to meet her family (well, the whole family) for the first time. Since I had the whole day before off, I decided to embark on a slightly more ambitious bread project both to impress the family and to see if I could yield any kind of positive result.

My goal was to make a bread basket, from which all the components were actually made of bread. That's right, the basket, the bowl for the dip, and of course the bread; all made from bread. I opted for two types of bread for some contrast in color and texture. The base bread (the basket and the bowl) were beer-bread made from a home-brewed stout. The filler bread was a an onion-herb white loaf. For the dip I opted for a cheesy-beer spread (same stout as the
bread).

I made the onion herb loaf first and baked it into small long loaves to be sliced and put in the basket. Since I made entirely too much I made a wreath bread also (basically an Epi in a ring). While this was rising I put together the beer bread. This I made by soaking some oatmeal and cracked rye in the beer, adding some hot water and then the rest of the ingredients to make the dough.



To make the basket I rolled out a piece of dough, pizza crust style, and twisted some long thin dough-ropes to make the basket walls, then I added the handles (flat pieces of dough folded over). The bowl was just a simple round loaf rolled in oats. I baked the basked and the bowl separately and then put them together after they came out of the oven.

My apologies for not providing a more exact recipe, I just don't use them... The basic idea for the breads follows, but you'll have to fill in the details yourself:

Beer bread:

Put your beer in a bowl, add some grains (I like to use grains complimentary to the beer e.g. oats to stout, cracked wheat to hefe, barley to ale, etc...) let it soak until the grains are soft.

Add hot water to bring it up to yeasty temps and add your yeast.

add an egg and maybe some oil (I don't know, like 1/2 cup maybe)

add some white flour (preferably a high-gluten) and then more wheat until you have bread dough.


Herb Bread:

Warm water and oil (maybe a total of 3 cups liquid)

Stir herbs of your choice into water (I used onion, oregano, basil, salt and pepper, and some garlic)

Add Flour until you have a bread dough.

They all get baked the same start oven at 450, immediately drop temp to 400 when bread goes, dump some water in the oven and leave it alone until it's done.

Whole wheat makes me forgetful

Yesterday I got whole wheat flour as an after-thought to buying all purpose flour. Then I left the AP behind at the check-stand and came home with only three bags of candy instead of four. At this point any normal person would have given up and maybe done something not food related for the rest of the day, but really it was that or I was going to have to go outside and punch someone.

The puff pastry straws/sticks is a test sampler - my first time making puff pastry dough by hand. You see my mother is Chinese. (So is my dad. So am I.) My mother and her friends like to scrunch up their noses at the sight of butter, sugar, and chocolate. But they LOVE puff pastry blossoms with chocolate inside. Yes, I'm serious. This Sunday I'm tasked with making said blossoms for their weekly gathering, and I'm really sick of buying puff pastry from the store. It's never on sale, and I hate buying stuff that's not on sale. Did I mention I'm Chinese? Also, I have a deep suspicion about prepared food in freezers. Once it's frozen, it can hide a dead body. So I used one stick of butter for about 3-4 cups of flour. The sticks turned out pretty well, though a little bland because I forgot to sprinkle sugar on top. Then my mom ate about half the batch, and I ate a few more, so now we just have a handful left.

Also remembered to bring home the rack of lamb with me from the grocery store, so the oven was on for like an hour. Not wanting to waste energy, I used about a cup and a half of the whole wheat flour to make dill biscuits. But then I forgot the butter for the biscuits, and they came out fine, just not as ... buttery. The dill came from my backyard, about four short twigs. I smeared some hummus on this morning and ate them.

Lastly, because the oven is turned off the residual heat takes some time to dissipate, I started a loaf of whole wheat olive bread. Then I forgot about it. So when I woke up this morning, I fed the fish, did some dishes, watched the latest episode of glee, and then "job searched." And then I thought, that's strange, why did I leave the cookie sheet out of the oven? (I keep cookie sheets in the oven, okay? It's hard to find places to keep stuff when you keep on buying more stuff.) So here it is, over-risen whole wheat olive bread. The olives are from Trader Joe's, though really I should go with Kalamata next time.

Happy, Mike?