More Fall Baking

Since there wasn't much planned for the weekend, I decided there was enough time to attempt a few new recipes.

First off was the cinnamon-swirl pumpkin rolls that I've been wanting to make. They turned out really tasty, but I was worried about them after I realized that I put in 1 can of pumpkin puree instead of 1 cup, basically doubling the amount of pumpkin. They seemed to turn out just fine after a little flour was added to the dough. Maybe they would have been a little lighter if I had done it right, but maybe they would have been drier. The ugly two crammed in on the right side were the ends. No point in wasting anything.

These got a simple glaze frosting, but a cream cheese frosting will be in order next time.

Next up on the list was a new sourdough bread recipe. The last one I made from the King Arthur Flour recipes wasn't too sour, but that may have been because the starter was fairly new. The new recipe was their extra-tangy sourdough.  This bread is supposed to be tangier (or sourer) than normal by using refrigerating a starter for 12 hours. Here is a picture sequence.

Starter after refrigerating. Looks a little rough looking.

Here is the dough after mixing in the rest of the ingredients. Looks a lot smoother now.

Here are the two loaves after the shaping, proofing, and slashing. Split 2/3 of it into a boule and the other 1/3 into a batard.

Here is the batard. It was first out of the oven by about 10 minutes. This loaf turned out very nice on the outside, good ears and browning. The crumb was a little dense, but it was very soft. The sourness was a little lacking out of the oven but was more pronounced the next day.

The boule had tons of oven spring, surprisingly most of it vertically. It started browning a lot by the time it had only hit 120 deg. F on the inside. When I went to tent it with foil I realized I was out of foil. Uh oh. I turned down the temp to 425 from 500 hoping that it would slow down the browning while the center caught up. Sort of worked, but the browning didn't look quite as good. The slashes turned out cool looking though. A few pieces on the inside weren't quite done either. When they say bake it until at least 200 in the center, they mean it. 195 is not good enough.

Also in the process of making some dinner rolls tonight. Want to test a recipe before the in-laws get here for Thanksgiving since I've never made dinner rolls before. May post pictures of those later.

Pumpkin Time

Now that fall has started, with the exception of the 70 degree weather the last week, eating pumpkin stuff just seems appropriate. I've found a handful of great recipes with pumpkin in them, so in the spirit of fall (and Halloween) I've decided to try to do a pumpkin recipe once a week for the next month or so.

Found what appeared to be a great pumpkin recipe on King Arthur Flour's blog a couple days ago - Pumpkin Bread. I had just picked up some cinnamon chips at the grocery store yesterday thinking they would have to come in handy soon. Since the recipe was for 2 loaves and I didn't feel like doing any math, I decided to just make them both, 1 of them with chocolate chips like the recipe mentioned and the other with the cinnamon chips.  Here's what they looked like.

Trying to split the recipe evenly into two separate bowls before adding the chips proved to be a little difficult if you can't tell by the significantly smaller loaf on the right. Both were delicious. Haven't had enough of either to decide a favorite yet.

It wasn't worthy of a separate post, but here is a picture of the pizza from last night. The crust turned out a little too bubbly, which I hadn't thought was possible. Just needs a little more punching down next time. The lopsided tomato arrangement was the product of not enough flour on the peel. Probably didn't help that I had it upside down either.

pain a l'ancienne

As of late, my focus has been baking, particularly artisan breads. I've been trying to test out a new type of bread each time. Typically my bread recipes either come from the internet, usually from King Arthur Flour or The Fresh Loaf. This weekend though, I reverted back to my first bread baking book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. I decided I wanted to try something new from the book, but something fairly simple that could pair with the balsamic braised chicken breasts I was making for dinner. I decided to try out the pain a l'ancienne that Peter raved about in the book.

Pain a l'ancienne is a very simple rustic bread made of only yeast, flour, water, and salt. It is also a very wet, sticky dough at a 80% hydration level, similar to ciabatta. The bread is unique in that you use ice water in it and then immediately refrigerate the dough after a light kneading. The bulk fermentation for the dough is done in the refrigerator for at least overnight, with the idea being that by retarding the fermentation, it will draw out flavors from the flour that otherwise would not arise from a conventional fermentation at room temperature. I went ahead and mixed it up Saturday morning, threw it in the fridge, and then pulled it out of the refrigerator Sunday morning. With a couple hours to warm up and then some simple shaping, the bread was ready for the oven. I chose a baguette shape as this seemed the simplest. Rather than the typical folded technique, I simply cut the dough with a bench scraper and then stretched it to length. The three baguettes then went into the 550 degree F oven onto the hot pizza stone. I then generated steam in the oven using my cheapo method of a cast iron skillet and ice cubes.

After about 20 minutes of baking, the bread came out quite nicely. It had a ton of oven spring and developed a nice crust. All's looking well from the outside.......

 After 10 minutes of cooling, it was time to see what the inside looked like. A recent rustic sourdough trial had resulted in a tight even crumb, which was not what was intended for that recipe or this one. Would it come out with huge uneven holes like a rustic very hydrated bread should??

Boom! There are the holes I was looking for. The taste though? Well, for a bread that only has 4 ingredients, it actually was pretty damn good. This bread is going on the staples list as it was easy, delicious, and cheap to make. The two things I will try differently the next time is to try to get a little more browning on the crust and also try to score the loaves, but I think that will prove difficult with this hydrated of a dough.

On a side note, here is a picture of the harvest pumpkin scones that were the dessert for dinner. I went with the diced crystallized ginger in this batch.

The Start

I love food. No. I LOVE food. Anyone that has known me very long, or just sat down at a restaurant with me, can quickly see that I love food. I've always enjoyed cooking to some degree, but my enjoyment of cooking has lagged that of the food itself.

Recently I've discovered that I am enjoying cooking more and more, especially baking. In attempt to keep a record of my endeavors in cooking so that I may remember the results that went well, those that didn't, and hopefully be able to realize an increasing level of skill, I've started this blog. I know my writing skill (both creativity and grammar) is horrible, so I plan to keep this thing heavy on the pictures and light on the word. My goal for this blog for the next year, is to post at least one entry, or food, per week.