For a couple of years now, I’ve been looking for the perfect rye bread recipe. I know, “perfect” is a dangerous term to use, but I think I found a recipe that makes beautiful and tasty bread.

This recipe started out as Daniel Leader’s Czech Country Bread from his book Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers. I like whole grains in my bread, so I experimented with adding different kinds of whole grains – starting with replacing the white rye with whole grain rye, but eventually I ended up with replacing half of the bread flour with white whole wheat flour.

150g refreshed whole grain rye sourdough starter
300g water
100g white rye flour
200g white whole wheat flour
200g unbleached bread flour
1 tsp yeast
1 1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tbsp wheat gluten
1 tbsp diastatic malt powder

Use a stand mixer to knead all the ingredients into dough (about 8-10 minutes on slow).
Cover the dough and let it rest for about two hours (or until doubled in size).
Give the dough a quick knead and form a loaf.
Cover the dough again and let rise for about 1 1/2 hours.
About one hour into the second rise place a pizza stone in oven on middle rack and a cast iron pan at the bottom of the oven and preheat to 475F.
Sprinkle whole wheat flour on a peel and place the loaf on it.
Score loaf with a very sharp knife.
Place loaf on pizza stone.
Add a cup of ice cubes into the cast iron pan close the door.
Reduce temperature to 425F.
Bake for 45 minutes.
Let the bread cool completely before cutting into it. Yes, I understand that’s hard to do, but it’s important. If you want to eat freshly baked (still hot) bread, make baguettes. There is noting better than a fresh piece of bread with some good butter.

Who would have thought that a recipe from a yogurt lid could actually be that delicious…

Stonyfield Farm is running a campaign to convince people to replace (unhealthy) ingredients with low fat yogurt. To illustrate that, they include a recipe for “Strawberry Muffins that Melt in Your Mouth”. Sounds good. I had some extra strawberries that were in desperate need for a recipe.

They look and taste delicious.

I usually freeze most of a batch and then have muffins for a few weeks (more like days).

You can find the recipe on their web site too – no need to buy some yogurt (just in case you are making your own), even though their yogurt is the best I’ve found this side of the Atlantic.

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baking, cooking, muffin, yogurt, healthy, strawberry

There is only one way to make pizza, and that’s the Italian way…

Pizza is three things: a crust, sauce and toppings. And all these things are pretty easy make – even from scratch. And just to save some time, we’ll skip the homemade mozzarella and use store bought.

Let’s start with the crust, the dough needs to rest for a few hours, that gives us enough time to work on the sauce and the toppings.

Pizza Dough

• 2 cups bread flour
• 1 pckt rapid rise yeast (about 2 tsp)
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 2 tbs olive oil
• about 1/2 cup warm water

I use my Kitchenaid mixer to prepare the dough. It can be done manually, but it’s a lot of kneading to form the gluten. Add all the dry ingredients to the mixing bowl and mix with the dough hook for a few seconds. Add the olive oil. Slowly add the water. Don’t add all of the water at first, leave a few tablespoons and watch the dough. If the dough does not come together after about two minutes, add a tablespoon at a time and let the dough mix for about one minute. Mix for about 10 minutes. The dough should form a ball. Cover the dough ball with oil and let rest in a covered bowl for about three hours or overnight in the fridge.

Sauce

• 2 tbs olive oil
• 1 chopped onion
• 1 garlic glove
• 1/4 cup white wine
• 1 can of pureed or diced tomatoes
• 1 can of tomato paste
• 1/4 tsp salt
• pepper
• 1/4 tsp dried oregano

Head a sauce pan with the olive and add the chopped onion and salt. Saute over medium heat until the onion is translucent. Add the chopped garlic (or use a garlic press). After about a minute, add the white wine and wait until almost all of it is evaporated. Add the pureed or diced tomatoes and the tomato paste, add a some freshly ground black pepper and oregano. Let the sauce cook over low heat for at least 15 minutes.

Thin and Flat

Preheat the oven with a pizza stone to 550F (if your oven does not go that high, crank it up as high as possible). Make sure that the pizza stone has enough time to get hot enough.

Now comes the most complicated step in the process: Forming the crust. Sprinkle your work surface with flour and place the dough on it, flatten the dough ball/heap/mountain and sprinkle more flour on top of the dough.

Press the dough into as large a disk as you can without ripping holes into it – use more flour if necessary. Then slowly stretch it out while rotating the disk.

When done, sprinkle corn meal on the peel and transfer the dough to the peel.

Toppings

• 1/4 lbs prosciutto, sliced very thin
• 2 cremini mushrooms
• marinated artichoke hearts cut into smaller pieces
• fresh mozzarella, diced

I always remove most of the fat from the prosciutto – makes for a healthier pizza.

Start out by ladling some of the sauce on the crust and spread it out. Don’t drench the crust, try to get away with as little sauce as possible while still covering the dough.

Then add the toppings, starting with prosciutto

followed by the artichoke hearts

and the cheese

and the mushrooms

and finally sprinkle oregano over the pizza.

Bake for about eight minutes, slightly longer when the oven is not as hot.

The cheese should have some brown spots, and be bubbly when removed from the oven.

Enjoy.

I drink coffee. Not only do I drink coffee, I do care enough about the coffee that I make at home that I did a lot of research to decide what kind of machine and what brand and model to buy. In addition to the hardware, there is the software, and I try to get freshly roasted beans. Unfortunately, my favorite local coffee roaster sold his business, and the new owners cannot reliably deliver the same quality of coffee.

So, how can I make sure that I always have freshly roasted coffee beans available? Or, as some of my friends would put it, how can I waste even more time on my morning cup of coffee?

Of course, home roasting is the answer to that question.

How to turn a bag of green coffee beans into something that can be used in a coffee maker or an espresso machine? After some serious research online I noticed that one company name came up again and again: Sweet Maria’s Home Coffee Roasting Supplies.

More after the jump…In addition to the 5 pounds of the Espresso Monkey Blend, I also got the espresso sampler pack (this is what’s left, I already went through three of the samples):

OK, I have green coffee beans, and I want to end up with something like this:

How do I do that? My first attempts were not very successful – I tried to use a hot air popcorn popper. There are numerous reports online from people who are able to use such a cheap device to roast some fine coffee. My popper however did not get hot enough. I was not even able to get to the first crack stage of the roasting process.

There are a bunch of other methods like pan roasting, or fire roasting, but I wanted something simpler, something that would just work. I can always spend some time in the future on a home build propane heated roaster. I decided to go with an entry level home roasting machine:

Let’s roast a batch of beans… First, take the batteries out of the smoke detector.

The FreshRoast is not a machine to roast a large batch of coffee, it can do about 2 1/4 oz. at a time. That’s not much. I usually do three batches in a row (with the required 20 minutes of cool down time in between the batches).

It’s fun to watch the coffee get darker and darker. At the beginning, the beans are greenish, and look more like split peas than like roasted coffee.

Within a few moments in the hot air stream, they slowly start to turn brown. At first we have something that looks like roasted peanuts. This is the stage where the beans release a grassy smell, which turns into the smell of hay.

The beans get moved around the roasting chamber by hot, rapidly moving air.

Once the beans dry, some of the chaff comes off the beans, and the air stream will move these light pieces of bean skin to the chaff collector.

A slightly darker shade of light brown.

An even darker shade of light brown.

A light shade of medium brown.

A medium shade of medium brown.

A darker shade of medium brown.

The experts of course know that we are moving through the different roasting levels of cinnamon, half city, New England, full city, … And, I’ll stop trying to make up descriptions for the different roasting levels.

I usually stop the roasting during or shortly after the second crack stage. The beans will have a slightly shiny surface at that point, because some of the internal oils will have traveled to the surface.

After cooling, and some more chaff removal, this is what the beans look like:

The FreshRoast Plus 8 has relatively good chaff collector. After the top cools down enough, it’s very easy to get rid of the collected chaff.

The beans are ready to be used for espresso after about 12-24 hours.

Here is my first attempt to bake one of the breads in Daniel Leader’s
Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers. As usual, I had a problem with following instructions, and I had to modify the recipe a bit: Instead of 500g of all purpose flour, I used 400g of AP and 100g of whole wheat graham flour. I did not want to replace too much flour with whole wheat to not change the character of the bread and the consistency of the dough too much.

And, because of time constraints, I had to “rush” the whole process a bit by shaving off a few minutes of every step. The temperature on that day (it was very hot) may have worked to my advantage because the dough did rise a lot faster.

French bread is best fresh, and I did not want to eat three loafs within an hour of baking them, so I also cut short the baking time a bit – hence the somehow pale look of the finished bread.

That allows me to freeze the loafs and then just pop them into my convection toaster oven for 8 to 10 minutes and have delicious fresh french bread.

I like bread. There is nothing better than bread fresh out of the oven – yes, I know you are not supposed to cut right into a freshly baked loaf, but still, there is nothing better…

Good bread recipes are hard to find, but I think I just hit the jackpot: Daniel Leader’s
Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers.

 

How to I judge a baking book? Of course, I look for the pretzel recipe. Most recipes I find online result in a dough that is too dry – Leader’s recipe gets it right (it took me quite a bit of experimenting to come up with my recipe). I’m not yet convinced that his baking soda/water ratio is correct, and I don’t want to know what boiling the dough for 1 minute will do to the pretzels… Actually, I think I do know: It will turn them into bagels, and that is not quite the texture that I’m looking for in a pretzel.

I looked at a bunch of recipes, and they all look good. In addition to the actual recipes there are enough illustrations in the general section of the book that show the finer points of processing and shaping the different breads.

This is a great book, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be busy over the next few months baking all sorts of artesian breads.

I have a bag of corn meal that I use to bake pizza, so that it comes off the peel without sticking. What else can you do with corn meal? Hmmm… There is this recipe for corn meal pancakes right on the bag. So let’s see what I need… OK, I’m out of baking soda (I guess I made to many pretzels lately), but I can probably get by without, there is enough baking powder in the recipe so that it should not matter that much. I don’t have buttermilk, but I have saco cultured Buttermilk Blend, so that’s not a problem either. Other than that, I have everything: corn meal, flour, eggs, oil, salt.

By replacing the buttermilk with the dry stuff, I have to modify the recipe a bit, and I keep telling myself: Don’t forget the eggs!

The batter is done, I start baking the pancakes, and I start noticing that they are not quite the way I imagined them… But I manage to get nicely brown pancakes after a while. While I bake the last batch it hits me: I forgot the eggs. Doh!

But, there is not much that a bit of fresh fruit and a lot of maple syrup cannot fix:

The pancakes were a bit flat (flatter than your usual pancake or Kansas), but once soaked in maple syrup quite tasty. But I guess next time I’ll remember the eggs…

What are Maultaschen? Just one more variation on your standard filled pasta dough – your ravioli, tortellini, wontons, mantı, 餃子, …
As you can see, every culture came up with their own way of filling pasta dough. In Swabia the dish is called Maultasche.
Historically, this is a dish that uses whatever leftovers you have, wrapped in dough.

Let’s assume that we already have a mixture of our leftovers (which is how I started this process, I had a bag of filling in my freezer – hence no pictures of preparing that). If you don’t have that mix available, try this:

2 onions (chopped)
1 pkg frozen spinach
1/2 pound ground beef (I use meat loaf mix)
a few strips of sauted bacon
salt
pepper
2-3 eggs
some slices of dry bread, soaked in milk
some fresh parsley

As you can see, the recipe is not very accurate, just use what you have, it’s traditionally a dish made from leftovers: Just throw in what you have (mushrooms, veggies, …)

For the pasta dough use the following:

[more after the jump]

4 eggs
400 g flour (about 14 oz)
2-3 tbs. water (if necessary)

Mix the flour with the eggs, if the dough is too dry, add a few table spoons of water (one at a time).

Use the pasta maker and run a small piece of dough through the straight rollers to clean the machine.

Set the dial of the pasta machine to 1 and run a piece of dough through it. Set the dial to 2 and feed the same piece through the pasta machine again. Do the same with the dial set to 4 and 6. Repeat these steps with a new piece of dough.

The two pieces should be about the same size.

Put about one tbs. of filling on the one sheet of dough, leaving at least 1/2″ of exposed dough around it. Repeat about every 1″ until the sheet is filled. Place the second sheet on top (you may need to wet the exposed portions of the dough to make it stick to the top piece). Run your finger around the filled portion and press down so that the top and bottom sheets stick together. Cut the individual pieces, and potentially crimp around the edges with a fork.

Cook the Maultschen in broth.

Plain yogurt has a bad rap… It’s not sweet, it does not have any additional flavor added, and it just tastes plain…

Have you ever tried good yogurt? It’s definitely not plain. It has all the flavor it needs, and if you add some fruit and granola, it’s the best breakfast ever!

So, how do you get to try good yogurt? You make it yourself of course. This way, you know exactly what went into it, and it also makes sure that you can actually pronounce all the ingredients.

There is a guy on the Internet who seems to be the expert on all things cheese: David B. Fankhauser has a “Cheese Page“. This guy is a Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati Clermont College – so I guess he knows his bacteria. Among other things, he has a recipe for yogurt that actually works.

I use Stonyfield fat free organic plain yogurt as starter (one 6oz cup per gallon of milk), 1% organic milk, and a styrofoam box from Omaha Steaks as my incubation chamber.

I’ve tried several different kinds of milk, and my experience is that ultra-pasteurized milk has a strange after taste, so I only used pasteurized milk.

3 mid-sized apples (I like to use Empire)
4 1/2 oz sugar
4 1/2 oz softened butter
7 oz whole wheat pastry flour (I use Bob’s Red Mill flour)
2 tsp baking powder (aluminum free)
2 tbl milk
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 350F.

Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy (at least 8 minutes). Add the vanilla and one egg at a time. Combine flour, baking powder and salt slowly add to the butter/sugar/egg mixture. Add milk.

Peel, core and quarter apples. If you are working slow, store the cut apples in water with some vitamin C (or lemon juice).

Now comes the trick: Make a number of cuts about 3/4 through the apple slices, lengthwise (look at the picture to get an idea).

Butter (or use baking spray) and flour a spring form and fill with batter. Arrange the apples on the batter (don’t push them into the batter).

Bake for 50-60 minutes, until golden brown.