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.

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.

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.

Yes, I put avocado on a cake… No, not in the form of guacamole, but as a (sweet) frosting. And no, it was not my idea. Alton Brown and his show Good Eats is responsible for this curious yet tasty experiment. In case you missed the show, the Good Eats Fan Page has the transcript of this show online, and the Food Network – of course – has the recipe for this tasty frosting available.

And yes, I know that it looks disgusting…

Just in case you don’t know what a Dutch baby is, check out the Wikipedia definition. So, it’s the Pennsylvania Dutch again who can be blamed for confusing the culinary language My recipe is more along the lines of an apple pancake than a traditional Pennsylvania Dutch baby.

Here is what you need:

• 1 apple
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup flour
• a pinch of salt
• 3 table spoons unsalted butter
• sugar (regular or confectioners)

Preheat the oven to 450F. Spray a 9in pie pan (I use glass) with cooking spray and add about two table spoons of butter to the pan. Place the pie pan on the middle rack in the oven.

Peal, core, quarter and slice the apple.Heat the remaining butter in a non-stick pan and heat on medium heat.Add the sliced apple and cook until starting to get translucent.

When the butter in the pie pan is melted, move the apple from the saute pan to the pie pan and place back in the oven.

Mix the eggs, milk, salt and flour in a bowl.

After the apples were in the oven for about five minutes, pour the batter into the pie pan and cook for 20-25 minutes.

Check after about 15 minutes and turn the pie pan if one side gets too dark.

Remove from the oven when the sides are brown.

Move to a plate and sprinkle some sugar over the Dutch baby. Most recipes call for confectioners sugar, but I prefer the crunchiness of regular (organic cane) sugar. Serve with a nice cup of cappuccino for breakfast.

The same recipe, but with asparagus, tomatoes, onions and some sweet pepper instead of the apples also makes a very nice dinner.

In a previous post I claimed to know a thing or two about pretzel baking… I guess it’s time to deliver the proof:

Here is my recipe:

• 500g (1.1lb) bread flour (I use all purpose when I’m out of bread flour)
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. sugar
• 350ml(1 1/2 cups) warm milk
• 40g (1/3 stick) unsalted butter
• 1 pkg. yeast

Mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, salt and yeast) with a stand mixer on low.

Melt the butter in the microwave and mix it with the warm milk. Make sure that the mixture is not too hot, otherwise the yeast will die a horrible death (and the pretzels will be pretty dense). Add the milk/butter mixture to the mixing bowl and wait until everything comes together.

It may be necessary to add one or two table spoons of water. Mix for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, remove the dough from the bowl, spray the bowl with cooking spray, and put the dough back into the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest for three hours in a warm place, or over night in the fridge.

Heat the oven to 425F.

Divide the dough into eight pieces (I usually end up with about 112g per piece). Roll the dough into a long rope. Make sure that the middle part is thicker than the ends.

I usually do this in two steps: First I roll out all pieces to about 12″ – this gives the dough some extra time to rest. In the second step, I bring them to the full 24″ that I need to form pretzels.

Form the pretzels and let them rest for a few more minutes.

While forming the pretzels, bring a pot with water to boil (about 1qt) and add about 1/3 box of baking soda.

Once the water is boiling, submerge one pretzel at a time and boil it for 15 seconds. After taking the pretzel out of the water, put it on a baking sheet that is covered with parchment paper. Sprinkle with pretzel salt while the dough is still wet. This helps the salt to stick.

Cut the thick part of the pretzel length-wise with a very sharp knife.

Reduce the oven temperature to 375F and place the baking sheet(s) into the oven. Rotate the sheets after about 10 minutes.

Bake for about 25 minutes.

Take the pretzels out of the oven and cool them on a cooling rack.

Enjoy!

As usual, you can see higher resolution images when you click on the images on this page.

As everybody who knows me can attest to, I’m a big Alton Brown fan. Last week’s “Good Eats” (this page has a video that starts when the page is loaded – bad!) episode was about my favorite food: Pretzels (or Brezen, how they are called in Bavaria). Given that I’m a pretty good pretzel baker myself, I think I have to critique the show and his process a bit…

The process in general was pretty close to how I do it. There even were erie similarities (e.g. how he cut his batch into eight pieces by weighing every piece, or that he’s using the same Soehnle scale that I use). But, there of course were things I do different, and things that were clearly wrong!

I use milk instead of water. I did a few test runs with recipes containing 100% water, 50/50 water and milk, and 100% milk. My taste tests did show that the pretzels made with just milk were the most authentic (and when I say authentic, I mean Bavarian). But even with just water, the pretzels are still very good.

Where he really went wrong was with how he formed the pretzels: First of all, when you roll out the dough, it is important that the ends are thinner than the middle part, and there just has to be a twist between the two ends cross each other. This is actually shown correctly at the beginning of the show at the end of the story about the Italian monk. Here is a picture of authentic German pretzels:

His second faux pas was that he did not cut into the dough just before baking them (after the boiling step). This will help the pretzels to rise. When the dough gets boiled, the outer layer of the pretzel becomes tough, which means that the yeast has a much harder time to work against the surface tension of the dough. Once the dough is cut with a sharp knife, we created an outlet and the middle of the pretzel will rise nicely.

And then of course, there was the story with the mustard. Don’t get me wrong, mustard is my most favorite condiment. Some people actually have accused me of using e.g. a wiener sausage as edible spoon for mustard… But, I would never – NEVER – put mustard on a preztel. Mustard goes on the sausage that you eat with your pretzel – and of course, that would preferably be a “Weisswurst“, the famous Bavarian white sausage (I am getting mine from Hartmann’s):

Here is a batch of my pretzels:

I still have to try his mustard recipe.