Potato Rosemary Bread

Now is when I confess my love-hate relationship with Peter Reinhart and, more specifically, with his tome, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. 

As I am working this year to slow things down, I find that this book fits the bill and I am grateful for the challenge from Nicole, the food blogger at Pinch My Salt, to bake each and every type of bread described in this thick volume.  Nowhere in the entire book will one find the words quick or easy.  This is hardcore, Old World baking. The loaves take days to prepare.  And when the bread emerges from the oven, it is perfect. It quiets my family at the table.  This is real bread and every attempt brands me a real baker.

Take the Potato Rosemary Bread I made this week.  I don’t know what I loved more about this recipe, its heaping cup of mashed potatoes or the succulent cloves of roasted garlic. 

And as I was working through the instructions on Day Two, I stopped in my tracks and nearly swooned.  Pepper!  I had missed it in my preliminary readings (more on this later).  A bread with pepper!  Oh my!  I considered leaving my husband and heading off to find Peter Reinhart for surely he is my soul mate.

But right about now is when it becomes impossible to ignore the hate part of my experience with the recipes.  Bread baking is both an art and a science.  On both fronts, these recipes are the baker’s version of the X-Games.  And let’s just say that I am a little out of shape.

After choosing a bread to tackle, I read the recipe thoroughly and scour the kitchen and various specialty stores to make sure I have all of the ingredients.  Then I carefully consider our schedule to verify that I have time available in the correct increments necessary for the recipe.  I read the recipe again the night before I begin. 

Often the first day’s steps can be completed easily in the late afternoon with WJ. Day One typically involves some water (at room temperature), some yeast (quick acting), and some flour (carefully measured).  What could go wrong? 

Let’s see…  I could forget to leave out water and have to take a break for the water to adjust to the correct temperature or else play a crazy guessing game trying to remember what room temperature feels like, which risks killing the yeast, quick acting or not.  Or I could turn the mixer on, set on SLOW albeit, and watch, jaw dropping to the floor, as the carefully measured flour rises up like a cloud and showers down on the counter.

On Day Two, when the tasks are divided into mixing, kneading, fermenting, forming, proofing, and baking, any number of things could go awry.  I could forget to add the rosemary until after both the mixing and the initial kneading.  I could knead, and knead, and knead and still find the internal temperature of the dough to be three degrees below Reinhart’s guidelines.

I could get so distracted by the temperature issue that I miss the instructions tucked in at the end of that dense paragraph, the instructions about spreading those miraculous cloves of roasted garlic over flattened dough and kneading them in before the two hours of fermenting and one to two hours of proofing.  I could miss that detail entirely until I spot the garlic on the counter while sliding the nearly finished loaves into the oven and be left with no other option than to squish the garlic and spread it in globs over the top of the dough, hoping for the best.

At each turn, there is an opportunity for failure.  Which brings me right back to the love, because nearly every time I come face to face with Mr. Reinhart and the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, I walk away amazed that somehow I have been able to keep up.

 What challenges have left you feeling suprised with yourself?

Whole wheat buttermilk waffles

One of the favorite breakfast choices since toddlerhood in this household has been a frozen waffle popped into the toaster.  For WJ, a waffle is a tasty vehicle for his not-so-secret maple syrup habit.  It is a big favorite from my point of view as well since it takes a grand total of about three minutes to prepare and I have been able to find brands that use whole grains.

These frozen waffles, however, do have high sodium content (between 10% and 20% of the recommended sodium intake for an adult) and feature a number of those sketchy, hard-to-pronounce ingredients we would all be happier if our children were not ingesting. 

This week’s effort at eliminating the instant from our family's pantry (or freezer in this case) and our diet: Whole Wheat Buttermilk Waffles.  Made at home; stored in the freezer.  A healthy and money-saving replacement that will still be ready on a school morning in three minutes flat.

This recipe comes from a perfectly lovely cookbook called The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham.  I have made three substitutions, which are noted below: 

3/4 cup whole wheat flour

3/4 cup whole-wheat white flour*

2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon agave nectar*

3 eggs

1 1/2 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup (one stick) melted butter

1/4 cup canola oil*

Stir the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl with a fork.  In another mixing bowl beat the eggs until well blended.   Stir in the buttermilk, agave, melted butter (cooled a little), and oil.  Add the flour mixture and stir until well mixed.  If the batter is too thick, stir in up to 1/4 cup regular milk.  The batter should pour from the spoon, not plop (a direct quote from Ms. Cunningham--makes me want to meet her and hear her say "plop").  Bake in a waffle iron until crisp and golden. 

*The original recipe calls for 3/4 cup of all-purpose flour, which I replaced with whole-wheat white flour.  This is a whole-grain flour that I have found often works well in recipes calling for regular white flour.  I used agave nectar instead of two tablespoons of sugar and replaced 1/4 cup of the 3/4 cup butter in the recipe with canola oil.  These quick changes make me that much happier about replacing the cardboard box in my freezer with these waffles of my own.

As you can see, my first waffle did not turn out.  I was in a grove and failed to check the doneness setting.  Apparently it was set on “sticky mess.”  This sad glob went directly into the trash, all of it but a quick taste for me.  Even in this soggy state, these waffles taste great. 

I adjusted the settings and the waffles were quickly finished.  The whole process took about thirty minutes.  In the end I had one waffle saved for the morning, nine destined for a Ziploc bag in the freezer, and one RIP in the trash can.  WJ will usually eat three of the five sections of these waffles as one serving.  So my efforts tonight will result in at least fourteen quick and easy breakfasts in the coming weeks.

For serving her whole wheat buttermilk waffles, Marion Cunningham suggests, “The perfect complement is warmed honey—which becomes thin and pours like syrup when heated.”  An added frugal bonus since the average price of a smallish maple syrup bottle at Whole Foods today was about $67.00.  

What processed foods are you trying to eliminate?

Mushy bananas

The brown bananas on the kitchen counter were looking like they were on the verge of oozing, which of course means it is time to whip up a batch of my favorite banana bread recipe.  I came across this recipe on Pinch My Salt at least two years ago after googling for a whole wheat version.  The recipe is from a King Arthur’s Flour cookbook but I follow Nicole’s suggestion to add 1/4 cup of applesauce and 1/4 cup of wheat germ. 

I had already creamed the butter and sugar tonight when I opened the fridge and found only one egg.  This made for a prime opportunity for a second experiment with substituting with flaxseed.  My first experiment would have passed for Passover matzah.  On the side of the ground flaxseed box there is a section outlining its use as a substitute for eggs and oil.  I love that it ends with this admonition: Don’t give up if your results aren’t perfect the first time! Translation: We’re settin’ you up for failure! Cheerio!

If you want to substitute flaxseed for eggs, use one tablespoon of ground flaxseed mixed with three tablespoons of water for each egg.  Tonight I mixed the flaxseed and water together before adding them.  It made a gooey mixture.  During my first attempt, I just added both the water and the flaxseed separately, directly into the batter.  Maybe someone out there well versed in the care and feeding of flaxseed could chime in if combining these ahead of time really is the key. 

Tonight it seemed to make a difference.  The batter looked perfect and it is baking in the oven as I type.  Smells good.

Honey pistachio biscotti

In case you were wondering, pre-shelled pistachios are worth every penny.  There was blood. And both of my thumbnails, as well as the nail on my right index finger, have nearly separated from my flesh.

Last night I settled in the kitchen while my husband got WJ into bed.  I was super excited to try this biscotti recipe from Ellie Krieger on The Food Network.  

First things first: shell the pistachios.  It turns out that in order to arrive at one cup of pistachios, one must shell half of the bag of nuts.  The boys finished bath, snack, story, prayer, and back-rubbing.  WJ was fast asleep.  Dave wandered into the kitchen.  I had nearly filled the 1/2 cup measuring cup.   The recipe calls for a whole cup. That’s two 1/2 cup measuring cups. His fingers stretched out, reaching toward the fruits of my labor. “Mind if I take a few of these?”

You can imagine how the rest of that interaction went, but it was lucky for him that I was wounded.

Next time, I will pay the extra money, drive the extra drive, make the extra trip.  I have learned my lesson. After finishing the shelling, I walked away from the kitchen, putting off the baking until the light of morning changed my attitude.

With my fingers covered in Band-Aids, I cautiously returned the recipe today.  It uses partly whole wheat flour, partly honey for sweetness, and entirely olive oil.  No butter. Very heart-healthy.  And there is lemon zest, which adds a nicely bright flavor.

As I mixed the dough, WJ hovered at the mixer, sticking his nose as far into the bowl as he could from his perch on his stool.  “I just can’t stop smelling that! It smells too good!”  He was right.  It smelled like a perfect cup of tea.

The dough was kneaded, shaped into a large slab, and slid into the oven to bake.  So far, so good.  Since the word "biscotti" comes from the Latin biscotus, meaning twice-cooked or twice-baked, my work was not yet finished, After cooling from the first bake, I sliced the slab of cookie into biscotti and baked again.  The cookies were flipped halfway through the second baking and emerged out of the oven, toasted and golden.

My cookies are a bit chunkier than Ellie’s.  Hers seem more crisp and delicate. 

I will slice them differently next time.  This go-around I missed the direction to cut on an angle.  And after the first bake, the dough was a little too crumby for 1/2 inch slices.  I also think I kneaded in too much extra flour before baking; that might explain my struggle with slicing. 

Or maybe it was just the Band-Aids.  

Brioches à tête

One of my personal intentions for this year is to find new ways to include in our weeks the things that I truly love. As the mother of a young child it is so easy to feel a little lost, a little like Rosy the Jetson’s Robot Maid, shuffling around attending to the needs of everyone else.

Earlier this spring, one of my favorite food bloggers, Pinch My Salt, invited her readers to participate in the BBA Challenge. Together over a hundred folks from all over the world are baking our way through a fabulous guide called The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart. It sounded like so much fun that I bought two copies, one for myself and one for my mother. She and I have been working at a slower pace than many of the other bakers in the group but it has truly been fun. And a challenge.

Today I made my first attempt at Middle-Class Brioche, a compromise between the Rich Man’s Brioche, which calls for a pound of butter, and the Poor Man’s Brioche, which calls for only one stick of butter.

I have never…

That is just about all I have to say.

The dough was so silky and melty. The loaves were perfectly golden and crisp and hollow. Looking at them, just out of the oven, made me wish I had a batch of homemade jam; Trader Joe’s Lemon Curd would have to suffice. The five year-old in our lives stuffed warm chunks of bread into his cheeks for the majority of the late afternoon, offering me the unforeseen benefit of a few minutes of quiet. My husband interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence at dinner to say, “Oh. This bread is really good.”  Then we all stopped talking.

It felt like that scene in the film Julie and Julia where Julia and Paul Child gobble up her fish in buttery wine sauce, moaning and dribbling with delight. Isn’t that when Meryl Streep says, “French people eat French food every single day!”?

A challenge in the kitchen helps me feel human, helps me feel like me. I wonder what keeps you tied to yourself?