Category: Food

Over summer I developed a crepe recipe.

We eat it savory because the batter is often the product of failed bread.

300g starter (150 flour + 150g water)
3 eggs
150g water
2g pepper
2g garlic powder
2g salt (when its not failed bread dough)
90g cheese (optional)

My wife likes them crispy (hence the scare quotes in the title).

So they take a while to cook.

Almost cheesy crackers.

Unfortunately the kids lost interest in making crepes and pancakes. But it’s a nice solitary activity on a weekend morning.

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The big toaster oven at my in-laws finally died, replaced by a smaller unit. So I downsized the recipe to 50g starter, 100g water, 150g flour. Worked well as long as I refreshed the starter twice before the main mix — I start the night before, refresh in the morning, mix in the mid-morning, bake at night.

When we went home, I forgot the starter, so I spent the first couple days using yeast (1g yeast for 250g flour). Whoohee! I see why people use yeast. So quick! Don’t have to baby the starter! Dried out a touch faster than sourdough, but not a problem if the loaves are gone within a day. Will keep this in mind if I need to bake a loaf before dinner.

In the move I found year-old wheat berries. Back to making blended whole wheat bread. The first loaf was 50% whole wheat. Didn’t go well. I’ve settled into 50g of wheat berries to 200g flour. Close enough to the ~25% percent sweet spot for flavoring bread.

As the year of the Ox transitions into the year of the Tiger, my bread has settled into another steady state. So here’s worth another update.

As for the past couple of years, I’m happily using the cast iron loaf pan, which gives a nice crust all around. Towards the end of 2021, I tried cooking two loaves at a time, but our stainless steel loaf pan doesn’t pop out the bread nearly so easily.

My recent return to the basics has continued to bear fruit with consistent success, even though the process takes a little more time.

I start by refreshing the starter. Mix 20g starter, 20g flour, 20g water and let it sit all day until happy and bubbly. Repeat again if the original starter is looking grouchy.

On to the main dough!

60g starter (previously mixed)
240g water
300g flour (currently organic brand from Costco)
6g salt

(a ratio of 20:80:100:2)

As always, I mix the first three ingredients to autolyze for half an hour and add the salt before the first fold.

Lately, I’ve started adding 40g of raisins (non-soaked). It adds a sweet tartness and makes for an out-of-this-world butter toast.

My baking tends to settle into a steady-state before something comes out of the blue to mess it all up (again). But at some point, things must finally settle down, right? Maybe this is the apotheosis of my sourdough baking?

I guess I just have to wait (and bake) to find out.

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Three nights ago, I had a dream where I conducted a performance art piece airbrushing a continuous line throughout two rooms in a coffee shop. It was a strangely emotional dream as a crumpled to the floor at the end of the performance.

Two nights ago, I dreamed about ordering an espresso at a coffee shop. I was worried about how the caffeine might affect me (I haven’t had any since the pandemic started), and I contemplated whether I should wait till March because I could then claim that I had gone a full two years of eating only homemade (or frozen) means prepared by family members.

Last night, I dreamt about taxing a B-1 bomber around time trying to find the tarmac so we could take off.

I wonder if logging the dreams on this blog post is making me more likely to remember them. Is the vividness of the dreams related to a practice of recording them?

The brain is weird. Worry not, these footnotes have nothing to do with bread.

I spent November on a bad run.

It was completely self-inflicted. I’ve always wanted to develop the laziest possible process for making sourdough so I kept trying to use old dough to start the next loaf several times. (I also tried this last year with the same dismal results).

After a month of gummy loaves, I returned to the basic process. Use a clean starter and refresh it a couple of times. Once the starter is popping, then mix the dough. I also went back to my usual 2% salt after trying a low salt mix.

Unsurprisingly but reassuringly, the results also returned to their old success.

My boy unwittingly trolled me when the first good loaf came out. He looked at the big poofy thing in the oven and asked why I started making mommy’s (yeasted) bread. He was so surprised at this new development that he repeated the question several times, even though I kept explaining that this is what my sourdough should be.

By the way, the bread was also as tasty as it looked. Going low salt is might be good for blood pressure but a few grams makes a huge difference.

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With multiple refreshes per loaf, I now have a bit of starter floating around. However, it’s not a big deal. Weekend pancakes can eat up a lot of starter for breakfast and we’ve also started making pizza for lunch.

The pancakes have been covered several times before, but the pizza is equally as simple. Take 150g of starter (1:1 hydration) and add 75g of flour. That changes the dough to a 2:1 ratio (67% hydration), a pretty standard mix for bread. Let the dough proof for as much time as you have available. Spread the dough out on an oiled cast-iron skillet. Throw on the toppings (cheese, oil, and miscellaneous veggies) and bake at 350 for about half an hour. Once the pizza is stiff, take it off the skillet and let it bake another 20 minutes on the rack.

Last year, I discovered the perfect cereal mix – puffed wheat, raisins, and nuts (such as walnuts or pecans). This works great with yogurt or whole milk. The nuts provide complex notes while the raisins give a bit of tang, and the ensemble is backed up by the fatty heft of whole milk. This has become a breakfast staple (along with my bread, of course).

I recently simplified this combo into an elegant snack – nuts and raisins.

I stumbled into realization when we toasted some unsalted pumpkin seeds. With my family’s history of high blood pressure, I’m careful with salt, but these seeds needed something else. I had some raisins and voila, I had a new snack from the pantry!

You’d think that all the years of store-bought trail mixes would have led me to this pairing much sooner. However, this discovery was only possible because we’ve been on a detox of unhealthy foods since the pandemic started. Aside from the occasional frozen pizza, every meal we’ve had for the past year has been home-cooked. Admittedly, we’ve bought our share of snacks in plastic bags, but even these have been limited because of the cold rationality of shopping online instead of being waylaid on the path to the checkout lane.

It’s impressive that toasted nuts and raisins can result in an elegant combination of tanginess, umami, and fat. It’s all the more satisfying when this magic mix was discovered organically.

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After the initial draft of this post, I’ve come up with a second simple “magic mix”. Ground black pepper, garlic, and olive oil can be applied to almost any savory meal to good effect. The label on the pepper container states that it is a product of Vietnam, which invariably makes me marvel at how far we’ve progressed since the age of exploration, kicked off by the Portuguese search for an alternate trading route to break the Italian monopoly on spices. It still amazes me that these mundane kitchen ingredients were worth so much that men would devote years of their life traveling the high seas to obtain these basic goods.

My bread is constantly evolving from one recipe to another, but my pancakes have remained consistent. The recipe hasn’t changed much from I posted it three years ago.

±240g (1 cup) starter
1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon baking soda or baking powder, whatever you got.

2017

Nowadays, I throw in two eggs, add a second tablespoon of sugar, and use less the salt. But really, it’s basically the same recipe from 2017. Pancakes have always been a loose recipe to use up old sourdough starter that would otherwise be discarded.

This weekend, I made the ultimate step in the recipe. Try to see what’s missing.

±240g (1 cup) starter
2 eggs (seperate the yolks and whites)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon salt

2021

Yup, we’ve gotten rid of the baking soda!

The girl wanted to have pancakes on Saturday morning, but I didn’t have sourdough starter to cook with. When I make non-sourdough pancakes, I usually add extra baking soda to push the good rise.

However, my wife hates the chemical flavor from baking soda, so I googled “pancakes without baking soda”. The top hit worked out perfectly. The short process:

1. Separate the egg whites and yolks.
2. Thoroughly mix all the the ingredients (including yolks) except for the egg whites.
3. Beat the egg whites till you have stiff peaks.
4. Gently fold in the egg whites into the batter.
5. Cook on medium-low heat.

The pancakes went over so well, I prepared sourdough starter for pancakes on Sunday morning as well! Saturday’s non-sourdough pancakes tasted just like cake, while Sunday’s sourdough pancakes had a little tang. Both came out great!

In making pancakes two days in a row, we were also honed in on the perfect cooking temperature (just a hair above dead center between medium and low).

It’s slightly more hassle to beat the eggs, but the effort is worth it to avoid the baking soda. I’m curious if there are any more changes to be made.

Then again, maybe I’ve landed upon the final recipe.

I’ve gotten into a good rhythm baking loaves with our Lodge Cast Iron loaf pan. The recipe is quite simple.

50g starter
150g to 200g water
250g bread flour
5g salt

You might notice the wide range of water in this recipe, anywhere from 60% to 80% hydration. It doesn’t seem to matter.

The key is to knead the dough hard at the start.

When I first got into making sourdoughs, all the recipes recommended gentle folding to get big artisan holes.

Having stooped to using the humble loaf pan, such pretensions are unnecessary, so my current process now aims for consistency.

To start at the beginning.

Bring out the starter and wake it up. If past its prime, refresh it.

Once the starter is happy, mix the dough without salt. Let it autolyze for 20 minutes to an hour.

Add salt and knead it (using wet hands in the bowl). Let it sit for half an hour. Knead it again and wait. Repeat again and again, until the dough starts to feel poofy.

By now it’s nighttime, so throw the batch into the fridge.

The next morning take out the dough. After the dough has woken up (usually a few hours) pour it into the loaf pan.

Once the dough has proofed well past the rim of the pan (a few more hours), preheat the toaster oven to 450f, and then bake it on convection for 40 minutes at 325f.

So far the loaves have been remarkably consistent. Admittedly, these instructions are still extremely fuzzy and subjective. That’s life with sourdough. Fermentation is a dance.

Of course, writing this self-congratulatory post guarantees my next loaf will bomb. Fortunately, this hobby lets us eat our mistakes.

Earlier in the week, I mixed some dough at the same time my wife started her own loaf of bread. I deferred and proofed it in the fridge so she could bake that night.

The next morning, I took the dough out to proof and bake. However, the day turned out to be a traffic jam of meetings. By the time I had a moment to breathe, the dough was completely over-proofed.

In the past, I would try to salvage the mess by adding fresh flour to make two loaves of bread. However it’s a gamble, and I’ve been on a losing streak.

I went with the guaranteed route.

On Tuesday morning, my daughter and I pulled out the dough (now batter) added a couple of eggs, a little milk, olive oil, some sugar, and a touch of baking soda.

We made a couple of full-size pancakes. Then I realized she’s old enough.

Time for her to flip these things!

We poured out a smaller pancake. At first, we used a silicone spatula with a short handle, but she accidentally brushed her finger against the rim of the pan.

She’s a tough girl, but no need to burn another finger. We pulled out the wooden spatula. The head wasn’t as sharp but had a long handle.

A mountain of pancakes later, she finished making breakfast.

As always, the kids enjoyed their meal of pan-fried dough, topped with butter and honey.

And I got this post to mark a momentous occasion in her life.

I’m still using the toaster oven with a cast iron Lodge pan, but I’ve made a couple tweaks from my previous bread post that has made the process even easier and provided more consistent results.

Poolish
40g starter from the previous dough
60g water
60g flour
Dough
200g water
120g bread flour
120g whole wheat flour
4g salt

As you can see, I’ve added a step to make a poolish, which adds about four hours to the process. You can mix a full loaf with the starter, but I’ve been getting more consistent results by cranking up the starter with fresh ingredients before mixing the main dough.

I also lowered the hydration a little, and I’m back to regularly using whole wheat flour. I’ve always preferred including a little whole wheat flour in my bread (20%), but I’m comfortable pushing it up to to 40% with the help of the King Arthur Bread Flour, which I absolutely adore. These percentages would work with my wet-grind method, so I might start doing that after we use up our whole wheat flour.

The final tweak is that I now pull the starter for the next loaf while it is still in the proofing bowl. It seems minor, but I found that the loaf will deflate quite a bit if you pull the starter after its been poured into the pan. It’s nothing time can’t fix, as long as your dough isn’t already on the verge of overproofing.

As for the poolish starter, you can keep it on the counter for a few hours to ripen up before mixing the the poolish, or you can throw it in the fridge until you’re ready for the next loaf (just be prepared for a 36 hour process, which could be accelerated with warm water, or as we head into summer).

Of course, none of this is foolproof. I forgot to add salt to a recent loaf and the darn thing came out quite flat. I was quite disappointed that night, but half of it was gone after breakfast. The best part of this hobby is that you can eat your mistakes, even if I prefer the next day’s success!

Over the past year, I’ve started making natto, the sticky, pungent soybean fermentation. The process is extended but fairly simple:

• Soak the beans for twelve or more hours
• Steam it in the Instapot with high pressure for 4 hours
• Inoculate the beans with with a spoonful of older beans
• Incubate it for 24 hours in a toaster oven set on warm (at around 100 degrees Farenheit).

I started with a commercial natto product and have been backslopping it for multiple generations. However, I’ve hit a couple weak batches.

These modern industrial mono-culture products are not considered particularly resilient, so maybe it’s time to start anew. However, I may also have been at fault. After an extended good run, I might have gotten sloppy and pushed my luck, using a smaller inoculating batch or not being vigilant during this process.

Even though my general philosophy has always been to push for “good enough”, there are still limits on how lackadaisical I can treat the process, since natto is not as forgiving as sourdough.

A sour batch (while still edible) invariably feels like a soul crushing disappointment, but I need to remind myself that I learn more from failure. One doesn’t find the limits via easy success. Boundaries are discovered by going awry.

Today’s loaf was a case of failing upwards.

I overproofed my dough in the toaster oven. Maybe because I set the warming function too high and prematurely killed my leaven. The loaf collapsed in the bake.

No matter, I was still hungry for a midnight snack.

Which is when I found out that I forgot to add salt to the dough when I mixed it this morning.

But all’s well that ends well.

I pulled out my fig butter (which I had fermented with too much salt) and slathered it on a slice.

I can’t say it was delectable, but it was tasty.

One of my favorite aspects of being a home baker of sourdough bread is that you get to eat your failures.

Occasionally those failures will be interesting. And I’d say that a bland gummy slice of sourdough bread with a heavily salted fig butter topping makes for a singularly unique snack.