Category: Food

Our range oven died after Thanksgiving and we’re waiting for the pandemic to settle down before fixing it. So I’ve been using a toaster oven for baking bread.

Fortunately we have a cast iron Lodge Loaf Pan which makes a lovely toasted crust, (though the top sometimes gets a little burnt given how much it rises, so I’m still working on that).

The recipe is as simple as always, just scaled down a little from my usual 4/3/1/.02

306g flour
270g water
46g starter
4g salt

The loaf pan lets me skip the shaping process. I take the proofed dough and just pour it directly into the pan. I let it rise a second time (about three hours) and then throw it into the oven for the bake. I don’t bother preheating the oven if it isn’t already hot from something else.

Since we’ve been eating a lot of bread (and because it is cool in the house due to winter), I’ve also started using the bread dough as its own starter. When I pour the dough into the loaf pan, I pull off some dough that becomes the next day’s starter. I let it proof on the counter overnight and it’s ready to start another loaf.

I kind of miss the shaping process, but it was the cause of quite a bit of mess and a little bit of stress, plus the loaf pan loaves are much easier to cut! In all, I can’t say I miss the dutch oven baking, though I’m certain I will revisit it, as soon as we get the range fixed.

I’ve been playing around with making crackers as a healthier alternative to all the other awesome snacks that are out in the market trying to addict me to their engineered flavors.

After initial some attempts over the past couple weeks, I sat down and converted Mark Bittman’s recipe to grams. Using his numbers and experimented with a batch and I think I’ve finally come with a good ratio – 1:2:7:0.2

10g cheese
20g water
70g all purpose flour (generic target organic brand)
2g salt

The result was a nice dry dough that I could run through the pasta roller (I ran it to thinness 6 out of 8). The pasta roller saved me a ton of time over rolling by hand and resulted in consistent, even bakes in the toaster oven.

By using the pasta roller, I unintentionally recreated the “water crackers” that I used to enjoy at art openings. So as a bonus I understand the origin of their name, since I had never realized that water and cream crackers were an oppositional pair.

For further experiments, I’d like to come up with an alternate version using sourdough starter, since these crackers did come out a little flat. I’d also like to try my hand at cream crackers, using milk instead of water.

However, the biggest thing is finding simple ratio for a dough that works in the pasta roller, because I now have a good home base for future experiments.

After trying a really high hydration bread that went well enough but not spectacularly, I came back to my standard 75 hydration. I wanted to use up some oil/water from a jar of marinated artichokes and some cheap flour that my father-in-law bought.

350g all purpose flour (Gold Medal)
50g buckwheat flour
100g starter
225g water
75g marinated artichoke water

The dough was a bit slow in rising, so I took it outside, and it quickly exploded such that I was on the verge of overproofing it. Then I overbaked it, which is why it came out a bit dark.

I pulled it out of the oven at 10pm. Just in time for a late snack – a couple slices with butter, and one more with olive oil and salt.

Even with the cheap flour and the mismanaged process, it was an amazing tasting loaf fresh out of the oven.

I know that my lackadaisical approach may be resulting in a ceiling to limit how great my bread might become, however the floor for these loaves are so high that I’ll take the tradeoff. This was not a spectacular loaf, but these three slices were better than anything I’ve ever bought from a store.

Baking bread can be an adventure, you just have to be ready to enjoy the journey.

In a recent Costco purchase, we got boxes of sunchips and popchips packaged into little snack bags.

Both of these products fall into the category of crispy premasticated snack. This fine lineage starts with the the old mexican tortilla chip, leading to Pringles, and then to these fellows.

The texture of Sunchips harkens to the tortilla, with a whole-grain texture to signal their (questionable) healthiness. Meanwhile, Popchips follow in the footsteps of Pringles, reveling in their artificiality in their pockmarked crunchy puffed texture.

The corrugated square pattern of the Sunchips reminds one of an old country shack with metal siding. The perfect circles in Popchips stand as a platonic ideal.

The flavors of the Sunchips are your classic “french onion” and “salsa”, while Popchips hit ya’ with bold flavors like “buffalo ranch sauce”.

Ultimately, I imagine one would be better served slicing up a couple potatoes on a mandolin, coating them in olive oil and salt in a stainless steel bowl, and then blasting the chips in the air fryer.

Such an process feels more natural than these two modern offerings, but only by degree.

At least you don’t waste a little plastic bag each time.

A few mornings ago, I weighed myself found myself at 155.2, exactly 19 pounds lower than my recorded high of 174.2 from November 8, 2019. My highest weight was almost certainly during the holiday season, but I had stopped recording my weight over that time.

My standard weight during my twenties and early thirties had hovered around 155, climbing into the 160’s with extended forays into the 170’s over the last couple years. Over the past half year I worked my way back down to 155 is due to the simple principle of “a little more exercise and a little less calories over a long period of time”, both greatly aided by the pandemic shut down.

Exercise is the easiest to explain. Working from home saves me an hour of commute every day. Twenty of those minutes were purposely turned into a walk. The other forty minutes have been spent chasing the children around. Playing with kids and a leisurely walk (my pace hovers around a 23 minute mile) is not much, but still a massive improvement over operating a vehicle and an otherwise sedentary life.

As for calories, the change was facilitated by cutting out restaurants beginning in late January and an improvement in snack options after we stopped leaving the house. We live with my in-laws, whose age makes us a high risk household so we’ve been particularly withdrawn from society after the pandemic spread to America.

I’m an inveterate snacks, which hasn’t changed, but staying at home has morphed my goodies into nuts and fruit. I suspect it is due the psychology of online purchase instead of shopping in person. It was no big deal to pick up a bag of chips at the supermarket, but it feels very different to make the same decision via your web browser, especially knowing that everything will have to go through a decontamination process after its delivered. Just this little extra friction has made a big difference … and missing out on four months of donuts at the office.

As for cutting out restaurants, there were three types of benefits — less food, healthier courses, and lighter ingredients.

In normal times, I’ll eat out about five times a week. Even though I won’t gratuitously stuff myself, I am a dude who clears the plate. If a restaurant gives me a significant overage, I get a doggy bag, but it feels odd to ask for a container for one last bite. At home, minimal leftovers are split between multiple people or becoming an appetizer for the next meal. At work, every little extra was ending up in my gut.

Helping the quantity improvements is are the reduced options for high calorie dishes when you’re making it yourself. We just made hamburgers for the first time in a week ago. I’ve had one can of sweetened soda once this entire lock down. I love fried food, but like snacks, I’m not addicted enough to deep fry my own fare. So I haven’t eaten french fries in four months.

Finally, each of our meals are just inherently more healthy. To satisfy their patrons, a restaurant needs to hedge their flavor with salt and fat. I’ll do the same when I’m cooking, but I am also much more cognizant of the long term consequences to me when I add each “extra”. Also, due to news of meat shortages, we ate way less meat during the first couple months for a couple months. I don’t have a stance in the carbs versus proteins debate, but we substituted the decreased proteins with increased vegetables instead of starches, which I presume it was an absolute win all around.

In all, I’m pretty pleased that I’ve been able to get back into my size 32 pants. Assuming that I lost these 19 pounds since the end of January, that calculates to just two ounces a day, which seems to be a pretty moderate pace.

Hopefully this new lifestyle will stay steady when things start to crawl back to normal.

Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with a “wet-grind” method that my wife suggested one morning. I soak wheat berries for about 8-12 hours at 160% hydration. Then I just blenderize the heck out of them in the vitamix.

I’ve had consistently good results with for 50% berry and 50% flour breads (basically 80% hydration dough), though I have had decent attempts all the way to 75% wheat berry loaves (admittedly it took a few tries to figure out how to fold such wet dough!).

The other day I found some chia seeds in the fridge. In the past, I’ve noticed they soak up an incredible amount of water (at least 4x their weight) so I thought I’d go all wheat berries this time:

200g Berries soaked in
320g water for about half a day. After blending, mix in
100g starter (100% hydrated)
With the starter, this is a 148% hydration dough.
40g chia seeds, soaking up an +/- equivalent of 160g water, resulting in an equivalent to about 72% hydration – an almost dryish loaf!
4g salt, don’t forget your salt.

And yeah it worked out really well, the oven spring wasn’t amazing (I don’t think I proofed long enough) but this was most likely the best tasting loaf so far this year.

Plus, with flour being so rare at this time, I think I’ll be doing this 100% wet wheat berry grind method for a while coming up.

Have fun!

I spent all day Sunday editing a video on making sourdough bread.

It would be a little faster to read my blog posts on sourdough bread, but hopefully this is a good “snapshot” of how I currently make my bread and there are things that video conveys that cannot be described adequately with the 26 symbols of the alphabet.

After years of being properly frightened by scary stories of salmonella, I finally got around to cooking chicken. I’ve never really cooked chicken before. I’ve roasted a couple of birds, but never actually handled uncooked chicken meat in any earnest way.

Four weeks ago, I moved out of my in-laws house out of an abundance of COVID-19 caution. Among the few items I brought along with me was a pack of five frozen chicken legs.

This past weekend I finally thawed them out and started messing with them. The last leg (and a couple bones) are stewing on the stove as I write this up. And it made me think of a few things that have accrued over the my past life that led to this moment.

When I was in high school, I got really into listening to world music and Seamus Egan’s album A Week in January was in heavy rotation. I recently picked up his newest album, Early Bright, and it has been playing in repeat in the background this whole month. As with his earlier album from the 90’s, it is a lively work, terse and tight, but somehow mellowed with passing of two decades.

My map in this experiment was the poultry chapter in Mark Bittman’s classic, How to Cook Everything, a book that I’ve purchased twice. The first time, I had accidentally purchased it as a soft cover book, which I salvaged by selling it to the used book store when we left Houston. The second time, was at the friends of the library bookstore; I made sure this one was a hard cover. Even though we work in an internet age, it is good to have a curated tome that you can trust implicitly. It may not have the best recipes for everything, but if you were searching for that, you wouldn’t need a cookbook. This book is properly a primer for those (like me) who have spent decades scared of touching dead birds.

The friend who introduced me to Mark Bittman was Chris Leong. He was a couple years ahead of me at Berkeley while we were never close I still look up to him. He was (and is) a great cook along with being a great architect. I remember going to his place with a few guys while he cooked up an amazing meal of some meat wrapped in something else. It was both gorgeous and delicious. More than the meal itself, I remember watching him that night in the tiny apartment kitchen enraptured in the task, while the rest of us fools were dicking around in the living room. It was a quietly brilliant display of concentration and craft that has stuck with me over the past two decades.

The table upon all these meals have been consumed was picked up by my wife while she was was in college. Ikea still makes the Ingo table, if you want one for yourself. We used it as our dining table during the years in Houston, the legs have been chewed up when we had bunnies running wild in the house. It bears the marks and scars from that time with its burn rings and oil stains as a record of our lives together. It spent a while in the garage while we stayed with the in-laws, but hopefully it is now back in use, for good.

When we had moved into our Hassett house for a brief moment a couple years ago, I decided to get a wok. One morning I popped into Resco to pick up some other items and saw one selling for $10. What the heck, I bought it. It sat there unseasoned for a year and a half. Last summer, I finally seasoned it, only to not use it for another six months. However, I’m happy to say this fellow has now been pressed into service, obliterating napa cabbage to go with a little chicken.

And yes, I’m happy to report that I am no longer scared of poultry. It took forty years of eatin’ other people’s birds, but I’m finally here to try my hand at this game.

We bought a Vitamix during Black Friday and after a bit of experimentation we’ve settled into a very good routine with the bread.

The basic ratio for soaking the wheat berries is 160% water (for winter red wheat, less for white). I also learned that I need to let it soak for a while. Definitely more than a couple hours (learned that the hard way) but it seems to work pretty good by the time you hit twelve hours.

During Black Friday we also bought a cast iron loaf pan. That allowed us to play with much wetter mixes than I had previously done, since shaping was no longer a limiting factor, I believe that I may had gotten up to 110% hydration on one loaf.

After playing around with different ratios of wheat berries to white flour, we ultimately decided that a 50/50 split was the tastiest option.

150g wheat berries all purpose flour
240g water (soak)
150g flour
150g starter
±3g salt

This base recipe results in an 80% hydration loaf, which is well in line with my round loaves. However, we’ve stuck with the loaf pan, primarily because it has been nice to bake in the toaster oven, saving us the hassle of taking everything outside the big oven.

To minimize waste, I’ll rinse out the vitamix into the starter. And if I put in a little too much water, I’ll take some of that water and use it for the dough, up to about 100% hydration.

In general this is working wonderfully, I strongly recommend trying this wet grind method. No need for a dry grinder, and no dusty mess.

The next step is to start throwing some odd grains into the mix and see what happens!

I’ve been playing with rising the dough in the fridge, and aside from the lost space in the box, it has worked out really well. The main thing is that the timing is much more forgiving.

400g all purpose flour
300g water
200g starter
4g salt

The only change from typical recipe is adding a lot more starter (and of course throwing the dough in the fridge for 2-3 days after the autolyse and mix).

Along with proofing in the fridge, we are now playing with using fresh wheat berries in the bread. I soak the 100g of berries in 200g water overnight and then process it in the vitamix (using the last 100g of water to wash out the container into the dough).

400g all purpose flour
300g water
200g starter
4g salt

This system is proving pretty promising, getting the flavors of whole wheat bread without concerns about the oils in the flour going rancid.

And now that we’ve gotten into the soaking business…next step, sprouted grains!