Category: Notes

On Sunday we decided to make some noodles, but my wife wanted to do something other than our usual 2 egg, 3 flour pasta. So we looked around online and found a pretty simple ratio on a Chinese website, 1 egg, 3 water, and 8 flour.

So we mixed up a 48g egg, with 152g water, and 400g flour, let it rest for an hour, and then rolled it out to the medium 5 setting and cut the noodles, cooked them and threw them in some soup. Most of the dough was used up that night, but the real revelation came last night after when we made noodles out of the remaining dough. The noodles from Sunday were good, but Monday dinner was extra springy with some bounce.

In the past we had tried storing leftover noodle dough for a couple nights in the fridge and it had gone bad, so these aren’t things you can let sit too long, but it seems that giving them an extra 24 hours works out very nicely.

This week, I read an article defending bread against all its current detractors.  The claim was fiberless bread is the culprit for all our woes, and it recommended a minimum of 10% fiber relative to carbohydrates.  I had already planned on skipping on the dried fruit this week, so I decided to add some whole wheat flour and crank up the flax seed meal and chia seeds, both of which are pretty heavy in fiber.

This morning, I still hadn’t gotten around to getting whole wheat flour so I started with a regular loaf and went heavy on the additives, but my wife went on a grocery run and picked some up, hence the odd 450g of flour this week.  We also used up the last of our Arrowhead flour which is pretty thirsty, so I dropped the water ratio a little bit until I added the whole wheat which always soaks up a bit of water.  According to my breadsheet, this gets me to 12.4% fiber.

400g all purpose flour (primarily King Arthur this time)
50g whole wheat flour
330g water
100g starter (the usual 50/50 mix)
10g salt
60g chia seeds, soaked in 90g water
60g flaxseed meal, soaked in 120g water

The mix and shape went well with the new SOP’s and the bread came out great.  It’s a little flat as usual, but I suspect I need to get a larger dutch oven if I want it to rise a little more.  You can see the flecks of whole wheat but at 10% its doesn’t affect the flavor or texture at all.  I think the flaxseed is very, very oily which is why the crust is more akin to one of my enriched breads, but that’s just fine.  As for the whole wheat I’m thinking about trying to get the ratio crazy high, but to do it in 10% increments so that when my wife says enough, I’ll know to stop.  Next week will definitely be 20%.

Anyone with a sourdough starter needs a good backup plan for using it up without baking.  The easy answers are to compost it or make pancakes.

This pancake recipe is a modified from what I found online, with sugar and baking soda way reduced, and simplified due to laziness.

±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.

The process is quite simple also.  Preheat your skillet with butter, medium heat. Mix up all the ingredients real good.  Drop in a couple spoonfuls of batter into the skillet.  Flip after a minute or two. Flip again after a minute.  Do it again.  Makes three or four pancakes.  Add butter and syrup.  Eat.

If you look at the Michael Ruhlman’s ratio for pancakes, you’ll see that we’ve essentially backed into his formula.  2 flour : 2 water : 1 egg : 1/2 fat.  The recipe above its 120g flour : 120g water : 50g egg : 28g olive oil.

However, don’t let the false exactness of the ratios confuse you, my recipe is very loose.  If I have a bigger egg or less starter, it will just be little flatter.  If you want it fluffier, add more baking soda. If you want to make a crepe, add a second egg and skip the baking powder. If you’re short on starter, just add equal parts flour and water and definitely throw in more baking powder.

Ultimately this recipe is all about burning up your leftover starter.  This will be especially important if you get into the Chad Robertson’s Tartine method, where you refresh your starter a couple times before making the dough.  I hate waste, so I usually skip the refresh (which is a polite way to say throw away most of the starter and feed the remainder) and just live with a slower rise and miss out on any smidgen of extra flavour profile I’d otherwise obtain.

But even then, I still occasionally need to burn up starter. Feeding the little fellow for another week’s hibernation is a doubling exercise, requiring at least an equal amount of fresh material.  So if I have 100g of starter, I need to add 50g of flour and 50g of water. You can see where this will lead if left unchecked, and pancakes is our buffer.

And it’s also where my girl started cooking.  So it’s sentimental too.

Nothing particularly special about this bread.  It is very similar to last week’s bread, except that I used the starter straight out of the fridge (my usual process) and now that the dried figs and apricots are gone, we opened up a giant bag of dried mangoes, to the great delight of our daughter!

400g flour
300g water
100g starter (the usual 50/50 mix)
10g salt
60g rehydrated mangos
40g chia seeds, soaked in 60g water
40g flaxseed meal, soaked in 80g water

Since the starter came out cold from the fridge, the proof started slow which was further retarded because the dough went into the fridge so we could attend Winnie the Pooh at the Rainbow Company Youth Theater.  The show was was great fun even I don’t think our daughter quite follow the story.

On Monday evening, I put the dough in the oven’s proof function and it rose high enough to bake.  Like the previous couple weeks, the dough was still cool to the touch when I shaped it, but for once it wasn’t overproofed.  Per my new standard operating procedure, the oven temperature was held at 450f, and only the pot was preheated without the lid.  I tried using silicone pot holders instead of oven mitts for the first time. It worked perfectly well and meant I didn’t have to fully dry off my hands after washing off any dough from the final shaping.

The bread came out nicely, with a lighter crumb than the last couple weeks.  I am generally satisfied with the flavor my loaves, even if I don’t push the limits of proofing my bread.  Ken Forkish recommends pushing the proof as long as possible, but given the downsides of overdoing it, I really need to get his voice out of my head.  I’m certain he is giving good advice for competitive bakers, but it really isn’t the hassle for someone like me.

As for the mangoes, I can’t tell the difference between this and the previous loaves.  Next week, I’ll just leave out the dried fruit and spare us the added sugar.

Last night we wanted to go out, but with an infant, it can be as tiring as making your own meal.  We had tomatoes, defrosted ground beef, roasted beets in the toaster oven, and veggies in the fridge. So after a few minutes of indecision we decided to make our own pasta and just eat at home.

Ever since learning the Michael Ruhlman’s simple 3 : 2 ratio (flour to egg in weight) it’s been quite easy for us to make pasta, especially now that we have the kitchenaid roller attachment.

To mix things up, I tried a 2 : 1 ratio, with 200g flour and 100g egg.  That did not work well, especially since I also tried mixing it on a thirsty wood cutting board instead of the usual metal bowl.  Eventually I had to add another 15g of water just to get the dough to form up.

As always we let it set for 15 minutes before rolling it out. I divided the dough into 60g balls and then rolled them all out on the widest 1 setting.  This process took some time since the original kneading was not very thorough since the mix was so stiff.  Each ball had to be run it through the roller multiple times to get the right smooth texture.  However, the extended rolling meant that it gave the dough some more time to rest.

Once all the balls were rolled out, I then rolled out each slab up to the 7 setting and then let it rest for a few minutes again. We got a pot of water started, so we could immediately cook the pasta once it was completed.

I finally ran each of these sections through the thinnest 8 setting twice.  It was relatively uneventful until the inevitable goof on the last one where the dough got misaligned and tore itself up halfway through on the second run.  While annoying it wasn’t catastrophic since it just left me with two short halves which I could still turn into noodles. We then took out the fettuccine cutter and cut all the noodles and immediately cooked it up in the pot of water.

This whole time my wife was making a tomato sauce with the beef so it was ready to eat when the pasta was cooked.  The last thing to do was cook the kale in the old pasta water.  With that, we had a colorful meal, a yellow orange beef sauce, bright magenta and yellow roasted beet slices, and the deep dark green of the boiled kale.

Ultimately, the pasta came out ok, but I’m going back to the original 3:2 ratio.  If I had to save on eggs, I suspect the 2:1 would work if I didn’t try to work on a dry wood cutting board, but it’s just not the right luxurious fresh egg pasta chewy texture that you can’t even get in a restaurant.

I had feared that something would be lost when we got the pasta roller for the kitchenaid, but rolling out the dough is by far the most laborious task of the process and while I slightly miss uneven texture of hand rolled dough and the chance to work it with our girl, it is more than made up for in the effort saved. Maybe next time I’ll try to fake it by rolling out the dough to level 5, and then hand rolling the rest, and I can get my daughter involved in the process again.

We decided to make pancakes for Saturday morning so I bulked up my starter the night before.  With such happy starter in the kitchen, I had to make bread with it, even though I still have half a loaf from last week’s late bake.

400g flour
300g water
100g starter (the usual 50/50 mix)
10g salt
60g rehydrated figs
60g chia seeds, soaked in 90g water
40g flaxseed meal, soaked in 80g water

With fresh starter, the proof started very nicely, but we went to a 3pm event at the library, so I had to put the dough into the fridge.  Sunday was spent with one of our daughter’s friends, so I didn’t get around to baking till Sunday night.  All this was a minor of a shame, since that dough was in a really, really good mood when it was first put in the fridge.

By the time I took out the dough, it was on the verge of being overproofed.  It wasn’t so bad I had to attempt a rescue, but it was barely able to hold its shape. For the bake itself, I also tried the two tweaks I mentioned last week – I just baked at 450f the whole time, and I started with a cold lid.  Given the state of the dough, I think the bread rose just fine so I plan on adopting these for the future.

As for the bread itself, it has the usual tight crumb, which I don’t love because  big open airy crumb is in fashion but I’ve given up trying to change since it’s good at catching butter butter.  The flavor is slightly sour, given the 30 extra hours in the fridge, but not as strong as last weeks loaf which spent a good 60 hours in the fridge.

In non-bread news, we also made pork wontons using the Kitchenaid pasta maker last night.  The recipe came from the web with a 180 flour, 26 egg, 64 water ratio.  Our egg was 45g so the ratio was upped accordingly and I accidentally added a 16g too much much water, so I had to add another 32g of flour.  The wrappers came out fine.  It seems the best process for making this dough is to let it rest (in a closed container to keep moisture) a lot along the way.  In the future I’ll mix, rest, divide and flatten each ball at the 1 setting, and then thin it all the way down on an as needed basis.

For the filling, my wife used our brand new new Kitchenaid food grinder.  The meat was a bit lean, but there were no glitches with the tool itself.  I can’t complain, it was deeply satisfying to use these things we purchased to celebrate the new job and its pay raise.  The bigger numbers on the biweekly check is nice, but it’s feels good to have some toys also.

We had some old cream that was set to expire, so we made some butter last Saturday.  With the butter came buttermilk, which I had never tasted in its non-cultured form.  I didn’t realize that non-cultured buttermilk would taste (like milk, duh!) but I was kind of disappointed.

However, leftover buttermilk would be perfect for one thing, making an enriched bread.  We had a birthday party to attend that day, so we refrigerated the buttermilk for a mix on Sunday morning.  So I took the usual 4-3-1-.1 recipe to make an enriched bread

400g flour
150g buttermilk + 150g milk
100g starter (the usual 50/50 mix)
10g salt
60g melted butter
60g chia seeds soaked in 90g water

We started with a twist I don’t plan on repeating.  I decided to mix the dough in the kitchenaid.  The machine seems to work just fine, but since I don’t normally  handknead (it’s too wet a mix for hand kneading) this doesn’t save any effort and it alienates me from the dough and the tactile feedback that comes from hand mixing.

After that came the second twist.  We found out there was a drum circle in the Summerlin library in the afternoon.  Given that the few loaves have overproofed, I decided to play it safe and threw the dough into the fridge when we left for the event.  This was definitely the correct decision, since we ended up meeting up with some friends and stayed out past dinner.

On Monday I took the dough out after work, warmed it up, but ultimately decided it wasn’t ready to bake.  It was getting late and a bake would have really made it a late night.  With my tendency to wake up early, anything past ten is a bit too late.

However, the dough wasn’t getting any younger and we had also finished our bounty from last week’s overproofing fiasco.  So on Tuesday I brought it out after work, warmed it in the proofing oven until 8:20, after which I fired it up to 350f. The dough had not completely warmed up, so I folded the dough, an exercise I had recently stopped doing, and it held its shape nicely.

Aside from the long proof and the mixer, I tried two other deviations from my usual process.  First, I did not preheat the lid. The process of handling a preheated dutch oven is fraught enough, I’d just as soon avoid having to work with a hot lid as well.  Given how this one came out, I’m not sure this will be a permannt change, but I’m going to try again with a normal dough.  The other twist came from my coworker who wets her ball of dough with her hands to get a chewier crust. Unfortunately this dough came out with an very thin crust, so while it fun to fondle the dough before throwing it into the dutch oven, I doubt I’ll try it again, certainly not with an enriched bread.

The process of transferring the dough to the dutch oven was uneventful, five snips to the top, throw on the lid, and back into the oven. As usual, I baked for the first half hour with the lid on, and the rise looked good when I took it off.  The crust was still white after twenty minutes without the lid, so I ended up baking it for another forty minutes.  After an hour and a half in the oven, I was getting worried about drying out the loaf so I pulled it out even though the crust was still very pale.

This morning, I just cut my first slice and the verdict is mixed.  The crumb is just fine, the usual density I generally get as long as I avoid overproofing the loaf. However, the crust is paper thin; the color in the oven did not lie.  I avoided going high on the oven to avoid burning the fats in the butter and milk, but I think I may have stayed too low, especially since I maybe could have gone higher because this bread did not include any sugar in the mix.

And finally, the bread is a bit sour.  A couple weeks ago, I had pondered why my sourdoughs are never sour.  I’ve read that the key is a cold proof, which doesn’t happen naturally in Vegas, so I rationally knew the answer.  Now I’ve proved it to myself.  However, my wife is not a fan of commercial sourdoughs, so I doubt it won’t go over well with her.  But my daughter, who will drink the vinegar and soy sauce mix that we make for potstickers, might dig the flavor.

If we ever make butter again, I’ll definitely use the buttermilk in the dough, though I don’t plan on voluntarily repeating this extended proof unless circumstances force the issue again.