Raccoon and Lobster

I combined Glutenous Maximus (Max) and Glutenous Minimus (Minnie) into one bowl for a battle royale to save on fridge space. Hopefully the hardiest yeast will survive and maybe the evolutionary drift between Max and Minnie and subsequent reintroduction will also add some good attributes to the yeast. The boyfriend was getting a little irked at the four bowls of starter in the fridge. Now we’re down to zero as I put Glutenous Medius on a feeding cycle to start baking sourdough loaves again. In the mean time I have been baking lots of ciabatta bread – 5 batches since my first batch 6 days ago. That’s 20 loaves of bread. No loaf has lasted longer than 48 hours. Now you see why I’m buying flour in bulk.

I decided to make a hybrid loaf of ciabatta, playing on both Nancy Silverton’s ciabatta recipe and the original Jason’s Quick Coccodrillo recipe I’ve been using.

I just reduced the yeast I use down to 1.75 tsp and added 1 cup (9oz or 250g) or so of sourdough starter. Rise as before and bake. The result was a loaf that didn’t taste sour at all but had a lot more subtle complex flavors and a great crust. I took a few quick pictures to make this post less boring but really, it looks exactly the same as the other loaves. The difference is in the flavor. This was a great way to make a bread I was already baking every day even better and a way to save on sourdough discard. Win-win.

It’s been done. A local source of bulk flour has been located and by this time tomorrow I will have a 50lb bag of King Arthur Special flour ready to take on all my baking needs. It’s going to be a long summer of baking.

If you live in the Los Angeles area and want to get King Arthur Special flour, Sir Lancelot High gluten flour, or Sir Galahad All purpose flour in bulk for about $15-20 for 50lbs, and want to split an order in the future, please let me know. Yegods my freezer is going to be full tonight.

Lost several hours today after discovering that there was a restaurant supply store within 20 minutes of us that had far more baking and cooking supplies than I could ever need. To add to the allure, a lot of their goods were higher quality than what you’d find at a fancypants cooking supply store and frequently cheaper to boot.  If I ever need a 30 quart professional mixer that stands as big as a man, I know where to go now.

I am totally making a list of things to make that will “require” a visit back.

Baked another giant batch of sourdough hippo biscuit surprise. Half of this batch is going off to a friend for his dog to evaluate. Local pups have seemed quite enamored with my biscuits so far. To stack the decks in my favor, I used double the amount of sardines as in the original recipe.

I also made a batch last week using sourdough starter discard and leftover bacon grease which also got rave reviews. Nancy Silverton lists these in her book as dual purpose dog biscuits or baby teething biscuits, using chopped mint instead of sardines. For fresh breath mint may be ideal, but as a training treat, I’ve had much better success with cheese, liver, bacon grease, or sardines as the “surprise” ingredient.

Submitted to Yeastspotting.

This face and pose should be illegal.

The bandage is for a small, itchy bug bite that he licked and licked and licked…now being cleaned and covered so it won’t get infected.

So my previous adventure with rhubarb was so bad it earned the catastrophe tag. But today, when wandering through the farmer’s market, I decided to give rhubarb a second chance. As I was preparing to try the rhubarb crisp recipe again, I decided to do a little googling first.

Hmmm. Funny thing. Stacy’s’ original recipe for rhubarb crisp called for 1-2 tablespoons of sugar for 4 cups of rhubarb. Since my disaster, she edited that to be 3-6 tablespoons but insists she just eyeballs it. Well a quick perusal of about.com, cooks.com, allrecipes.com, and epicurious.com shows a preferred ratio of somewhere between 3/4 cup sugar to 1 and 1/3 cups sugar for ever 4 cups of rhubarb with a median ratio of 1 cup sugar to 4 cups of rhubarb. For the record, 6 tablespoons of sugar is just over 1/3 of a cup. So a generous interpretation of her recipe still puts you about 3 times short of the internet recipe consensus.

Now if you were using her original unedited recipe, and decided to split the 1-2 tablespoon recommendation and put in 1.5 tablespoons, that would put you at 0.09375 cups of sugar, or just under one tenth of the recommended ratio. Off by an entire order of magnitude. So perhaps, dear reader, I should remove the catastrophe tag from my post and add it under her name on my blog roll instead?

Now of course, there are other possibilities here besides the obvious one of a Sasquatch roundeye conspiracy. After all, it’s entirely plausible that the vast, cold wastelands of her residence caused her to create a sort of culinary fight club, only feeling alive when her taste receptors are under assault from an unadulterated source of tartness. Or perhaps,the wintry, near-Canadian territory of her inhabitance has also had its devastating effect on the rhubarb, causing it to be as watery and tasteless as the celery stalk it so resembles. Reader, the world may never know the answer to such questions.

What I can give you, however, is a recipe for

Actually Edible Rhubarb Crisp for People with Functioning Taste Receptors

4 cups rhubarb, sliced.
1 cup sugar
dash salt

Combine and layer in baking dish.

For topping, combine

1/2 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup flour
2 teaspoons cinammon
dash nutmeg
dash salt
8 tablespoons butter (1 stick)
1/2 cup rolled oats

and cut butter in with pastry cutter until the size of small peas. Apply topping over the rhubarb mixture and bake in 350° oven until rhubarb is soft.

Much better.

Pulled a muscle blogging so hard yesterday. Please accept this paltry offering from the archives in lieu of actual content. There’s another episode of Information Retrieval soon to come.

This is seriously the most fun I’ve had baking ever and the oven isn’t even on yet. If you have a Kitchen-Aid mixer, I don’t care how lazy you are, you NEED to do this.

The recipe is taken from a posting on The Fresh Loaf and it has very good directions, but what it will not tell you is how much naked glee you will experience watching the dough get the living crap kicked out of it.

Jason’s Quick Coccodrillo Ciabatta Bread

500g bread flour
475g (~2 cups) water
2 tsp. yeast
15g salt

The first thing you’ll notice is that this is a very very wet dough. At first there doesn’t seem like there is any hope that this is going to make anything more than batter. But have faith.

Combine ingredients and beat with paddle until combined. Let rest for 10 minutes. Then turn the paddle up to 6, which will seem like a ludicrous speed. I thought I had it on high when it turns out I just had the speed at 4. The dough is going to start climbing up the paddle after about 4 minutes, and that is when you switch to the hook. When you remove the dough it’s already going to be developing some gluten strands. In the third picture you can see my hastily scrawled notes while I’m mixing and it says “sneeze” in the bottom left corner. Folks, the consistency of the dough at this point is that of a sneeze. I’m sorry. It is. You’re going to touch it to get it off the paddle and go “Ew!” At least it’s not going to be as messy as most bread baking because the dough is so sticky it will cling together.

After a few more minutes of using the dough hook on 6, the dough is going to start cleaning the bowl and form an actual shape. Ten minutes in, everything is going to be spotless and you will catch your mixer trying to walk itself off the counter. It’s going to be loud and the noises it makes are going to be hilarious. You’re going to see the gluten developing and finally understand what those crazy bread bakers are talking about when they say gluten strands. There are going to be some seriously loud, wet whaps as dough gets flung onto the bowl and peels itself off. You’re gonna have to turn your shutter speed up to crazy levels just to get a motion blur picture.

After about 19-20 minutes of mixing, the dough is going to start climbing up the hook and will have completely peeled off the bottom. It looks like a well formed ball in motion but when you stop the mixer, it’s all gonna fall back into a wet sticky puddle again. As you remove it from the hook, it’s gonna be so wet and sticky and stretchy that it gets thin enough to see through.  Pouring it into a well oiled container means long white sheets of dough stretching the full height between the mixing bowl and the counter. I wish I had a picture for you, but somehow the boyfriend managed to sleep through the entire ruckus and it is impossible to do this and hold a camera at the same time. You’re just going to have to make this bread yourself and play with your food. I’m telling you, this is  cool.

Cover the dough and let it rise until tripled, about 2.5 hours. (Please see footnote, both times I have baked it today it has taken about 1.5 hours for the dough to triple.) That’s where I am in the recipe. Update to come in about 2 hours*.

95 minutes to triple today folks! You are gonna love the way this puffball dough falls out of the container. Empty on to a very well floured surface, cut into 4 pieces, spray with oil and flour very very well. Cover with a well floured cloth and let rest for 45 minutes. Now is the time to heat up your oven to 500°.

And batch #1 is in the oven! Due to the necessity of splitting up the baking, and the fact that the yeast is being so active today, the first batch is going in at 30 minutes, and the second will go in at 50 minutes. Splitting the difference as it were. Flip your dough upside onto parchment paper or a well floured peel, stretch it out to about 10″, and slide that sucker into the oven. See you in 20 minutes for the reveal…

Look at this ridiculous oven spring!!! Ye gods!

GOAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!

And here is batch #2 for comparison. I turned the heat down to 450° for the last 10 minutes.

So it took 4 people about an hour to devour all the loaves and I started making another batch tonight. I guess it’s safe to say that this recipe is a success. This will be submitted to the bread baking roundup at Yeastspotting.

*Of course, in matters of baking, it takes however long it takes. So updates to come whenever this dough has decided 2.5 hours has passed. Edit: On the second batch it’s taking a little over an hour for the tripling as well. So WATCH YOUR DOUGH to tell you when the right time has passed.

Another day, another puppy sleeping in the bathtub. Oh Arthur…

Hey wait a second! This isn’t the flighty, flirtatious, troublemaker blonde twin from Southern California! It’s the older, serious, sensible, down to earth blonde twin from Southern California!

You crazy twins. Switch seats and no one knows the difference.