Category: Food

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.

This week’s bread was a pretty standard setup, but it went sideways since I overproofed it, again.  I’ve been on a bad run over overproofing my doughs, so this was yet another opportunity to try and rescue the final product.

I mixed the dough before breakfast with my standard 4-3-1-.1+~30% ratio

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

So far so good, and the autolyse and the folds all went as planned.  However we had some friends drop by the house and the kids ran around the house all afternoon.  They didn’t stay for dinner, but the next thing you know its 5pm and the dough was already well overproofed.

I tried to rescue it by adding 200g flour and 100g water, but after an hour it was still really slack.  So I kneaded in in another 100g flour, which helped a bit, but still was not feeling right.  After another hour I kneaded in another 100g of flour and waited.  At 9pm, I preheated the oven to 480f, dumped out the dough, preshaped, cut, reshaped, and then threw them into the dutch ovens and baked.  I made one additional mistake, I forgot to lower my temperature to 420f when I took off the lids, which meant the loaves ended up pretty dark.  I like the heavier toasted flavors of the crust, but it makes for hard cutting.

Even though the loaves did not have an impressive rise, but the crumb was still moist and avoided being completely rock hard dense, so it was not a total failure.  In the future, when I try to rescue a loaf, I think I’ll just add flour without water.  And I think I’m going to change my standard baking process to just keep it at an even 450f throughout, instead of starting at 480f and then lowering it to 420f midway like I’ve been doing for the past month.

When I first started baking, I made a slew of overproofed doughs and had no idea how to save them. After the successful salvage a couple weeks ago, when I didn’t only just add flour but also really kneaded the dough, it seems that I now have a way to save overproofed doughs.  Ultimately I’d still prefer to avoid having to practice this fallback process too often.

I got out of Berkeley at the bottom of the dot com bust so I ended up working as a landscaping laborer. As could be expected I had a pretty hefty caloric demand but was light on cash. Furthermore our lunch breaks were also quite short (we bundled our paid breaks into a paid 30 minute lunch).

So my solution was to bring loaf of bread with meat in a can, usually Vienna sausage but anything would do. I tried to upscale this simple menu by baking my own bread. But I didn’t know what I was doing and had very little luck, though I did end up making a sourdough starter that made some awesome pancakes for a while.

I stir-fried some carrot and asparagus today and it turned out to be a pretty good combination. Put some peanut oil in pan and set on medium high until hot. Put a few cloves of crushed garlic in the pan along with some green onion. Let it sizzle in the pan on very low heat while you chop asparagus. Chop the tough parts into thin strips and leave the tops. When the carrots are coated in oil and wilted, dump the asparagus in. Put in some salt and a dash of chardonney and chicken broth. Keep stir frying. Turn the heat back to medium high. Cook until done.