Slider buns

Straight dough: egg 50 g, water 130 g, butter 12 g, veg oil 30 g, salt 5 g, yeast, flour 300 g, 60 g each, yolk glaze w sesame seeds, 2.5" x 2.5", cut in portions prior to baking, baked against each other at 400F, about 15 min.

Big strides in the world of croissants (remember, this is my electronic kitchen notebook of sorts, this is a horrible post if you're looking for something fancy and bloglike)

I found a piece on the KAF blog recently called capturing butter heaven: making baker’s croissants which changed my life.  Some time ago, I took a class at @LaChatColumbus with the infamous Tad.  One particular instruction he provided was NOT to use too much flour between layers while turning (a turn is when the rolled out dough is folded into thirds, a lamination step).

Based on Tad's ethereal croissants, I can't argue with anything he says, but, from my own experience in long multi-step processes where the effect of each step is nearly impossible to isolate, such specific precautions are often derived from critical parameters.  And, in any experimental design, boundary conditions of critical parameters are everything!

The problem with my croissants has been a heavy and dense and my hypothesis was layers may have run together, broken due to something in the lamination process (too many layers, bleeding of butter between layers, etc).  I couldn't help think of Tad's precaution NOT to flour excessively between layers.  Having scrupulously eliminated flour dusting during lamination and seeing my results get worse with each try, I started to search on this phenomena and this KAF piece came up.

In this preparation flour is incorporated into the butter pat that gets folded into the dough to stabilize it, keep it from running out during baking.  The author makes a point of differentiating home baking from a bakery where a sheeter would be used.  Carrying this further, why not butter between layers (makes rolling MUCH easier) and maybe this would help keep layers separated until the final oven blast.  There are other things discussed in this piece, but that's what I latched onto.  Not sure if that's the *trick* but things are going well. Croissants are the result of a zillion steps, but there are so many rests, it's actually a great dough for a busy morning.  It's made the night before, final roll and makeup in the morning, quick bake, boom!  Up at 5:15, out the door by 7(ish).

I'm babbling because I'm excited.  I posted this to validate a great croissant tutorial.  My prep is pretty close to this with a few small things left to work out, if you want to make croissants, read this piece, it's well done.  Here's some action shots of the past couple mornings.

 Baking ham and cheese, nutella and even marshmallow fluff filled (Scoops got the marshmallow one, ick)

 Final ham and cheese, nice blistered surfaces, pretty light.

This morning's 400 gram run, rolled into 8 x 12", cut into 8 x 50 g traditional croissants.  To me, they were an 7-8/10, I only sampled 1 and was so excited, I ran around C'ville and gave the rest away.

Crest (do I have to say it?) Gastropub

My tortured interpretation of the word Gastropub is a portmanteau of something to do with gastric upset and pubic something or other.  I hate the name.  I am offended that a bar with the name Crest, that Craig Dupler tended so proudly, is juxtaposed with it.  /rant

I will miss the open Jazz on Monday nights, a more casual jam session early evenings on Tuesday, the dart teams, Frankie playing pool on their table, my dog being allowed to sit by my stool while I sipped a pint and getting to know some locals; a large portion who grew up within blocks of the bar and I'll miss the bartenders who did more than sell drinks. 

I wanted to hate it. I visited the other night with @FeedMyBeast.  After loosening up and finding a seat at the bar, at approximately the same coordinates I used to sit, I found it easy to accept.  Good food, good drink, happy people.  Crest looks like it will continue to be a communal place to meet friends, eat, drink and be merry in the center of the area I enjoy calling home.  It's different, but it's good.

bacon in the oven

I used to resist frying bacon because of the mess and spattering oil that remained on the stove when finished.  Then I considered the oven method.  Scanning the Google top ten results, most people bake it in the oven beyond the flash point of lard, ca.400-450F, the most often prescribed temperature.  The bacon sure does cook and fast at that temperature!  And, if you're lucky enough to forget about it for a minute because the dog is peeing in the mudroom and you're trying to clean it before it soaks in to the floor tile, the smoke detectors go off and your oven is smokey and covered in spattered bacon grease.

I played with temps and finally ended with a nice slow, 250F.  It cooks nice, there's a big window of doneness and it's just as good as anything on the stove.  Slow down people.  Smell the roses.  Eat the bacon.

Gravity feed fuel? (a mini minion alternative) with UPDATE

Cooking low 'n slow with lump or briquettes poses a challenge of maintaining a low temperature (ca. 225F) with a wood/lump/briquette-fueled heat source for, ideally, an overnight session.  A Weber Smokey Mountain handles this well by utilizing a really tight design allowing a controlled amount of air to give the long slow burn.  Doing this in a simple 22.5" kettle, the most awesome and ubiquitous cooking instrument on earth, is trickier.  Most use a the mini-minion method whereby a few lit pieces of fuel are placed atop a pile of unlit fuel and the kettle closed up with only a slight bit of airflow.  Most of the time this works, sometimes we wake to a kettle that went cold in the middle of the night.

Another solution was brought to my attention recently.  Stump's smokers are pretty awesome; at the heart of these brutish beasts is a gravity feed chamber in which a *covered* vertical chute of fuel permits perfect delivery of fuel.  Load it up, let it go.  The vertical chute has an opening at the bottom only.  The only fuel that burns is as high as the air can get in, the rest of the fuel does not burn.  This is in contrast to a open-top chimney many use to ignite a batch of fuel.  The only problem with Stump's Smokers is they're about $2,000 (and 2,000 pounds) on the low end.  I'm philosophically opposed to making pulled pork at that price and sought to find a cheaper alternative using this same elegant principle buried inside my faithful kettle.

Depicted below is a hacked up piece of stove pipe, only 4" wide and 12" tall, to see if I could get a working preliminary model.  This small rig took about 20 briquettes.  This was placed in an uncovered kettle.  The briquettes at the bottom burned for over 5 hours (then I went to bed)!  More later as this develops ...

NOW, the update: 12-May-2013

I used a chimney starter, covered all the holes on the side by securing some thin aluminum around it and charged it up with fuel.  It's been running all day with little maintenance and a bunch of observation and running steady at 240F in the dome.

Here's a typical chimney starter.  I shaved off the outside pieces that held the grate in the middle so the sides have holes in them but is smooth.  I found a curved piece of aluminum at Lowe's in the duct section, cut it in half and affixed them to the outside of the chimney and secured the already snug fit with a piece of copper wire.  The sheets of aluminum were slid most of the way down so only a little of the lowermost vents were showing.

Behold a cylindrical fuel cell for lump or briquettes.  

This thing is placed over a few lit coals, charged up (holds about 10 pounds of briquettes) sprinkled with cherry chips and a plate sitting perfectly on top of the cylinder so it snuffs the combustion at the top.  Place meat in, leave.  The vents in the kettle are all open, the combustion is completely controlled by the amt of vent at the bottom of the fuel feed chamber.  The temp at the exit vent of the kettle stayed at 240F.  I'll show a temp profile later.  I ran this rig about 8 hours before the meat went on, dead stable temp.  I think it should run about 8-10 hours on a charge of fuel.  

Finally, a tedious graph of last night's action!

Last charge at 6 pm, took off meat at 6 am.  Fuel to spare.  Dip in temp at the end, uncertain.  Click image to embiggen.

The only problem at this point is the dome temp at the exit is hotter than the cook  surface.  I think the cook surface is only about 200-225, need to redo this with the temp probe at the cooking surface and maybe expose more of the vents in the bottom of the cylinder to adjust the temperature.  Still looks promising. 

Ginger beer?

Light dry malt extract 425 g
White sugar 200 g
Ginger, finely sliced, 50 g
Munton's ale yeast
Dilution to OG 1.050, ca. 1 gal total volume
Intended backsweetening w Splenda.
What's left? (updates posted)
Fermented to 1.012 or so
Added potassium sorbate to kill residual yeast
let clarify
Currently waiting for it to clarify.
add some sugar back to ca. 5% by weight
bottle and force carbonate in pet bottles with this.
Right now??
It's perking along, I'll put it on ustream soon (haha).

Pita / Naan

My recent prep of stovetop pita remains my favorite innovation in bread from our kitchen in a long time.  The breads are soft, taste at least as good the 2nd day and are good clear into the 4th day.  Frankie is especially fond of using them for pizza.  In the initial runs, I used a minimal dough and made them super thin, about 40 grams each rolled to a 6-8" diameter circle.  This thickness is pretty great for pizza and general consumption.

But the other night, we had some takeout from Aab (mmmmmm).  I ate some of their naan and got to work on a variation of the recipe.  Even though I don't have a tandoor, the combination of dry heat and flame makes what I perceive to be a bread that resembles naan, but the recipe needed a boost.

Here's what I got, a little heavier, a little thicker, richer texture: water (180 g), unbleached white (300 g), salt (5 g), yogurt (30 g), sugar (10 g), vegetable oil (10 g), yeast (Fleischmann's fast rise, 7g).  Straight dough tossed together in the morning and let rise in fridge all day.  If I thought more, I'd have used milk instead of water too (next time). The yogurt (full fat Dannon) gave a nice richness.  I also rolled them thicker, about 80 grams and about 5-6" diameter.  Same cooking method as stovetop pita.  Enjoy.  Frankie couldn't stop eating them.

I'm pretty sure these will never come out right.

Vote for @CMHGourmand, 614's Best Blogger

One of Columbus' food ambassadors has been nominated for 614's Best Blogger.

Jim has been an integral part of the Columbus food culture long before the word sustainable was forced down our gullet.  His innumerable contributions include: writing for Taco Trucks Columbus, Alt.Eats.Columbus, and WCBE Foodcast, judging competitive cooking, organizing the Pizza Grand Prix I-VI at Wild Goose Creative, going to school for post graduate training in hot dog science. He scours every culinary niche of the city exploring the food, the experience and the historical context of that food for us to enjoy on CMH Gourmand.  Each post introduces us to good food and the inspiring people who prepare it.  He recognizes the good in our community and diplomatically spares us the rare disappointing experiences.   I don't take his queues only to find a good meal, but to learn more about Columbus through food.  We all benefit from Jim's past and continued efforts to educate us (there are also exhaustive pursuits of donuts and dagwoods).

CMHGourmand is bigger than any award, but this would be a nice way to express thanks for his efforts.  I hope you'll consider a vote (you need only your Facebook login to vote, he is under the category People & Community, which is apt, he's as much about community & people as he is food).

On Measuring Yeast Fermentation Rate for Slow Rise Doughs

Once in a while I get interested in slow rise/pre-ferments/poolish/sour dough, etc. type breads.  A small amount of yeast and long rise, there's a billion or so ways to do this.  The trickiest part of these loaves is the proof, the final rise prior to launching your work into the oven.  Too long a proof, the loaf crashes or comes out pale, too short and it comes out dense.

The duration of proof is dependent on the environment, especially the constantly changing temperature and humidity over the course of the day or from season to season. I wanted to find a metric to help me reliably determine the optimal proof time.  Any homebrewer who's nursed a fermentation along won't be surprised that yeast fermentation rates over time look generally like this, so I thought I'd try using a bubbler as a cheap gas flowmeter on a slow rise dough to try to differentiate the rate of CO2 evolution over time.  If successful, I could begin to make better predictions. The simplistic test of poking the dough with your finger and seeing how much it springs back is inadequate for a 1-a-day baker.  It works if you gain precision and experience from baking 2,000 loaves a day, if you bake 1 a day, you'll never realize precision.

Here's my apparatus and a video of it in action.  I'll refer back to this post as I gather results.

pita pizzas

Pita mania continues here at the ranch.  The soft and tender pita are lying around after the flurry of recent activity.  Today we took some of the leftover pita, those made from atta flour, and topped them and baked at 450F.  It is a most crisp and delicate substrate for pizza.  Almost as good as starting with fresh dough.

click to make bigger, they're beauties.

stovetop pita

After doing a bunch of chapati recently, I wanted to try the same cooking method for pita.  My pita dough: water 180 g warm, unbleached white 300 g, active dry yeast 5g, olive oil 12 g, salt 5g, sugar 10g. Mix, knead and stash in fridge until ready.  Can keep it in there for about 5 days and cook with it within an hour.

Tear off 40 g blobs of dough and round them, using scant flour to keep it from sticking, roll out as thin as you can, ca. 6" diameter.  Let rest a minute.  Preheat a dry pan, cast iron or any heavy bottom pan to a surface temp of about 400F (that's about medium on a big burner). Have some kind of perforated sheet pan on top of an adjacent burner.

Take the piece of dough and toss it in the dry pan for 40 seconds per side and then toss it on the perforated sheet until it puffs.  Flip and let it cook 10 seconds or so on the other side to get some charry marks.  Wrap the pita in a towel.  They'll stay nice and soft when cooled.

 First in the dry pan (400F surface)

Second side, about 40 seconds.

Toss over live flame that has a thin perforated sheet on it, until puffs, watch closely so it doesn't ignite.

Flip and cook the other side and get a tad of char on the other side too.

Final product.  Tender, soft, light, two layers, really nice.  I'm proud of these, much better than my oven baked pita.

pain au chocolat minis (nutella)

Tonight's the international pot luck at Frankie's school.  I tried my croissant dough for pain au chocolat minis.  I'm not entirely fond of the no melt dark chocolate that is conventional for these, I prefer nutella.  They came out pretty nice.  The dough (500 g) is lean and was folded 3³ x 2, or 54 layers with 114 g of butter.  I froze the dough overnight and left it in the fridge for 6 hours before rolling these.  Final proof about an hour. Whole egg glaze with a sprinkle of sugar.

Towards a leguminous snack

Scattered throughout my archives are a series of posts in which I take beans and boil them in (salted) water until tender.  The beans are filtered, rinsed and slowly roasted as a single layer at about 250-300F.  The texture is interesting.  They are not like the roasted chickpeas one finds in Mediterranean markets, those are vile chalky bits.  Cannellini, to this point, have been the best.  As they roast, they pop open and the frayed leguminous nuggets are left crisp.  It's fun to watch them during the roasting.  

Today I did black beans.  I often roast them with a skim of oil, but not this time.  So, salted water boil until tender, strained, rinsed and 2h roast at 300F on a sheet pan and there ya go:

Good snack?  They're pleasantly crisp and they stay that way.  They're not chalky, but were under seasoned.  I could have salted them while they were wet, prior to roasting, but I'm thinking bigger; how can I incorporate more and different flavors prior to roasting?