cracked wheat bread

cracked wheat bread, originally uploaded by Seligmans Dog.

I like to bake whole grain breads, but often have problems. When I say whole grain, I don't want all rough milled flour, I want a significant fraction of the grain to be whole grain just hydrated to soften it. The biggest problem? I like my grainy bread to be for sandwhiches and enjoying with cheese; for that I prefer a boule shape. The inherent challenge with this shape and having whole grain in the ingredient list is often a doughy undercooked center. The whole grain retains so much moisture (which is great for shelf life), but it creates two different environments of cooking, the exterior and middle. Kind of like breast and thighs on chicken.

I tried a recipe I really liked recently. Inspired by Bittman's Food Matters (thanks Bethia!). I use more water than Bittman's recipe and let the grain steep for a long time prior to mixing to insure no crunchies in the final bread. I made this Sunday afternoon and it's still as good as the day it came out of the oven. This is a big deal for me. I like Frankie to have her bread from home and don't always have time to bake bread daily.

Cracked Wheat Bread
• In a bowl used for rising add:
Cracked wheat (coarse or fine), 1/2 C
Boiling water, 2.0 C
• Let sit until convenient (an hour or so, I let it sit all day).
• Add:
salt, 1.5 teaspoons
grain flours mix, 1/2 C (I have a tub of spelt, wheat and rye flour mixed)
unbleached white (need some structure), 2 Cups
vegetable oil, 2 tablespoon
dry yeast, 1/2 teaspoon
• Mix until the thing forms a ball and kind of knead with wooden spoon in bowl
• Let rise at least 12 hours.
• Form into a boule and let sit on parchment covered with a dry dishtowel for about 8 hours. The dough's not very sticky, typical of nice grainy doughs. Use a bit of flour to prevent any tackiness if you need while shaping.
• Slide into a 425°F oven; I cooked it on a sheet pan that preheated in the oven and toss a 1/4 cup of water into the bottom of the oven.
• Bake 45 minutes at 425°F, remove and let thoroughly cool.

Coffee Bean Roasting: I knew I could make this more complicated than it needed to be.

Mac's been roasting beans using a nifty whirly pop popcorn maker. Kudos to you Mac. I love those things. Eager to jump in and be cool too, I turned to my $1.91 generic (thanks Volunteers of America!) popocorn popper to roast green coffee beans. I got the beans from Mediterranean Food Imports on Dodridge and N High (home of the only source of Merguez in Columbus) for $4/lb. The owner thinks they're from Brazil, but is not sure.

The question I had is: While coffee's roasting, do the stages of roasting, indicated by the casually tossed around term "cracking," correspond to detectable thermal transitions? Temperature profile to the rescue.

I popped 50 grams of green beans to the hopper, dangled my thermocouple into the headspace and let the baby rip for 15 minutes (a time based on some futzing around). Here's the profile:

Really boring temperature profile over roasting period.


The beans are shinier in the image because of my inability to use flash properly

The beans were slightly shiny, and dark roasted and are resting before I grind. I've never been able to hear that definitive cracking - all I hear is the dog whimpering, the cat attacking my feet or the kid running in the hall, so I've relied on time to provide an endpoint for roasting. According to my time profile, there appears to be no thermal events to dictate the perfect roasting endpoint. Just have to stick with plain old trial and error. A fun set of observations though.

... Honey, the popcorn is starting to taste funny.

Another nifty find at Crestview Market

Soba noodles, greens and pork, originally uploaded by Seligmans Dog.

Crestview (corner of Crestview and North High) is on my way home and my new favorite stop on the way home. It's a typical crammed Asian market and the value of it, I'm finding, is in the details.

The other day I had an itch to make a dish that was fast, used leftover freezer meat, and was healthy. Greens and grain is a biggie on our menus and I decided it would be greens, soba noodles and some of the vacuum wrapped, grilled pork loing that had occupied the freezer for months.

I ran in Crestview and had decided a simple, quick wilting bok choy would be a good green. I picked up one of the many types of greens there, my soba noodles, ginger and sprinted home to start a nice meal.

Turns out, my greens weren't bok choy but a more sturdy mustard-type green that took a bit longer to cook but pleasantly surprised us to be very tasty. The dish:

Into a mongo huge fry pan:
peanut and sesame oil, shaved garlic and ginger, sauted some sliced frozen pork loin, then tossed in greens, soy (2T) and 1/4 C water (the pork was grilled and had a lot of flavor), and let the greens steam a bit. While that was cooking, I cooked the soba in salted water for about 4-6 minutes, strained and tossed all to heat. Really fast, healthy and very satisfying.

Spend some time in Crestview's small produce area. It's got more than you might think.

Introducing my new infrared thermometer with laser

I'm not paid as a scientist anymore, but I do enjoy the tools of the trade. My newest acquisition is an IR laser-guided thermometer. Just measures surface temps, but it's fun, and the cat loves it. I got it primarily for the firedome; I wanted to know how the temperature and uniformity of the clay cooking surface compared to the dome temperature. I also want to smuggle it into pizza places and check their oven temps. It stabilizes in about a 1/2 second and the range is -76°F to 1022°F. I wanted a higher temp unit, but this'll do for a while.

Caramelized Onion, Asiago Cheese and Salt Focaccia

Caramelized Onion, Asiago Cheese and Salt Focaccia, originally uploaded by Seligmans Dog.

The other night I got to partake in a food blogger thingy at Wild Goose Creative and we were all supposed to bring an item for a potluck type spread. I usually make a traditionally topped focaccia for something like this because it travels well and is pretty good served at room temp.

This time I got a little crazy. I caramelized some onion, used some grated asiago on top and some Baleine coarse salt. When it was topped before cooking (1 Kg dough on a standard half sheet), it looked kind of bland and ... white. After cooking, the onion became crisped in places, the cheese melted and darkened and the whole thing came together more like a lightly topped pizza than a focaccia but I was quite happy with it. I think I'll make it again sometime.

Wow, that was friggin' awesome!

(click image to visit the Wild Goose Creative's site)

Tonight I had the good fortune to:
a. be outside in Columbus after 8:00 pm
b. sit on a panel of food bloggers at the Wild Goose Creative on Summit.

A bunch of foodies talkin' food. Aside from being from Columbus, weber_cam doesn't have too much to do with the local thing, so I was grateful to be included. I also learned from Nick I should go to Michael's Goody Boy Drive-in for b'fast. Thanks for the tip Nick.

While there, I offered (as I often do) to give anyone interested a tutorial to make a baguette or focaccia and a few showed interest. To this end, we could do these tutorials in my kitchen OR in group mode at the rear of the WGC. If you're reading this, let me know your preference in the comments. If we go with the group, each could launch their bread prep every 20 minutes. This way we could all watch the lesson repeatedly - this helps when learning a process like this and also staggers us for oven use. A class could easily accommodate 4-5 individuals baking their own bread (more could be spectators). All you'd have to pay is a few hours time (a little slower than the two hours promised because more people). I think it'd be fun for a weekend afternoon.

To the staff and visitors at Wild Goose Creative - Thanks so much!!

ps, During the panel, I rambled. In a class I'd be more focused, and I can almost guarantee you'd go home with something nice to eat cooked in the WGC's own oven.

PS - Rosie got a nice recap of the event. Thanks Rosie.

The biggest pan on earth (for pad thai)

The biggest pan on earth., originally uploaded by Seligmans Dog.

I've been reading Hungry Monkey, a great book about a Dad cooking simple, but wonderful, dishes with his little girl. There's a pad thai recipe in it that takes a bit of work to make the tamarind extract, but once done, the dish goes together in a couple minutes.

Whenever I make a dish like this I like to have a lot of room in the pan so the food doesn't suck ALL the heat from the pan. So, I got this heavy aluminum pan at Wasserstrom. It's killer. About $50, but we'll have it for life.

Baked Beans (w/ pancetta)

Baked Beans, originally uploaded by Seligmans Dog.

Was doing a casual burger cookout the other night and decided to have a nice side of baked beans. Didn't have a ham hock or other appropriate pork product to stand in for the backbone of the classic Boston Baked beans.

I did, however, have some leftover home-cured pancetta (courtesy of Andrew). Perfect. A little mediterranean would play nice with the traditional dish. It was too late to do all the saute and stuff to get this, so in 10 minutes or so these babies were tossed on the stove, about 18 hours before the get together.

My easy baked beans
pancetta, ca. 100 g, coarse chop
great northerns, 1C (dry)
onion
garlic
dry mustard, Coleman's 1.5 t
pork fat, ca. 1T
parsley, 2T
brown sugar, 1T
ketchup, 1T
worcestershire, 1T
salt, 2t
pepper
water, 4C
Put in a cast iron dutch oven on smallest burner, covered, on lowest heat for 18 hours. Cooled and reheated for serving. Pretty amazing.

By the way, for only a finif, you can see me and a bunch of other food bloggers at ...
The Wild Goose Creative's Sunday night extravaganza: Too Many Cooks
When: Sunday, September 6th, 7 PM
Where: 2491 Summit Street, Columbus, OH 43202
I'll be signing autographs after the event.

Adventures with the Firedome

Firedome Run 22-Aug-2009, 10 pizzas, originally uploaded by Seligmans Dog.

If my schedule permitted, I would open Dave's Brasserie and sell nothing but pizzas on my deck to a few tables a night. No charge. It's too much fun.

Had a nice smooth run last night. The Firedome maintained 600°F for about 2.5 hours and over 1 hour of that teetering around 700°F using briquettes.

My high temperature aspirations aren't just a manly effort to incinerate food. Noted by one guest, the pizza, using an identical dough formulation, tastes different (and better) cooked in this mini blast-furnace compared to my oven. And, it's still cooking evenly. A build up of cornmeal on the stone contributed to a couple charry bottoms, but I won't be using it anymore. A simple light dusting with flour is adequate to keep the pizza moving on the peel.

Where to from here? The fuel distribution and placement are near optimal, so is the method of fuel ignition, and the cooking surface. All I need is a heat resistant knob on the door (for which Mario gets 10% of the royalties if this goes into production) and some work on different combustibles: lump charcoal, green wood, small woodland animals. Some fun things to try.

Keep you all posted and watch out for invites to my version of Hell's Kitchen where I experiment on live dinner guests.

Training run for Pizza Grand Prix

Training run for Pizza Grand Prix, originally uploaded by Seligmans Dog.

I'm having a training run tonight with my beloved Firedome. Got a gig at the Wild Goose Creative on October 18th in the Pizza Grand Prix. Tonight's warm up is a basic 10 pizzas for a few friends in the Firedome. Tonight I'll be using a different lighting method: chimney of fuel to ignite the surrounding fuel, using simple briquettes and timing the available cook time for one charge of fuel with my datalogger. The Firedome is not convenient to charge midstream. A significant limitation if I want to push this to production level cooking. Modifiications will have to be made if this is the goal.

The other thing I'll be checking is amount of dough per pizza. I'm shooting for 10-12" pie with 225 g per shell. This should give a thin crust, but not paper thin. Toppings will be classic. Chiffonade of basil, tomatoes and mozzarella. A few will be the wife and I's favorite: grilled eggplant, caramelized onion and chevre (not classic, but good). I'll post the final Temp vs. Time profile. I'm also hoping this run gets me 700+ °F. We'll see.

For the dough. I made it about 24 hours in advance. I made a kilo at a time in my bread machine, scaled and rounded/balled it into 225 g lumps and chilled it in the freezer for 20 minutes. Then these were placed in retarding containers in my fridge for ca. 18 hours, punched down, re-rounded and are now ready for pushing into shells tonight.

Serf! Hand me my armor.

American Style Honey Wheat

Reposted because it's the beginning of the school year!

The Columbus City Schools are pretty awesome. Frankie's in a public French language immersion school (K-8). Just through kindergarten, she giggles at me trying to pronounce a French r. By second grade I suspect she'll be able to order me a beer in a brasserie in Paris. The only problem with the CCS is the lunch program. No veggies and lots of warmed up starch and fat. It's sad. So, here it is, the staple substrate of many of her lunches, bread.

Although my passion is a nice crispy baguette, it's sometimes tough to fit in with gymnastics, soccer and our work schedules. For the day to day, we often enjoy a plain old enriched American style loaf; it's got reasonable shelf life and is a fast prep. This is a really reliable straight dough method loaf. Just made one tonight for a sandwich for myself for tomorrow. It goes together in a snap.

Here's the recipe:
water, room temp - warm, 240 g (1 C)
unbleached white flour 240 g (ca. 1 2/3 C)
wheat/rye/spelt mix (1:1:1 w/w), 120 g (3/4 C)
shortening, 12 g (1 T)
vegetable oil, 24 g (2 T)
honey, 30 g (1.5 T)
instant active dry yeast, 1 packet
salt, 1.5 t
sunflower seeds, handful

Straight dough method, first rise 60 min, 2nd rise 25 min, 3rd rise (proof) 40 min in loaf pan (ca. 2.5" x 5" x 9", metal) slashed top of loaf, and baked in abundantly pre-heated 425°F oven for 30 minutes. Awesome volume. Popped the loaf out of the pan and let it sit out overnight to cool (all ready for my nostalgic bologna sandwich tomorrow).

Pom Wow! (free swag)

frosty and freshly delivered cold to my door

weber_cam is one of the most visited sites on the internet. Last count, my sitemeter was tracking about 100-200 visitors per day. Take that Drudge.

With this kind of traffic there are perks. The delightful Molly, from Pom Wonderful emailed me and asked if I wanted a sample since it looks like some of my posts indicate I enjoyed healthy food (probably not the posts on ribs). I wasn't obliged to write anything or even mention the freebie on the site, but hey, nothing else to jabber about and still getting over jet-lag, I figured I'd write something about it anyway.

The good
It's yummy stuff. After having my first portion full strength, I cut it with water 1:1 because it's really strong. It possesses a pleasant tartness (similar to cranberry), but sweeter. The sugar content is 32 g/236 mL. I'm not sure what the native sweetener in a pomegranate, but it's a sweet one. I'm guessing it's cane. There's no added coloring and preservation is likely done through thermal processing rather than by benign chemical additives (I'm a chemist and believe chemical additives for preservation are perceived poorly because most people don't understand them and their function). Nonetheless, this is a great-tasting quality product and worth its high price. I think the 8 pack I generously received would be about $10. Actually, not bad for real juice, real juice is pricey.

My soapbox
The literature I received has lots of references to primary medical literature supporting its antioxidant activity, cardio-health claims, the crowd-pleasing manly things like super duper erections, and of course the ever popular, euro-loving, colon cleansing. These are the boiler plate claims of almost all natural foods claiming to be the newest fountain of youth and often underestimate the intelligence of the consumer. Some claims are supported, some, who knows. Antioxidant efficacy is a pretty easy proof for any food (most fruit knows how to protect itself from oxidation), but the chemical BHT in each and every bite of kid's cereal is also a great antioxidant and safe. The whole antioxidant thing isn't a guarantee against anything.

I'm no medical expert and feel free to shoot barbs at me in the comments, but a glass a day won't prevent you from getting a stroke and probably won't provide the woody promised - I'm currently participating in my own clinical study for the next 10 days - in the name of science.

Dear Molly of PomWonderful.com ...
Thanks so much for the gift. Despite my warning that I would not say a thing about this product on my site, you politely sent it anyway. My family and I do sincerely appreciate it. I think I'll actually buy more as a treat on special occasions. It's wicked tasty. I'm contemplating spiking my smoothies with it. I'll let you know in a subsequent post if I pursue it. Thanks again.

Friet from Waterlooplein Market

Fries and mayonaise is classic Amsterdam street food. I had this combo 7 years ago and my stomach still turns thinking about it. The fries are cooked perfectly; blanched til limp in oil and finished just before serving. I decided to identify myself as American and get them with some ketchup. Their ketchup was slightly spicy, not as sweet and more tomatoey and was the perfect complement to the perfect friet.

ribs ... mmmmmmmmmmm

ribs ... mmmmmmmmmmm, originally uploaded by Seligmans Dog.

I haven't done ribs in about a year. That time we made too many half racks, didn't cook them long enough and then served them to guests whom we didn't know had an aversion (or allergy) to pork products (we didn't know ahead of time). Needless to say, the experience left me a bit scarred on rib cookery.

The other night, we had our surrogate Columbus parents in for a meal of ribs, corn pudding and green beans. I got the ribs from plain old Kroger, removed the membrane (thanks for the instruction from Mike - worked easy), gave them an ever so light rub, let rest overnight and cooked 'em around 250°F for about 8 hours with a light slather of sauce (Charcuterie Carolina Sauce) 2 hours before the end. Covered them a couple hours and dug in.

I have never been so happy with the leftovers from that rib session.

I told Frankie the other morning I was taking out the leftover ribs for thawing so we could have them for dinner. She asked if we were having company. That's how good they were. She (and our friends) ate many. I am copacetic with ribs again.