Comments anyone?

-- Jim Lahey and Rick Flaste: My Bread, The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method.
I think Lahey was the first to be videotaped with Bittman on this no knead stuff. I'm in B&N now and wondering if this is worthwhile. The books got back-cover endorsements from Bourdain, Bittman, Batali and Steingarten - is it possible he paid them ALL off to get their praise? Chime in and let me know if you've used this.

ps In the interest of full disclosure, this is an affiliate link. If you click and buy, I make big bucks kiddies. About 4% of the price. I use these all over the webercam and come end of the quarter, I'm rolling in nickels, about $3 and change each and every 3 months. Heh, heh, heh.

One pie, coming up.

Been a little preoccupied this week with the upcoming Pizza Grand Prix. As you can see, my trunk kept receiving bags of lump and briquettes as I contemplated - and tested for - the perfect fuel. I'm not sure if I'm running lump or briquettes in the Firedome yet. Maybe it'll be a secret mixture.

My hardware choice is locked down; my version 2 flopped wicked bad, but a slightly modified 1st model is certainly adequate. I'm now hunting down ingredients. Today I scored my tomatoes. Do you know how hard it is to find a label like that? They're nice and will make up a key part of my topping. The other ingredients are on my scavenger hunt for the next couple days. It's not going to be anything groundbreaking. A simple pie celebrating the beauty of a handful of ingredients. The contest part will be fun, but the truth is I make pizzas for anyone who likes them, myself included. My big challenge Sunday will be a bit more orderliness to my mise while prepping and serving a handful of pizzas (not doing quite so many this time). My last run was sloppy.

Stop by, my girls will be cheering me on (even if my pizza isn't quite as good as the one at Chuck E. Cheese).

18 Minute (or less) Matzo

Over the past few days, I've been thinking of this cracker. I made something like this before, but these are better. Kind of like traditional matzo, except they're grained up and there's no Rabbi in the recipe:

Steel cut oats, 50 g, ground fine in a burr grinder
Flax seed, 1T
water, 100 g
unbleached white flour, 100 g
salt, 3 g
vegetable oil, 1T
sugar, 1t

Mix ingredients, divide in 60 g lumps, roll out into 8" discs, place discs on super thin sheet (I use a grilling vegetable topper), score surface with pizza cutter before placing in oven, bake at 450°F until some burned bits appear (ca. 10 minutes), cool, crack and eat.

epic. failure.

Last night I used a modification of my firedome project.  I swapped the kettle's lower hemisphere for one that had an 8" hole cut out of the bottom.  The idea was to increase air flow, hence combustion, and get the temps inside the dome to about 1,000°F.  That gaping hole, compared to the normal venting, apparently screwed things up.  I did get a dome temp of about 950 for an hour or so, but when I tossed on a pizza, the bottom charred in about 2 minutes while the top was undercooked.  Oh, and Dave the Brilliant changed another variable while he was at it.  I used lump charcoal.  2 Variables changed and char formation.  What to do?  The Pizza Grand Prix is nearing (March 14th at WildGooseCreative(.com, come by and I'll autograph your kettle) and I'm busy as hell with the 9-to-5.  I'm backing off to the normal lower hemisphere, using lump and will probably have time for one more test run.  

I'm not terribly worried.  I think the massive cutout in the kettle, in hindsight, was just too radical a change.  Pizza in the grill is all about uniformity:  getting the top and bottom to cook at similar rates and who knows what that hole in bottom is doing compared to the relatively closed and vented system of the normal kettle.  The lump will be a fun and relatively conservative tweak that I believe will be constructive.

Dinner that night was interesting.  Half the night's intended menu had undergone near complete combustion leaving only residual ash and char.  I took the other blob of dough and heated the regular oven fast, using convection, and tossed on a legume side and some fresh raw veggies.  We had a meal in about 20 minutes and I had lots to think about.  After the initial shock of disappointment, failures can be pretty instructive.  Wish I hadn't waited so long to give it a test drive.

Smelts, frozen like Walt Disney

I recently realized frozen smelts can only be found in the grocery store during cooler months. I prepped a bunch last night and took what I didn't cook and tossed 'em in the freezer. I'm hoping the breading stays on once I removed them from the freezer. Depicted are my stages of preparation of these little delicate morsels of the sea.

Smelts, thawed and dried.

Floured, egged and encrusted in breadcrumbs, some fried, some frozen.

Vacuum packed and sentenced to the freezer until the next fish fry.

Related on the web ...

The the freaks at Alcor ...

A word from our sponsor

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Corn Tortillas a la YouTube

I tried making corn tortillas years ago, failed when I tried to roll them out and gave up. The other day, I bought some more masa harina, watched about 10 vids on YouTube searching for "corn tortillas" and, after a little tinkering, got it. No matter what bullshit hand-waving goes on about a grain behaving differently due to the relative humidity of the season, grain's moisture level doesn't change. I worked on the relative amounts of masa and water to get a nice dough; I found 120 g masa to 180 g water to make a nice dough. The second challenge encountered was rolling them out. This dough cannot be rolled, it can only be squashed. I put the 40 gram balls of dough (after resting) between the sheets of a ziploc plastic bag and squashed it really flat with a cast iron pan. The resulting disc is delicate, but, doesn't stick to the plastic. Cook a few minutes on each side on a wicked hot cast iron pan that's been wiped with a bit of oil. Let resulting tortillas rest (they soften on resting and develop flavor). I took a few and stuffed them with some leftover roasted chicken and a small bit of salsa for a decadent Saturday afternoon snack.

Another Steak Please

My photography sucks, hope you get the picture ...

1.1 lb New York Strip, 1.5" thick.

I bought it because of Mike's recent post of a killer ribeye. That steak burned an image in my memory and I needed a fix.

I rarely get the good cuts right when I grill. Low 'n slow is easy, the nice cuts require some experience. I added salt and pepper, got a smokin' hot kettle ready for direct, on Mike's guidance, 9 minutes (no peeks, no touch) on the first side, 7 minutes on the other, 5 minutes rest (the family was getting hungry) and served up for the 3 of us with roasted potatoes and steamed broccoli.

Food of the gods. Thanks Mike. Wish the image conveyed more accurately how nice it was. Even the dog got some of the fat. She's just as happy as us.

Boil n bake honey wheat bagels

 

That's more like it.

milk, 1/2 C
water, 1/2 C
yeast, instant active, 1 pkg
salt, 1.5 t
honey, 1/4 C
white wheat flour, 1 C
unbleached white, 2 C
handful of rolled oats

Straight dough, overnight in the fridge. Warm up a couple hours, portion into 80 gram pieces, roll into ca. 7" ropes, curl into loops, let rest about 10 minutes, boil in 3 qts water/1/4 C honey for 1 minute, bake at 450°F for about 15 minutes. Yum.

Calories, about 200 each (w/o cream cheese).

One from the kid and Mrs DavesBeer

Wicked cold temps and caged up kids. Could there be a better combination to make one look to Jack Daniels for help?

Frankie had a friend over and Mom made them some cupcakes and let them decorate 'em. Here's an example of Mom's handiwork. A rose atop a delicate little cake. Pretty tasty.

Miserable failure

Starting to host images using Picasweb, still learning.

First attempt at bagels this morning flopped. I used a mix of coarse ground oats, whole wheat and unbleached white. Texture off, flavor was ok, everything else sucked. Back to the drawing board. Blah.

It's almost March, Pizza Grand Prix is just around the corner

I'm training for Wild Goose Creative's Pizza Grand Prix in March, the brainchild of Jim; I'm entering a pizza.

Here's my schedule.

1. Repair my launch pad. I have a mini patio for my Firedome, v 2.0 that needs some fixing. I'm nearly in traction after my work on that today; swinging a pickaxe and everthing. I ache. Got about another day's work and my pad will be finished.

2. Got a new heavy duty, very industrial-looking stand made for my kettle mod. It too needs a few hours work to finish. It's serious-as-shit looking.

3. Finally, some cooking runs:
a. Only hitting a consistent 650-750°F during past runs. In an attempt to get near 1,000°F, I'll be trying a hugely larger air intake from a modified lower kettle.
b. I'll be trying lump instead of briquettes.
c. I need a more thermally resistant cooking surface. Going to 5th Ave to a tile place to find a thicker stone.

Lots of work ahead. Keep you posted on results.

I have my head held down

Ascorbic acid concentration effect on fermentation volume

Note: This is an ongoing post with updates. Scroll down for updates.
Link for this post: http://bit.ly/85Crbe

I've been enamored by bread volume for a long time. I like my breads, but, I've always yearned to make the super volume, airy, razor-crusted loaves that characterize the baguettes used in Parisian street food.

About a decade ago, potassium bromate was removed from most flour formulations. It was an agent used to strengthen dough, speed up aging and whitening of flour and contribute to huge volume. I'm not sure what combination of conditioners or additives replaced bromate, but one suspect is ascorbic acid. General Mills Pro formulations (Superlative, etc.) are spec'd at about 30-50 ppm ascorbic acid. Otherwise, the label ingredients look identical to the flour in the store.

In order to determine the effect of ascorbic acid on bread volume, I designed this little flour formulation experiment.* I'm not baking a loaf, but checking the volume of the first rise as a surrogate endpoint for the final loaf volume (big assumption).

I bought some vitamin C tablets, (ascorbic acid, 500 mg) and diluted it in Gold Medal Bread Flour to 50 and 500 ppm by successive solid dilutions. The 3 glasses contain flour (50 g), water (50 g), yeast (1 t). The glass on the left is straight unmodified flour, the middle is 50 ppm ascorbic acid and the right 500 ppm. I want to see which glass "test tube" contents give the highest rise before collapsing. It's getting late, it's a school night and I can't watch the results unfold. I set up the 3 tests and perched them in front of my netbook's webcam with a little piece of software to snap a pic every minute. I'll see what I see in the morning.

Anyone still there? Anyone? Stay tuned ...

*I realize I could buy a bag of flour with the ascorbic acid in it, but I'd have to commit to 50 lbs without a test. This way I can have a bit more flexibility. I can determine if the ascorbic acid does anything and I can alter its concentration to see what's best.

Results 01-Jan-10, discussion to follow ...

Kind of fun to watch.

Update 02-Jan-10
This may be a very long post but I want to keep it all in one entry. I'm currently retesting this using an alternate and more accurate dilution of ascorbic acid. My test samples contain 0, 40, 80 and 200 ppm ascorbic acid in a slack dough of 25 g flour, 25 g water, 1 t yeast. I added the ascorbic acid as a 2 mg/ml solution to these to achieve those concentrations. Using the successive solid dilutions in flour, I feared, may have been inaccurate. We'll see. Exciting isn't it?

In this case there is an effect on volume of fermentation even at the 40 ppm level, but the higher concentration is almost double.

Wrap up to this point
I'm having trouble reproducing these results.

Some key questions left unanswered that I'll be addressing in the future:
1. Is the small-scale (25 g flour, 25 g water, 1/4 t yeast), fermentation volume evaluation a valid flour assay and does it relate to final loaf volume?
2. I'll be trying gluten addition also.
3. Comparisons not only with ascorbic acid and gluten additions, but General Mills vs. Montana Sapphire flour need to be done.
4. Final baked loaf volume needs to be added to the small scale fermentation volume to see if they are correlated. If they are, the small scale fermentation would be a nice flour assay for high volume crusty bread applications.

Last night I just tried a loaf with Gold Medal (General Mills) flour and 50 ppm ascorbic acid and the loaf volume wasn't as good as my typical Montana Sapphire loaf. I need to try the Gold Medal without ascorbic acid and then try some gluten runs.

Reproducibility is a bitch.