ciabatta

Last night I completed my first real bread baking project. I've baked bread before, sure, lots of times, but this was different. This was real freakin bread, with a 2-day process and some sophisticated techniques involved. The results, I have to say, are amazing:


^^^an actual picture of the actual bread I actually baked^^^

When I opened the oven and took out these loaves, I couldn't believe that I actually baked them. They looked like something they were selling in some store I avoid because their prices are (deservedly, for the most part) too high. They smelled incredible. I've never smelled a more satisfying aroma.

What was so different was that they were made from a Biga that had been allowed to ferment in my refrigerator for 2 full days. It's a bit odd to make a batch of bread dough, complete with rising and everything, throw it in the refrigerator for a day, then cut it up and add it to essentially a whole new batch of bread as an ingredient. It works, though. Can't argue with results. I used the recipe for ciabatta in The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

This book and I, we have a spotted past together, to say the least. I've trifled with its bacon cornbread recipe twice now, and regretted it twice. It's not a good recipe. I baked some raisin bread out of there, as well, and it was pretty good, but not stellar. The ciabatta is stellar. I tasted just a bit last night (there was a bit of dangling crust), and it was truly great. I don't usually get too excited about bread, but this is exciting.

Lord help me, I may start doing it more often. I still cringe while remembering how it took me 4.5 combined hours of waiting and dough manipulation after work yesterday, on top of the Biga preparation 2 days before, to say nothing of the part where my kitchen was covered in flour and I still have a ton of cleanup to do, but I know (even though it's painful to contemplate) that I'll be back doing it soon.

Thanksgiving menu

Grilled organic turkey with sage and garlic
Celeriac mashed potatoes with giblet gravy
Scalloped sweet potatoes
Key lime cranberry sauce
Cabbage wedges braised in butter and dry vermouth with garlic and shallots
Savory chanterelle stuffed White Swan acorn squash

That's everything we served. The celeriac mash was really the most amazing bit. It did something with the giblet gravy that briefly blew my mind (embarassing yummy noises ensued). It just wasn't the same with other gravy as leftovers, and I don't know why.

Our distinguished guests brought pumpkin pie, chocolate pecan pie, and some delicious olive bread with goat cheese to go with it. I had picked up some green olives stuffed with PiriPiri peppers, which were great. Some of them were really hot, others not.

I drank my way through a six-pack of my Fresh Hop IPA over the long weekend. My brother had one and was mildly complimentary. I like it a lot, still, although it disturbs me that it did not turn out precisely as I planned. I have to let such things go, I know...I'm really thrilled at the head on this beer. It's a major accomplishment, in my book. I will calulate fastidiously when priming from now on.

lunch

I just got back from having lunch at The Heathman in Portland. It was one of those meals that, when you're done, just sits there in your insides making you feel like everything's going to turn out OK. Perhaps I'm a bit food-drunk. I had the Duck in Mole. The Mole was not as good as what I make, but the duck breast was amazing, flavorful, smokey, a bit crisp, and it went perfectly with the spice in the sauce and the rice, prepared in a manner that normally would not be at all to my taste, very soft and creamy.

I love it when food makes life tolerable for no good reason.

Bento link

Thanks to the influence (and habitual misspelling) of Beaglebot, I came across this site about Bento today while doing some pointless research. This is amazing stuff, beautifully photographed. If I had about 3 hours every night to make my lunch, I might be able to produce an ugly version of maybe a third of what this woman makes. I am highly impressed and envious (and after looking for 30 seconds at that site, hungry).

Stromboli

I made something new (for me) last weekend: stromboli. It was one of those things I had decided to make without really knowing what exactly it was. This seems to be a good approach for me, actually. I used this approach to create my version of posole, a recipe that has won acclaim from nearly everyone I've made it for, including my perfectionistic older brother.

So, stromboli is actually an American creation, first made either in Pennsylvania somewhere or in Spokane, depending on who you believe (or whether you care). It's basically just a pizza crust rolled around the sort of stuff you'd put in a sandwich, meats and cheese, with no sauce. It's like a savory, meat-filled jelly roll.

In conjunction with this experiment, I wanted to try retarding the fermentation (putting the dough in the refrigerator instead of a warm place) of a batch of pizza dough to see if, as promised, it would make it more flavorful. It did, I think.

I took the dough out of the refrigerator and let it rise in the warm kitchen (warm from making jam) for several hours, got it all set out like I would for a pizza, then added (in this order) a layer of pepperoni, a layer of sliced mozzerella, a layer of Italian Sausage (sliced the log way to make it flatter and easier to roll), and then a final layer of sliced mozzerella. I rolled it up, pinched the ends shut, rubbed it all over with a beaten egg, and baked it for 20 minutes at about 425 on the pizza stone.

It was really, really tasty. I served it with warm marinara on the side had a salad from the lettuce in my garden with it. It was perfect, like all the best parts about pizza, a delightful golden brown on the outside. I will definitely be making it again.

crazy/stupid

Somehow it seemed like a good idea to have people over two days in a row on a weekend when I planned to brew beer. Day 1 went OK, I survived anyway, but day 2 looms, and it's the one with the brewing.
Day 1 highlights:

• Kal Bi (turned out awesome, described by my father-in-law as 'Hawaiian style,' which I took as a compliment).
  
• Raspberry Rhubarb topping for ice cream (on the fly, with vanilla paste and bourbon, probably the best thing I made).
• Sashimi (hard to cut right, but damn, it tasted good).
• Laulau made with pork jowl bacon (my idea) and real luau leaf, steamed in banana leaves.

The plan for tomorrow is for BBQ pork sandwiches and some unspecified dessert (perhaps nutmeg cake). I don't know when I'm going to have a chance to cook the pork (to say nothing of the cake), but I'll just have to make it happen on the fly.

Enough parentheses for today?

Fat, or what the real world already knows about food.

I was reading this Bruni review today in the NYT, in which Bruni pretends he's never eaten any real food. Newsflash, dude: while the elevated ranks of restauranteurs, the people who supposedly define what good food is, were busy making little swirls of sauce on a plate with squirt bottles and dusting cylindrical piles of watercress with fish eggs, the rest of the world was still eating whole pigs, bacon, pie crust made with lard, and bone marrow. Real food exists outside of the realm of the gourmand. All sorts of food just keeps on keeping on all over the world, and it's good. It doesn't take Thomas keller deciding to bastardize and sell it for it to be good, it just takes putting it in your mouth. There might be a little less foie gras and truffle oil in it before it goes in someone's mouth, but maybe that's not a bad thing, mmkay? How long before they're serving gravy burgers in NY? Chefs are "discovering" all the stuff everybody eats and claiming it as their own, just like Columbus "discovered" the New World. It's all so...colonial. I have no problem with food migrating out of different venues, or even with chefs making traditional recipes their own, but it seems silly to pretend it's all new and different when it's just the same food that people have been eating since back before they invented Crisco.

Cotija

Inspired by a recent purchase of some cotija to accompany last night's dinner of veggie burritos, I decided to do some research on Mexican cheeses and came across this page, which seems to contain more information than my brain can hold on the subject. Of course, according to the article the plastic-wrapped cheese I purchased is crap (whatever), but it sure tasted good to me. I'm going to make an effort to try as many different kinds of Mexican cheese as I can find. Once I exhaust the variety available in the store, I'll go looking around Vancouver for a place to buy the "real" thing. I know it's out there, I just have to find it. I'd also like to find a good tortilleria, so hopefully I can kill two birds with one stone.

10 Reasons to Buy Local Food

Anyone who enjoys good food (you know who you are) should check out this fact sheet:
10 Reasons to Buy Local Food

Now if only they would publish a list of ways to get the local food without paying through the nose, and a list of ways to get your local government to stop zoning farmland into McMansion plantations (of course step 1 on both those lists would be to buy more locally grown food...)

Kid Chow

There's a good article in the NYT today about menus for kids in most restaurants nowadays. David Kamp discussed the ubiquity and tastelessness of most "kid food," both points I agree with. Why should kids be fed some flavorless pabulum instead of real food that is every bit as good as what adults get? Admittedly, a lot of adults go to restaurants and order the least adevnturous and most boring item on the menu, but for those who know better, it is painful to watch your kids choose something pathetic and tasteless while you've carefully selected a mind-expanding taste treat. My strategy has been to make sure they know what I'm eating (not always an incentive to order adventurously, since that means they witness me eating pork hocks and coagulated duck blood at the Vietnamese place we like), and to try to encourage them to at least think about the fact that the place has dishes unusual enough to trigger their fear of the exotic.

Part of the problem not covered in the article is that school lunches suck. Kids are fed worse food at school than anything ever served to me by the lunch lady. Their chow is of poor quality, of unknown nutritional value, presented in an institutional manner, but with condescendingly cute names like Zany Jungle Chicken, meaning that after it was defrosted, they sloshed a spoonful of high fructose corn syrup with imitation pineapple flavoring onto it. The main difference between these horrifying meals and what kids are served at restaurants is that the restaurant does a slightly better job of preparing and presenting it, sometimes going so far as dumping it all into a cardboard box shaped like a car or something. Couldn't we make school lunches a bit better? Raise the level on quality, preparation, etc? Food has a major impact on society. Many of the US's problems with energy, the economy, and healthcare are all about food. Maybe food would be less of a problem if we taught kids that it was important from the time they entered public school by demonstrating that it's important. If kids got used to eating good food, they would demand it when they got to a restaurant, and they would demand it as adults. They would take some steps to secure a strong supply of good food, steps that should have been taken 30, 40, and 50 years ago.

An interesting question to ask, ala Freakonomics, would be whether exposure to a variety of different foods early in life leads to adventurous eating habits as an adult. I don't have very specific career hopes for my kids, merely that they do something that they enjoy doing, but I do want for them to grow up recognizing and appreciating good food. I want them to shed what I assume are juvenile hangups about spices, strong flavors, and other (in my opinion) silly artificial sensibilities. I don't think that making kids eat crazy stuff would accomplish that, but I don't think that giving them the opportunity to try will hurt, either.

Here is my proposal, modest as its influence (nobody, essentially) may be: instead of having a kids' menu, offer child-sized portions of all the adult food. Worst case: they eat the least adventurous item on the menu and complain about it. Best case: you create a lifetime fan of your food and expand the horizons of a young diner.