Continuing to use the panini press. We’re loving it. For brunch this morning we made croque madame from slices of a boule I just baked.
The filling included ham, cheese, a béchamel sauce, dijon mustard. Topped with a fried egg. My taste buds have been humming all day.
The ritual boiling before baking:
Ready to eat with salad in the background:
What started out as a plan to use up some leftovers or expiring food turned out to be a real feast:
And I made a split-pea soup from the Moosewood cookbook, but needed to make a correction to the obvious omission by throwing in a big chunk of leftover smoked ham shank.
Leftover baguette dough using Parisian starter, stored in refrigerator for 1 week. Shaped into 90g balls:
Proofed and then stretched:
Then fried in butter in cast iron skillet:
Don’t what to call it. Not hollow like pita or naan. Tasted great with leg of lamb spit roasted over a live fire.
I’ve been craving home-made English muffins for a while. The plan is to use them as the base for Extreme Eggs Benedict (stay-tuned). I ran across a recipe from Nancy Silverton for a different kind of English muffin, loaded with grains and seeds, from her La Brea Bakery. These won’t be used for the Extreme Eggs Benedict. I improvised with the ingredients I had on-hand, including:
Split in half with a fork, slathered with butter and jam. Life is good!
I’ve never been a big fan of biscuits, but my wife considers them an essential breakfast staple. I’ve tried through the years to help her relive the biscuits of her youth and have consistently failed with all kinds of scratch recipes and mixes- too dense, too flakey, too sweet, too tall, too flat, too hard, too too ….
This week I received some varieties of biscuit mix from Pioneer. Made the buttermilk ones today and finally, yes finally, got a “just right”. I also used the same mix for a batch of pancakes. Now, I am very, very proud of my made-from-scratch buttermilk pancakes based on a recipe from Marion Cunningham. Guess what? These were better. And easier. And probably less expensive. Just add milk and eggs.
I can’t believe how delicious this bread is, made with leftover dough from the pizzas I baked the other day – thin crispy crust, soft-silky crumb, and a light-buttery flavor.
This made an extremely simple lunch – but deeply satisfying: coppa, salami, and butter.
One of the very best books about bread, Brother Juniper’s Bread Book
Struan is not merely bread – it is bread that reperesents the essence of bread, which is one of the great analogies of life itself…
Perhaps this an overstatement, at least until you work on this recipe and gain a better understanding and appreciation of it and adapt it to your vision. In the final product all of the ingredients come together for an effect that is greater than the sum of its parts – not just in terms of taste and texture, but also in the symbolism of its components.
In my version, I use the following ingredients:
Artisan bread flour
Honey
Polenta
Wheat bran
Brown rice
Rye flakes
Buttermilk
Sea salt
Brown sugar
Natural starter culture (Russian)
You might think this would be a heavy, dense loaf, but nothing could be further from the truth – it is light, and soft, and slightly sweet. When baking, the house is filled with an intoxicating aroma that forms an important part of the experience.
Made 4 baguettes, 1 epi, and 1 boule today from a batch of dough started 4 days ago. No commercial yeast, just natural starter culture from Paris. Room-temp ferment, a few days in the fridge, room-temp proof. Lunch consiisted of smoked chicken salad on baguettes. Mid-afternoon snack was some bread slathered with good butter, a slice of Serrano ham, a slice of Emmenthaler cheese. I could bake every day!